We demonstrate the usefulness of surroundedness for eye fixation prediction by proposing a Boolean Map based Saliency model (BMS). In our formulation, an image is characterized by a set of binary ...images, which are generated by randomly thresholding the image's feature maps in a whitened feature space. Based on a Gestalt principle of figure-ground segregation, BMS computes a saliency map by discovering surrounded regions via topological analysis of Boolean maps. Furthermore, we draw a connection between BMS and the Minimum Barrier Distance to provide insight into why and how BMS can properly captures the surroundedness cue via Boolean maps. The strength of BMS is verified by its simplicity, efficiency and superior performance compared with 10 state-of-the-art methods on seven eye tracking benchmark datasets.
An improved proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller based on predictive functional control (PFC) is proposed and tested on the chamber pressure in an industrial coke furnace. The proposed ...design is motivated by the fact that PID controllers for industrial processes with time delay may not achieve the desired control performance because of the unavoidable model/plant mismatches, while model predictive control (MPC) is suitable for such situations. In this paper, PID control and PFC algorithm are combined to form a new PID controller that has the basic characteristic of PFC algorithm and at the same time, the simple structure of traditional PID controller. The proposed controller was tested in terms of set-point tracking and disturbance rejection, where the obtained results showed that the proposed controller had the better ensemble performance compared with traditional PID controllers.
•A novel PID controller optimized by predictive functional control (PFC) is proposed.•The design is tested on chamber pressure in the industrial coke furnace.•Improved closed-loop control performance is achieved for set-point tracking and disturbance rejection.
We aim to model the top-down attention of a convolutional neural network (CNN) classifier for generating task-specific attention maps. Inspired by a top-down human visual attention model, we propose ...a new backpropagation scheme, called Excitation Backprop, to pass along top-down signals downwards in the network hierarchy via a probabilistic Winner-Take-All process. Furthermore, we introduce the concept of contrastive attention to make the top-down attention maps more discriminative. We show a theoretic connection between the proposed contrastive attention formulation and the Class Activation Map computation. Efficient implementation of Excitation Backprop for common neural network layers is also presented. In experiments, we visualize the evidence of a model’s classification decision by computing the proposed top-down attention maps. For quantitative evaluation, we report the accuracy of our method in weakly supervised localization tasks on the MS COCO, PASCAL VOC07 and ImageNet datasets. The usefulness of our method is further validated in the text-to-region association task. On the Flickr30k Entities dataset, we achieve promising performance in phrase localization by leveraging the top-down attention of a CNN model that has been trained on weakly labeled web images. Finally, we demonstrate applications of our method in model interpretation and data annotation assistance for facial expression analysis and medical imaging tasks.
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Nowadays, metal nanoparticles (NPs) have been considered as highly promising functional materials, impacting virtually all the fields of science and technologies. Numerous ...wet-chemical approaches have been developed to synthesize metal NPs with various components and structures. Although successful, impurities, such as additives and reaction residuals, usually remain in products. Recently, an alternative method, pulsed laser ablation in liquid (PLAL) phase has attracted increasing attention for colloidal NP preparation, since it can realize a chemical-free environment, leading to the formation of a “clean” NP dispersion. This unique feature makes the PLAL method and resulting metal NPs extremely attractive for catalytic applications, since catalytic reaction efficiency is strongly dependent on the surface feature of metal NPs. Usually, a surfactant-free, “bare” metal surface is highly desired for catalysis as it favors the access of the reactants to the surface active sites of metal NPs. Due to the absence of ligand or stabilizer molecules on the surface of PLAL-NPs, it is expected that these PLAL-NPs can exhibit higher catalytic activity in comparison to their chemically synthesized counterparts. In this review, we briefly introduce some recent advances on the synthesis of PLAL-metal NPs and some of their important catalytic applications.
