CottonMD: a multi-omics database for cotton biological study.

Cotton is an important economic crop, and many loci for important traits have been identified, but it remains challenging and time-consuming to identify candidate or causal genes/variants and clarify their roles in phenotype formation and regulation. Here, we first collected and integrated the multi-omics datasets including 25 genomes, transcriptomes in 76 tissue samples, epigenome data of five species and metabolome data of 768 metabolites from four tissues, and genetic variation, trait and transcriptome datasets from 4180 cotton accessions. Then, a cotton multi-omics database (CottonMD, http://yanglab.hzau.edu.cn/CottonMD/) was constructed. In CottonMD, multiple statistical methods were applied to identify the associations between variations and phenotypes, and many easy-to-use analysis tools were provided to help researchers quickly acquire the related omics information and perform multi-omics data analysis. Two case studies demonstrated the power of CottonMD for identifying and analyzing the candidate genes, as well as the great potential of integrating multi-omics data for cotton genetic breeding and functional genomics research.

ClsGAN: Selective Attribute Editing Model based on Classification Adversarial Network.

Attribution editing has achieved remarkable progress in recent years owing to the encoder-decoder structure and generative adversarial network (GAN). However, it remains challenging to generate high-quality images with accurate attribute transformation. Attacking these problems, the work proposes a novel selective attribute editing model based on classification adversarial network (referred to as ClsGAN) that shows good balance between attribute transfer accuracy and photo-realistic images. Considering that the editing images are prone to be affected by original attribute due to skip-connection in encoder-decoder structure, an upper convolution residual network (referred to as Tr-resnet) is presented to selectively extract information from the source image and target label. In addition, to further improve the transfer accuracy of generated images, an attribute adversarial classifier (referred to as Atta-cls) is introduced to guide the generator from the perspective of attribute through learning the defects of attribute transfer images. Experimental results on CelebA demonstrate that our ClsGAN performs favorably against state-of-the-art approaches in image quality and transfer accuracy. Moreover, ablation studies are also designed to verify the great performance of Tr-resnet and Atta-cls.

Part-based visual tracking via online weighted P-N learning.

We propose a novel part-based tracking algorithm using online weighted P-N learning. An online weighted P-N learning method is implemented via considering the weight of samples during classification, which improves the performance of classifier. We apply weighted P-N learning to track a part-based target model instead of whole target. In doing so, object is segmented into fragments and parts of them are selected as local feature blocks (LFBs). Then, the weighted P-N learning is employed to train classifier for each local feature block (LFB). Each LFB is tracked through the corresponding classifier, respectively. According to the tracking results of LFBs, object can be then located. During tracking process, to solve the issues of occlusion or pose change, we use a substitute strategy to dynamically update the set of LFB, which makes our tracker robust. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art trackers.