Cell segmentation and counting is a time-consuming task and an important experimental step in traditional biomedical research. Many current counting methods require exact cell locations. However, there are few such cell datasets with detailed object coordinates. Most existing cell datasets only have the total number of cells and a global segmentation labelling. To make more effective use of existing datasets, we divided the cell counting task into cell number prediction and cell segmentation respectively. This paper proposed a lightweight fast multi-task multi-scale feature fusion model based on generative adversarial networks (MFGAN). To coordinate the learning of these two tasks, we proposed a Combined Hybrid Loss function (CH Loss) and used conditional GAN to train our network. We proposed a Lightweight Fast Multitask Generator (LFMG) which reduced the number of parameters by 20% compared with U-Net but got better performance on cell segmentation. We used multi-scale feature fusion technology to improve the quality of reconstructed segmentation images. In addition, we also proposed a Structure Fusion Discrimination (SFD) to refine the accuracy of the details of the features. Our method achieved non-Point-based counting that no longer needs to annotate the exact position of each cell in the image during the training and successfully achieved excellent results on cell counting and cell segmentation.

Crowd counting is of considerable significance to society in terms of public safety and urban development. Manual counting of people in a video or photo is often time-consuming and labour-intensive. People will need an efficient and economy way instead of counting manually. Nowadays, the convolutional neural network was popularly utilized as the baseline for crowd counting. However, the more complex the CNN-based algorithm, the more computing resources will be consumed. This article aims to present a simpler and faster fully optimized convolutional neural network for crowd counting with desired performance. To minimize the computational cost on training networks, we proposed a fully optimized method to build our network. Extensive experiments on our fully optimized convolutional neural network indicate the superiority of our network that has very high accuracy and speed on small scale crowd.

In this paper we study the min-max cycle cover problem with neighborhoods, which is to find a given number of K cycles to collaboratively visit n Points of Interest (POIs) in a 2D space such that the length of the longest cycle among the K cycles is minimized. The problem arises from many applications, including employing mobile sinks to collect sensor data in wireless sensor networks (WSNs), dispatching charging vehicles to recharge sensors in rechargeable sensor networks, scheduling Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to monitor disaster areas, etc. For example, consider the application of employing multiple mobile sinks to collect sensor data in WSNs. If some mobile sink has a long data collection tour while the other mobile sinks have short tours, this incurs a long data collection latency of the sensors in the long tour. Existing studies assumed that one vehicle needs to move to the location of a POI to serve it. We however assume that the vehicle is able to serve the POI as long as the vehicle is within the neighborhood area of the POI. One such an example is that a mobile sink in a WSN can receive data from a sensor if it is within the transmission range of the sensor (e.g., within 50 meters). It can be seen that the ignorance of neighborhoods will incur a longer traveling length. On the other hand, most existing studies only took into account the vehicle traveling time but ignore the POI service time. Consequently, although the length of some vehicle tour is short, the total amount of time consumed by a vehicle in the tour is prohibitively long, due to many POIs in the tour. In this paper we first study the min-max cycle cover problem with neighborhoods, by incorporating both neighborhoods and POI service time into consideration. We then propose novel approximation algorithms for the problem, by exploring the combinatorial properties of the problem. We finally evaluate the proposed algorithms via experimental simulations. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms are promising. Especially, the maximum tour times by the proposed algorithms are only about from 80% to 90% of that by existing algorithms.