Underwater motion deblurring based on cascaded attention mechanism

The  images  captured  in  the  underwater  scene  frequently  suffer  from  blur  effects  due  to  the  insufficient light  and  the  relative  motion  between  the  captured  scenes  and  the  imaging  system,  which  severely  hinders  the visual-based  exploration  and  investigation  in  the  ocean.  In  this  paper,  we  propose  a  feature  pyramid  attention network  (FPAN)  to  remove  themotion  blur  and  restore  the  blurry  underwater  images.  FPAN  incorporates  the cascaded  attention  modules  into  the  feature  pyramid  network  (FPN)  that  enables  it  to  learn  more  discriminative information. To facilitate the training of FPAN, we construct a weighted loss function, which consists of a content loss, an adversarial loss, and a perceptual loss. The cascaded attention module and the weighted loss function enable our proposed FPAN to generate more realistic high-quality images from the blurry underwater images. In addition, to deal with the lack of publicly available datasets in underwater image deblurring, we built two specific underwater deblurring  datasets,  namely  Underwater  Convolutional  Deblurring  Dataset  (UCDD)  and  Underwater  Multi-frame AveragingDeblurring Dataset (UMADD), to train and examine different deep learning-based networks.Finally, we conduct  sea  trial  experiments  on  our  autonomous  underwater  vehicle  (AUV).  Experimental  results  on  two underwater  deblurring  datasets  demonstrate  our  proposed  method  achieves  satisfactory results, which  validates  the potential practical values of our proposed method in real-world applications.</p

Underwater image enhancement using adaptive color restoration and dehazing

Underwater images captured by optical cameras can be degraded by light attenuation and scattering, which leads to deteriorated visual image quality. The technique of underwater image enhancement plays an important role in a wide range of subsequent applications such as image segmentation and object detection. To address this issue, we propose an underwater image enhancement framework which consists of an adaptive color restoration module and a haze-line based dehazing module. First, we employ an adaptive color restoration method to compensate the deteriorated color channels and restore the colors. The color restoration module consists of three steps: background light estimation, color recognition, and color compensation. The background light estimation determines the image is blueish or greenish, and the compensation is applied in red-green or red-blue channels. Second, the haze-line technique is employed to remove the haze and enhance the image details. Experimental results show that the proposed method can restore the color and remove the haze at the same time, and it also outperforms several state-of-the-art methods on three publicly available datasets. Moreover, experiments on an underwater object detection dataset show that the proposed underwater image enhancement method is able to improve the accuracy of the subsequent underwater object detection framework

Characterization of the HDAC/PI3K inhibitor CUDC-907 as a novel senolytic

The accumulation of senescent cells has an important role in the phenotypical changes observed in ageing and in many age-related pathologies. Thus, the strategies designed to prevent these effects, collectively known as senotherapies, have a strong clinical potential. Senolytics are a type of senotherapy aimed at specifically eliminating senescent cells from tissues. Several small molecule compounds with senolytic properties have already been identified, but their specificity and range of action are variable. Because of this, potential novel senolytics are being actively investigated. Given the involvement of HDACs and the PI3K pathway in senescence, we hypothesized that the dual inhibitor CUDC-907, a drug already in clinical trials for its antineoplastic effects, could have senolytic effects. Here, we show that CUDC-907 was indeed able to selectively induce apoptosis in cells driven to senesce by p53 expression, but not when senescence happened in the absence of p53. Consistent with this, CUDC-907 showed senolytic properties in different models of stress-induced senescence. Our results also indicate that the senolytic functions of CUDC-907 depend on the inhibitory effects of both HDACs and PI3K, which leads to an increase in p53 and a reduction in BH3 pro-survival proteins. Taken together, our results show that CUDC-907 has the potential to be a clinically relevant senolytic in pathological conditions in which stress-induced senescence is involved.</p