arXiv subjects

Chuang Yang

Publications and source records attributed to Chuang Yang.

46 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2023

Traffic Sign Interpretation in Real Road Scene

Most existing traffic sign-related works are dedicated to detecting and recognizing part of traffic signs individually, which fails to analyze the global semantic logic among signs and may convey inaccurate traffic instruction. Following the above issues, we propose a traffic sign interpretation (TSI) task, which aims to interpret global semantic interrelated traffic signs (e.g.,~driving instruction-related texts, symbols, and guide panels) into a natural language for providing accurate instruction support to autonomous or assistant driving. Meanwhile, we design a multi-task learning architecture for TSI, which is responsible for detecting and recognizing various traffic signs and interpreting them into a natural language like a human. Furthermore, the absence of a public TSI available dataset prompts us to build a traffic sign interpretation dataset, namely TSI-CN. The dataset consists of real road scene images, which are captured from the highway and the urban way in China from a driver's perspective. It contains rich location labels of texts, symbols, and guide panels, and the corresponding natural language description labels. Experiments on TSI-CN demonstrate that the TSI task is achievable and the TSI architecture can interpret traffic signs from scenes successfully even if there is a complex semantic logic among signs. The TSI-CN dataset and the source code of the TSI architecture will be publicly available after the revision process.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Revisiting Mobility Modeling with Graph: A Graph Transformer Model for Next Point-of-Interest Recommendation

Next Point-of-Interest (POI) recommendation plays a crucial role in urban mobility applications. Recently, POI recommendation models based on Graph Neural Networks (GNN) have been extensively studied and achieved, however, the effective incorporation of both spatial and temporal information into such GNN-based models remains challenging. Extracting distinct fine-grained features unique to each piece of information is difficult since temporal information often includes spatial information, as users tend to visit nearby POIs. To address the challenge, we propose \textbf{\underline{Mob}}ility \textbf{\underline{G}}raph \textbf{\underline{T}}ransformer (MobGT) that enables us to fully leverage graphs to capture both the spatial and temporal features in users' mobility patterns. MobGT combines individual spatial and temporal graph encoders to capture unique features and global user-location relations. Additionally, it incorporates a mobility encoder based on Graph Transformer to extract higher-order information between POIs. To address the long-tailed problem in spatial-temporal data, MobGT introduces a novel loss function, Tail Loss. Experimental results demonstrate that MobGT outperforms state-of-the-art models on various datasets and metrics, achieving 24\% improvement on average. Our codes are available at \url{https://github.com/Yukayo/MobGT}.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Metapopulation Graph Neural Networks: Deep Metapopulation Epidemic Modeling with Human Mobility

Epidemic prediction is a fundamental task for epidemic control and prevention. Many mechanistic models and deep learning models are built for this task. However, most mechanistic models have difficulty estimating the time/region-varying epidemiological parameters, while most deep learning models lack the guidance of epidemiological domain knowledge and interpretability of prediction results. In this study, we propose a novel hybrid model called MepoGNN for multi-step multi-region epidemic forecasting by incorporating Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and graph learning mechanisms into Metapopulation SIR model. Our model can not only predict the number of confirmed cases but also explicitly learn the epidemiological parameters and the underlying epidemic propagation graph from heterogeneous data in an end-to-end manner. The multi-source epidemic-related data and mobility data of Japan are collected and processed to form the dataset for experiments. The experimental results demonstrate our model outperforms the existing mechanistic models and deep learning models by a large margin. Furthermore, the analysis on the learned parameters illustrate the high reliability and interpretability of our model and helps better understanding of epidemic spread. In addition, a mobility generation method is presented to address the issue of unavailable mobility data, and the experimental results demonstrate effectiveness of the generated mobility data as an input to our model.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2022

