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Owing to the diverse geographical environments, intricate landscapes, and high-density settlements, the automatic identification of urban village boundaries using remote sensing images is a highly challenging task. This paper proposes a novel and efficient neural network model called UV-Mamba for accurate boundary detection in high-resolution remote sensing images. UV-Mamba mitigates the memory loss problem in long sequence modeling, which arises in state space model (SSM) with increasing image size, by incorporating deformable convolutions (DCN). Its architecture utilizes an encoder-decoder framework, includes an encoder with four deformable state space augmentation (DSSA) blocks for efficient multi-level semantic extraction and a decoder to integrate the extracted semantic information. We conducted experiments on the Beijing and Xi'an datasets, and the results show that UV-Mamba achieves state-of-the-art performance. Specifically, our model achieves 73.3% and 78.1% IoU on the Beijing and Xi'an datasets, respectively, representing improvements of 1.2% and 3.4% IoU over the previous best model, while also being 6x faster in inference speed and 40x smaller in parameter count. Source code and pre-trained models are available in the supplementary material., Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables

Water market is a contemporary marketplace for water trading and is deemed to one of the most efficient instruments to improve the social welfare. In modern water markets, the two widely used trading systems are an improved pair-wise trading, and a 'smart market' or common pool method. In comparison with the economic model, this paper constructs a conceptual mathematic model through the HARA utility functions. Mirroring the concepts such as Nash Equilibrium, Pareto optimal and stable matching in economy, three significant propositions are acquired which illustrate the advantages of the common pool method compared with the improved pair-wise trading.

The challenge of efficient target searching in vast natural environments has driven the need for advanced multi-UAV active search strategies. This paper introduces a novel method in which global and local information is adeptly merged to avoid issues such as myopia and redundant back-and-forth movements. In addition, a trajectory generation method is used to ensure the search pattern within continuous space. To further optimize multi-agent cooperation, the Voronoi partition technique is employed, ensuring a reduction in repetitive flight patterns and making the control of multiple agents in a decentralized way. Through a series of experiments, the evaluation and comparison results demonstrate the efficiency of our approach in various environments. The primary application of this innovative approach is demonstrated in the search for horseshoe crabs within their wild habitats, showcasing its potential to revolutionize ecological survey and conservation efforts.

Semantic relevance calculation is crucial for e-commerce search engines, as it ensures that the items selected closely align with customer intent. Inadequate attention to this aspect can detrimentally affect user experience and engagement. Traditional text-matching techniques are prevalent but often fail to capture the nuances of search intent accurately, so neural networks now have become a preferred solution to processing such complex text matching. Existing methods predominantly employ representation-based architectures, which strike a balance between high traffic capacity and low latency. However, they exhibit significant shortcomings in generalization and robustness when compared to interaction-based architectures. In this work, we introduce a robust interaction-based modeling paradigm to address these shortcomings. It encompasses 1) a dynamic length representation scheme for expedited inference, 2) a professional terms recognition method to identify subjects and core attributes from complex sentence structures, and 3) a contrastive adversarial training protocol to bolster the model's robustness and matching capabilities. Extensive offline evaluations demonstrate the superior robustness and effectiveness of our approach, and online A/B testing confirms its ability to improve relevance in the same exposure position, resulting in more clicks and conversions. To the best of our knowledge, this method is the first interaction-based approach for large e-commerce search relevance calculation. Notably, we have deployed it for the entire search traffic on alibaba.com, the largest B2B e-commerce platform in the world., Comment: Accepted by ECML-PKDD'24 as Outstanding Paper. 8 pages, 2 figures, 7 tables

Mobile manipulators are known for their superior mobility over manipulators on fixed bases, offering promising applications in smart industry and housekeeping scenarios. However, the dynamic coupling nature between the mobile base and the manipulator presents challenges for the physical interactive tasks of the mobile manipulator. Current methods suffer from complex modeling processes and poor transferability. To address this, this article presents a novel dynamic model of the manipulator on the mobile base that requires only the manipulator dynamics and the kinematic information of the mobile base. In addition, embedding the dynamic model, an uncertainty and disturbance estimator-based (UDE-based) dynamic motion/force control scheme is proposed for the mobile manipulator, which compensates for the dynamic coupling and other unmodeled uncertainties. Passivity and stability analyses justify the proposed control law. Simulation and experimental results on our mobile manipulator platform demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of our proposed methodology.

