Crowd counting is very important in many tasks such as video surveillance, traffic monitoring, public security, and urban planning, so it is a very important part of the intelligent transportation system. However, achieving an accurate crowd counting and generating a precise density map are still challenging tasks due to the occlusion, perspective distortion, complex backgrounds, and varying scales. In addition, most of the existing methods focus only on the accuracy of crowd counting without considering the correctness of a density distribution; namely, there are many false negatives and false positives in a generated density map. To address this issue, we propose a novel encoder-decoder Convolution Neural Network (CNN) that fuses the feature maps in both encoding and decoding sub-networks to generate a more reasonable density map and estimate the number of people more accurately. Furthermore, we introduce a new evaluation method named the Patch Absolute Error (PAE) which is more appropriate to measure the accuracy of a density map. The extensive experiments on several existing public crowd counting datasets demonstrate that our approach achieves better performance than the current state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, considering the cross-scene crowd counting in practice, we evaluate our model on some cross-scene datasets. The results show our method has a good performance in cross-scene datasets.

Target detection in remote sensing image has long been one of the research focuses in related areas. This paper proposed a deep learning model for target detection in remote sensing image fusing multilevel features and applied to detect aircrafts in remote sensing images. Because the model is small in size and applies fusion of multilevel features, the detection accuracy of aircraft targets with different scales and denser in remote sensing images has been improved, without compromising the detection speed. A packet fusion reject detection bounding boxes (PFR-DBB) algorithm was also proposed, which is able to better remove redundant detection boxes and further improve detection accuracy. With the experiment results of two remote sensing aircraft data sets detection based on the model, it is proved that small-scale deep networks can also achieve high performance for multi-scale aircraft target detection on small sample data sets.

The team orienteering problem with time windows (TOPTW) is a well studied routing problem. In this paper, a cooperative algorithm is proposed. It collaborates metaheuristic and branch-and-price. A restricted master problem and subproblem are defined. It uses a heuristic to obtain an integral solution for the restricted master problem and a metaheuristic to generate new columns for the subproblem. Experimental study shows that this algorithm can find new better solutions for several instances in short time, which supports the effectiveness of the cooperative mechanism between metaheuristic and branch-and-price.

We propose a novel discriminative learning approach to image set classification by modeling the image set with its natural second-order statistic, i.e. covariance matrix. Since nonsingular covariance matrices, a.k.a. symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices, lie on a Riemannian manifold, classical learning algorithms cannot be directly utilized to classify points on the manifold. By exploring an efficient metric for the SPD matrices, i.e., Log-Euclidean Distance (LED), we derive a kernel function that explicitly maps the covariance matrix from the Riemannian manifold to a Euclidean space. With this explicit mapping, any learning method devoted to vector space can be exploited in either its linear or kernel formulation. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) are considered in this paper for their feasibility for our specific problem. We further investigate the conventional linear subspace based set modeling technique and cast it in a unified framework with our covariance matrix based modeling. The proposed method is evaluated on two tasks: face recognition and object categorization. Extensive experimental results show not only the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art ones in both accuracy and efficiency, but also its stability to two real challenges: noisy set data and varying set size.

In many descriptors, spatial intensity transforms are often packed into a histogram or encoded into binary strings to be insensitive to local misalignment and compact. Discriminative information, however, might be lost during the process as a trade-off. To capture the lost pixel-wise local information, we propose a new feature descriptor, Circular Center Symmetric-Pairs of Pixels (CCS-POP). It concatenates the symmetric pixel differences centered at a pixel position along various orientations with various radii; it is a generalized form of Local Binary Patterns, its variants and Pairs-of-Pixels (POP). Combining CCS-POP with existing descriptors achieves better face identification performance on FRGC Ver. 1.0 and FERET datasets compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

With the goal of matching unknown faces against a gallery of known people, the face identification task has been studied for several decades. There are very accurate techniques to perform face identification in controlled environments, particularly when large numbers of samples are available for each face. However, face identification under uncontrolled environments or with a lack of training data is still an unsolved problem. We employ a large and rich set of feature descriptors (with more than 70,000 descriptors) for face identification using partial least squares to perform multichannel feature weighting. Then, we extend the method to a tree-based discriminative structure to reduce the time required to evaluate probe samples. The method is evaluated on Facial Recognition Technology (FERET) and Face Recognition Grand Challenge (FRGC) data sets. Experiments show that our identification method outperforms current state-of-the-art results, particularly for identifying faces acquired across varying conditions.

We present a method for face verification that combines Partial Least Squares (PLS) and the One-Shot similarity model[28]. First, a large feature set combining shape, texture and color information is used to describe a face. Then PLS is applied to reduce the dimensionality of the feature set with multi-channel feature weighting. This provides a discriminative facial descriptor. PLS regression is used to compute the similarity score of an image pair by One-Shot learning. Given two feature vector representing face images, the One-Shot algorithm learns discriminative models exclusively for the vectors being compared. A small set of unlabeled images, not containing images belonging to the people being compared, is used as a reference (negative) set. The approach is evaluated on the Labeled Face in the Wild (LFW) benchmark and shows very comparable results to the state-of-the-art methods (achieving 86.12% classification accuracy) while maintaining simplicity and good generalization ability.

Though biomedical research often draws on knowledge from a wide variety of fields, few visualization methods for biomedical data incorporate meaningful cross-database exploration. A new approach is offered for visualizing and exploring a query-based subset of multiple heterogeneous biomedical databases. Databases are modeled as an entity-relation graph containing nodes (database records) and links (relationships between records). Users specify a keyword search string to retrieve an initial set of nodes, and then explore intra- and interdatabase links. Results are visualized with user-defined semantic substrates to take advantage of the rich set of attributes usually present in biomedical data. Comments from domain experts indicate that this visualization method is potentially advantageous for biomedical knowledge exploration.

Mean-shift analysis is a general nonparametric clustering technique based on density estimation for the analysis of complex feature spaces. It has been successfully applied to many applications such as segmentation and tracking. However, despite its promising performance, there are applications for which the algorithm converges too slowly and is not practical. In this paper, an improved version of mean shift algorithm is proposed and implemented. The fast mean shift procedure uses a new iteration strategy and re-sampling. The new iteration strategy is based on updating cluster centers according to dynamically updated sample set. And the original data set is simplified by re-sampling, which accelerates the algorithm more significantly. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency of the fast mean shift procedure in clustering problems.