Chengzhi Ma

Jintao Wang, Pingping Zhang, Chengzhi Ma et al.

Reconfigurable distributed antennas and reflecting surface (RDARS) has emerged as a transformative solution to address the stringent requirements of future wireless networks. By combining distributed active antennas with reconfigurable passive reflecting surfaces, RDARS integrates the advantages of both active transmission and passive wave control in a cost-effective and energy-efficient manner. This hybrid architecture enables enhanced coverage, improved spectral efficiency, and seamless support for integrated communication and sensing. In this article, we first introduce the fundamental architecture and working principles of RDARS, followed by practical benefits and comparisons with recently proposed intelligent surface variants. We then highlight the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) gains in representative applications of RDARS-aided communication and sensing scenarios, where RDARS demonstrates clear advantages over conventional reconfigurable intelligent surfaces. Finally, we outline key challenges related to practical implementation and resource allocation, and discuss potential research directions. With its unique hybrid mode synergy, RDARS is envisioned to play a pivotal role in shaping the evolution of next-generation intelligent communication systems.

Chengzhi Ma, Kunqian Li, Shuaixin Liu et al.

Indiscernible marine object counting encounters numerous challenges, including limited visibility in underwater scenes, mutual occlusion and overlap among objects, and the dynamic similarity in appearance, color, and texture between the background and foreground. These factors significantly complicate the counting process. To address the scarcity of video-based indiscernible object counting datasets, we have developed a novel dataset comprising 50 videos, from which approximately 800 frames have been extracted and annotated with around 40,800 point-wise object labels. This dataset accurately represents real underwater environments where indiscernible marine objects are intricately integrated with their surroundings, thereby comprehensively illustrating the aforementioned challenges in object counting. To address these challenges, we propose a depth-assisted network with adaptive motion-differentiated feature encoding. The network consists of a backbone encoding module and three branches: a depth-assisting branch, a density estimation branch, and a motion weight generation branch. Depth-aware features extracted by the depth-assisting branch are enhanced via a depth-enhanced encoder to improve object representation. Meanwhile, weights from the motion weight generation branch refine multi-scale perception features in the adaptive flow estimation module. Experimental results demonstrate that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art performance on the proposed dataset but also yields competitive results on three additional video-based crowd counting datasets. The pre-trained model, code, and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/OUCVisionGroup/VIMOC-Net.

Han Mei, Kunqian Li, Shuaixin Liu et al.

Due to the complex interplay of light absorption and scattering in the underwater environment, underwater images experience significant degradation. This research presents a two-stage underwater image enhancement network called the Data-Driven and Physical Parameters Fusion Network (DPF-Net), which harnesses the robustness of physical imaging models alongside the generality and efficiency of data-driven methods. We first train a physical parameter estimate module using synthetic datasets to guarantee the trustworthiness of the physical parameters, rather than solely learning the fitting relationship between raw and reference images by the application of the imaging equation, as is common in prior studies. This module is subsequently trained in conjunction with an enhancement network, where the estimated physical parameters are integrated into a data-driven model within the embedding space. To maintain the uniformity of the restoration process amid underwater imaging degradation, we propose a physics-based degradation consistency loss. Additionally, we suggest an innovative weak reference loss term utilizing the entire dataset, which alleviates our model's reliance on the quality of individual reference images. Our proposed DPF-Net demonstrates superior performance compared to other benchmark methods across multiple test sets, achieving state-of-the-art results. The source code and pre-trained models are available on the project home page: https://github.com/OUCVisionGroup/DPF-Net.