Weakly-supervised Caricature Face Parsing through Domain Adaptation

A caricature is an artistic form of a person's picture in which certain striking characteristics are abstracted or exaggerated in order to create a humor or sarcasm effect. For numerous caricature related applications such as attribute recognition and caricature editing, face parsing is an essential pre-processing step that provides a complete facial structure understanding. However, current state-of-the-art face parsing methods require large amounts of labeled data on the pixel-level and such process for caricature is tedious and labor-intensive. For real photos, there are numerous labeled datasets for face parsing. Thus, we formulate caricature face parsing as a domain adaptation problem, where real photos play the role of the source domain, adapting to the target caricatures. Specifically, we first leverage a spatial transformer based network to enable shape domain shifts. A feed-forward style transfer network is then utilized to capture texture-level domain gaps. With these two steps, we synthesize face caricatures from real photos, and thus we can use parsing ground truths of the original photos to learn the parsing model. Experimental results on the synthetic and real caricatures demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed domain adaptation algorithm. Code is available at: https://github.com/ZJULearning/CariFaceParsing .Comment: Accepted in ICIP 2019, code and model are available at https://github.com/ZJULearning/CariFaceParsin

合肥话单字调的知觉研究 = RESEARCH ON THE MONOSYLLABIC TONE PERCEPTION OF HEFEI DIALECT

Master'sMASTER OF ART

Enabling the Electrochemical Performance of Maricite-NaMnPO4 and Maricite-NaFePO4 Cathode Materials in Sodium-Ion Batteries

NaMnPO4 and NaFePO4, polyanion cathode materials, exist in two different phases maricite/natrophilite and maricite/olivine, respectively. Both natrophilite NaMnPO4 and olivine NaFePO4 are electrochemically active and possess a one-dimensional tunnel for sodium-ion migration; however, these two phases are thermodynamically unstable. Therefore, they can be synthesized through an electrochemical route. On the contrary, maricite (m)-NaMnPO4 and maricite (m)-NaFePO4 are thermodynamically stable forms but have a huge activation energy of their diffusion pathways for sodium extraction and insertion in the crystal structure, which hinders electrochemical reactions. Therefore, the electrochemical behaviour of commercial m-NaMnPO4 and m-NaFePO4 has been studied to find a way for enabling them electrochemically. Ball milling and thermal/mechanical carbon coating are employed to reduce the particle size to enhance the electrochemical performance and shorten the diffusion pathway. Moreover, ball milling leads to defects and partial phase transformation. The electrochemical performance of milled-coated NaMnPO4 and NaFePO4 has been thoroughly investigated and compared. The phase transition of NaFePO4 is revealed by a differential scanning calorimeter. As a result, the achievable capacities of both cathode materials are significantly enhanced up to ∼50 mAh.g−1 via the particle size reduction as well as by carbon coating. However, the side reactions and agglomeration problems in such materials need to be minimized and must be considered to enable them for applications

Plasma Clusterin and the CLU Gene rs11136000 Variant Are Associated with Mild Cognitive Impairment in Type 2 Diabetic Patients

Objective: Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is related to an elevated risk of mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Plasma clusterin is reported associated with the early pathology of Alzheimer's disease (AD) and longitudinal brain atrophy in subjects with MCI. The rs11136000 single nucleotide polymorphism within the clusterin (CLU) gene is also associated with the risk of AD. We aimed to investigate the associations among plasma clusterin, rs11136000 genotype and T2DM-associated MCI. Methods: A total of 231 T2DM patients, including 126 MCI and 105 cognitively healthy controls were enrolled in this study. Demographic parameters were collected and neuropsychological tests were conducted. Plasma clusterin and CLU rs11136000 genotype were examined.Results: Plasma clusterin was significantly higher in MCI patients than in control group (p=0.007). In subjects with MCI, plasma clusterin level was negatively correlated with Montreal cognitive assessment and auditory verbal learning test_delayed recall scores (p=0.027 and p=0.020, respectively). After adjustment for age, educational attainment, and gender, carriers of rs11136000 TT genotype demonstrated reduced risk for MCI compared with the CC genotype carriers (OR=0.158, χ2=4.113, p=0.043). Multivariable regression model showed that educational attainment, duration of diabetes, HDL-c, and plasma clusterin levels are associated with MCI in T2DM patients.Conclusions: Plasma clusterin was associated with MCI and may reflect a protective response in T2DM patients. TT genotype exhibited a reduced risk of MCI compared to CC genotype. Further investigations should be conducted to determine the role of clusterin in cognitive decline