SAVOIAS
Visual complexity identifies the level of intricacy and details in an image or the level of difficulty to describe the image. It is an important concept in a variety of areas such as cognitive psychology, computer vision and visualization, and advertisement. Yet, efforts to create large, downloadable image datasets with diverse content and unbiased groundtruthing are lacking. In this work, we introduce Savoias, a visual complexity dataset that compromises of more than 1,400 images from seven image categories relevant to the above research areas, namely Scenes, Advertisements, Visualization and infographics, Objects, Interior design, Art, and Suprematism. The images in each category portray diverse characteristics including various low-level and high-level features, objects, backgrounds, textures and patterns, text, and graphics. The ground truth for Savoias is obtained by crowdsourcing more than 37,000 pairwise comparisons of images using the forced-choice methodology and with more than 1,600 contributors. The resulting relative scores are then converted to absolute visual complexity scores using the Bradley-Terry method and matrix completion. When applying five state-of-the-art algorithms to analyze the visual complexity of the images in the Savoias dataset, we found that the scores obtained from these baseline tools only correlate well with crowdsourced labels for abstract patterns in the Suprematism category (Pearson correlation r=0.84). For the other categories, in particular, the objects and advertisement categories, low correlation coefficients were revealed (r=0.3 and 0.56, respectively). These findings suggest that (1) state-of-the-art approaches are mostly insufficient and (2) Savoias enables category-specific method development, which is likely to improve the impact of visual complexity analysis on specific application areas, including computer vision. …

Probabilistic Neural Programs
We present probabilistic neural programs, a framework for program induction that permits flexible specification of both a computational model and inference algorithm while simultaneously enabling the use of deep neural networks. Probabilistic neural programs combine a computation graph for specifying a neural network with an operator for weighted nondeterministic choice. Thus, a program describes both a collection of decisions as well as the neural network architecture used to make each one. We evaluate our approach on a challenging diagram question answering task where probabilistic neural programs correctly execute nearly twice as many programs as a baseline model. …

OpenCLIPER
Medical image processing is often limited by the computational cost of the involved algorithms. Whereas dedicated computing devices (GPUs in particular) exist and do provide significant efficiency boosts, they have an extra cost of use in terms of housekeeping tasks (device selection and initialization, data streaming, synchronization with the CPU and others), which may hinder developers from using them. This paper describes an OpenCL-based framework that is capable of handling dedicated computing devices seamlessly and that allows the developer to concentrate on image processing tasks. The framework handles automatically device discovery and initialization, data transfers to and from the device and the file system and kernel loading and compiling. Data structures need to be defined only once independently of the computing device; code is unique, consequently, for every device, including the host CPU. Pinned memory/buffer mapping is used to achieve maximum performance in data transfers. Code fragments included in the paper show how the computing device is almost immediately and effortlessly available to the users algorithms, so they can focus on productive work. Code required for device selection and initialization, data loading and streaming and kernel compilation is minimal and systematic. Algorithms can be thought of as mathematical operators (called processes), with input, output and parameters, and they may be chained one after another easily and efficiently. Also for efficiency, processes can have their initialization work split from their core workload, so process chains and loops do not incur in performance penalties. Algorithm code is independent of the device type targeted. …

General Algorithmic Search (GAS)
In this paper we present a metaheuristic for global optimization called General Algorithmic Search (GAS). Specifically, GAS is a stochastic, single-objective method that evolves a swarm of agents in search of a global extremum. Numerical simulations with a sample of 31 test functions show that GAS outperforms Basin Hopping, Cuckoo Search, and Differential Evolution, especially in concurrent optimization, i.e., when several runs with different initial settings are executed and the first best wins. Python codes of all algorithms and complementary information are available online. …