Traditional handcrafted crowd-counting techniques in an image are currently transformed via machine-learning and artificial-intelligence techniques into intelligent crowd-counting techniques. This paradigm shift offers many advanced features in terms of adaptive monitoring and the control of dynamic crowd gatherings. Adaptive monitoring, identification/recognition, and the management of diverse crowd gatherings can improve many crowd-management-related tasks in terms of efficiency, capacity, reliability, and safety. Despite many challenges, such as occlusion, clutter, and irregular object distribution and nonuniform object scale, convolutional neural networks are a promising technology for intelligent image crowd counting and analysis. In this article, we review, categorize, analyze (limitations and distinctive features), and provide a detailed performance evaluation of the latest convolutional-neural-network-based crowd-counting techniques. We also highlight the potential applications of convolutional-neural-network-based crowd-counting techniques. Finally, we conclude this article by presenting our key observations, providing strong foundation for future research directions while designing convolutional-neural-network-based crowd-counting techniques. Further, the article discusses new advancements toward understanding crowd counting in smart cities using the Internet of Things (IoT).

Gliomas are the most common and highly growing tumors lead to high mortality rate in their highest grade. The early diagnosis of gliomas, and treatment planning are most important steps to enhance the life expectancy of a patient. Among the modern imaging techniques, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is the most robust and widely used technique to visualize the brain tumor. The CNN-based networks mainly depend on multi-branch and increasing the depth/width of the network to enhance the segmentation accuracy at the cost of high computational cost. To mitigate these drawbacks we therefore, propose a hybrid weights alignment with multi-dilated attention network for automatic brain tumor segmentation (Hybrid-DANet). It employs multiple modules incorporated on baseline encoder-decoder architecture. Firstly, we proposed a novel hybrid weight alignment with multi-dilated attention module (HWADA) is used between the skip connections. It has capability to obtain the different sets of aligned weight by using different dilation schemes. Different weight alignments play a vital role to obtain very precise targeted information while negating the less informative part. It utilizes the low and high level information with skip connections across each branch of encoder and decoder. Secondly, we incorporated a multi channel multi scale module (MCS) on the baseline module. It consists of multiple channels used to extract the channel-wise information with more reduced computational cost. To reduce the resultant saturated accuracy due to vanishing gradient problem, we incorporated the residual module (RM). Thus, the RM, and MCS are useful to obtain the deep, intrinsic, channel-wise feature without expansion of depth and height. Whereas the novel HWADA not only propagates the low level information but also process it to obtain more semantic features used for decoder. We have tested our proposed technique on well-known datasets; BraTS 2017, and 2018 with comparable performance to counter-part.

This paper highlights the critical role of Machine Learning (ML) in combating the dynamic nature of cybersecurity threats. Unlike previous studies focusing mainly on static analysis, this work surveys the literature on dynamic analysis-based malware generation and detection. The study addresses the complexities of applying GANs to tabular data with heavy-tailed and multimodal distributions. It also examines the challenges of generating sequential malware behavior data and categorizes GAN-based models and their primary use cases. Furthermore, the paper evaluates adversarial losses and their limitations in generating dynamic malware behavior. Finally, it identifies existing metrics to assess GAN generalization in malware research and suggests future research directions based on identified limitations.

The accuracy of object-based computer vision techniques declines due to major challenges originating from large scale variation, varying shape, perspective variation, and lack of side information. To handle these challenges most of the crowd counting methods use multi-columns (restrict themselves to a set of specific density scenes), deploying a deeper and multi-networks for density estimation. However, these techniques suffer a lot of drawbacks such as extraction of identical features from multi-column, computationally complex architecture, overestimate the density estimation in sparse areas, underestimating in dense areas and averaging of feature maps result in reduced quality of density map. To overcome these drawbacks and to provide a state-of-the-art counting accuracy with comparable computational cost, we therefore propose a deeper and wider network: a Context-aware Scale Aggregation CNN-based Crowd Counting method (CASA-Crowd) to obtain the deep, varying scale and perspective varying features. Further, we include a dilated convolution with varying filter size to obtain contextual information. In addition, due to different dilation rates, a variation in receptive field size is more useful to overcome the perspective distortion. The quality of density map is enhanced while preserving the spatial dimension by obtaining a comparable computational complexity. We further evaluate our method on three well-known datasets: UCF_CC_50, ShanghaiTech Part_A, ShanghaiTech Part_B.

Crowd counting is a challenging task due to large perspective, density, and scale variations. CNN-based crowd counting techniques have achieved significant performance in sparse to dense environments. However, crowd counting in high perspective-varying scenes (images) is getting harder due to different density levels occupied by the same number of pixels. In this way large variations for objects in the same spatial area make it difficult to count accurately. Further, existing CNN-based crowd counting methods are used to extract rich deep features; however, these features are used locally and disseminated while propagating through intermediate layers. This results in high counting errors, especially in dense and high perspective-variation scenes. Further, class-specific responses along channel dimensions are underestimated. To address these above mentioned issues, we therefore propose a CNN-based dense feature extraction network for accurate crowd counting. Our proposed model comprises three main modules: (1) backbone network, (2) dense feature extraction modules (DFEMs), and (3) channel attention module (CAM). The backbone network is used to obtain general features with strong transfer learning ability. The DFEM is composed of multiple sub-modules called dense stacked convolution modules (DSCMs), densely connected with each other. In this way features extracted from lower and middle-lower layers are propagated to higher layers through dense connections. In addition, combinations of task independent general features obtained by the former modules and task-specific features obtained by later ones are incorporated to obtain high counting accuracy in large perspective-varying scenes. Further, to exploit the class-specific response between background and foreground, CAM is incorporated at the end to obtain high-level features along channel dimensions for better counting accuracy. Moreover, we have evaluated the proposed method on three well known datasets: Shanghaitech (Part-A), Shanghaitech (Part-B), and Venice. The performance of the proposed technique justifies its relative effectiveness in terms of selected performance compared to state-of-the-art techniques.