Representation and reasoning with qualitative spatial relations is an important problem in artificial intelligence and has wide applications in the fields of geographic information system, computer vision, autonomous robot navigation, natural language understanding, spatial databases and so on. The reasons for this interest in using qualitative spatial relations include cognitive comprehensibility, efficiency and computational facility. This paper summarizes progress in qualitative spatial representation by describing key calculi representing different types of spatial relationships. The paper concludes with a discussion of current research and glimpse of future work.

Extracting buildings automatically from high-resolution aerial images is a significant and fundamental task for various practical applications, such as land-use statistics and urban planning. Recently, various methods based on deep learning, especially the fully convolution networks, achieve impressive scores in this challenging semantic segmentation task. However, the lack of global contextual information and the careless upsampling method limit the further improvement of the performance for building extraction task. To simultaneously address these problems, we propose a novel network named Efficient Non-local Residual U-shape Network(ENRU-Net), which is composed of a well designed U-shape encoder-decoder structure and an improved non-local block named asymmetric pyramid non-local block (APNB). The encoder-decoder structure is adopted to extract and restore the feature maps carefully, and APNB could capture global contextual information by utilizing self-attention mechanism. We evaluate the proposed ENRU-Net and compare it with other state-of-the-art models on two widely-used public aerial building imagery datasets: the Massachusetts Buildings Dataset and the WHU Aerial Imagery Dataset. The experiments show that the accuracy of ENRU-Net on these datasets has remarkable improvement against previous state-of-the-art semantic segmentation models, including FCN-8s, U-Net, SegNet and Deeplab v3. The subsequent analysis also indicates that our ENRU-Net has advantages in efficiency for building extraction from high-resolution aerial images.

Minimally invasive surgery like laparoscopic surgery is an active research area of clinical practice for less pain and a faster recovery rate. Detection of surgical tools with more accurate spatial locations in surgical videos not only helps to ensure patient safety by reducing the incidence of complications but also makes a difference to assess the surgeon performance. In this paper, we propose a novel Modulated Anchoring Network for detection of laparoscopic surgery tools based on Faster R-CNN, which inherits the merits of two-stage approaches while also maintains high efficiency of comparable speed as state-of-the-art one-stage methods. Since objects like surgical instruments with a wide aspect ratio are difficult to recognize, we develop a novel training scheme named as modulated anchoring to explicitly predict arbitrary anchor shapes of objects of interest. For taking the relationship of different tools into consideration, it is useful to embed the relation module in our network. We evaluate our method using an existing dataset (m2cai16-tool-locations) and a new private dataset (AJU-Set), both collected from cholecystectomy surgical videos in hospital, covering information of seven surgical tools with spatial bounds. We show that our detector yields excellent detection accuracy of 69.6% and 76.5% over the introduced datasets superior to other recently used architectures. We further verify the efficiency of our method by analyzing the usage patterns of tools, the economy of the movement, and the dexterity of operations to assess surgical quality.

With the increasing concern over environment protection, Economic Emission Dispatch (EED) problem has received much attention. It is essentially a Multi-objective Optimization Problem, which minimizes both fuel cost and emission pollution simultaneously, as well as meets some system limits. This study transforms EED problem to a single-objective problem with weighted sum method, and then use Newton method to solve the equality constraint iteratively and introduce a common penalty function to deal with the inequality constraint. Moreover, this study tries to propose a new meta-heuristic algorithm inspired by kernel tricks to solve EED problem with no hyper parameters to be tuned. The new algorithm can map a non-linear objective function into a linear one with higher-dimension. Thus the optimization process could be transformed into a linear process, which is more likely to get the optimum solution. When applied in the 3 real-world EED cases with valve point, the new algorithm achieved a better performance compared with other algorithms in the literature.