Cattle face recognition holds paramount significance in domains such as animal husbandry and behavioral research. Despite significant progress in confined environments, applying these accomplishments in wild settings remains challenging. Thus, we create the first large-scale cattle face recognition dataset, ICRWE, for wild environments. It encompasses 483 cattle and 9,816 high-resolution image samples. Each sample undergoes annotation for face features, light conditions, and face orientation. Furthermore, we introduce a novel parallel attention network, PANet. Comprising several cascaded Transformer modules, each module incorporates two parallel Position Attention Modules (PAM) and Feature Mapping Modules (FMM). PAM focuses on local and global features at each image position through parallel channel attention, and FMM captures intricate feature patterns through non-linear mappings. Experimental results indicate that PANet achieves a recognition accuracy of 88.03% on the ICRWE dataset, establishing itself as the current state-of-the-art approach. The source code is available in the supplementary materials., Comment: Accepted by ICME 2024

In recent years, significant progress has been made in the field of underwater image enhancement (UIE). However, its practical utility for high-level vision tasks, such as underwater object detection (UOD) in Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), remains relatively unexplored. It may be attributed to several factors: (1) Existing methods typically employ UIE as a pre-processing step, which inevitably introduces considerable computational overhead and latency. (2) The process of enhancing images prior to training object detectors may not necessarily yield performance improvements. (3) The complex underwater environments can induce significant domain shifts across different scenarios, seriously deteriorating the UOD performance. To address these challenges, we introduce EnYOLO, an integrated real-time framework designed for simultaneous UIE and UOD with domain-adaptation capability. Specifically, both the UIE and UOD task heads share the same network backbone and utilize a lightweight design. Furthermore, to ensure balanced training for both tasks, we present a multi-stage training strategy aimed at consistently enhancing their performance. Additionally, we propose a novel domain-adaptation strategy to align feature embeddings originating from diverse underwater environments. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that our framework not only achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in both UIE and UOD tasks, but also shows superior adaptability when applied to different underwater scenarios. Our efficiency analysis further highlights the substantial potential of our framework for onboard deployment., Comment: accepted by ICRA24

Existing Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models mainly handle translation in the general domain, while overlooking domains with special writing formulas, such as e-commerce and legal documents. Taking e-commerce as an example, the texts usually include amounts of domain-related words and have more grammar problems, which leads to inferior performances of current NMT methods. To address these problems, we collect two domain-related resources, including a set of term pairs (aligned Chinese-English bilingual terms) and a parallel corpus annotated for the e-commerce domain. Furthermore, we propose a two-step fine-tuning paradigm (named G2ST) with self-contrastive semantic enhancement to transfer one general NMT model to the specialized NMT model for e-commerce. The paradigm can be used for the NMT models based on Large language models (LLMs). Extensive evaluations on real e-commerce titles demonstrate the superior translation quality and robustness of our G2ST approach, as compared with state-of-the-art NMT models such as LLaMA, Qwen, GPT-3.5, and even GPT-4., Comment: 4 pages, 1 figure, WWW2024 accepted

Multi-robot systems have increasingly become instrumental in tackling search and coverage problems. However, the challenge of optimizing task efficiency without compromising task success still persists, particularly in expansive, unstructured environments with dense obstacles. This paper presents an innovative, decentralized Voronoi-based approach for search and coverage to reactively navigate these complexities while maintaining safety. This approach leverages the active sensing capabilities of multi-robot systems to supplement GIS (Geographic Information System), offering a more comprehensive and real-time understanding of the environment. Based on point cloud data, which is inherently non-convex and unstructured, this method efficiently generates collision-free Voronoi regions using only local sensing information through spatial decomposition and spherical mirroring techniques. Then, deadlock-aware guided map integrated with a gradient-optimized, centroid Voronoi-based coverage control policy, is constructed to improve efficiency by avoiding exhaustive searches and local sensing pitfalls. The effectiveness of our algorithm has been validated through extensive numerical simulations in high-fidelity environments, demonstrating significant improvements in both task success rate, coverage ratio, and task execution time compared with others.

