Content-Adaptive Sketch Portrait Generation by Decompositional Representation Learning

Sketch portrait generation benefits a wide range of applications such as digital entertainment and law enforcement. Although plenty of efforts have been dedicated to this task, several issues still remain unsolved for generating vivid and detail-preserving personal sketch portraits. For example, quite a few artifacts may exist in synthesizing hairpins and glasses, and textural details may be lost in the regions of hair or mustache. Moreover, the generalization ability of current systems is somewhat limited since they usually require elaborately collecting a dictionary of examples or carefully tuning features/components. In this paper, we present a novel representation learning framework that generates an end-to-end photo-sketch mapping through structure and texture decomposition. In the training stage, we first decompose the input face photo into different components according to their representational contents (i.e., structural and textural parts) by using a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). Then, we utilize a Branched Fully Convolutional Neural Network (BFCN) for learning structural and textural representations, respectively. In addition, we design a Sorted Matching Mean Square Error (SM-MSE) metric to measure texture patterns in the loss function. In the stage of sketch rendering, our approach automatically generates structural and textural representations for the input photo and produces the final result via a probabilistic fusion scheme. Extensive experiments on several challenging benchmarks suggest that our approach outperforms example-based synthesis algorithms in terms of both perceptual and objective metrics. In addition, the proposed method also has better generalization ability across dataset without additional training.Comment: Published in TIP 201

Database Constraint Enforcement: A Decompositional Approach.

This thesis presents an efficient and integrated approach to integrity constraint checking for advanced database systems. The proposed approach essentially consists of three phases: constraint decomposition, global enforcement strategy and local enforcement tuning. The central theme of this dissertation is the development of constraint decomposition theory, which can be used to decompose each constraint formula into a set of constraint sub-formulas. The constraint sub-formulas derived from the decomposition satisfy the sufficient conditions imposed by the original constraint and are also much simpler and more efficient to check. The decomposition is done only once for each constraint, at the time of its definition. The global enforcement strategies, with the application of decomposition theory, are studied in both sequential and parallel environments. The physical characteristics of the database state is used to determine the checking order or to make assignment of constraint sub-formulas to processing elements. It is shown that the performance of constraint enforcement, with the application of the decomposition theory, is much better than that without the application of the decomposition theory. Local enforcement tuning methods are developed to further simplify each constraint sub-formula derived at constraint decomposition phase. Because of the simplicity of constraint sub-formulas, more efficient and simple methods can be used. Furthermore, more information, such as update types and update data, are available for the purpose of simplification. The fundamental assumption underlying our approach is that most database updates satisfy integrity constaints. A second assumption is that transactions are localized and database updates are nonuniform in their distribution. Based on these assumptions, the proposed approach will achieve a significant performance increase over previous approaches

Improved Sketch-to-Photo Generation Using Filter Aided Generative Adversarial Network

Generating a photographic face image from given input sketch is most challenging task in computer vision. Mainly the sketches drawn by sketch artist used in human identification. Sketch to photo synthesis is very important applications in law enforcement as well as character design, educational training. In recent years Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) shows excellent performance on sketch to photo synthesis problem.  Quality of hand drawn sketches affects the quality generated photo. It might be possible that while handling the hand drawn sketches, accidently by touching the user hand on pencil sketch or similar activities causes noise in given sketch. Likewise different styles like shading, darkness of pencil used by sketch artist may cause unnecessary noise in sketches. In recent year many sketches to photo synthesis methods are proposed, but they are mainly focused on network architecture to get better performance. In this paper we proposed Filter-aided GAN framework to remove such noise while synthesizing photo images from hand drawn sketches. Here we implement and compare different filtering methods with GAN.  Quantitative and qualitative result shows that proposed Filter-aided GAN generate the photo images which are visually pleasant and closer to ground truth image

From capability to concept : fusion of systems analysis techniques for derivation of future soldier systems

The intent of this thesis is to define a set of processes for use within UK Government dismounted soldier systems research that will provide stakeholders with auditable and traceable information to understand gaps in military capability and justify future procurement decisions. The need for this approach is linked to organisational shifts within the UK Ministry of Defence, and more specifically Government research with the move towards procurement of capability rather than equipment. In conjunction with reducing defence budgets and increased scrutiny, there is a need to prioritise spending to those areas that will provide the most significant enhancement to operational effectiveness. The proposed process suite provides underpinning data to support Government decisions, from definition of military need through to concept design and prioritisation of future research activities. The approach is grounded in the field of systems thinking and systems engineering providing the logical and systematic constructs required for highly complex systems where the human is a central focus. A novel fusion of existing systems tools and techniques enables both subjective data from domain experts and objective data in the form of operational analysis and field trials to be utilised for analysis across the five NATO capability domains, with output defining the relative importance of survivability, sustainability, mobility, lethality and C4I in the context of operational and strategic level military goals as well as wider challenges represented by the doctrinal defence lines of development. Future developments should include alignment with developing pan-MoD initiatives in the form of MODAF, if required by the customer organisation. This would enable generic versions of the process suite to be applied to any defence domain and problem.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

