Fermentation is a widely used process in the biotechnology industry, in which sugar-based substrates are transformed into a new product through chemical reactions carried out by microorganisms. Fermentation yields depend heavily on critical process parameter (CPP) values which need to be finely tuned throughout the process; this is usually performed by a biotech production expert relying on empirical rules and personal experience. Although developing a mathematical model to analytically describe how yields depend on CPP values is too challenging because the process involves living organisms, we demonstrate the benefits that can be reaped by using a black-box machine learning (ML) approach based on recurrent neural networks (RNN) and long short-term memory (LSTM) neural networks to predict real time OD_600nm values from fermentation CPP time series. We tested both networks on an E. coli fermentation process (upstream) optimized to obtain inclusion bodies whose purification (downstream) in a later stage will yield a targeted neurotrophin recombinant protein. We achieved root mean squared error (RMSE) and relative error on final yield (REFY) performances which demonstrate that RNN and LSTM are indeed promising approaches for real-time, in-line process yield estimation, paving the way for machine learning-based fermentation process control algorithms.

Fingerprints are one of the most copious evidence in a crime scene and, for this reason, they are frequently used by law enforcement for identification of individuals. But fingerprints can be altered. “Altered fingerprints” refers to intentionally damage of the friction ridge pattern and they are often used by smart criminals in hope to evade law enforcement. We use a deep neural network approach training an Inception-v3 architecture. This paper proposes a method for detection of altered fingerprints, identification of types of alterations and recognition of gender, hand and fingers. We also produce activation maps that show which part of a fingerprint the neural network has focused on, in order to detect where alterations are positioned. The proposed approach achieves an accuracy of 98.21%, 98.46%, 92.52%, 97.53% and 92,18% for the classification of fakeness, alterations, gender, hand and fingers, respectively on the SO.CO.FING. dataset.

Continuous detection and efficient monitoring of Out-Of-Stock (OOS) of products in retail environments is a key factor to improve stores profits. Traditional methods require labour-intensive human work dedicated to checking for products to refill raising the requirement of automatic solutions to detect OOS. In this work, we focus on the problem of OOS detection from an egocentric perspective proposing a new weak annotation of the EgoCart dataset. We benchmark the considered challenge employing a deep learning approach for the detection of OOS areas. Specifically, we train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to predict attention maps useful to find OOS in retail areas and hence suggest the retail employers where to intervene. We evaluate results with both objective measures and a subjective analysis provided by human which has reviewed the obtained OOS attention maps. The achieved performance demonstrates that the proposed pipeline is promising to help the refilling process in the retail domain.

This paper proposes a novel approach for semi-supervised domain adaptation for holistic regression tasks, where a DNN predicts a continuous value $y\in \mathbb{R}$ given an input image x. The current literature generally lacks specific domain adaptation approaches for this task, as most of them mostly focus on classification. In the context of holistic regression, most of the real-world datasets not only exhibit a covariate (or domain) shift, but also a label gap—the target dataset may contain labels not included in the source dataset (and vice versa). We propose an approach tackling both covariate and label gap in a unified training framework. Specifically, a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) is used to reduce covariate shift, and label gap is mitigated via label normalisation. To avoid overfitting, we propose a stopping criterion that simultaneously takes advantage of the Maximum Mean Discrepancy and the GAN Global Optimality condition. To restore the original label range—that was previously normalised—a handful of annotated images from the target domain are used. Our experimental results, run on 3 different datasets, demonstrate that our approach drastically outperforms the state-of-the-art across the board. Specifically, for the cell counting problem, the mean squared error (MSE) is reduced from 759 to 5.62; in the case of the pedestrian dataset, our approach lowered the MSE from 131 to 1.47. For the last experimental setup, we borrowed a task from plant biology, i.e., counting the number of leaves in a plant, and we ran two series of experiments, showing the MSE is reduced from 2.36 to 0.88 (intra-species), and from 1.48 to 0.6 (inter-species).