Object detection through LiDAR-based point cloud has recently been important in autonomous driving. Although achieving high accuracy on public benchmarks, the state-of-the-art detectors may still go wrong and cause a heavy loss due to the widespread corruptions in the real world like rain, snow, sensor noise, etc. Nevertheless, there is a lack of a large-scale dataset covering diverse scenes and realistic corruption types with different severities to develop practical and robust point cloud detectors, which is challenging due to the heavy collection costs. To alleviate the challenge and start the first step for robust point cloud detection, we propose the physical-aware simulation methods to generate degraded point clouds under different real-world common corruptions. Then, for the first attempt, we construct a benchmark based on the physical-aware common corruptions for point cloud detectors, which contains a total of 1,122,150 examples covering 7,481 scenes, 25 common corruption types, and 6 severities. With such a novel benchmark, we conduct extensive empirical studies on 8 state-of-the-art detectors that contain 6 different detection frameworks. Thus we get several insight observations revealing the vulnerabilities of the detectors and indicating the enhancement directions. Moreover, we further study the effectiveness of existing robustness enhancement methods based on data augmentation and data denoising. The benchmark can potentially be a new platform for evaluating point cloud detectors, opening a door for developing novel robustness enhancement methods.

The increased resolution of real-world videos presents a dilemma between efficiency and accuracy for deep Video Quality Assessment (VQA). On the one hand, keeping the original resolution will lead to unacceptable computational costs. On the other hand, existing practices, such as resizing and cropping, will change the quality of original videos due to the loss of details and contents, and are therefore harmful to quality assessment. With the obtained insight from the study of spatial-temporal redundancy in the human visual system and visual coding theory, we observe that quality information around a neighbourhood is typically similar, motivating us to investigate an effective quality-sensitive neighbourhood representatives scheme for VQA. In this work, we propose a unified scheme, spatial-temporal grid mini-cube sampling (St-GMS) to get a novel type of sample, named fragments. Full-resolution videos are first divided into mini-cubes with preset spatial-temporal grids, then the temporal-aligned quality representatives are sampled to compose the fragments that serve as inputs for VQA. In addition, we design the Fragment Attention Network (FANet), a network architecture tailored specifically for fragments. With fragments and FANet, the proposed efficient end-to-end FAST-VQA and FasterVQA achieve significantly better performance than existing approaches on all VQA benchmarks while requiring only 1/1612 FLOPs compared to the current state-of-the-art. Codes, models and demos are available at https://github.com/timothyhtimothy/FAST-VQA-and-FasterVQA.

Spatial autocorrelation and spatial heterogeneity widely exist in spatial data, which make the traditional machine learning model perform badly. Spatial domain generalization is a spatial extension of domain generalization, which can generalize to unseen spatial domains in continuous 2D space. Specifically, it learns a model under varying data distributions that generalizes to unseen domains. Although tremendous success has been achieved in domain generalization, there exist very few works on spatial domain generalization. The advancement of this area is challenged by: 1) Difficulty in characterizing spatial heterogeneity, and 2) Difficulty in obtaining predictive models for unseen locations without training data.

In this paper, we present a spatio-temporal tendency reasoning (STR) network for recovering human body pose and shape from videos. Previous approaches have focused on how to extend 3D human datasets and temporal-based learning to promote accuracy and temporal smoothing. Different from them, our STR aims to learn accurate and natural motion sequences in an unconstrained environment through temporal and spatial tendency and to fully excavate the spatio-temporal features of existing video data. To this end, our STR learns the representation of features in the temporal and spatial dimensions respectively, to concentrate on a more robust representation of spatio-temporal features. More specifically, for efficient temporal modeling, we first propose a temporal tendency reasoning (TTR) module. TTR constructs a time-dimensional hierarchical residual connection representation within a video sequence to effectively reason temporal sequences' tendencies and retain effective dissemination of human information. Meanwhile, for enhancing the spatial representation, we design a spatial tendency enhancing (STE) module to further learns to excite spatially time-frequency domain sensitive features in human motion information representations. Finally, we introduce integration strategies to integrate and refine the spatio-temporal feature representations. Extensive experimental findings on large-scale publically available datasets reveal that our STR remains competitive with the state-of-the-art on three datasets. Our code are available at https://github.com/Changboyang/STR.git.

While recent large-scale video-language pre-training made great progress in video question answering, the design of spatial modeling of video-language models is less fine-grained than that of image-language models; existing practices of temporal modeling also suffer from weak and noisy alignment between modalities. To learn fine-grained visual understanding, we decouple spatial-temporal modeling and propose a hybrid pipeline, Decoupled Spatial-Temporal Encoders, integrating an image- and a video-language encoder. The former encodes spatial semantics from larger but sparsely sampled frames independently of time, while the latter models temporal dynamics at lower spatial but higher temporal resolution. To help the video-language model learn temporal relations for video QA, we propose a novel pre-training objective, Temporal Referring Modeling, which requires the model to identify temporal positions of events in video sequences. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms previous work pre-trained on orders of magnitude larger datasets.

