Abstract Large‐scale variations may cause a serious problem in crowd counting. In recent years, most methods for this problem use convolutional neural networks with a fixed scale for encoding and decoding image features. The scale of the convolutional layer is usually manually adjusted and may have to deal with image features on unfitted scales. In this paper, a method called scale‐aware convolutional neural network(SCNet) is proposed, which adds a scale selection mechanism to the dilated convolutional operation. Shared weight multi‐branch is used to deal with features on different scales, and an attention mechanism is introduced to determine the weights of the branches that fit the scale. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed SCNet outperforms most existing methods.

3D shape retrieval has attracted much attention and become a hot topic in computer vision field recently.With the development of deep learning, 3D shape retrieval has also made great progress and many view-based methods have been introduced in recent years. However, how to represent 3D shapes better is still a challenging problem. At the same time, the intrinsic hierarchical associations among views still have not been well utilized. In order to tackle these problems, in this paper, we propose a multi-loop-view convolutional neural network (MLVCNN) framework for 3D shape retrieval. In this method, multiple groups of views are extracted from different loop directions first. Given these multiple loop views, the proposed MLVCNN framework introduces a hierarchical view-loop-shape architecture, i.e., the view level, the loop level, and the shape level, to conduct 3D shape representation from different scales. In the view-level, a convolutional neural network is first trained to extract view features. Then, the proposed Loop Normalization and LSTM are utilized for each loop of view to generate the loop-level features, which considering the intrinsic associations of the different views in the same loop. Finally, all the loop-level descriptors are combined into a shape-level descriptor for 3D shape representation, which is used for 3D shape retrieval. Our proposed method has been evaluated on the public 3D shape benchmark, i.e., ModelNet40. Experiments and comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods show that the proposed MLVCNN method can achieve significant performance improvement on 3D shape retrieval tasks. Our MLVCNN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by the mAP of 4.84% in 3D shape retrieval task. We have also evaluated the performance of the proposed method on the 3D shape classification task where MLVCNN also achieves superior performance compared with recent methods.

This demo presents AstroShelf, our on-going effort to enable astrophysicists to collaboratively investigate celestial objects using data originating from multiple sky surveys, hosted at different sites. The AstroShelf platform combines database and data stream, workflow and visualization technologies to provide a means for querying and displaying telescope images (in a Google Sky manner), visualizations of spectrum data, and for managing annotations. In addition to the user interface, AstroShelf supports a programmatic interface (available as a web service), which allows astrophysicists to incorporate functionality from AstroShelf in their own programs. A key feature is Live Annotations which is the detection and delivery of events or annotations to users in real-time, based on their profiles. We demonstrate the capabilities of AstroShelf through real end-user exploration scenarios (with participation from "stargazers" in the audience), in the presence of simulated annotation workloads executed through web services.