SSN: Shape Signature Networks for Multi-class Object Detection from Point Clouds

Multi-class 3D object detection aims to localize and classify objects of multiple categories from point clouds. Due to the nature of point clouds, i.e. unstructured, sparse and noisy, some features benefit-ting multi-class discrimination are underexploited, such as shape information. In this paper, we propose a novel 3D shape signature to explore the shape information from point clouds. By incorporating operations of symmetry, convex hull and chebyshev fitting, the proposed shape sig-nature is not only compact and effective but also robust to the noise, which serves as a soft constraint to improve the feature capability of multi-class discrimination. Based on the proposed shape signature, we develop the shape signature networks (SSN) for 3D object detection, which consist of pyramid feature encoding part, shape-aware grouping heads and explicit shape encoding objective. Experiments show that the proposed method performs remarkably better than existing methods on two large-scale datasets. Furthermore, our shape signature can act as a plug-and-play component and ablation study shows its effectiveness and good scalabilityComment: Code is available at https://github.com/xinge008/SS

Contourlet-Based Edge Extraction for Image Registration

Image registration is a crucial step in most image processing tasks for which the final result is achieved from a combination of various resources. In general, the majority of registration methods consist of the following four steps: feature extraction, feature matching, transform modeling, and finally image resampling. As the accuracy of a registration process is highly dependent to the feature extraction and matching methods, in this paper, we have proposed a new method for extracting salient edges from satellite images. Due to the efficiency of multiresolution data representation, we have considered four state-of-the-art multiresolution transforms –namely, wavelet, curvelet, complex wavelet and contourlet transform- in the feature extraction step of the proposed image registration method. Experimental results and performance comparison among these transformations showed the high performance of the contourlet transform in extracting efficient edges from satellite images. Obtaining salient, stable and distinguishable features increased the accuracy of the proposed registration process

Moving Vehicle Tracking Using Disjoint View Multicameras

Multicamera vehicle tracking is a necessary part of any video-based intelligent transportation system for extracting different traffic parameters such as link travel times and origin/destination counts. In many applications, it is needed to locate traffic cameras disjoint from each other to cover a wide area. This paper presents a method for tracking moving vehicles in such camera networks. The proposed method introduces a new method for handling inter-object occlusions as the most challenging part of the single camera tracking phase. This approach is based on coding the silhouette of moving objects before and after occlusion and separating occluded vehicles by computing the longest common substring of the related chain codes. In addition, to improve the accuracy of the tracking method in the multicamera phase, a new feature based on the relationships among surrounding vehicles is formulated. The proposed feature can efficiently improve the efficiency of the appearance (or space-time) features when they cannot discriminate between correspondent and non-correspondent vehicles due to noise or dynamic condition of traffic scenes. A graph-based approach is then used to track vehicles in the camera network. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed methods

An Efficient Adaptive Boundary Matching Algorithm for Video Error Concealment

Sending compressed video data in error-prone environments (like the Internet and wireless networks) might cause data degradation. Error concealment techniques try to conceal the received data in the decoder side. In this paper, an adaptive boundary matching algorithm is presented for recovering the damaged motion vectors (MVs). This algorithm uses an outer boundary matching or directional temporal boundary matching method to compare every boundary of candidate macroblocks (MBs), adaptively. It gives a specific weight according to the accuracy of each boundary of the damaged MB. Moreover, if each of the adjacent MBs is already concealed, different weights are given to the boundaries. Finally, the MV with minimum adaptive boundary distortion is selected as the MV of the damaged MB. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can improve both objective and subjective quality of reconstructed frames without any considerable computational complexity The average PSNR in some frames of test sequences increases about 4.59, 4.44, 3.57, and 2.98 dB compared to classic boundary matching, directional boundary matching, directional temporal boundary matching, and outer boundary matching algorithm, respectively

Post-disaster multi-period road network repair: work scheduling and relief logistics optimization

We develop a multi-period bi-level programming model for the post-disaster road network repair work scheduling and relief logistics problem. A maximum relative satisfaction degree-based steady-state parallel genetic algorithm is designed to solve this model. In order to validate and test the effectiveness of the presented mathematical model and method, we use a network generator to create numerical examples with different scales and characteristics of road network. Our numerical analysis of the solutions shows that the proposed mathematical model and method can effectively assist the decision-makers to deal with the road network repair work scheduling and relief logistics optimization problem during the emergency response phase. This mathematical model and the approach being developed are applied to deal with the case of Wenchuan earthquake in China. The results show that the required CPU time is short enough such that it meets the time limitation in the emergency response phase, and the strategy of road network repair scheduling will allow repair of the damaged roads to be completed before the end of the planning time horizon by 14.93%. Furthermore, the strategy of relief logistics can provide an efficient relief allocation and transportation path