169 research outputs found
Fusion of Multispectral Data Through Illumination-aware Deep Neural Networks for Pedestrian Detection
Multispectral pedestrian detection has received extensive attention in recent
years as a promising solution to facilitate robust human target detection for
around-the-clock applications (e.g. security surveillance and autonomous
driving). In this paper, we demonstrate illumination information encoded in
multispectral images can be utilized to significantly boost performance of
pedestrian detection. A novel illumination-aware weighting mechanism is present
to accurately depict illumination condition of a scene. Such illumination
information is incorporated into two-stream deep convolutional neural networks
to learn multispectral human-related features under different illumination
conditions (daytime and nighttime). Moreover, we utilized illumination
information together with multispectral data to generate more accurate semantic
segmentation which are used to boost pedestrian detection accuracy. Putting all
of the pieces together, we present a powerful framework for multispectral
pedestrian detection based on multi-task learning of illumination-aware
pedestrian detection and semantic segmentation. Our proposed method is trained
end-to-end using a well-designed multi-task loss function and outperforms
state-of-the-art approaches on KAIST multispectral pedestrian dataset
Box-level Segmentation Supervised Deep Neural Networks for Accurate and Real-time Multispectral Pedestrian Detection
Effective fusion of complementary information captured by multi-modal sensors
(visible and infrared cameras) enables robust pedestrian detection under
various surveillance situations (e.g. daytime and nighttime). In this paper, we
present a novel box-level segmentation supervised learning framework for
accurate and real-time multispectral pedestrian detection by incorporating
features extracted in visible and infrared channels. Specifically, our method
takes pairs of aligned visible and infrared images with easily obtained
bounding box annotations as input and estimates accurate prediction maps to
highlight the existence of pedestrians. It offers two major advantages over the
existing anchor box based multispectral detection methods. Firstly, it
overcomes the hyperparameter setting problem occurred during the training phase
of anchor box based detectors and can obtain more accurate detection results,
especially for small and occluded pedestrian instances. Secondly, it is capable
of generating accurate detection results using small-size input images, leading
to improvement of computational efficiency for real-time autonomous driving
applications. Experimental results on KAIST multispectral dataset show that our
proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of both
accuracy and speed
Unsupervised Domain Adaptation for Multispectral Pedestrian Detection
Multimodal information (e.g., visible and thermal) can generate robust
pedestrian detections to facilitate around-the-clock computer vision
applications, such as autonomous driving and video surveillance. However, it
still remains a crucial challenge to train a reliable detector working well in
different multispectral pedestrian datasets without manual annotations. In this
paper, we propose a novel unsupervised domain adaptation framework for
multispectral pedestrian detection, by iteratively generating pseudo
annotations and updating the parameters of our designed multispectral
pedestrian detector on target domain. Pseudo annotations are generated using
the detector trained on source domain, and then updated by fixing the
parameters of detector and minimizing the cross entropy loss without
back-propagation. Training labels are generated using the pseudo annotations by
considering the characteristics of similarity and complementarity between
well-aligned visible and infrared image pairs. The parameters of detector are
updated using the generated labels by minimizing our defined multi-detection
loss function with back-propagation. The optimal parameters of detector can be
obtained after iteratively updating the pseudo annotations and parameters.
Experimental results show that our proposed unsupervised multimodal domain
adaptation method achieves significantly higher detection performance than the
approach without domain adaptation, and is competitive with the supervised
multispectral pedestrian detectors
The Emerging Roles of the RNA Binding Protein QKI in Cardiovascular Development and Function
RNA binding proteins (RBPs) have a broad biological and physiological function and are critical in regulating pre-mRNA posttranscriptional processing, intracellular migration, and mRNA stability. QKI, also known as Quaking, is a member of the signal transduction and activation of RNA (STAR) family, which also belongs to the heterogeneous nuclear ribonucleoprotein K- (hnRNP K-) homology domain protein family. There are three major alternatively spliced isoforms, QKI-5, QKI-6, and QKI-7, differing in carboxy-terminal domains. They share a common RNA binding property, but each isoform can regulate pre-mRNA splicing, transportation or stability differently in a unique cell type-specific manner. Previously, QKI has been known for its important role in contributing to neurological disorders. A series of recent work has further demonstrated that QKI has important roles in much broader biological systems, such as cardiovascular development, monocyte to macrophage differentiation, bone metabolism, and cancer progression. In this mini-review, we will focus on discussing the emerging roles of QKI in regulating cardiac and vascular development and function and its potential link to cardiovascular pathophysiology
Real-space renormalization group for the random-field Ising model
We present real--space renormalization group (RG) calculations of the
critical properties of the random--field Ising model on a cubic lattice in
three dimensions. We calculate the RG flows in a two--parameter truncation of
the Hamiltonian space. As predicted, the transition at finite randomness is
controlled by a zero temperature, disordered critical fixed point, and we
exhibit the universal crossover trajectory from the pure Ising critical point.
