Panoptic UAV:Panoptic Segmentation of UAV Images for Marine Environment Monitoring

UAV marine monitoring plays an essential role in marine environmental protection because of its flexibility and convenience,low cost and convenient maintenance.In marine environmental monitoring,the similarity between objects such as oil spill and sea surface,Spartina alterniflora and algae is high,and the effect of the general segmentation algorithm is poor,which brings new challenges to the segmentation of UAV marine images.Panoramic segmentation can do object detection and semantic segmentation at the same time,which can well solve the polymorphism problem of objects in UAV ocean images.Currently,there are few studies on UAV marine image recognition with panoptic segmentation.In addition,there are no publicly available panoptic segmentation datasets for UAV images.In this work,we collect and annotate UAV images to form a panoptic segmentation UAV dataset named UAV-OUC-SEG and propose a panoptic segmentation method named PanopticUAV.First,to deal with the large intraclass variability in scale,deformable convolution and CBAM attention mechanism are employed in the backbone to obtain more accurate features.Second,due to the complexity and diversity of marine images,boundary masks by the Laplacian operator equation from the ground truth are merged into feature maps to improve boundary segmentation precision.Experiments demonstrate the advantages of PanopticUAV beyond the most other advanced approaches on the UAV-OUC-SEG dataset.

Segmentation Based Real Time Anomaly Detection and Tracking Model for Pedestrian Walkways

Presently,video surveillance is commonly employed to ensure security in public places such as traffic signals,malls,railway stations,etc.A major chal-lenge in video surveillance is the identification of anomalies that exist in it such as crimes,thefts,and so on.Besides,the anomaly detection in pedestrian walkways has gained significant attention among the computer vision communities to enhance pedestrian safety.The recent advances of Deep Learning(DL)models have received considerable attention in different processes such as object detec-tion,image classification,etc.In this aspect,this article designs a new Panoptic Feature Pyramid Network based Anomaly Detection and Tracking(PFPN-ADT)model for pedestrian walkways.The proposed model majorly aims to the recognition and classification of different anomalies present in the pedestrian walkway like vehicles,skaters,etc.The proposed model involves panoptic seg-mentation model,called Panoptic Feature Pyramid Network(PFPN)is employed for the object recognition process.For object classification,Compact Bat Algo-rithm(CBA)with Stacked Auto Encoder(SAE)is applied for the classification of recognized objects.For ensuring the enhanced results better anomaly detection performance of the PFPN-ADT technique,a comparison study is made using Uni-versity of California San Diego(UCSD)Anomaly data and other benchmark data-sets(such as Cityscapes,ADE20K,COCO),and the outcomes are compared with the Mask Recurrent Convolutional Neural Network(RCNN)and Faster Convolu-tional Neural Network(CNN)models.The simulation outcome demonstrated the enhanced performance of the PFPN-ADT technique over the other methods.

A Fast Panoptic Segmentation Network for Self-Driving Scene Understanding

In recent years,a gain in popularity and significance of science understanding has been observed due to the high paced progress in computer vision techniques and technologies.The primary focus of computer vision based scene understanding is to label each and every pixel in an image as the category of the object it belongs to.So it is required to combine segmentation and detection in a single framework.Recently many successful computer vision methods has been developed to aid scene understanding for a variety of real world application.Scene understanding systems typically involves detection and segmentation of different natural and manmade things.A lot of research has been performed in recent years,mostly with a focus on things(a well-defined objects that has shape,orientations and size)with a less focus on stuff classes(amorphous regions that are unclear and lack a shape,size or other characteristics Stuff region describes many aspects of scene,like type,situation,environment of scene etc.and hence can be very helpful in scene understanding.Existing methods for scene understanding still have to cover a challenging path to cope up with the challenges of computational time,accuracy and robustness for varying level of scene complexity.A robust scene understanding method has to effectively deal with imbalanced distribution of classes,overlapping objects,fuzzy object boundaries and poorly localized objects.The proposed method presents Panoptic Segmentation on Cityscapes Dataset.Mobilenet-V2 is used as a backbone for feature extraction that is pre-trained on ImageNet.MobileNet-V2 with state-of-art encoder-decoder architecture of DeepLabV3+with some customization and optimization is employed Atrous convolution along with Spatial Pyramid Pooling are also utilized in the proposed method to make it more accurate and robust.Very promising and encouraging results have been achieved that indicates the potential of the proposed method for robust scene understanding in a fast and reliable way.

“Where Angels Fear to Tread, Fools Will.” Who Is in Control of Your Sexual Health? A Discursive Examination of Self-Surveillance in an HIV and AIDS Prevention Campaign

The global community witnessed vigorous and aggressive campaigns in the past three decades since the advent of HIV and AIDS. Various strategies have been used in this regard in order to advocate safer sex practices among the youth. The article argues that although three decades later, HIV infections are reported to be declining in the regions that were worst hard hit, specifically southern Africa, and there is still a need to promote condom-use among youth aged between 15 and 25. Through text and reception analysis, the article examines discourses of sexual self-responsibility in a purposively selected poster(advocating condom-use) from a host of HIV and AIDS prevention posters and banners advocating HIV and AIDS prevention in 2006-2009, from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Informed by Foucault's notion of the "panoptic gaze" and "techniques of the self", an in-depth textual analysis of the posters is conducted. Norman Fairclough's CDA, augmented by Thompson's ideologies and Kress and van Leeuwen's The Grammar of Visual Design, are used to reveal the language and visual strategies used by the originators of the posters to reveal risk governmentality that may be subsumed in the interplay between the verbal and non-verbal features used in the texts. Furthermore, Hall's reception theory is employed to reveal responses of the students through Focus Group Discussions. The article analyses the discursive self "I" and the second-person deictic pronoun "You" as strategies employed by the campaigns to promote self-surveillance and individual agency. The article argues for continued efforts in condom promotion to reduce HIV infections and while doing so, for the inclusion of youth in designing prevention messages.