It is not clear whether the method used in functional brain-network related research can be applied to explore the feature binding mechanism of visual perception. In this study, we investigated feature binding of color and shape in visual perception. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data were collected from 38 healthy volunteers at rest and while performing a visual perception task to construct brain networks active during resting and task states. Results showed that brain regions involved in visual information processing were obviously activated during the task. The components were partitioned using a greedy algorithm, indicating the visual network existed during the resting state. Z-values in the vision-related brain regions were calculated, confirming the dynamic balance of the brain network. Connectivity between brain regions was determined, and the result showed that occipital and lingual gyri were stable brain regions in the visual system network, the parietal lobe played a very important role in the binding process of color features and shape features, and the fusiform and inferior temporal gyri were crucial for processing color and shape information. Experimental findings indicate that understanding visual feature binding and cognitive processes will help establish computational models of vision, improve image recognition technology, and provide a new theoretical mechanism for feature binding in visual perception.

The world today is being hit by COVID-19. As opposed to fingerprints and ID cards, facial recognition technology can effectively prevent the spread of viruses in public places because it does not require contact with specific sensors. However, people also need to wear masks when entering public places, and masks will greatly affect the accuracy of facial recognition. Accurately performing facial recognition while people wear masks is a great challenge. In order to solve the problem of low facial recognition accuracy with mask wearers during the COVID-19 epidemic, we propose a masked-face recognition algorithm based on large margin cosine loss (MFCosface). Due to insufficient masked-face data for training, we designed a masked-face image generation algorithm based on the detection of the detection of key facial features. The face is detected and aligned through a multi-task cascaded convolutional network; and then we detect the key features of the face and select the mask template for coverage according to the positional information of the key features. Finally, we generate the corresponding masked-face image. Through analysis of the masked-face images, we found that triplet loss is not applicable to our datasets, because the results of online triplet selection contain fewer mask changes, making it difficult for the model to learn the relationship between mask occlusion and feature mapping. We use a large margin cosine loss as the loss function for training, which can map all the feature samples in a feature space with a smaller intra-class distance and a larger inter-class distance. In order to make the model pay more attention to the area that is not covered by the mask, we designed an Att-inception module that combines the Inception-Resnet module and the convolutional block attention module, which increases the weight of any unoccluded area in the feature map, thereby enlarging the unoccluded area’s contribution to the identification process. Experiments on several masked-face datasets have proved that our algorithm greatly improves the accuracy of masked-face recognition, and can accurately perform facial recognition with masked subjects.

Rhythms of the brain are generated by neural oscillations across multiple frequencies. These oscillations can be decomposed into distinct frequency intervals associated with specific physiological processes. In practice, the number and ranges of decodable frequency intervals are determined by sampling parameters, often ignored by researchers. To improve the situation, we report on an open toolbox with a graphical user interface for decoding rhythms of the brain system (DREAM). We provide worked examples of DREAM to investigate frequency-specific performance of both neural (spontaneous brain activity) and neurobehavioral (in-scanner head motion) oscillations. DREAM decoded the head motion oscillations and uncovered that younger children moved their heads more than older children across all five frequency intervals whereas boys moved more than girls in the age of 7 to 9 years. It is interesting that the higher frequency bands contain more head movements, and showed stronger age-motion associations but weaker sex-motion interactions. Using data from the Human Connectome Project, DREAM mapped the amplitude of these neural oscillations into multiple frequency bands and evaluated their test-retest reliability. The resting-state brain ranks its spontaneous oscillation’s amplitudes spatially from high in ventral-temporal areas to low in ventral-occipital areas when the frequency band increased from low to high, while those in part of parietal and ventral frontal regions are reversed. The higher frequency bands exhibited more reliable amplitude measurements, implying more inter-individual variability of the amplitudes for the higher frequency bands. In summary, DREAM adds a reliable and valid tool to mapping human brain function from a multiple-frequency window into brain waves.

Accurate recognition of tomato diseases is of great significance for agricultural production. Sufficient and insufficient training data of supervised recognition neural network training are symmetry problems. A high precision neural network needs a large number of labeled data, and the difficulty of data sample acquisition is the main challenge to improving the performance of disease recognition. The tomato leaf data augmented by the traditional data augmentation methods based on geometric transformation usually contain less information, and the generalization is not strong. Therefore, a new data augmentation method, RAHC_GAN, based on generative adversarial networks is proposed in this paper, which is used to expand tomato leaf data and identify diseases. In this method, continuous hidden variables are added at the input of the generator, and the purpose is to continuously control the size of the generated disease area and to supplement the intra class information of the same disease. Additionally, the residual attention block is added to the generator to make it pay more attention to the disease region in the leaf image; a multi-scale discriminator is also used to enrich the detailed texture of the generated image and finally generate leaves with obvious disease features. Then, we use the images generated by RAHC_GAN and the original training images to build an expanded data set, which is used to train four kinds of recognition networks, AlexNet, VGGNet, GoogLeNet, and ResNet, and the performance is evaluated through the test set. Experimental results show that RAHC_GAN can generate leaves with obvious disease features, and the generated expanded data set can significantly improve the recognition performance of the classifier. Furthermore, the results of the apple, grape, and corn data set show that RAHC_GAN can also be used as a method to solve the problem of insufficient data in other plant research tasks.

The big-data use is becoming a standard practice in the neuroimaging field through data-sharing initiatives. It is important for the community to realize that such open science effort must protect personal, especially facial information when raw neuroimaging data are shared. An ideal tool for the face anonymization should not disturb subsequent brain tissue extraction and further morphological measurements. Using the high-resolution head images from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) of 215 healthy Chinese, we discovered and validated a template effect on the face anonymization. Improved facial anonymization was achieved when the Chinese head templates but not the Western templates were applied to obscure the faces of Chinese brain images. This finding has critical implications for international brain imaging data-sharing. To facilitate the further investigation of potential culture-related impacts on and increase diversity of data-sharing for the human brain mapping, we released the 215 Chinese multi-modal MRI data into a database for imaging Chinese young brains, namely’I See your Brains (ISYB)’, to the public via the Science Data Bank (https://doi.org/10.11922/sciencedb.00740).