Hybrid attention network based on progressive embedding scale-context for crowd counting

The existing crowd counting methods usually adopted attention mechanism to tackle background noise, or applied multi-level features or multi-scales context fusion to tackle scale variation. However, these approaches deal with these two problems separately. In this paper, we propose a Hybrid Attention Network (HAN) by employing Progressive Embedding Scale-context (PES) information, which enables the network to simultaneously suppress noise and adapt head scale variation. We build the hybrid attention mechanism through paralleling spatial attention and channel attention module, which makes the network to focus more on the human head area and reduce the interference of background objects. Besides, we embed certain scale-context to the hybrid attention along the spatial and channel dimensions for alleviating these counting errors caused by the variation of perspective and head scale. Finally, we propose a progressive learning strategy through cascading multiple hybrid attention modules with embedding different scale-context, which can gradually integrate different scale-context information into the current feature map from global to local. Ablation experiments provides that the network architecture can gradually learn multi-scale features and suppress background noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HANet obtain state-of-the-art counting performance on four mainstream datasets.

BigDL: A Distributed Deep Learning Framework for Big Data

In this paper, we present BigDL, a distributed deep learning framework for Big Data platforms and workflows. It is implemented on top of Apache Spark, and allows users to write their deep learning applications as standard Spark programs (running directly on large-scale big data clusters in a distributed fashion). It provides an expressive, "data-analytics integrated" deep learning programming model, so that users can easily build the end-to-end analytics + AI pipelines under a unified programming paradigm; by implementing an AllReduce like operation using existing primitives in Spark (e.g., shuffle, broadcast, and in-memory data persistence), it also provides a highly efficient "parameter server" style architecture, so as to achieve highly scalable, data-parallel distributed training. Since its initial open source release, BigDL users have built many analytics and deep learning applications (e.g., object detection, sequence-to-sequence generation, visual similarity, neural recommendations, fraud detection, etc.) on Spark.