As an important part of intelligent transportation systems, traffic forecasting has attracted tremendous attention from academia and industry. Despite a lot of methods being proposed for traffic forecasting, it is still difficult to model complex spatial-temporal dependency. Temporal dependency includes short-term dependency and long-term dependency, and the latter is often overlooked. Spatial dependency can be divided into two parts: distance-based spatial dependency and hidden spatial dependency. To model complex spatial-temporal dependency, we propose a novel framework for traffic forecasting, named Spatial-Temporal Graph Convolutional Gated Recurrent Network (STGCGRN). We design an attention module to capture long-term dependency by mining periodic information in traffic data. We propose a Double Graph Convolution Gated Recurrent Unit (DGCGRU) to capture spatial dependency, which integrates graph convolutional network and GRU. The graph convolution part models distance-based spatial dependency with the distance-based predefined adjacency matrix and hidden spatial dependency with the self-adaptive adjacency matrix, respectively. Specially, we employ the multi-head mechanism to capture multiple hidden dependencies. In addition, the periodic pattern of each prediction node may be different, which is often ignored, resulting in mutual interference of periodic information among nodes when modeling spatial dependency. For this, we explore the architecture of model and improve the performance. Experiments on four datasets demonstrate the superior performance of our model.

Data-driven decision making is becoming an integral part of manufacturing companies. Data is collected and commonly used to improve efficiency and produce high quality items for the customers. IoT-based and other forms of object tracking are an emerging tool for collecting movement data of objects/entities (e.g. human workers, moving vehicles, trolleys etc.) over space and time. Movement data can provide valuable insights like process bottlenecks, resource utilization, effective working time etc. that can be used for decision making and improving efficiency. Turning movement data into valuable information for industrial management and decision making requires analysis methods. We refer to this process as movement analytics. The purpose of this document is to review the current state of work for movement analytics both in manufacturing and more broadly. We survey relevant work from both a theoretical perspective and an application perspective. From the theoretical perspective, we put an emphasis on useful methods from two research areas: machine learning, and logic-based knowledge representation. We also review their combinations in view of movement analytics, and we discuss promising areas for future development and application. Furthermore, we touch on constraint optimization. From an application perspective, we review applications of these methods to movement analytics in a general sense and across various industries. We also describe currently available commercial off-the-shelf products for tracking in manufacturing, and we overview main concepts of digital twins and their applications.

As humans, we perceive the three-dimensional structure of the world around us with apparent ease. Think of how vivid the three-dimensional percept is when you look at a vase of flowers sitting on the table next to you. You can tell the shape and translucency of each petal through the subtle patterns of light and shading that play across its surface and effortlessly segment each flower from the background of the scene (Figure 1.1). Looking at a framed group por- trait, you can easily count (and name) all of the people in the picture and even guess at their emotions from their facial appearance. Perceptual psychologists have spent decades trying to understand how the visual system works and, even though they can devise optical illusions1 to tease apart some of its principles (Figure 1.3), a complete solution to this puzzle remains elusive (Marr 1982; Palmer 1999; Livingstone 2008).

Neural network representation learning for spatial data is a common need for geographic artificial intelligence (GeoAI) problems. In recent years, many advancements have been made in representation learning for points, polylines, and networks, whereas little progress has been made for polygons, especially complex polygonal geometries. In this work, we focus on developing a general-purpose polygon encoding model, which can encode a polygonal geometry (with or without holes, single or multipolygons) into an embedding space. The result embeddings can be leveraged directly (or finetuned) for downstream tasks such as shape classification, spatial relation prediction, and so on. To achieve model generalizability guarantees, we identify a few desirable properties: loop origin invariance, trivial vertex invariance, part permutation invariance, and topology awareness. We explore two different designs for the encoder: one derives all representations in the spatial domain; the other leverages spectral domain representations. For the spatial domain approach, we propose ResNet1D, a 1D CNN-based polygon encoder, which uses circular padding to achieve loop origin invariance on simple polygons. For the spectral domain approach, we develop NUFTspec based on Non-Uniform Fourier Transformation (NUFT), which naturally satisfies all the desired properties. We conduct experiments on two tasks: 1) shape classification based on MNIST; 2) spatial relation prediction based on two new datasets - DBSR-46K and DBSR-cplx46K. Our results show that NUFTspec and ResNet1D outperform multiple existing baselines with significant margins. While ResNet1D suffers from model performance degradation after shape-invariance geometry modifications, NUFTspec is very robust to these modifications due to the nature of the NUFT.

The absence of a conventional association between the cell-cell cohabitation and its emergent dynamics into cliques during development has hindered our understanding of how cell populations proliferate, differentiate, and compete, i.e. the cell ecology. With the recent advancement of the single-cell RNA-sequencing (RNA-seq), we can potentially describe such a link by constructing network graphs that characterize the similarity of the gene expression profiles of the cell-specific transcriptional programs, and analyzing these graphs systematically using the summary statistics informed by the algebraic topology. We propose the single-cell topological simplicial analysis (scTSA). Applying this approach to the single-cell gene expression profiles from local networks of cells in different developmental stages with different outcomes reveals a previously unseen topology of cellular ecology. These networks contain an abundance of cliques of single-cell profiles bound into cavities that guide the emergence of more complicated habitation forms. We visualize these ecological patterns with topological simplicial architectures of these networks, compared with the null models. Benchmarked on the single-cell RNA-seq data of zebrafish embryogenesis spanning 38,731 cells, 25 cell types and 12 time steps, our approach highlights the gastrulation as the most critical stage, consistent with consensus in developmental biology. As a nonlinear, model-independent, and unsupervised framework, our approach can also be applied to tracing multi-scale cell lineage, identifying critical stages, or creating pseudo-time series.