We extract scaling fields and critical exponents, and study the distribution of
barrier heights between states as a function of length scale.Comment: 12 pages, CU-MSC-757
Critical Exponents of the pure and random-field Ising models
We show that current estimates of the critical exponents of the
three-dimensional random-field Ising model are in agreement with the exponents
of the pure Ising system in dimension 3 - theta where theta is the exponent
that governs the hyperscaling violation in the random case.Comment: 9 pages, 4 encapsulated Postscript figures, REVTeX 3.
Critical Behavior of the 3d Random Field Ising Model: Two-Exponent Scaling or First Order Phase Transition?
In extensive Monte Carlo simulations the phase transition of the random field
Ising model in three dimensions is investigated. The values of the critical
exponents are determined via finite size scaling. For a Gaussian distribution
of the random fields it is found that the correlation length diverges
with an exponent at the critical temperature and that
with for the connected susceptibility
and with for
the disconnected susceptibility. Together with the amplitude ratio
being close to one this gives
further support for a two exponent scaling scenario implying
. The magnetization behaves discontinuously at the
transition, i.e. , indicating a first order transition. However, no
divergence for the specific heat and in particular no latent heat is found.
Also the probability distribution of the magnetization does not show a
multi-peak structure that is characteristic for the phase-coexistence at first
order phase transition points.Comment: 14 pages, RevTeX, 11 postscript figures (fig9.ps and fig11.ps should
be printed separately
BMP10 preserves cardiac function through its dual activation of SMAD-mediated and STAT3-mediated pathways
Bone morphogenetic protein 10 (BMP10) is a cardiac peptide growth factor belonging to the transforming growth factor β superfamily that critically controls cardiovascular development, growth, and maturation. It has been shown that BMP10 elicits its intracellular signaling through a receptor complex of activin receptor-like kinase 1 with morphogenetic protein receptor type II or activin receptor type 2A. Previously, we generated and characterized a transgenic mouse line expressing BMP10 from the α-myosin heavy chain gene promoter and found that these mice have normal cardiac hypertrophic responses to both physiological and pathological stimuli. In this study, we report that these transgenic mice exhibit significantly reduced levels of cardiomyocyte apoptosis and cardiac fibrosis in response to a prolonged administration of the β-adrenoreceptor agonist isoproterenol. We further confirmed this cardioprotective function with a newly generated conditional Bmp10 transgenic mouse line, in which Bmp10 was activated in adult hearts by tamoxifen. Moreover, the intraperitoneal administration of recombinant human BMP10 was found to effectively protect hearts from injury, suggesting potential therapeutic utility of using BMP10 to prevent heart failure. Gene profiling and biochemical analyses indicated that BMP10 activates the SMAD-mediated canonical pathway and, unexpectedly, also the signal transducer and activator of transcription 3 (STAT3)-mediated signaling pathway both in vivo and in vitro Additional findings further supported the notion that BMP10's cardioprotective function likely is due to its dual activation of SMAD- and STAT3-regulated signaling pathways, promoting cardiomyocyte survival and suppressing cardiac fibrosis
Phase Diagram of the 3D Bimodal Random-Field Ising Model
The one-parametric Wang-Landau (WL) method is implemented together with an
extrapolation scheme to yield approximations of the two-dimensional
(exchange-energy, field-energy) density of states (DOS) of the 3D bimodal
random-field Ising model (RFIM). The present approach generalizes our earlier
WL implementations, by handling the final stage of the WL process as an
entropic sampling scheme, appropriate for the recording of the required
two-parametric histograms. We test the accuracy of the proposed extrapolation
scheme and then apply it to study the size-shift behavior of the phase diagram
of the 3D bimodal RFIM. We present a finite-size converging approach and a
well-behaved sequence of estimates for the critical disorder strength. Their
asymptotic shift-behavior yields the critical disorder strength and the
associated correlation length's exponent, in agreement with previous estimates
from ground-state studies of the model.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure
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