The Devil of Face Recognition is in the Noise

The growing scale of face recognition datasets empowers us to train strong convolutional networks for face recognition. While a variety of architectures and loss functions have been devised, we still have a limited understanding of the source and consequence of label noise inherent in existing datasets. We make the following contributions: 1) We contribute cleaned subsets of popular face databases, i.e., MegaFace and MS-Celeb-1M datasets, and build a new large-scale noise-controlled IMDb-Face dataset. 2) With the original datasets and cleaned subsets, we profile and analyze label noise properties of MegaFace and MS-Celeb-1M. We show that a few orders more samples are needed to achieve the same accuracy yielded by a clean subset. 3) We study the association between different types of noise, i.e., label flips and outliers, with the accuracy of face recognition models. 4) We investigate ways to improve data cleanliness, including a comprehensive user study on the influence of data labeling strategies to annotation accuracy. The IMDb-Face dataset has been released on https://github.com/fwang91/IMDb-Face.Comment: accepted to ECCV'1

Quantum tunneling time of a Bose-Einstein condensate traversing through a laser-induced potential barrier

We theoretically study the effect of atomic nonlinearity on the tunneling time in the case of an atomic Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC) traversing the laser-induced potential barrier. The atomic nonlinearity is controlled to appear only in the region of the barrier by employing the Feshbach resonance technique to tune interatomic interaction in the tunneling process. Numerical simulation shows that the atomic nonlinear effect dramatically changes the tunneling behavior of the BEC matter wave packet, and results in the violation of Hartman effect and the occurrence of negative tunneling time.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

A Coarse-to-Fine Adaptive Network for Appearance-Based Gaze Estimation

Human gaze is essential for various appealing applications. Aiming at more accurate gaze estimation, a series of recent works propose to utilize face and eye images simultaneously. Nevertheless, face and eye images only serve as independent or parallel feature sources in those works, the intrinsic correlation between their features is overlooked. In this paper we make the following contributions: 1) We propose a coarse-to-fine strategy which estimates a basic gaze direction from face image and refines it with corresponding residual predicted from eye images. 2) Guided by the proposed strategy, we design a framework which introduces a bi-gram model to bridge gaze residual and basic gaze direction, and an attention component to adaptively acquire suitable fine-grained feature. 3) Integrating the above innovations, we construct a coarse-to-fine adaptive network named CA-Net and achieve state-of-the-art performances on MPIIGaze and EyeDiap.Comment: 9 pages, 7figures, AAAI-2

Color-aware surface registration

Shape registration is fundamental to 3D object acquisition; it is used to fuse scans from multiple views. Existing algorithms mainly utilize geometric information to determine alignment, but this typically results in noticeable misalignment of textures (i.e. surface colors) when using RGB-depth cameras. We address this problem using a novel approach to color-aware registration, which takes both color and geometry into consideration simultaneously. Color information is exploited throughout the pipeline to provide more effective sampling, correspondence and alignment, in particular for surfaces with detailed textures. Our method can furthermore tackle both rigid and non-rigid registration problems (arising, for example, due to small changes in the object during scanning, or camera distortions). We demonstrate that our approach produces significantly better results than previous methods

Molecular structural differences between maize leaf and endosperm starches

The morphology, whole molecular size distribution and chain-length distribution of maize leaf starch have been characterized and compared to its endosperm starch, to better understand differences between leaf and endosperm starch structure, and the relationship with the functions of starch in these organs. Leaf starch is found to have amylopectin with much shorter chains (virtually none with a degree of polymerization, DP, above 70) than the endosperm amylopectin, which has significant numbers of chains with DP up to ∼120, and has much smaller molecular size (and is present at a much lower amount) than endosperm starch. It is postulated that these pronounced differences arise from the distinct starch synthesis pathways in these organs, and are consistent with the starches’ distinct botanical functions: short-term storage requiring relatively rapid degradation for leaf starch, and high crystallinity and high energy density requiring slow degradation for endosperm starch

Phase boundary engineering of metal-organic-framework-derived carbonaceous nickel selenides for sodium-ion batteries

Abstract: Sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) are promising power sources due to the low cost and abundance of battery-grade sodium resources, while practical SIBs suffer from intrinsically sluggish diffusion kinetics and severe volume changes of electrode materials. Metal-organic framework (MOFs) derived carbonaceous metal compound offer promising applications in electrode materials due to their tailorable composition, nanostructure, chemical and physical properties. Here, we fabricated hierarchical MOF-derived carbonaceous nickel selenides with bi-phase composition for enhanced sodium storage capability. As MOF formation time increases, the pyrolyzed and selenized products gradually transform from a single-phase Ni3Se4 into bi-phase NiSex then single-phase NiSe2, with concomitant morphological evolution from solid spheres into hierarchical urchin-like yolk-shell structures. As SIBs anodes, bi-phase NiSex@C/CNT-10h (10 h of hydrothermal synthesis time) exhibits a high specific capacity of 387.1 mAh/g at 0.1 A/g, long cycling stability of 306.3 mAh/g at a moderately high current density of 1 A/g after 2,000 cycles. Computational simulation further proves the lattice mismatch at the phase boundary facilitates more interstitial space for sodium storage. Our understanding of the phase boundary engineering of transformed MOFs and their morphological evolution is conducive to fabricate novel composites/hybrids for applications in batteries, catalysis, sensors, and environmental remediation

