Video Crowd Counting via Dynamic Temporal Modeling

Crowd counting aims to count the number of instantaneous people in a crowded space, which plays an increasingly important role in the field of public safety. More and more researchers have already proposed many promising solutions to the crowd counting task on the image. With the continuous extension of the application of crowd counting, how to apply the technique to video content has become an urgent problem. At present, although researchers have collected and labeled some video clips, less attention has been drawn to the spatiotemporal characteristics of videos. In order to solve this problem, this paper proposes a novel framework based on dynamic temporal modeling of the relationship between video frames. We model the relationship between adjacent features by constructing a set of dilated residual blocks for crowd counting task, with each phase having an expanded set of time convolutions to generate an initial prediction which is then improved by the next prediction. We extract features from the density map as we find the adjacent density maps share more similar information than original video frames. We also propose a smaller basic network structure to balance the computational cost with a good feature representation. We conduct experiments using the proposed framework on five crowd counting datasets and demonstrate its superiority in terms of effectiveness and efficiency over previous approaches.

Curve Text Detection with Local Segmentation Network and Curve Connection

Curve text or arbitrary shape text is very common in real-world scenarios. In this paper, we propose a novel framework with the local segmentation network (LSN) followed by the curve connection to detect text in horizontal, oriented and curved forms. The LSN is composed of two elements, i.e., proposal generation to get the horizontal rectangle proposals with high overlap with text and text segmentation to find the arbitrary shape text region within proposals. The curve connection is then designed to connect the local mask to the detection results. We conduct experiments using the proposed framework on two real-world curve text detection datasets and demonstrate the effectiveness over previous approaches.

Adaptive Scenario Discovery for Crowd Counting

Crowd counting, i.e., estimation number of pedestrian in crowd images, is emerging as an important research problem with the public security applications. A key ingredient in the design of crowd counting systems is the construction of counting models while being robust to various scenarios under facts such as camera perspective and physical barriers. In this paper, we present an adaptive scenario discovery framework for crowd counting. The system is structured with two parallel pathways that are trained with different sizes of receptive field to represent different scales and crowd densities. After ensuring that these components are present in the proper geometric configuration, a third branch is designed to adaptively recalibrate the pathway-wise responses by discovering and modeling the dynamic scenarios implicitly. Our system is able to represent highly variable crowd images and achieves state-of-the-art results in two challenging benchmarks.

Towards Intelligent Vehicular Networks: A Machine Learning Framework

As wireless networks evolve towards high mobility and providing better support for connected vehicles, a number of new challenges arise due to the resulting high dynamics in vehicular environments and thus motive rethinking of traditional wireless design methodologies. Future intelligent vehicles, which are at the heart of high mobility networks, are increasingly equipped with multiple advanced onboard sensors and keep generating large volumes of data. Machine learning, as an effective approach to artificial intelligence, can provide a rich set of tools to exploit such data for the benefit of the networks. In this article, we first identify the distinctive characteristics of high mobility vehicular networks and motivate the use of machine learning to address the resulting challenges. After a brief introduction of the major concepts of machine learning, we discuss its applications to learn the dynamics of vehicular networks and make informed decisions to optimize network performance. In particular, we discuss in greater detail the application of reinforcement learning in managing network resources as an alternative to the prevalent optimization approach. Finally, some open issues worth further investigation are highlighted.

Crowd Counting with Density Adaption Networks

Crowd counting is one of the core tasks in various surveillance applications. A practical system involves estimating accurate head counts in dynamic scenarios under different lightning, camera perspective and occlusion states. Previous approaches estimate head counts despite that they can vary dramatically in different density settings; the crowd is often unevenly distributed and the results are therefore unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a lightweight deep learning framework that can automatically estimate the crowd density level and adaptively choose between different counter networks that are explicitly trained for different density domains. Experiments on two recent crowd counting datasets, UCF_CC_50 and ShanghaiTech, show that the proposed mechanism achieves promising improvements over state-of-the-art methods. Moreover, runtime speed is 20 FPS on a single GPU.

