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The utilization of AIoT technology has become a crucial trend in modern poultry management, offering the potential to optimize farming operations and reduce human workloads. This paper presents a real-time and compact edge-AI enabled detector designed to identify chickens and their healthy statuses using frames captured by a lightweight and intelligent camera equipped with an edge-AI enabled CMOS sensor. To ensure efficient deployment of the proposed compact detector within the memory-constrained edge-AI enabled CMOS sensor, we employ a FCOS-Lite detector leveraging MobileNet as the backbone. To mitigate the issue of reduced accuracy in compact edge-AI detectors without incurring additional inference costs, we propose a gradient weighting loss function as classification loss and introduce CIOU loss function as localization loss. Additionally, we propose a knowledge distillation scheme to transfer valuable information from a large teacher detector to the proposed FCOS-Lite detector, thereby enhancing its performance while preserving a compact model size. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed edge-AI enabled detector achieves commendable performance metrics, including a mean average precision (mAP) of 95.1$\%$ and an F1-score of 94.2$\%$, etc. Notably, the proposed detector can be efficiently deployed and operates at a speed exceeding 20 FPS on the edge-AI enabled CMOS sensor, achieved through int8 quantization. That meets practical demands for automated poultry health monitoring using lightweight intelligent cameras with low power consumption and minimal bandwidth costs.

Recognizing interactive actions, including hand-to-hand interaction and human-to-human interaction, has attracted increasing attention for various applications in the field of video analysis and human-robot interaction. Considering the success of graph convolution in modeling topology-aware features from skeleton data, recent methods commonly operate graph convolution on separate entities and use late fusion for interactive action recognition, which can barely model the mutual semantic relationships between pairwise entities. To this end, we propose a mutual excitation graph convolutional network (me-GCN) by stacking mutual excitation graph convolution (me-GC) layers. Specifically, me-GC uses a mutual topology excitation module to firstly extract adjacency matrices from individual entities and then adaptively model the mutual constraints between them. Moreover, me-GC extends the above idea and further uses a mutual feature excitation module to extract and merge deep features from pairwise entities. Compared with graph convolution, our proposed me-GC gradually learns mutual information in each layer and each stage of graph convolution operations. Extensive experiments on a challenging hand-to-hand interaction dataset, i.e., the Assembely101 dataset, and two large-scale human-to-human interaction datasets, i.e., NTU60-Interaction and NTU120-Interaction consistently verify the superiority of our proposed method, which outperforms the state-of-the-art GCN-based and Transformer-based methods.

With potential applications in fields including intelligent surveillance and human-robot interaction, the human motion prediction task has become a hot research topic and also has achieved high success, especially using the recent Graph Convolutional Network (GCN). Current human motion prediction task usually focuses on predicting human motions for atomic actions. Observing that atomic actions can happen at the same time and thus formulating the composite actions, we propose the composite human motion prediction task. To handle this task, we first present a Composite Action Generation (CAG) module to generate synthetic composite actions for training, thus avoiding the laborious work of collecting composite action samples. Moreover, we alleviate the effect of composite actions on demand for a more complicated model by presenting a Dynamic Compositional Graph Convolutional Network (DC-GCN). Extensive experiments on the Human3.6M dataset and our newly collected CHAMP dataset consistently verify the efficiency of our DC-GCN method, which achieves state-of-the-art motion prediction accuracies and meanwhile needs few extra computational costs than traditional GCN-based human motion methods.

Due to distribution shift, deep learning based methods for image dehazing suffer from performance degradation when applied to real-world hazy images. In this paper, we consider a dehazing framework based on conditional diffusion models for improved generalization to real haze. First, we find that optimizing the training objective of diffusion models, i.e., Gaussian noise vectors, is non-trivial. The spectral bias of deep networks hinders the higher frequency modes in Gaussian vectors from being learned and hence impairs the reconstruction of image details. To tackle this issue, we design a network unit, named Frequency Compensation block (FCB), with a bank of filters that jointly emphasize the mid-to-high frequencies of an input signal. We demonstrate that diffusion models with FCB achieve significant gains in both perceptual and distortion metrics. Second, to further boost the generalization performance, we propose a novel data synthesis pipeline, HazeAug, to augment haze in terms of degree and diversity. Within the framework, a solid baseline for blind dehazing is set up where models are trained on synthetic hazy-clean pairs, and directly generalize to real data. Extensive evaluations show that the proposed dehazing diffusion model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods on real-world images. Our code is at https://github.com/W-Jilly/frequency-compensated-diffusion-model-pytorch., Comment: 19 pages

User selection has become crucial for decreasing the communication costs of federated learning (FL) over wireless networks. However, centralized user selection causes additional system complexity. This study proposes a network intrinsic approach of distributed user selection that leverages the radio resource competition mechanism in random access. Taking the carrier sensing multiple access (CSMA) mechanism as an example of random access, we manipulate the contention window (CW) size to prioritize certain users for obtaining radio resources in each round of training. Training data bias is used as a target scenario for FL with user selection. Prioritization is based on the distance between the newly trained local model and the global model of the previous round. To avoid excessive contribution by certain users, a counting mechanism is used to ensure fairness. Simulations with various datasets demonstrate that this method can rapidly achieve convergence similar to that of the centralized user selection approach.

Image steganalysis is a special binary classification problem that aims to classify natural cover images and suspected stego images which are the results of embedding very weak secret message signals into covers. How to effectively suppress cover image content and thus make the classification of cover images and stego images easier is the key of this task. Recent researches show that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) are very effective to detect steganography by learning discriminative features between cover images and their stegos. Several deep CNN models have been proposed via incorporating domain knowledge of image steganography/steganalysis into the design of the network and achieve state of the art performance on standard database. Following such direction, we propose a novel model called Cover Image Suppression Network (CIS-Net), which improves the performance of spatial image steganalysis by suppressing cover image content as much as possible in model learning. Two novel layers, the Single-value Truncation Layer (STL) and Sub-linear Pooling Layer (SPL), are proposed in this work. Specifically, STL truncates input values into a same threshold when they are out of a predefined interval. Theoretically, we have proved that STL can reduce the variance of input feature map without deteriorating useful information. For SPL, it utilizes sub-linear power function to suppress large valued elements introduced by cover image contents and aggregates weak embedded signals via average pooling. Extensive experiments demonstrate the proposed network equipped with STL and SPL achieves better performance than rich model classifiers and existing CNN models on challenging steganographic algorithms.

Deep learning based image steganalysis has attracted increasing attentions in recent years. Several Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models have been proposed and achieved state-of-the-art performances on detecting steganography. In this paper, we explore an important technique in deep learning, the batch normalization, for the task of image steganalysis. Different from natural image classification, steganalysis is to discriminate cover images and stego images which are the result of adding weak stego signals into covers. This characteristic makes a cover image is more statistically similar to its stego than other cover images, requiring steganalytic methods to use paired learning to extract effective features for image steganalysis. Our theoretical analysis shows that a CNN model with multiple normalization layers is hard to be generalized to new data in the test set when it is well trained with paired learning. To hand this difficulty, we propose a novel normalization technique called Shared Normalization (SN) in this paper. Unlike the batch normalization layer utilizing the mini-batch mean and standard deviation to normalize each input batch, SN shares same statistics for all training and test batches. Based on the proposed SN layer, we further propose a novel neural network model for image steganalysis. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed network with SN layers is stable and can detect the state of the art steganography with better performances than previous methods., Comment: submitted to IEEE Transactions on Multimedia