Make and model recognition (MMR) of vehicles plays an important role in automatic vision-based systems. This paper proposes a novel deep learning approach for MMR using the SqueezeNet architecture. The frontal views of vehicle images are first extracted and fed into a deep network for training and testing. The SqueezeNet architecture with bypass connections between the Fire modules, a variant of the vanilla SqueezeNet, is employed for this study, which makes our MMR system more efficient. The experimental results on our collected large-scale vehicle datasets indicate that the proposed model achieves 96.3% recognition rate at the rank-1 level with an economical time slice of 108.8 ms. For inference tasks, the deployed deep model requires less than 5 MB of space and thus has a great viability in real-time applications.

Human action monitoring can be advantageous to remotely monitor the status of patients or elderly person for intelligent healthcare. Human action recognition enables efficient and accurate monitoring of human behaviors, which can exhibit multifaceted complexity attributed to disparities in viewpoints, personality, resolution and motion speed of individuals, etc. The spatial-temporal information plays an important role in the human action recognition. In this paper, we proposed a novel deep learning architecture named as recurrent 3D convolutional neural network (R3D) to extract effective and discriminative spatial-temporal features to be used for action recognition, which enables the capturing of long-range temporal information by aggregating the 3D convolutional network entries to serve as an input to the LSTM (Long Short-Term Memory) architecture. The 3D convolutional network and LSTM are two effective methods for extracting the temporal information. The proposed R3D network integrated these two methods by sharing a shared 3D convolutional network in sliding windows on video streaming to capturing short-term spatial-temporal features into the LSTM. The output features of LSTM encapsulate the long-range spatial-temporal information representing high-level abstraction of the human actions. The proposed algorithm is compared to traditional and the-state-of-the-art and deep learning algorithms. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed system, which can be used as smart monitoring for remote healthcare.

Vehicle analysis involves license-plate recognition (LPR), vehicle-type classification (VTC), and vehicle make and model recognition (MMR). Among these tasks, MMR plays an important complementary role in respect to LPR. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for MMR using local tiled deep networks. The frontal views of vehicle images are first extracted and fed into the local tiled deep networks for training and testing. A local tiled convolutional neural network (LTCNN) is proposed to alter the weight sharing scheme of CNN with local tiled structure. The LTCNN unties the weights of adjacent units and then ties the units k steps from each other within a local map. This architecture provides the translational, rotational, and scale invariance as well as locality. In addition, to further deal with the colour and illumination variation, we applied the histogram oriented gradient (HOG) to the frontal view of images prior to the LTCNN. The experimental results show that our LTCNN framework achieved a 98% accuracy rate in terms of vehicle MMR.

Human pose estimation is a problem that continues to be one of the greatest challenges in the field of computer vision. While the stacked structure of an hourglass network has enabled substantial progress in human pose estimation and key-point detection areas, it is largely used as a backbone network. However, it also requires a relatively large number of parameters and high computational capacity due to the characteristics of its stacked structure. Accordingly, the present work proposes a more lightweight version of the hourglass network, which also improves the human pose estimation performance. The new hourglass network architecture utilizes several additional skip connections, which improve performance with minimal modifications while still maintaining the number of parameters in the network. Additionally, the size of the convolutional receptive field has a decisive effect in learning to detect features of the full human body. Therefore, we propose a multidilated light residual block, which expands the convolutional receptive field while also reducing the computational load. The proposed residual block is also invariant in scale when using multiple dilations. The well-known MPII and LSP human pose datasets were used to evaluate the performance using the proposed method. A variety of experiments were conducted that confirm that our method is more efficient compared to current state-of-the-art hourglass weight-reduction methods.