Growing Instance Mask on Leaf

Contour-based instance segmentation methods include one-stage and multi-stage schemes. These approaches achieve remarkable performance. However, they have to define plenty of points to segment precise masks, which leads to high complexity. We follow this issue and present a single-shot method, called \textbf{VeinMask}, for achieving competitive performance in low design complexity. Concretely, we observe that the leaf locates coarse margins via major veins and grows minor veins to refine twisty parts, which makes it possible to cover any objects accurately. Meanwhile, major and minor veins share the same growth mode, which avoids modeling them separately and ensures model simplicity. Considering the superiorities above, we propose VeinMask to formulate the instance segmentation problem as the simulation of the vein growth process and to predict the major and minor veins in polar coordinates. Besides, centroidness is introduced for instance segmentation tasks to help suppress low-quality instances. Furthermore, a surroundings cross-correlation sensitive (SCCS) module is designed to enhance the feature expression by utilizing the surroundings of each pixel. Additionally, a Residual IoU (R-IoU) loss is formulated to supervise the regression tasks of major and minor veins effectively. Experiments demonstrate that VeinMask performs much better than other contour-based methods in low design complexity. Particularly, our method outperforms existing one-stage contour-based methods on the COCO dataset with almost half the design complexity.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

CM-Net: Concentric Mask based Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection

Recently fast arbitrary-shaped text detection has become an attractive research topic. However, most existing methods are non-real-time, which may fall short in intelligent systems. Although a few real-time text methods are proposed, the detection accuracy is far behind non-real-time methods. To improve the detection accuracy and speed simultaneously, we propose a novel fast and accurate text detection framework, namely CM-Net, which is constructed based on a new text representation method and a multi-perspective feature (MPF) module. The former can fit arbitrary-shaped text contours by concentric mask (CM) in an efficient and robust way. The latter encourages the network to learn more CM-related discriminative features from multiple perspectives and brings no extra computational cost. Benefiting the advantages of CM and MPF, the proposed CM-Net only needs to predict one CM of the text instance to rebuild the text contour and achieves the best balance between detection accuracy and speed compared with previous works. Moreover, to ensure that multi-perspective features are effectively learned, the multi-factor constraints loss is proposed. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed CM is efficient and robust to fit arbitrary-shaped text instances, and also validate the effectiveness of MPF and constraints loss for discriminative text features recognition. Furthermore, experimental results show that the proposed CM-Net is superior to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) real-time text detection methods in both detection speed and accuracy on MSRA-TD500, CTW1500, Total-Text, and ICDAR2015 datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

EpiMob: Interactive Visual Analytics of Citywide Human Mobility Restrictions for Epidemic Control

The outbreak of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has swept across more than 180 countries and territories since late January 2020. As a worldwide emergency response, governments have implemented various measures and policies, such as self-quarantine, travel restrictions, work from home, and regional lockdown, to control the spread of the epidemic. These countermeasures seek to restrict human mobility because COVID-19 is a highly contagious disease that is spread by human-to-human transmission. Medical experts and policymakers have expressed the urgency to effectively evaluate the outcome of human restriction policies with the aid of big data and information technology. Thus, based on big human mobility data and city POI data, an interactive visual analytics system called Epidemic Mobility (EpiMob) was designed in this study. The system interactively simulates the changes in human mobility and infection status in response to the implementation of a certain restriction policy or a combination of policies (e.g., regional lockdown, telecommuting, screening). Users can conveniently designate the spatial and temporal ranges for different mobility restriction policies. Then, the results reflecting the infection situation under different policies are dynamically displayed and can be flexibly compared and analyzed in depth. Multiple case studies consisting of interviews with domain experts were conducted in the largest metropolitan area of Japan (i.e., Greater Tokyo Area) to demonstrate that the system can provide insight into the effects of different human mobility restriction policies for epidemic control, through measurements and comparisons.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2021

