Vision-inspired Representation and Learning for Data-driven Signal Processing

In the era of data explosion, massive data is generated from various sources at an unprecedented speed. The ever-growing amount of data reveals enormous opportunities for developing novel data-driven solutions to unsolved problems. In recent years, benefiting from numerous public datasets and advances in deep learning, data-driven approaches in the computer vision domain have demonstrated superior performance with high adaptability on various data and tasks. Meanwhile, signal processing has long been dominated by techniques derived from rigorous mathematical models built upon prior knowledge of signals. Due to the lack of adaptability to real data and applications, model-based methods often suffer from performance degradation and engineering difficulties. In this dissertation, multiple signal processing problems are studied from vision-inspired data representation and learning perspectives to address the major limitation on adaptability. Corresponding data-driven solutions are proposed to achieve significantly improved performance over conventional solutions. Specifically, in the compressive sensing domain, an open-source image compressive sensing toolbox and benchmark to standardize the implementation and evaluation of reconstruction methods are first proposed. Then a plug-and-play compression ratio adapter is proposed to enable the adaptability of end-to-end data-driven reconstruction methods to variable compression ratios. Lastly, the problem of transfer learning from images to bioelectric signals is experimentally studied to demonstrate the improved performance of data-driven reconstruction. In the image subsampling domain, task-adaptive data-driven image subsampling is studied to reduce data redundancy and retain information of interest simultaneously. In the semiconductor analysis domain, the data-driven automatic error detection problem is studied in the context of integrated circuit segmentation for the first time. In the light detection and ranging(LiDAR) camera calibration domain, the calibration accuracy degradation problem in low-resolution LiDAR scenarios is addressed with data-driven techniques.