Image classification is a fundamental component in modern computer vision systems, where sparse representation-based classification has drawn a lot of attention due to its robustness. However, on the optimization of sparse learning systems, regularization and data augmentation are both powerful, but currently isolated. We believe that regularization and data augmentation can cooperate to generate a breakthrough in robust image classification. In this article, we propose a novel framework, regularization on augmented data (READ), which creates diversification in the data using the generic augmentation techniques to implement robust sparse representation-based image classification. When the training data are augmented, READ applies a distinct regularizer, l₁ or l₂, in particular, on the augmented training data apart from the original data, so that regularization and data augmentation are utilized and enhanced synchronously. We introduce an elaborate theoretical analysis on how to optimize the sparse representation by both l₁-norm and l₂-norm with the generic data augmentation and demonstrate its performance in extensive experiments. The results obtained on several facial and object datasets show that READ outperforms many state-of-the-art methods when using deep features.

Blockage of pedestrians will cause inaccurate people counting, and people’s heads are easily blocked by each other in crowded occasions. To reduce missed detections as much as possible and improve the capability of the detection model, this paper proposes a new people counting method, named Soft-YoloV4, by attenuating the score of adjacent detection frames to prevent the occurrence of missed detection. The proposed Soft-YoloV4 improves the accuracy of people counting and reduces the incorrect elimination of the detection frames when heads are blocked by each other. Compared with the state-of-the-art YoloV4, the AP value of the proposed head detection method is increased from 88.52 to 90.54%. The Soft-YoloV4 model has much higher robustness and a lower missed detection rate for head detection, and therefore it dramatically improves the accuracy of people counting.