In standard hospital blood tests, the traditional process requires doctors to manually isolate leukocytes from microscopic images of patients' blood using microscopes. These isolated leukocytes are then categorized via automatic leukocyte classifiers to determine the proportion and volume of different types of leukocytes present in the blood samples, aiding disease diagnosis. This methodology is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but it also has a high propensity for errors due to factors such as image quality and environmental conditions, which could potentially lead to incorrect subsequent classifications and misdiagnosis. To address these issues, this paper proposes an innovative method of leukocyte detection: the Multi-level Feature Fusion and Deformable Self-attention DETR (MFDS-DETR). To tackle the issue of leukocyte scale disparity, we designed the High-level Screening-feature Fusion Pyramid (HS-FPN), enabling multi-level fusion. This model uses high-level features as weights to filter low-level feature information via a channel attention module and then merges the screened information with the high-level features, thus enhancing the model's feature expression capability. Further, we address the issue of leukocyte feature scarcity by incorporating a multi-scale deformable self-attention module in the encoder and using the self-attention and cross-deformable attention mechanisms in the decoder, which aids in the extraction of the global features of the leukocyte feature maps. The effectiveness, superiority, and generalizability of the proposed MFDS-DETR method are confirmed through comparisons with other cutting-edge leukocyte detection models using the private WBCDD, public LISC and BCCD datasets. Our source code and private WBCCD dataset are available at https://github.com/JustlfC03/MFDS-DETR., Comment: 15 pages, 11 figures, accept Computers in Biology and Medicine 2024

This paper proposes a method for analyzing a series of potential motions in a coupling-tiltable aerial-aquatic quadrotor based on its nonlinear dynamics. Some characteristics and constraints derived by this method are specified as Singular Thrust Tilt Angles (STTAs), utilizing to generate motions including planar motions. A switch-based control scheme addresses issues of control direction uncertainty inherent to the mechanical structure by incorporating a saturated Nussbaum function. A high-fidelity simulation environment incorporating a comprehensive hydrodynamic model is built based on a Hardware-In-The-Loop (HITL) setup with Gazebo and a flight control board. The experiments validate the effectiveness of the absolute and quasi planar motions, which cannot be achieved by conventional quadrotors, and demonstrate stable performance when the pitch or roll angle is activated in the auxiliary control channel., Comment: Unmanned Aerial-Aquatic Vehicle

This article investigates the practical scenarios of chasing an adversarial evader in an unbounded environment with cluttered obstacles. We propose a Voronoi-based decentralized algorithm for multiple pursuers to encircle and capture the evader by reacting to collisions. An efficient approach is presented for constructing an obstacle-aware evader-centered bounded Voronoi cell (OA-ECBVC), which strictly ensures collision avoidance in various obstacle scenarios when pursuing the evader. The evader can be efficiently enclosed in a convex hull given random initial configurations. Furthermore, to cooperatively capture the evader, each pursuer continually compresses the boundary of its OA-ECBVC to quickly reduce the movement space of the evader while maintaining encirclement. Our OA-ECBVC algorithm is validated in various simulated environments with different dynamic systems of robots. Real-time performance of resisting uncertainties shows the superior reliability of our method for deployment on multiple robot platforms., Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, conference