Origin and evolution of the triploid cultivated banana genome

DATA AVAILABILITY : Genome assemblies of Cavendish, Gros Michel and Zebrina v2.0 have been deposited into NCBI under GenBank numbers JAVVNX000000000, JAVVNW000000000 and JAVVNV000000000 and in the National Genomics Data Center BioProject database (https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/bioproject/) under the accession number PRJCA019650. Genome assemblies with annotations and results of ChIP–seq and DNase-seq can be accessed at FigShare (https://figshare.com/projects/Origin_and_evolution_of_the_triploid_cultivated_banana_genome/178041). Raw data used for the assemblies, including PacBio, Illumina and Hi-C data, are available through the Sequence Read Archive of the National Centre for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) under the BioProject PRJNA1017453 with SRA accessions from SRR23425440 to SRR23425472 and from SRR23885547 to SRR23885549. Fifty-eight RNA-seq datasets were downloaded from NCBI BioProject accessions PRJNA381300, PRJNA394594 and PRJNA598018. DNA methylation data were downloaded from NCBI BioProject PRJNA381300.Most fresh bananas belong to the Cavendish and Gros Michel subgroups. Here, we report chromosome-scale genome assemblies of Cavendish (1.48 Gb) and Gros Michel (1.33 Gb), defining three subgenomes, Ban, Dh and Ze, with Musa acuminata ssp. banksii, malaccensis and zebrina as their major ancestral contributors, respectively. The insertion of repeat sequences in the Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense (Foc) tropical race 4 RGA2 (resistance gene analog 2) promoter was identified in most diploid and triploid bananas. We found that the receptor-like protein (RLP) locus, including Foc race 1-resistant genes, is absent in the Gros Michel Ze subgenome. We identified two NAP (NAC-like, activated by apetala3/pistillata) transcription factor homologs specifically and highly expressed in fruit that directly bind to the promoters of many fruit ripening genes and may be key regulators of fruit ripening. Our genome data should facilitate the breeding and super-domestication of bananas.The National Natural Science Foundation of China, Construction of Plateau Discipline of Fujian Province, the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program and from Ghent University (Methusalem funding).http://www.nature.com/ng2024-06-11hj2024BiochemistryGeneticsMicrobiology and Plant PathologySDG-02:Zero Hunge

Research on application of artificial intelligence technology in fire alarm system of substations

It is very important to identify fires in substations. Traditional fire alarm systems have problems such as low sensitivity and slow response. This article introduces the working principle of a fire alarm system based on artificial intelligence. And this article also designs different smoke particle sampling schemes for different areas in the substation, such as functional rooms/cable trenches, to ensure the correct operation of the system combined with the actual conditions of each area. Resulting that the fire alarm system based on artificial intelligence can detect the fire at the early stage and alarm in time

Analysis and application research of new type online monitoring technologies for substation equipment

At present, a variety of online monitoring technologies for substation equipment including winding temperature by optical fiber, however, the accuracy and stability show great differences among them. This paper focuses on the advancement, feasibility and economics of various new technologies, combined with the construction and operation experience of wisdom substations, in order to select mature, reliable, and effective new online monitoring technologies that reduce the amount of equipment operation and maintenance from a number of new technologies. In the end, the article gives suggestions on the application of various new online monitoring technologies

Effects of Travel Speed on the Microstructure and Abrasion Resistance of Hardfacing Alloys Deposited with Composite Powder Particles and Solid Wire

Composite powder particles (CPP) preset on base metals were fused with a solid wire to form a melt by the intense heat provided by the arc. An X-ray diffractometer, scanning electron microscopy, and energy dispersive spectrometer were employed to investigate the effects of travel speed on the microstructure and abrasion resistance. It was found that the microstructure of hardfacing alloys with CPP consists of γ-Fe, M7C3, and (Ti, V) C. With an increase in the travel speed from 3.5 to 6 mm/s, the microstructure with CPP changed from a hypoeutectic to hypereutectic structure. For hardfacing alloys with CPP, the increase in the travel speed not only contributed to a reduction of the dilution ratio of base metals, but also deliberately increased the volume fraction of primary M7C3-type carbides, which indicated that the bonding function executed on powder components led to a significant improvement in abrasion resistance and increased the utilization ratio of the alloying elements. The wear mechanism of hardfacing alloys included micro-cutting of abrasive particles and micro-spalling