Bing Zhou

Wei Huang, Ning Wang, Panpan Feng et al.

Electrocardiograms (ECG), which record the electrophysiological activity of the heart, have become a crucial tool for diagnosing these diseases. In recent years, the application of deep learning techniques has significantly improved the performance of ECG signal classification. Multi-resolution feature analysis, which captures and processes information at different time scales, can extract subtle changes and overall trends in ECG signals, showing unique advantages. However, common multi-resolution analysis methods based on simple feature addition or concatenation may lead to the neglect of low-resolution features, affecting model performance. To address this issue, this paper proposes the Multi-Resolution Mutual Learning Network (MRM-Net). MRM-Net includes a dual-resolution attention architecture and a feature complementary mechanism. The dual-resolution attention architecture processes high-resolution and low-resolution features in parallel. Through the attention mechanism, the high-resolution and low-resolution branches can focus on subtle waveform changes and overall rhythm patterns, enhancing the ability to capture critical features in ECG signals. Meanwhile, the feature complementary mechanism introduces mutual feature learning after each layer of the feature extractor. This allows features at different resolutions to reinforce each other, thereby reducing information loss and improving model performance and robustness. Experiments on the PTB-XL and CPSC2018 datasets demonstrate that MRM-Net significantly outperforms existing methods in multi-label ECG classification performance. The code for our framework will be publicly available at https://github.com/wxhdf/MRM.

Pei Lv, Jianqi Fan, Xixi Nie et al.

Personalized image aesthetic assessment (PIAA) has recently become a hot topic due to its usefulness in a wide variety of applications such as photography, film and television, e-commerce, fashion design and so on. This task is more seriously affected by subjective factors and samples provided by users. In order to acquire precise personalized aesthetic distribution by small amount of samples, we propose a novel user-guided personalized image aesthetic assessment framework. This framework leverages user interactions to retouch and rank images for aesthetic assessment based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL), and generates personalized aesthetic distribution that is more in line with the aesthetic preferences of different users. It mainly consists of two stages. In the first stage, personalized aesthetic ranking is generated by interactive image enhancement and manual ranking, meanwhile two policy networks will be trained. The images will be pushed to the user for manual retouching and simultaneously to the enhancement policy network. The enhancement network utilizes the manual retouching results as the optimization goals of DRL. After that, the ranking process performs the similar operations like the retouching mentioned before. These two networks will be trained iteratively and alternatively to help to complete the final personalized aesthetic assessment automatically. In the second stage, these modified images are labeled with aesthetic attributes by one style-specific classifier, and then the personalized aesthetic distribution is generated based on the multiple aesthetic attributes of these images, which conforms to the aesthetic preference of users better.

Pei Lv, Hui Wei, Tianxin Gu et al.

Trajectory prediction is a fundamental and challenging task for numerous applications, such as autonomous driving and intelligent robots. Currently, most of existing work treat the pedestrian trajectory as a series of fixed two-dimensional coordinates. However, in real scenarios, the trajectory often exhibits randomness, and has its own probability distribution. Inspired by this observed fact, also considering other movement characteristics of pedestrians, we propose one simple and intuitive movement description, probability trajectory, which maps the coordinate points of pedestrian trajectory into two-dimensional Gaussian distribution in images. Based on this unique description, we develop one novel trajectory prediction method, called social probability. The method combines the new probability trajectory and powerful convolution recurrent neural networks together. Both the input and output of our method are probability trajectories, which provide the recurrent neural network with sufficient spatial and random information of moving pedestrians. And the social probability extracts spatio-temporal features directly on the new movement description to generate robust and accurate predicted results. The experiments on public benchmark datasets show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Chaochao Li, Pei Lv, Mingliang Xu et al.

We present a novel trajectory prediction algorithm for pedestrians based on a personality-aware probabilistic feature map. This map is computed using a spatial query structure and each value represents the probability of the predicted pedestrian passing through various positions in the crowd space. We update this map dynamically based on the agents in the environment and prior trajectory of a pedestrian. Furthermore, we estimate the personality characteristics of each pedestrian and use them to improve the prediction by estimating the shortest path in this map. Our approach is general and works well on crowd videos with low and high pedestrian density. We evaluate our model on standard human-trajectory datasets. In practice, our prediction algorithm improves the accuracy by 5-9% over prior algorithms.

Pei Lv, Shunhua Liu, Mingliang Xu et al.

This paper proposes a method based on repulsive forces and sparse reconstruction for the detection and location of abnormal events in crowded scenes. In order to avoid the challenging problem of accurately tracking each specific individual in a dense or complex scene, we divide each frame of the surveillance video into a fixed number of grids and select a single representative point in each grid as the individual to track. The repulsive force model, which can accurately reflect interactive behaviors of crowds, is used to calculate the interactive forces between grid particles in crowded scenes and to construct a force flow matrix using these discrete forces from a fixed number of continuous frames. The force flow matrix, which contains spatial and temporal information, is adopted to train a group of visual dictionaries by sparse coding. To further improve the detection efficiency and avoid concept drift, we propose a fully unsupervised global and local dynamic updating algorithm, based on sparse reconstruction and a group of word pools. For anomaly location, since our method is based on a fixed grid, we can judge whether anomalies occur in a region intuitively according to the reconstruction error of the corresponding visual words. We experimentally verify the proposed method using the UMN dataset, the UCSD dataset and the Web dataset separately. The results indicate that our method can not only detect abnormal events accurately, but can also pinpoint the location of anomalies.