A novel intense beam-driven scheme for high yield of the tri-alpha reaction 11B(p,{\alpha})2{\alpha} was investigated. We used a foam target made of cellulose triacetate (TAC, C_9H_{16}O_8) doped with boron. It was then heated volumetrically by soft X-ray radiation from a laser heated hohlraum and turned into a homogenous, and long living plasma. We employed a picosecond laser pulse to generate a high-intensity energetic proton beam via the well-known Target Normal Sheath Acceleration (TNSA) mechanism. We observed up to 10^{10}/sr {\alpha} particles per laser shot. This constitutes presently the highest yield value normalized to the laser energy on target. The measured fusion yield per proton exceeds the classical expectation of beam-target reactions by up to four orders of magnitude under high proton intensities. This enhancement is attributed to the strong electric fields and nonequilibrium thermonuclear fusion reactions as a result of the new method. Our approach shows opportunities to pursue ignition of aneutronic fusion.

Lake extraction from remote sensing imagery is a complex challenge due to the varied lake shapes and data noise. Current methods rely on multispectral image datasets, making it challenging to learn lake features accurately from pixel arrangements. This, in turn, affects model learning and the creation of accurate segmentation masks. This paper introduces a prompt-based dataset construction approach that provides approximate lake locations using point, box, and mask prompts. We also propose a two-stage prompt enhancement framework, LEPrompter, with prompt-based and prompt-free stages during training. The prompt-based stage employs a prompt encoder to extract prior information, integrating prompt tokens and image embedding through self- and cross-attention in the prompt decoder. Prompts are deactivated to ensure independence during inference, enabling automated lake extraction without introducing additional parameters and GFlops. Extensive experiments showcase performance improvements of our proposed approach compared to the previous state-of-the-art method. The source code is available at https://github.com/BastianChen/LEPrompter., Comment: Accepted by ICME 2024

Lake extraction from remote sensing images is challenging due to the complex lake shapes and inherent data noises. Existing methods suffer from blurred segmentation boundaries and poor foreground modeling. This paper proposes a hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture, called LEFormer, for accurate lake extraction. LEFormer contains three main modules: CNN encoder, Transformer encoder, and cross-encoder fusion. The CNN encoder effectively recovers local spatial information and improves fine-scale details. Simultaneously, the Transformer encoder captures long-range dependencies between sequences of any length, allowing them to obtain global features and context information. The cross-encoder fusion module integrates the local and global features to improve mask prediction. Experimental results show that LEFormer consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance and efficiency on the Surface Water and the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau Lake datasets. Specifically, LEFormer achieves 90.86% and 97.42% mIoU on two datasets with a parameter count of 3.61M, respectively, while being 20 minor than the previous best lake extraction method. The source code is available at https://github.com/BastianChen/LEFormer., Comment: Accepted by ICASSP 2024

Premature births can lead to complications, with fetal lung immaturity being a primary concern. Currently, fetal lung maturity (FLM) requires an invasive surfactant extraction procedure between the 32nd and 39th weeks of pregnancy. Unfortunately, there is no non-invasive method for FLM assessment. This work hypothesized that fetal breathing movement (FBM) and surfactant levels are inversely coupled and that FBM can serve as a proxy for FLM estimation. To investigate the correlation between FBM and FLM, antenatal corticosteroid (ACS) was administered to increase fetal pulmonary surfactant levels in a high-risk 35th-week pregnant woman showing intrauterine growth restriction. Synchronous sonographic and phonographic measurements were continuously recorded for 25 minutes before and after the ASC treatments. Before the ACS injection, 268 continuous movements FBM episodes were recorded. The number of continuous FBM episodes significantly decreased to 3, 43, and 79 within 24, 48, and 72 hours, respectively, of the first injection of ACS, suggesting an inversely coupled connection between FBM and surfactant level s. Therefore, FBM may serve as a proxy for FLM estimation. Quantitative confirmation of these findings would suggest that FBM measurements could be used as a non-invasive and widely accessible FLM-assessment tool for high-risk pregnancies and routine examinations., Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, 50th Computing in Cardiology conference in Atlanta, Georgia, USA on 1st - 4th October 2023