Precise Temporal Action Localization by Evolving Temporal Proposals

Locating actions in long untrimmed videos has been a challenging problem in video content analysis. The performances of existing action localization approaches remain unsatisfactory in precisely determining the beginning and the end of an action. Imitating the human perception procedure with observations and refinements, we propose a novel three-phase action localization framework. Our framework is embedded with an Actionness Network to generate initial proposals through frame-wise similarity grouping, and then a Refinement Network to conduct boundary adjustment on these proposals. Finally, the refined proposals are sent to a Localization Network for further fine-grained location regression. The whole process can be deemed as multi-stage refinement using a novel non-local pyramid feature under various temporal granularities. We evaluate our framework on THUMOS14 benchmark and obtain a significant improvement over the state-of-the-arts approaches. Specifically, the performance gain is remarkable under precise localization with high IoU thresholds. Our proposed framework achieves mAP@IoU=0.5 of 34.2%.

Arbitrary-Oriented Scene Text Detection via Rotation Proposals

This paper introduces a novel rotation-based framework for arbitrary-oriented text detection in natural scene images. We present the Rotation Region Proposal Networks (RRPN), which are designed to generate inclined proposals with text orientation angle information. The angle information is then adapted for bounding box regression to make the proposals more accurately fit into the text region in terms of the orientation. The Rotation Region-of-Interest (RRoI) pooling layer is proposed to project arbitrary-oriented proposals to a feature map for a text region classifier. The whole framework is built upon a region-proposal-based architecture, which ensures the computational efficiency of the arbitrary-oriented text detection compared with previous text detection systems. We conduct experiments using the rotation-based framework on three real-world scene text detection datasets and demonstrate its superiority in terms of effectiveness and efficiency over previous approaches.

Attentional Factorization Machines: Learning the Weight of Feature Interactions via Attention Networks

Factorization Machines (FMs) are a supervised learning approach that enhances the linear regression model by incorporating the second-order feature interactions. Despite effectiveness, FM can be hindered by its modelling of all feature interactions with the same weight, as not all feature interactions are equally useful and predictive. For example, the interactions with useless features may even introduce noises and adversely degrade the performance. In this work, we improve FM by discriminating the importance of different feature interactions. We propose a novel model named Attentional Factorization Machine (AFM), which learns the importance of each feature interaction from data via a neural attention network. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of AFM. Empirically, it is shown on regression task AFM betters FM with a $8.6\%$ relative improvement, and consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art deep learning methods Wide&Deep and DeepCross with a much simpler structure and fewer model parameters. Our implementation of AFM is publicly available at: https://github.com/hexiangnan/attentional_factorization_machine

Evolving Boxes for Fast Vehicle Detection

We perform fast vehicle detection from traffic surveillance cameras. A novel deep learning framework, namely Evolving Boxes, is developed that proposes and refines the object boxes under different feature representations. Specifically, our framework is embedded with a light-weight proposal network to generate initial anchor boxes as well as to early discard unlikely regions; a fine-turning network produces detailed features for these candidate boxes. We show intriguingly that by applying different feature fusion techniques, the initial boxes can be refined for both localization and recognition. We evaluate our network on the recent DETRAC benchmark and obtain a significant improvement over the state-of-the-art Faster RCNN by 9.5% mAP. Further, our network achieves 9-13 FPS detection speed on a moderate commercial GPU.

Fusing Multi-Stream Deep Networks for Video Classification

This paper studies deep network architectures to address the problem of video classification. A multi-stream framework is proposed to fully utilize the rich multimodal information in videos. Specifically, we first train three Convolutional Neural Networks to model spatial, short-term motion and audio clues respectively. Long Short Term Memory networks are then adopted to explore long-term temporal dynamics. With the outputs of the individual streams, we propose a simple and effective fusion method to generate the final predictions, where the optimal fusion weights are learned adaptively for each class, and the learning process is regularized by automatically estimated class relationships. Our contributions are two-fold. First, the proposed multi-stream framework is able to exploit multimodal features that are more comprehensive than those previously attempted. Second, we demonstrate that the adaptive fusion method using the class relationship as a regularizer outperforms traditional alternatives that estimate the weights in a "free" fashion. Our framework produces significantly better results than the state of the arts on two popular benchmarks, 92.2\% on UCF-101 (without using audio) and 84.9\% on Columbia Consumer Videos.