TasselNet: Counting maize tassels in the wild via local counts regression network

Accurately counting maize tassels is important for monitoring the growth status of maize plants. This tedious task, however, is still mainly done by manual efforts. In the context of modern plant phenotyping, automating this task is required to meet the need of large-scale analysis of genotype and phenotype. In recent years, computer vision technologies have experienced a significant breakthrough due to the emergence of large-scale datasets and increased computational resources. Naturally image-based approaches have also received much attention in plant-related studies. Yet a fact is that most image-based systems for plant phenotyping are deployed under controlled laboratory environment. When transferring the application scenario to unconstrained in-field conditions, intrinsic and extrinsic variations in the wild pose great challenges for accurate counting of maize tassels, which goes beyond the ability of conventional image processing techniques. This calls for further robust computer vision approaches to address in-field variations. This paper studies the in-field counting problem of maize tassels. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a plant-related counting problem is considered using computer vision technologies under unconstrained field-based environment.Comment: 14 page

The resilience of interdependent transportation networks under targeted attack

Modern world builds on the resilience of interdependent infrastructures characterized as complex networks. Recently, a framework for analysis of interdependent networks has been developed to explain the mechanism of resilience in interdependent networks. Here we extend this interdependent network model by considering flows in the networks and study the system's resilience under different attack strategies. In our model, nodes may fail due to either overload or loss of interdependency. Under the interaction between these two failure mechanisms, it is shown that interdependent scale-free networks show extreme vulnerability. The resilience of interdependent SF networks is found in our simulation much smaller than single SF network or interdependent SF networks without flows.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Cross-Domain Labeled LDA for Cross-Domain Text Classification

Cross-domain text classification aims at building a classifier for a target domain which leverages data from both source and target domain. One promising idea is to minimize the feature distribution differences of the two domains. Most existing studies explicitly minimize such differences by an exact alignment mechanism (aligning features by one-to-one feature alignment, projection matrix etc.). Such exact alignment, however, will restrict models' learning ability and will further impair models' performance on classification tasks when the semantic distributions of different domains are very different. To address this problem, we propose a novel group alignment which aligns the semantics at group level. In addition, to help the model learn better semantic groups and semantics within these groups, we also propose a partial supervision for model's learning in source domain. To this end, we embed the group alignment and a partial supervision into a cross-domain topic model, and propose a Cross-Domain Labeled LDA (CDL-LDA). On the standard 20Newsgroup and Reuters dataset, extensive quantitative (classification, perplexity etc.) and qualitative (topic detection) experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of the proposed group alignment and partial supervision.Comment: ICDM 201