Autonomous navigation in unknown environments with obstacles remains challenging for micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) due to their limited onboard computing and sensing resources. Although various collision avoidance methods have been developed, it is still possible for drones to collide with unobserved obstacles due to unpredictable disturbances, sensor limitations, and control uncertainty. Instead of completely avoiding collisions, this article proposes Air Bumper, a collision detection and reaction framework, for fully autonomous flight in 3D environments to improve the safety of drones. Our framework only utilizes the onboard inertial measurement unit (IMU) to detect and estimate collisions. We further design a collision recovery control for rapid recovery and collision-aware mapping to integrate collision information into general LiDAR-based sensing and planning frameworks. Our simulation and experimental results show that the quadrotor can rapidly detect, estimate, and recover from collisions with obstacles in 3D space and continue the flight smoothly with the help of the collision-aware map. Our Air Bumper will be released as open-source software on GitHub.

Accurate detection and localization of X-corner on both planar and non-planar patterns is a core step in robotics and machine vision. However, previous works could not make a good balance between accuracy and robustness, which are both crucial criteria to evaluate the detectors performance. To address this problem, in this paper we present a novel detection algorithm which can maintain high sub-pixel precision on inputs under multiple interference, such as lens distortion, extreme poses and noise. The whole algorithm, adopting a coarse-to-fine strategy, contains a X-corner detection network and three post-processing techniques to distinguish the correct corner candidates, as well as a mixed sub-pixel refinement technique and an improved region growth strategy to recover the checkerboard pattern partially visible or occluded automatically. Evaluations on real and synthetic images indicate that the presented algorithm has the higher detection rate, sub-pixel accuracy and robustness than other commonly used methods. Finally, experiments of camera calibration and pose estimation verify it can also get smaller re-projection error in quantitative comparisons to the state-of-the-art., Comment: 15 pages, 8 figures and 4 tables. Unpublished further research and experiments of Checkerboard corner detection network CCDN (arXiv:2302.05097) and application exploration for robust camera calibration (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9428389)

The terahertz (THz) band (0.1-10 THz) is widely considered to be a candidate band for the sixth-generation mobile communication technology (6G). However, due to its short wavelength (less than 1 mm), scattering becomes a particularly significant propagation mechanism. In previous studies, we proposed a scattering model to characterize the scattering in THz bands, which can only reconstruct the scattering in the incidence plane. In this paper, a three-dimensional (3D) stochastic model is proposed to characterize the THz scattering on rough surfaces. Then, we reconstruct the scattering on rough surfaces with different shapes and under different incidence angles utilizing the proposed model. Good agreements can be achieved between the proposed model and full-wave simulation results. This stochastic 3D scattering model can be integrated into the standard channel modeling framework to realize more realistic THz channel data for the evaluation of 6G.

Replanning in temporal logic tasks is extremely difficult during the online execution of robots. This study introduces an effective path planner that computes solutions for temporal logic goals and instantly adapts to non-static and partially unknown environments. Given prior knowledge and a task specification, the planner first identifies an initial feasible solution by growing a sampling-based search tree. While carrying out the computed plan, the robot maintains a solution library to continuously enhance the unfinished part of the plan and store backup plans. The planner updates existing plans when meeting unexpected obstacles or recognizing flaws in prior knowledge. Upon a high-level path is obtained, a trajectory generator tracks the path by dividing it into segments of motion primitives. Our planner is integrated into an autonomous mobile robot system, further deployed on a multicopter with limited onboard processing power. In simulation and real-world experiments, our planner is demonstrated to swiftly and effectively adjust to environmental uncertainties.

