This paper proposes an effective infrared and visible image fusion method based on a texture conditional generative adversarial network (TC-GAN). The constructed TC-GAN generates a combined texture map for capturing gradient changes in image fusion. The generator in the TC-GAN is designed as a codec structure for extracting more details, and a squeeze-and-excitation module is applied to this codec structure to increase the weight of significant texture information in the combined texture map. The generator loss function is designed by combing the gradient loss and adversarial loss to retain the texture information of the source images. The discriminator brings the texture of the generated image closer to the visible image. To obtain significant texture information from the source images, a multiple decision map-based fusion strategy is proposed using a combined texture map and an adaptive guided filter. Extensive experiments on the public TNO and RoadScene datasets demonstrate that the proposed method is superior to other state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of a subjective evaluation and quantitative indicators.

Natural gas has been proposed as a solution to increase the security of energy supply and reduce environmental pollution around the world. Being able to forecast natural gas price benefits various stakeholders and has become a very valuable tool for all market participants in competitive natural gas markets. Machine learning algorithms have gradually become popular tools for natural gas price forecasting. In this paper, we investigate data-driven predictive models for natural gas price forecasting based on common machine learning tools, i.e., artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), gradient boosting machines (GBM), and Gaussian process regression (GPR). We harness the method of cross-validation for model training and monthly Henry Hub natural gas spot price data from January 2001 to October 2018 for evaluation. Results show that these four machine learning methods have different performance in predicting natural gas prices. However, overall ANN reveals better prediction performance compared with SVM, GBM, and GPR.

The tremendous progress in deep learning has enabled to extract soft-biometric attributes from faces, which raises privacy concerns over images collected for face recognition. Advances toward attribute privacy have been able to conceal multiple attributes while preserving identity information but suffer from limitations: they 1) only consider a few soft-biometric attributes and 2) fail to support reversibility for attribute privacy preservation. To break these limitations, we design a reversible privacy-preserving scheme for various face attributes, called reversible attribute privacy preservation (RAPP). RAPP benefits from two modules: 1) The attribute obfuscator introduces a stream cipher to determine that special attributes have to be concealed with the user-defined password, which also supports recovering original attributes. 2) The attribute adversarial network is proposed to generate perturbed images that conceal various attributes while retaining the utility of face verification. In addition, when a wrong password is provided, the returned image with wrong attribute classification results still keeps realistic, which confuses an attacker to know whether the recovery is correct. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RAPP enables to conceal various attributes and recover original images while facilitating face verification.

Vision is the most important sense for people, and it is also one of the main ways of cognition. As a result, people tend to utilize visual content to capture and share their life experiences, which greatly facilitates the transfer of information. Meanwhile, it also increases the risk of privacy violations, e.g., an image or video can reveal different kinds of privacy-sensitive information. Scholars have persistently pursued the advancement of tailored privacy protection measures. Various surveys attempt to consolidate these efforts from specific viewpoints. Nevertheless, these surveys tend to focus on particular issues, scenarios, or technologies, hindering a comprehensive overview of existing solutions on a broader scale. In this survey, a framework that encompasses various concerns and solutions for visual privacy is proposed, which allows for a macro understanding of privacy concerns from a comprehensive level. It is based on the fact that privacy concerns have corresponding adversaries, and divides privacy protection into three categories, based on computer vision (CV) adversary, based on human vision (HV) adversary, and based on CV & HV adversary. For each category, we analyze the characteristics of the main approaches to privacy protection, and then systematically review representative solutions. Open challenges and future directions for visual privacy protection are also discussed.