GIA-Net: Global Information Aware Network for Low-light Imaging

It is extremely challenging to acquire perceptually plausible images under low-light conditions due to low SNR. Most recently, U-Nets have shown promising results for low-light imaging. However, vanilla U-Nets generate images with artifacts such as color inconsistency due to the lack of global color information. In this paper, we propose a global information aware (GIA) module, which is capable of extracting and integrating the global information into the network to improve the performance of low-light imaging. The GIA module can be inserted into a vanilla U-Net with negligible extra learnable parameters or computational cost. Moreover, a GIA-Net is constructed, trained and evaluated on a large scale real-world low-light imaging dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed GIA-Net outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in terms of four metrics, including deep metrics that measure perceptual similarities. Extensive ablation studies have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed GIA-Net for low-light imaging by utilizing global information.Comment: 16 pages 6 figures; accepted to AIM at ECCV 202

RIA applications based on CMS and e-commerce systems

Aplikacje RIA zyskują popularność w szerokim świecie Internetu. Ich główną zaletą jest bardzo duży stopień przystępności dla użytkownika, przede wszystkim ze względu na eliminację konieczności "przeładunku" strony po dokonaniu pewnych jej modyfikacji. RIA jest idealną technologią do współpracy z środowiskiem CMS. System CMS umożliwia zarządzanie stronami w bardzo łatwy sposób, nawet dla osób z relatywnie małą znajomością języka HTML. Technologia RIA jest wymarzonym rozwiązaniem dla właścicieli małych firm, które nie mogą sobie pozwolić na zatrudnienie dodatkowej osoby tylko do zarządzania stroną internetową. Skomplikowane systemy, takie jak CMS, stają się nawet prostsze niż pisanie strony w zwykłym - klasycznym kodzie HTML. Do głównych celów realizowanych w powyższym systemie można zaliczyć uproszczenie wszystkich skomplikowanych operacji oraz zapewnienie przyjaznego dla użytkownika interfejsu, który "poprowadzi" za rękę użytkowników. System CMS musi być bardzo elastyczny, aby dostosować się do użytkowników. Innym bardzo ważnym aspektem jest bieżące utrzymanie systemu, gdyż każdy błąd zagrażający bezpieczeństwu danych musi zostać wyeliminowany. Dla środowiska rozwijającego oprogramowanie ważnym wątkiem jest również rejestracja wszystkich błędów, tak aby w przyszłości móc go odtworzyć w zależności od kierunku rozwoju oprogramowania.RIA applications are gaining popularity over the internet. They are very user friendly because we are eliminating page reloading after making actions. It's ideal technology for making backend for CMS. A CMS system makes managing of website very easy for people with zero HTML skills. It's perfect for owners of small business which can't afford for hire another person, just for managing website. But such complex systems as CMS are very complicated, even if it's simpler than writing website in plain HTML it still may be too hard to understand for people. And it is developer's work to simplify all complex operation, provide user friendly interface which will take users hand and bring him safely to the other side. CMS systems must be also very flexible to adjust themselves to users. We must also remember about keeping system up to date, because every bug which is threaten for data safety must be eliminated. For developer it's also important to log all errors, so in future he or she can recreate the error on develop environment

Various designs of the two-stroke engine heads with the valve flushed system

The two-stroke engines have never acquired the popularity of the four-stroke engines due to their inherent performance limitations. The tasks of many engineering teams were to find the basic causes, which resulted in the inferior performance of these engines. Today’s task is to build a two-stroke engine whose performance could match that of a four-stroke engine in areas of common use. The most typical performance problems of a two-stroke engine are high petrol consumption caused by low efficiency, toxic by-products of combustion being emitted into the atmosphere (caused by oil present in the petrol), and uneven and loud engine noise. The greatest challenge is to achieve a good chamber purge during one stroke in which the fresh fuel mixture flows through the piston-controlled inlet port while at the same time the fumes are being exhausted through the outlet port. This in contrast with the four-stroke engines where the intake and exhaust are each done with two separate strokes. From the energy point of view, the two-stroke engine is not efficient because a certain amount of fresh fuel is being wasted in the exhaust fumes. We propose to replace the piston-controlled cam with the valve-flushed system, which will cause the combustion process to become more efficient. The purpose of this paper is to present various designs of the engine heads and analyse their performance. The goal of this proposal is to choose the best combination of these engine heads in order to achieve the optimum overall engine performance

The impact of the energy state of the surface of friction pairs on the friction and wear in internal combustion engines