Underwater image enhancement (UIE) is vital for high-level vision-related underwater tasks. Although learning-based UIE methods have made remarkable achievements in recent years, it's still challenging for them to consistently deal with various underwater conditions, which could be caused by: 1) the use of the simplified atmospheric image formation model in UIE may result in severe errors; 2) the network trained solely with synthetic images might have difficulty in generalizing well to real underwater images. In this work, we, for the first time, propose a framework \textit{SyreaNet} for UIE that integrates both synthetic and real data under the guidance of the revised underwater image formation model and novel domain adaptation (DA) strategies. First, an underwater image synthesis module based on the revised model is proposed. Then, a physically guided disentangled network is designed to predict the clear images by combining both synthetic and real underwater images. The intra- and inter-domain gaps are abridged by fully exchanging the domain knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our framework over other state-of-the-art (SOTA) learning-based UIE methods qualitatively and quantitatively. The code and dataset are publicly available at https://github.com/RockWenJJ/SyreaNet.git., Comment: ICRA23

Aiming to improve the checkerboard corner detection robustness against the images with poor quality, such as lens distortion, extreme poses, and noise, we propose a novel detection algorithm which can maintain high accuracy on inputs under multiply scenarios without any prior knowledge of the checkerboard pattern. This whole algorithm includes a checkerboard corner detection network and some post-processing techniques. The network model is a fully convolutional network with improvements of loss function and learning rate, which can deal with the images of arbitrary size and produce correspondingly-sized output with a corner score on each pixel by efficient inference and learning. Besides, in order to remove the false positives, we employ three post-processing techniques including threshold related to maximum response, non-maximum suppression, and clustering. Evaluations on two different datasets show its superior robustness, accuracy and wide applicability in quantitative comparisons with the state-of-the-art methods, like MATE, ChESS, ROCHADE and OCamCalib., Comment: ICIRA 2018 oral. 11 pages, 4 figures, 2 tables

Same-style products retrieval plays an important role in e-commerce platforms, aiming to identify the same products which may have different text descriptions or images. It can be used for similar products retrieval from different suppliers or duplicate products detection of one supplier. Common methods use the image as the detected object, but they only consider the visual features and overlook the attribute information contained in the textual descriptions, and perform weakly for products in image less important industries like machinery, hardware tools and electronic component, even if an additional text matching module is added. In this paper, we propose a unified vision-language modeling method for e-commerce same-style products retrieval, which is designed to represent one product with its textual descriptions and visual contents. It contains one sampling skill to collect positive pairs from user click log with category and relevance constrained, and a novel contrastive loss unit to model the image, text, and image+text representations into one joint embedding space. It is capable of cross-modal product-to-product retrieval, as well as style transfer and user-interactive search. Offline evaluations on annotated data demonstrate its superior retrieval performance, and online testings show it can attract more clicks and conversions. Moreover, this model has already been deployed online for similar products retrieval in alibaba.com, the largest B2B e-commerce platform in the world., Comment: Accepted in The Web Conference (WWW2023) Industry Track. 5 pages, 3 figures

Aerial-aquatic vehicles are capable to move in the two most dominant fluids, making them more promising for a wide range of applications. We propose a prototype with special designs for propulsion and thruster configuration to cope with the vast differences in the fluid properties of water and air. For propulsion, the operating range is switched for the different mediums by the dual-speed propulsion unit, providing sufficient thrust and also ensuring output efficiency. For thruster configuration, thrust vectoring is realized by the rotation of the propulsion unit around the mount arm, thus enhancing the underwater maneuverability. This paper presents a quadrotor prototype of this concept and the design details and realization in practice., Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures, accepted to 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

Local feature detection is a key ingredient of many image processing and computer vision applications, such as visual odometry and localization. Most existing algorithms focus on feature detection from a sharp image. They would thus have degraded performance once the image is blurred, which could happen easily under low-lighting conditions. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet both efficient and effective keypoint detection method that is able to accurately localize the salient keypoints in a blurred image. Our method takes advantages of a novel multi-layer perceptron (MLP) based architecture that significantly improve the detection repeatability for a blurred image. The network is also light-weight and able to run in real-time, which enables its deployment for time-constrained applications. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our detector is able to improve the detection repeatability with blurred images, while keeping comparable performance as existing state-of-the-art detectors for sharp images.