47 research outputs found
Real-time Rescue Target Detection Based on UAV Imagery for Flood Emergency Response
Timely acquisition of rescue target information is critical for emergency response after a flood disaster. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with remote sensing capabilities offer distinct advantages, including high-resolution imagery and exceptional mobility, making them well suited for monitoring flood extent and identifying rescue targets during floods. However, there are some challenges in interpreting rescue information in real time from flood images captured by UAVs, such as the complexity of the scenarios of UAV images, the lack of flood rescue target detection datasets and the limited real-time processing capabilities of the airborne on-board platform. Thus, we propose a real-time rescue target detection method for UAVs that is capable of efficiently delineating flood extent and identifying rescue targets (i.e., pedestrians and vehicles trapped by floods). The proposed method achieves real-time rescue information extraction for UAV platforms by lightweight processing and fusion of flood extent extraction model and target detection model. The flood inundation range is extracted by the proposed method in real time and detects targets such as people and vehicles to be rescued based on this layer. Our experimental results demonstrate that the Intersection over Union (IoU) for flood water extraction reaches an impressive 80%, and the IoU for real-time flood water extraction stands at a commendable 76.4%. The information on flood stricken targets extracted by this method in real time can be used for flood emergency rescue
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Electrotunable liquid sulfur microdroplets.
Manipulating liquids with tunable shape and optical functionalities in real time is important for electroactive flow devices and optoelectronic devices, but remains a great challenge. Here, we demonstrate electrotunable liquid sulfur microdroplets in an electrochemical cell. We observe electrowetting and merging of sulfur droplets under different potentiostatic conditions, and successfully control these processes via selective design of sulfiphilic/sulfiphobic substrates. Moreover, we employ the electrowetting phenomena to create a microlens based on the liquid sulfur microdroplets and tune its characteristics in real time through changing the shape of the liquid microdroplets in a fast, repeatable, and controlled manner. These studies demonstrate a powerful in situ optical battery platform for unraveling the complex reaction mechanism of sulfur chemistries and for exploring the rich material properties of the liquid sulfur, which shed light on the applications of liquid sulfur droplets in devices such as microlenses, and potentially other electrotunable and optoelectronic devices
Epidemiological changes and molecular characteristics of Brucella strains in Ningxia, China
ObjectiveHuman brucellosis causes serious public health concerns in Ningxia, China.MethodsThis study employed epidemiological, bacteriological, and multiple-locus variable-number tandem repeat analysis (MLVA) methods to conduct an epidemiological investigation, which is necessary for devising tailored control strategies.ResultsBetween 1958 and 2022, 29,892 cases were reported, with an average annual number of cases and incidence of 467 and 7.1/100,000, respectively. The epidemic situation gradually worsened, with cases escalating from 26 cases in 2005 to 6,292 in 2022, with the incidence rate rising from 0.441 in 2005 to 86.83 in 2022. Geographically, the disease spread from a single affected county in 2004 to encompass all 22 counties in 2022. Yanchi County had the highest incidence, followed by the Hongsibao and Tongxin counties. These data suggest that Brucella infection has become a rampant regional concern in human brucellosis. Between 1958 and 2019, a total of 230 Brucella strains were identified across four studied hosts. These strains comprised four species with 12 biovars, including B. melitensis bv. 1, bv. 2, bv. 3, B. abortus bv. 1, bv. 3, bv. 4, bv. 5, bv. 6, bv. 7, B. suis bv. 1 and bv. 3, and B. canis. These data highlight the high species/biovars and host diversity of the Brucella population, posing a substantial challenge to brucellosis surveillance. There was an apparent transition from multiple species/biovars historically to the current dominance of a single species, B. melitensis, emphasizing the requirement for strengthening surveillance of B. melitensis. Genotypes 42 and 116, constituting 96.2% of the total number of genotypes, predominated in panel 1 and MLVA-11, indicating that all strains belong to the East Mediterranean lineage. MLVA cluster analysis revealed persistent transmission of dominant circulating genotypes, presenting an epidemic pattern characterized primarily by epidemiologically related cases with a few sporadic cases. Strains in this study exhibited high genetic homogeneity with strains from the Northwest, and those from Kazakhstan and Mongolia.ConclusionThe epidemic situation of human brucellosis has gradually worsened; the rampant epidemic of the disease has become a regional concern. The present study highlights that implementing the of targeted surveillance and intervention strategies is urge
Siam-DWENet: Flood inundation detection for SAR imagery using a cross-task transfer siamese network
