Youmei Zhang

Xingjian Tang, Jingwei Guan, Linge Li et al.

Diffusion models, as powerful generative models, have found a wide range of applications and shown great potential in solving image reconstruction problems. Some works attempted to solve MRI reconstruction with diffusion models, but these methods operate directly in pixel space, leading to higher computational costs for optimization and inference. Latent diffusion models, pre-trained on natural images with rich visual priors, are expected to solve the high computational cost problem in MRI reconstruction by operating in a lower-dimensional latent space. However, direct application to MRI reconstruction faces three key challenges: (1) absence of explicit control mechanisms for medical fidelity, (2) domain gap between natural images and MR physics, and (3) undefined data consistency in latent space. To address these challenges, a novel Latent Diffusion Prior-based undersampled MRI reconstruction (LDPM) method is proposed. Our LDPM framework addresses these challenges by: (1) a sketch-guided pipeline with a two-step reconstruction strategy, which balances perceptual quality and anatomical fidelity, (2) an MRI-optimized VAE (MR-VAE), which achieves an improvement of approximately 3.92 dB in PSNR for undersampled MRI reconstruction compared to that with SD-VAE \cite{sd}, and (3) Dual-Stage Sampler, a modified version of spaced DDPM sampler, which enforces high-fidelity reconstruction in the latent space. Experiments on the fastMRI dataset\cite{fastmri} demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of the proposed method and its robustness across various scenarios. The effectiveness of each module is also verified through ablation experiments.

Youmei Zhang, Chunluan Zhou, Faliang Chang et al.

Occlusions, complex backgrounds, scale variations and non-uniform distributions present great challenges for crowd counting in practical applications. In this paper, we propose a novel method using an attention model to exploit head locations which are the most important cue for crowd counting. The attention model estimates a probability map in which high probabilities indicate locations where heads are likely to be present. The estimated probability map is used to suppress non-head regions in feature maps from several multi-scale feature extraction branches of a convolution neural network for crowd density estimation, which makes our method robust to complex backgrounds, scale variations and non-uniform distributions. In addition, we introduce a relative deviation loss to compensate a commonly used training loss, Euclidean distance, to improve the accuracy of sparse crowd density estimation. Experiments on Shanghai-Tech, UCF_CC_50 and World-Expo'10 data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.