In real-world surveillance systems, the person images captured by the camera network consists of various low-resolution (LR) images. It creates a resolution mismatching problem when compared against high-resolution images of a targeted person. It significantly affects the performance of person re- Identification. This problem is known as Low-Resolution Person re-identification (LR PREID). An efficient strategy would be to exploit image super-resolution (SR) with person re-identification as a mutual learning approach. In this paper, we propose a novel method MSA-SR-PREID to solve this problem. The model takes low-resolution images on different resolutions and resized them to pre-defined fixed resolution. The design of the super-resolution network consists of ESRGAN and the de-Noising module to generate superresolution images. The SR images are later passed to the re-identification network to learn the unique descriptors to recognize a person identity. The performance of this model is evaluated on four competitive benchmarks, MLR-VIPeR, MLR-DukeMTMC-reID, VR-MSMT17, and VR-Market1501. The comparison with similar state-of-the-art demonstrates the superiority of our model.

Mobile crowdsourcing is a new computing paradigm that enables outsourcing computation tasks to mobile crowd nodes by means of offloading the tasks from the user to a mobile edge computing (MEC) server. This article studies the problem of scheduling security-critical tasks of crowdsourcing applications in a multiserver MEC environment. We formulate this scheduling problem as an integer program and propose a family of convergent grey wolf optimizer (CGWO) metaheuristic algorithms to seek for the best scheduling solutions. Our proposed CGWO uses a task permutation to represent a candidate solution to the formulated scheduling problem, and employs a probability-based mapping scheme to map each search agent in grey wolf optimizer (GWO) onto a valid task permutation. We introduce a new position update strategy for generating the next generation of grey wolf population after each round of search. With this strategy, we prove our proposed CGWO guarantees its convergence to the global best solution. More importantly, we provide a thorough analysis on the movement trajectories of grey wolves during the evolutionary procedure, in order to determine appropriate parameter values such that CGWO would not be trapped in local optima. Experimental results justify the superiority of CGWO metaheuristics over the standard GWO in solving the crowdsourcing task scheduling problem.

Automating generalized nucleus segmentation has proven to be non-trivial and challenging in digital pathology. Most existing techniques in the field rely either on deep neural networks or on shallow learning-based cascading models. The former lacks theoretical understanding and tends to degrade performance when only limited amounts of training data are available while the latter often suffers from limitations for generalization. To address these issues, we propose sparse coding driven deep decision tree ensembles (ScD ² TE), an easily trained yet powerful representation learning approach with performance highly competitive to deep neural networks in the generalized nucleus segmentation task. We explore the possibility of stacking several layers based on fast convolutional sparse coding–decision tree ensemble pairwise modules and generate a layer-wise encoder–decoder architecture with intra-decoder and inter-encoder dense connectivity patterns. Under this architecture, all the encoders share the same assumption across the different layers to represent images and interact with their decoders to give fast convergence. Compared with deep neural networks, our proposed ScD ² TE does not require back-propagation computation and depends on less hyper-parameters. ScD ² TE is able to achieve a fast end-to-end pixel-wise training in a layer-wise manner. We demonstrated the superiority of our segmentation method by evaluating it on the multi-disease state and multi-organ dataset where consistently higher performances were obtained for comparison against other state-of-the-art deep learning techniques and cascading methods with various connectivity patterns.