Traffic sign detection is an important task in traffic sign recognition systems. Chinese traffic signs have their unique features compared with traffic signs of other countries. Convolutional neural ...networks (CNNs) have achieved a breakthrough in computer vision tasks and made great success in traffic sign classification. In this paper, we present a Chinese traffic sign detection algorithm based on a deep convolutional network. To achieve real-time Chinese traffic sign detection, we propose an end-to-end convolutional network inspired by YOLOv2. In view of the characteristics of traffic signs, we take the multiple 1 × 1 convolutional layers in intermediate layers of the network and decrease the convolutional layers in top layers to reduce the computational complexity. For effectively detecting small traffic signs, we divide the input images into dense grids to obtain finer feature maps. Moreover, we expand the Chinese traffic sign dataset (CTSD) and improve the marker information, which is available online. All experimental results evaluated according to our expanded CTSD and German Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark (GTSDB) indicate that the proposed method is the faster and more robust. The fastest detection speed achieved was 0.017 s per image.
In recent years, the deep learning is applied to the field of traffic sign detection methods which achieves excellent performance. However, there are two main challenges in traffic sign detection to ...be solve urgently. For one thing, some traffic signs of small size are more difficult to detect than those of large size so that the small traffic signs are undetected. For another, some false signs are always detected because of interferences caused by the illumination variation, bad weather and some signs similar to the true traffic signs. Therefore, to solve the undetection and false detection, we first propose a cascaded R-CNN to obtain the multiscale features in pyramids. Each layer of the cascaded network except the first layer fuses the output bounding box of the previous one layer for joint training. This method contributes to the traffic sign detection. Then, we propose a multiscale attention method to obtain the weighted multiscale features by dot-product and softmax, which is summed to fine the features to highlight the traffic sign features and improve the accuracy of the traffic sign detection. Finally, we increase the number of difficult negative samples for dataset balance and data augmentation in the training to relieve the interference by complex environment and similar false traffic signs. The data augment method expands the German traffic sign training dataset by simulation of complex environment changes. We conduct numerous experiments to verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithm. The accuracy and recall rate of our method are 98.7% and 90.5% in GTSDB, 99.7% and 83.62% in CCTSDB and 98.9% and 85.6% in Lisa dataset respectively.
Visual object tracking is a significant technology for camera-based sensor networks applications. Multilayer convolutional features comprehensively used in correlation filter (CF)-based tracking ...algorithms have achieved excellent performance. However, there are tracking failures in some challenging situations because ordinary features are not able to well represent the object appearance variations and the correlation filters are updated irrationally. In this paper, we propose a local-global multiple correlation filters (LGCF) tracking algorithm for edge computing systems capturing moving targets, such as vehicles and pedestrians. First, we construct a global correlation filter model with deep convolutional features, and choose horizontal or vertical division according to the aspect ratio to build two local filters with hand-crafted features. Then, we propose a local-global collaborative strategy to exchange information between local and global correlation filters. This strategy can avoid the wrong learning of the object appearance model. Finally, we propose a time-space peak to sidelobe ratio (TSPSR) to evaluate the stability of the current CF. When the estimated results of the current CF are not reliable, the Kalman filter redetection (KFR) model would be enabled to recapture the object. The experimental results show that our presented algorithm achieves better performances on OTB-2013 and OTB-2015 compared with the other latest 12 tracking algorithms. Moreover, our algorithm handles various challenges in object tracking well.
Tool breakage causes losses of surface polishing and dimensional accuracy for machined part, or possible damage to a workpiece or machine. Tool Condition Monitoring (TCM) is considerably vital in the ...manufacturing industry. In this paper, an indirect TCM approach is introduced with a wireless triaxial accelerometer. The vibrations in the three vertical directions (x, y and z) are acquired during milling operations, and the raw signals are de-noised by wavelet analysis. These features of de-noised signals are extracted in the time, frequency and time-frequency domains. The key features are selected based on Pearson's Correlation Coefficient (PCC). The Neuro-Fuzzy Network (NFN) is adopted to predict the tool wear and Remaining Useful Life (RUL). In comparison with Back Propagation Neural Network (BPNN) and Radial Basis Function Network (RBFN), the results show that the NFN has the best performance in the prediction of tool wear and RUL.