The elements creating a friction pairs are described to be very difficult in terms of defining all optimal parameters in an unequivocal way. The research on stability of friction pairs is focused on the surface and the top layer of surface in the parts concerned. The main goal is to find new design solutions and materials, thereby achieving one million kilometers of mileage to main repair in the case of internal combustion engines. The biggest structural difficulties are noticeable in friction pairs where it can be observed sliding and returning motion, which is also connected with sealing function. A typical example of such pair is piston ring – cylinder sleeve in piston – rings - cylinder unit in an internal combustion engine. Engineers are currently seeking an additional factor, which would enable gaining the reduction of tangential force by reducing the friction coefficient in elements of friction pair during operations. The surface free energy may be such factor - it results from molecular structure and nature of the bonds between the molecules present in the material. Components of surface free energy determine the tribological properties of the material, which is reflected in the stability of the units. Energy state of the surface, which is connected with chemistry and characteristics in the material, is the first step to consider about the impact on wearing in internal combustion engine. This is the main topic of this article

Review of possibilities of increasing the thickness of an anti-wear coating on piston rings by using specifically designed physical vapour deposition process

The super-hard, anti-wear amorphic coatings based on carbon-like diamond (called DLC) show a promising direction in automotive industry, mainly in terms of decreasing friction coefficient in parts of internal combustion engine. However, the technology of producing DLC-coated parts, which is most often chemical vapour deposition (CVD) or physical vapour deposition (PVD) is proven to be still not perfect for achieving desired characteristics of the coating. The thickness of a coating is the main issue one should strive to improve, as the PVD methods produce films as thin as few micrometres. In such case, the coating is not only exposed to cracking, but also pitting is possible to happen. This is proven to be highly undesirable and unacceptable for this process. In addition, in case of thin films, the adhesion to the base is often too weak, despite the coating itself being extremely durable and hard. In this article, a theoretical ways to improve the process of coating are presented. The process itself is described, the achievable parameters are defined and the possible improvements are stated. The research made for the purpose of this article will be further exploited to design a process allowing creating the coating for testing of the best possible characteristics

VARIOUS DESIGNS OF THE TWO-STROKE ENGINE HEADS WITH THE VALVE FLUSHED SYSTEM

The two-stroke engines have never acquired the popularity of the four-stroke engines due to their inherent performance limitations. The tasks of many engineering teams were to find the basic causes, which resulted in the inferior performance of these engines. Today’s task is to build a two-stroke engine whose performance could match that of a four-stroke engine in areas of common use. The most typical performance problems of a two-stroke engine are high petrol consumption caused by low efficiency, toxic by-products of combustion being emitted into the atmosphere (caused by oil present in the petrol), and uneven and loud engine noise. The greatest challenge is to achieve a good chamber purge during one stroke in which the fresh fuel mixture flows through the piston-controlled inlet port while at the same time the fumes are being exhausted through the outlet port. This in contrast with the four-stroke engines where the intake and exhaust are each done with two separate strokes. From the energy point of view, the two-stroke engine is not efficient because a certain amount of fresh fuel is being wasted in the exhaust fumes. We propose to replace the piston-controlled cam with the valve-flushed system, which will cause the combustion process to become more efficient. The purpose of this paper is to present various designs of the engine heads and analyse their performance. The goal of this proposal is to choose the best combination of these engine heads in order to achieve the optimum overall engine performance

Structural similarity-based object tracking in multimodality surveillance videos

This paper addresses the problem of object tracking in video sequences for surveillance applications by using a recently proposed structural similarity-based image distance measure. Multimodality surveillance videos pose specific challenges to tracking algorithms, due to, for example, low or variable light conditions and the presence of spurious or camouflaged objects. These factors often cause undesired luminance and contrast variations in videos produced by infrared sensors (due to varying thermal conditions) and visible sensors (e.g., the object entering shadowy areas). Commonly used colour and edge histogram-based trackers often fail in such conditions. In contrast, the structural similarity measure reflects the distance between two video frames by jointly comparing their luminance, contrast and spatial characteristics and is sensitive to relative rather than absolute changes in the video frame. In this work, we show that the performance of a particle filter tracker is improved significantly when the structural similarity-based distance is applied instead of the conventional Bhattacharyya histogram-based distance. Extensive evaluation of the proposed algorithm is presented together with comparisons with colour, edge and mean-shift trackers using real-world surveillance video sequences from multimodal (infrared and visible) cameras