Adaptive Shrink-Mask for Text Detection

Existing real-time text detectors reconstruct text contours by shrink-masks directly, which simplifies the framework and can make the model run fast. However, the strong dependence on predicted shrink-masks leads to unstable detection results. Moreover, the discrimination of shrink-masks is a pixelwise prediction task. Supervising the network by shrink-masks only will lose much semantic context, which leads to the false detection of shrink-masks. To address these problems, we construct an efficient text detection network, Adaptive Shrink-Mask for Text Detection (ASMTD), which improves the accuracy during training and reduces the complexity of the inference process. At first, the Adaptive Shrink-Mask (ASM) is proposed to represent texts by shrink-masks and independent adaptive offsets. It weakens the coupling of texts to shrink-masks, which improves the robustness of detection results. Then, the Super-pixel Window (SPW) is designed to supervise the network. It utilizes the surroundings of each pixel to improve the reliability of predicted shrink-masks and does not appear during testing. In the end, a lightweight feature merging branch is constructed to reduce the computational cost. As demonstrated in the experiments, our method is superior to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in both detection accuracy and speed on multiple benchmarks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

BiP-Net: Bidirectional Perspective Strategy based Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection Network

Detecting irregular-shaped text instances is the main challenge for text detection. Existing approaches can be roughly divided into top-down and bottom-up perspective methods. The former encodes text contours into unified units, which always fails to fit highly curved text contours. The latter represents text instances by a number of local units, where the complicated network and post-processing lead to slow detection speed. In this paper, to detect arbitrary-shaped text instances with high detection accuracy and speed simultaneously, we propose a \textbf{Bi}directional \textbf{P}erspective strategy based \textbf{Net}work (BiP-Net). Specifically, a new text representation strategy is proposed to represent text contours from a top-down perspective, which can fit highly curved text contours effectively. Moreover, a contour connecting (CC) algorithm is proposed to avoid the information loss of text contours by rebuilding interval contours from a bottom-up perspective. The experimental results on MSRA-TD500, CTW1500, and ICDAR2015 datasets demonstrate the superiority of BiP-Net against several state-of-the-art methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

MT: Multi-Perspective Feature Learning Network for Scene Text Detection

Text detection, the key technology for understanding scene text, has become an attractive research topic. For detecting various scene texts, researchers propose plenty of detectors with different advantages: detection-based models enjoy fast detection speed, and segmentation-based algorithms are not limited by text shapes. However, for most intelligent systems, the detector needs to detect arbitrary-shaped texts with high speed and accuracy simultaneously. Thus, in this study, we design an efficient pipeline named as MT, which can detect adhesive arbitrary-shaped texts with only a single binary mask in the inference stage. This paper presents the contributions on three aspects: (1) a light-weight detection framework is designed to speed up the inference process while keeping high detection accuracy; (2) a multi-perspective feature module is proposed to learn more discriminative representations to segment the mask accurately; (3) a multi-factor constraints IoU minimization loss is introduced for training the proposed model. The effectiveness of MT is evaluated on four real-world scene text datasets, and it surpasses all the state-of-the-art competitors to a large extent.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

VLUC: An Empirical Benchmark for Video-Like Urban Computing on Citywide Crowd and Traffic Prediction

Nowadays, massive urban human mobility data are being generated from mobile phones, car navigation systems, and traffic sensors. Predicting the density and flow of the crowd or traffic at a citywide level becomes possible by using the big data and cutting-edge AI technologies. It has been a very significant research topic with high social impact, which can be widely applied to emergency management, traffic regulation, and urban planning. In particular, by meshing a large urban area to a number of fine-grained mesh-grids, citywide crowd and traffic information in a continuous time period can be represented like a video, where each timestamp can be seen as one video frame. Based on this idea, a series of methods have been proposed to address video-like prediction for citywide crowd and traffic. In this study, we publish a new aggregated human mobility dataset generated from a real-world smartphone application and build a standard benchmark for such kind of video-like urban computing with this new dataset and the existing open datasets. We first comprehensively review the state-of-the-art works of literature and formulate the density and in-out flow prediction problem, then conduct a thorough performance assessment for those methods. With this benchmark, we hope researchers can easily follow up and quickly launch a new solution on this topic.

cs.LG↗