Pei Lv, Meng Wang, Yongbo Xu et al.

When assessing whether an image is of high or low quality, it is indispensable to take personal preference into account. Existing aesthetic models lay emphasis on hand-crafted features or deep features commonly shared by high quality images, but with limited or no consideration for personal preference and user interaction. To that end, we propose a novel and user-friendly aesthetic ranking framework via powerful deep neural network and a small amount of user interaction, which can automatically estimate and rank the aesthetic characteristics of images in accordance with users' preference. Our framework takes as input a series of photos that users prefer, and produces as output a reliable, user-specific aesthetic ranking model matching with users' preference. Considering the subjectivity of personal preference and the uncertainty of user's single selection, a unique and exclusive dataset will be constructed interactively to describe the preference of one individual by retrieving the most similar images with regard to those specified by users. Based on this unique user-specific dataset and sufficient well-designed aesthetic attributes, a customized aesthetic distribution model can be learned, which concatenates both personalized preference and aesthetic rules. We conduct extensive experiments and user studies on two large-scale public datasets, and demonstrate that our framework outperforms those work based on conventional aesthetic assessment or ranking model.

Mingliang Xu, Qingfeng Li, Jianwei Niu et al.

QR codes are usually scanned in different environments, so they must be robust to variations in illumination, scale, coverage, and camera angles. Aesthetic QR codes improve the visual quality, but subtle changes in their appearance may cause scanning failure. In this paper, a new method to generate scanning-robust aesthetic QR codes is proposed, which is based on a module-based scanning probability estimation model that can effectively balance the tradeoff between visual quality and scanning robustness. Our method locally adjusts the luminance of each module by estimating the probability of successful sampling. The approach adopts the hierarchical, coarse-to-fine strategy to enhance the visual quality of aesthetic QR codes, which sequentially generate the following three codes: a binary aesthetic QR code, a grayscale aesthetic QR code, and the final color aesthetic QR code. Our approach also can be used to create QR codes with different visual styles by adjusting some initialization parameters. User surveys and decoding experiments were adopted for evaluating our method compared with state-of-the-art algorithms, which indicates that the proposed approach has excellent performance in terms of both visual quality and scanning robustness.

Mingliang Xu, Zhaoyang Ge, Xiaoheng Jiang et al.

It is important to monitor and analyze crowd events for the sake of city safety. In an EDOF (extended depth of field) image with a crowded scene, the distribution of people is highly imbalanced. People far away from the camera look much smaller and often occlude each other heavily, while people close to the camera look larger. In such a case, it is difficult to accurately estimate the number of people by using one technique. In this paper, we propose a Depth Information Guided Crowd Counting (DigCrowd) method to deal with crowded EDOF scenes. DigCrowd first uses the depth information of an image to segment the scene into a far-view region and a near-view region. Then Digcrowd maps the far-view region to its crowd density map and uses a detection method to count the people in the near-view region. In addition, we introduce a new crowd dataset that contains 1000 images. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our DigCrowd method

Mingliang Xu, Hao Su, Yafei Li et al.

With the continued proliferation of smart mobile devices, Quick Response (QR) code has become one of the most-used types of two-dimensional code in the world. Aiming at beautifying the visual-unpleasant appearance of QR codes, existing works have developed a series of techniques. However, these works still leave much to be desired, such as personalization, artistry, and robustness. To address these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel type of aesthetic QR codes, SEE (Stylize aEsthEtic) QR code, and a three-stage approach to automatically produce such robust style-oriented codes. Specifically, in the first stage, we propose a method to generate an optimized baseline aesthetic QR code, which reduces the visual contrast between the noise-like black/white modules and the blended image. In the second stage, to obtain art style QR code, we tailor an appropriate neural style transformation network to endow the baseline aesthetic QR code with artistic elements. In the third stage, we design an error-correction mechanism by balancing two competing terms, visual quality and readability, to ensure the performance robust. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SEE QR code has high quality in terms of both visual appearance and robustness, and also offers a greater variety of personalized choices to users.

Yihao Zhang, Weiyao Lin, Bing Zhou et al.

Expression cloning plays an important role in facial expression synthesis. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed for facial expression cloning. The proposed algorithm first introduces a new elastic model to balance the global and local warping effects, such that the impacts from facial feature diversity among people can be minimized, and thus more effective geometric warping results can be achieved. Furthermore, a muscle-distribution-based (MD) model is proposed, which utilizes the muscle distribution of the human face and results in more accurate facial illumination details. In addition, we also propose a new distance-based metric to automatically select the optimal parameters such that the global and local warping effects in the elastic model can be suitably balanced. Experimental results show that our proposed algorithm outperforms the existing methods.

Weiyao Lin, Ming-Ting Sun, Hongxiang Li et al.

In this paper, a macroblock classification method is proposed for various video processing applications involving motions. Based on the analysis of the Motion Vector field in the compressed video, we propose to classify Macroblocks of each video frame into different classes and use this class information to describe the frame content. We demonstrate that this low-computation-complexity method can efficiently catch the characteristics of the frame. Based on the proposed macroblock classification, we further propose algorithms for different video processing applications, including shot change detection, motion discontinuity detection, and outlier rejection for global motion estimation. Experimental results demonstrate that the methods based on the proposed approach can work effectively on these applications.