An empirical taxonomy of technology alliance contracts

Although contracts are characterized by a certain logical and artifactual unity, the typical approach of economic and organizational studies focuses on particular contract clauses. Another common perspective, that addresses contracts as unitary entities, directs the attention to the choice between axiomatically defined alternative governance forms, with little or no investigation of empirical types. This state of things reflects the lack of an accepted framework for the development and testing of hypotheses about contract design. This study tries to redress this situation by analyzing actual contracts as configurations of a wide array of elements. In developing an analytical framework, this study develops a perspective that considers contracts as an organizational phenomenon, expands the set of mechanisms considered beyond incentive provisions and pricing structures, and includes procedural elements inspired both by organizational theory and by the empirical literature on contracting. The constructs so identified are applied to the analysis of a set of pharmaceutical biotechnology agreements. We employed categorical principal component analysis to determine underlying dimensions that differentiate among different contracts. Cluster analysis then produced an empirical taxonomy of these technology agreements

The Competitiveness of State-Owned Commercial Banks in China

China has undertaken a series of comprehensive economic and banking reform programs over the past three decades. As part of the WTO agreement, the domestic financial sector is fully open to foreign investors from WTO member countries in 2006. To answer the challenges, the policy makers and management of SOCB have been introducing two major steps to improve the Competitiveness of the commercial banks: transfer the bad debts to asset management companies and inject foreign exchange reserves to capital. However, the qualitative study shows that the general performance of the state-owned commercial banks is unstable during this period. It is high time that the consequences and efficiency of the reform were examined on an objective basis. This research offers a careful and rigorous examination of the condition and determinants of banking efficiency and competitiveness in China, with the focus on the state-owned commercial banks. The key contribution of this study is to develop a comprehensive empirical framework to measure and explain the performance of the state-owned commercial banks during the crucial transitional period from 1998 to 2003. This research examines the banking market conditions on the basis of a synthesis of the traditional Structure-Conduct-Performance paradigm and other alternative hypotheses. The thesis reveals that the state-owned commercial banks still dominate in both retail and business banking markets. The interest earnings remain the dominant source of commercial revenues. Due to the special relationship with government and their operational characters in the financial market, the state-owned commercial banks are not sensitive to monetary policy adjustments. The competition from other type of commercial banks has been strengthening, but the impact is rather limited. The main contribution of this study to the empirical literature on the Chinese banking market is the employment of the Data Envelopment Analysis to measure the efficiency of the state-owned commercial banks at provincial level, followed by a panel econometric investigation into the differences in banking efficiency across the stat-owned commercial banking groups as well as individual provinces. The results show that the level of banking efficiency was generally very low and there was a significant extent of input surplus among the provincial branches. The source of inefficiency is different among individual banking groups. The econometric study reveals that the SOCBs benefit from the concentrated market structure and strong complementary relationship with their traditional business areas. The empirical results have also shed light on further policy measures to enhance banking competition and performance in China

Model Transformation Languages with Modular Information Hiding

Model transformations, together with models, form the principal artifacts in model-driven software development. Industrial practitioners report that transformations on larger models quickly get sufficiently large and complex themselves. To alleviate entailed maintenance efforts, this thesis presents a modularity concept with explicit interfaces, complemented by software visualization and clustering techniques. All three approaches are tailored to the specific needs of the transformation domain

Correctness of services and their composition

We study correctness of services and their composition and investigate how the design of correct service compositions can be systematically supported. We thereby focus on the communication protocol of the service and approach these questions using formal methods and make contributions to three scenarios of SOC.Wir studieren die Korrektheit von Services und Servicekompositionen und untersuchen, wie der Entwurf von korrekten Servicekompositionen systematisch unterstützt werden kann. Wir legen dabei den Fokus auf das Kommunikationsprotokoll der Services. Mithilfe von formalen Methoden tragen wir zu drei Szenarien von SOC bei