Emergency management agencies must address the challenges presented by frequent flooding events. Remote sensing imagery provides a means for timely monitoring of rapidly changing water bodies during flooding events; but manual analysis of remote sensing (RS) images however, is labor intensive and time consuming. Automated methods are effective, but the post-classification comparison method for flood inundation detection is subject to error accumulation, and the direct change detection method is limited by the accuracy of flood mapping and the difficulty of obtaining training samples. To overcome these challenges, a flood inundation detection network (Siam-DWENet) that achieves high-accuracy inundation detection is proposed. In Siam-DWENet, an innovative cross-task transfer learning strategy incorporates an attention mechanism and multi-scale pyramid structure based on Siamese architectures. This approach realizes a priori knowledge transfer-based flood inundation detection with a limited number of training samples. Comparative experiments on Siam-DWENet and other methods using two flooding SAR datasets to evaluate the accuracy of flood detection. The experimental results indicate that Siam-DWENet outperforms other change detection methods and makes the inundation area edge more accurate when dealing with complex backgrounds, achieving an average OA of 0.887 and F1 of 0.865 in flood inundation detection tasks
MCR: Multilayer crossâfusion with reconstructor for multimodal abstractive summarisation
Abstract Multimodal abstractive summarisation (MAS) aims to generate a textual summary from multimodal data collection, such as videoâtext pairs. Despite the success of recent work, the existing methods lack a thorough analysis for consistency across multimodal data. Besides, previous work relies on the fusion method to extract multimodal semantics, neglecting the constraints for complementary semantics of each modality. To address those issues, a multilayer crossâfusion model with the reconstructor for the MAS task is proposed. Their model could thoroughly conduct crossâfusion for each modality via layers of crossâmodal transformer blocks, resulting in crossâmodal fusion representations with consistency across modalities. Then the reconstructor is employed to reproduce source modalities based on crossâmodal fusion representations. The reconstruction process constrains the fusion representations with the complementary semantics of each modality. Comprehensive comparison and ablation experiments on the open domain multimodal dataset How2 are proposed. The results empirically verify the effectiveness of the multilayer crossâfusion with the reconstructor structure on the proposed model
Comparison of three types of anaerobic granular sludge for treating pharmaceutical wastewater
Three types of anaerobic granular sludge for treating chemical synthesis-based pharmaceutical wastewater were compared: (1) an up-flow anaerobic sludge blanket (UASB) filled with polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) gel beads (UASB-PVA); (2) a UASB filled with traditional anaerobic granular sludge; and (3) a UASB filled with traditional anaerobic granular sludge and granular active carbon (UASB-GAC). The domestication times for the UASB-PVA, UASB, and UASB-GAC reactors were 30, 47, and 47 days, respectively. When the organic loading rate (OLR) was up to 7 kg chemical oxygen demand (COD)/(m3¡d), the COD efficiency of the UASB-PVA, UASB, and UASB-GAC stayed in the range of 69% to 75% (deviation 1.8%), 46% to 69% (deviation 8.6%), and 61% to 73% (deviation 4.0%), respectively. The highest OLRs reached for the UASB-PVA, UASB, and UASB-GAC were 12, 7, and 8 kg COD/(m3¡d), respectively. The performance of the UASB-PVA was the best of the three, the UASB-GAC was second, and the UASB was the worst. High-throughput pyrosequencing analysis showed that Levilinea, Syntrophorhabdus, Desulfovibrio and Acetobacterium were the dominant bacteria in the UASB-PVA, UASB, and UASB-GAC reactorsâ granular sludge. The abundance and diversity of the microbial community in the UASB-PVA sludge were higher than for the UASB and UASB-GAC granular sludge
Role of Stat3 Signaling in Control of EMT of Tubular Epithelial Cells During Renal Fibrosis
Background/Aims: Transforming growth factor β 1 (TGFβ1) plays a critical role in the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition (EMT) of renal tubular epithelial cells (TECs) during renal injury, a major cause of acute renal failure, renal fibrosis and obstructive nephropathy. However, the underlying molecular mechanisms remain ill-defined. Here, we addressed this question. Methods: Expression of TGFβ1, Snail, and phosphorylated Stat3 was examined by immunohistochemistry in the kidney after induction of unilateral ureteral obstruction (UUO) in mice. In vitro, primary TECs were purified by flow cytometry, and then challenged with TGFβ1 with/without presence of specific inhibitors for phosphorylation of SMAD3 or Stat3. Protein levels were determined by Western blotting. Results: We detected significant increases in Snail and phosphorylated Stat3, an activated form for Stat3, in the kidney after induction of UUO in mice. In vitro, TGFβ1-challenged primary TECs upregulated Snail, in a SMAD3/Stat3 dependent manner. Conclusion: Our study sheds light on the mechanism underlying the EMT of TECs after renal injury, and suggests Stat3 signaling as a promising innovative therapeutic target for prevention of renal fibrosis
Common Sense Addition Explained by Hurwicz Optimism-Pessimism Criterion
If we place a can of coke that weigh 0.35 kg into a car that weighs 1 ton = 1000 kg, what will be the resulting weight of the car? Mathematics says 1000.35 kg, but common sense says 1 ton. In this paper, we show that this common sense answer can be explained by the Hurwicz optimism-pessimism criterion of decision making under interval uncertainty