AP-CNN: Weakly Supervised Attention Pyramid Convolutional Neural Network for Fine-Grained Visual Classification.

Classifying the sub-categories of an object from the same super-category (e.g., bird species and cars) in fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) highly relies on discriminative feature representation and accurate region localization. Existing approaches mainly focus on distilling information from high-level features. In this article, by contrast, we show that by integrating low-level information (e.g., color, edge junctions, texture patterns), performance can be improved with enhanced feature representation and accurately located discriminative regions. Our solution, named Attention Pyramid Convolutional Neural Network (AP-CNN), consists of 1) a dual pathway hierarchy structure with a top-down feature pathway and a bottom-up attention pathway, hence learning both high-level semantic and low-level detailed feature representation, and 2) an ROI-guided refinement strategy with ROI-guided dropblock and ROI-guided zoom-in operation, which refines features with discriminative local regions enhanced and background noises eliminated. The proposed AP-CNN can be trained end-to-end, without the need of any additional bounding box/part annotation. Extensive experiments on three popularly tested FGVC datasets (CUB-200-2011, Stanford Cars, and FGVC-Aircraft) demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance. Models and code are available at https://github.com/PRIS-CV/AP-CNN_Pytorch-master.

Coded Cooperation for Multiway Relaying in Wireless Sensor Networks.

Wireless sensor networks have been considered as an enabling technology for constructing smart cities. One important feature of wireless sensor networks is that the sensor nodes collaborate in some manner for communications. In this manuscript, we focus on the model of multiway relaying with full data exchange where each user wants to transmit and receive data to and from all other users in the network. We derive the capacity region for this specific model and propose a coding strategy through coset encoding. To obtain good performance with practical codes, we choose spatially-coupled LDPC (SC-LDPC) codes for the coded cooperation. In particular, for the message broadcasting from the relay, we construct multi-edge-type (MET) SC-LDPC codes by repeatedly applying coset encoding. Due to the capacity-achieving property of the SC-LDPC codes, we prove that the capacity region can theoretically be achieved by the proposed MET SC-LDPC codes. Numerical results with finite node degrees are provided, which show that the achievable rates approach the boundary of the capacity region in both binary erasure channels and additive white Gaussian channels.