Tracking by Animation: Unsupervised Learning of Multi-Object Attentive Trackers

Online Multi-Object Tracking (MOT) from videos is a challenging computer vision task which has been extensively studied for decades. Most of the existing MOT algorithms are based on the Tracking-by-Detection (TBD) paradigm combined with popular machine learning approaches which largely reduce the human effort to tune algorithm parameters. However, the commonly used supervised learning approaches require the labeled data (e.g., bounding boxes), which is expensive for videos. Also, the TBD framework is usually suboptimal since it is not end-to-end, i.e., it considers the task as detection and tracking, but not jointly. To achieve both label-free and end-to-end learning of MOT, we propose a Tracking-by-Animation framework, where a differentiable neural model first tracks objects from input frames and then animates these objects into reconstructed frames. Learning is then driven by the reconstruction error through backpropagation. We further propose a Reprioritized Attentive Tracking to improve the robustness of data association. Experiments conducted on both synthetic and real video datasets show the potential of the proposed model. Our project page is publicly available at: https://github.com/zhen-he/tracking-by-animationComment: CVPR 201

Patterns of de novo metastasis and survival outcomes by age in breast cancer patients: a SEER population-based study

BackgroundThe role of age in metastatic disease, including breast cancer, remains obscure. This study was conducted to determine the role of age in patients with de novo metastatic breast cancer.MethodsBreast cancer patients diagnosed with distant metastases between 2010 and 2019 were retrieved from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results database. Comparisons were performed between young (aged ≤ 40 years), middle-aged (41–60 years), older (61–80 years), and the oldest old (> 80 years) patients. Adjusted hazard ratios (aHRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated using multivariate Cox proportional hazard models. Survival analysis was performed by the Kaplan–Meier method.ResultsThis study included 24155 (4.4% of all patients) de novo metastatic breast cancer patients. The number of young, middle-aged, older, and the oldest old patients were 195 (8.3%), 9397 (38.9%), 10224 (42.3%), and 2539 (10.5%), respectively. The 5-year OS rate was highest in the young (42.1%), followed by middle-aged (34.8%), older (28.3%), and the oldest old patients (11.8%). Multivariable Cox regression analysis showed that middle-aged (aHR, 1.18; 95% CI, 1.10–1.27), older (aHR, 1.42; 95% CI, 1.32–1.52), and the oldest old patients (aHR, 2.15; 95% CI, 1.98–2.33) had worse OS than young patients. Consistently, middle-aged (aHR, 1.16; 95% CI, 1.08–1.25), older (aHR, 1.32; 95% CI, 1.23–1.43), and the oldest old patients (aHR, 1.86; 95% CI, 1.71–2.03) had worse BCSS than young patients.ConclusionThis study provided clear evidence that de novo metastatic breast cancer had an age-specific pattern. Age was an independent risk factor for mortality in patients with de novo metastatic breast cancer

Layered Extraction and Adsorption Performance of Extracellular Polymeric Substances from Activated Sludge in the Enhanced Biological Phosphorus Removal Process

A large amount of phosphorus was found in the extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) of activated sludge used in enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR), so the role of EPS and extracellular phosphorus in EBPR should not be neglected. The composition and properties of tightly bound EPS (TB-EPS) and loosely bound EPS (LB-EPS) were significantly different, and it was necessary to study the adsorption performance of EPS through the fractionating of activated sludge into LB-EPS, TB-EPS and microbial cells. In this study, the adsorption performance of LB-EPS and TB-EPS for phosphate was explored by extracting LB-EPS and TB-EPS via sonication and cation exchange resin (CER), respectively. The results indicated that the sonication-CER method was an efficient and reliable extraction method for EPS with a synergistic effect. The performance of EPS in the adsorption/complexing of phosphate was excellent because of its abundant functional groups. Specifically, the type and content of metal elements and functional groups in TB-EPS were much greater than those in LB-EPS, which led to the key role of TB-EPS in the adsorption/complexing of phosphate. Finally, a metabolic model for EBPR with consideration of the adsorption performance of LB-EPS and TB-EPS was proposed

A Dynamic Bayesian Network for Vehicle Maneuver Prediction in Highway Driving Scenarios: Framework and Verification

Accurate maneuver prediction for surrounding vehicles enables intelligent vehicles to make safe and socially compliant decisions in advance, thus improving the safety and comfort of the driving. The main contribution of this paper is proposing a practical, high-performance, and low-cost maneuver-prediction approach for intelligent vehicles. Our approach is based on a dynamic Bayesian network, which exploits multiple predictive features, namely, historical states of predicting vehicles, road structures, as well as traffic interactions for inferring the probability of each maneuver. The paper also presents algorithms of feature extraction for the network. Our approach is verified on real traffic data in large-scale publicly available datasets. The results show that our approach can recognize the lane-change maneuvers with an F1 score of 80% and an advanced prediction time of 3.75 s, which greatly improves the performance on prediction compared to other baseline approaches

Human-Machine Cooperative Trajectory Planning for Semi-Autonomous Driving Based on the Understanding of Behavioral Semantics

This paper presents a novel cooperative trajectory planning approach for semi-autonomous driving. The machine interacts with the driver at the decision level and the trajectory generation level. To minimize conflicts between the machine and the human, the trajectory planning problem is decomposed into a high-level behavior decision-making problem and a low-level trajectory planning problem. The approach infers the driver’s behavioral semantics according to the driving context and the driver’s input. The trajectories are generated based on the behavioral semantics and driver’s input. The feasibility of the proposed approach is validated by real vehicle experiments. The results prove that the proposed human–machine cooperative trajectory planning approach can successfully help the driver to avoid collisions while respecting the driver’s behavior

A New Quartic Equation of State Based on a General Form and Its Application to Pure Fluids

A new quartic equation of state (EOS) based on a general form is proposed. Parameters in the new equation are regressed as substance-specific constants for 88 pure substances. The calculated saturated properties for nonpolar and polar substances are compared with experimental data and with that obtained by the Peng–Robinson Stryjek–Vera (PRSV), Patel–Teja (PT), and Yun EOSs for the various pure substances. Despite its simplicity, the proposed equation has good predictive capability over the entire temperature region

Effects of Varicocele Surgical Repair on Serum Hormone and Inhibin B Levels for Patients With Varicocele: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Varicocele surgical repair can improve the function of the testis for patients with varicocele. We carried out a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the effects of varicocele surgical repair on serum hormones and inhibin B levels in patients with varicocele. A literature search was performed in August 2022, and no language or geographic region restrictions were applied. The search included the following databases: PubMed, Embase, and Medline. A literature review was performed to identify all published clinical trials assessing serum hormone and inhibin B levels before and after varicocele surgical repair. The reference lists of retrieved studies were also investigated. A systematic review and meta-analysis were conducted. Eight articles were selected from 162 articles, including 452 patients. The combined analysis showed that after surgical treatment, mean serum testosterone, inhibin B, and sperm concentration levels increased compared with preoperative levels ( p < .05). After surgical treatment, mean serum follicle-stimulating hormon (FSH), and Luteinizing hormone (LH) levels decreased compared with preoperative levels ( p < .05). This meta-analysis demonstrates that varicocele surgical repair can improve testicular function, increase serum testosterone, and inhibin B levels and decrease serum FSH and LH levels in patients with varicocele. This might be related to the improvement of infertility. A large-scale multicenter randomized controlled study is needed for further confirmation

Enhanced optical response of crystalline silicon photovoltaic devices with integration of silver nanoparticles and ultrathin TiO2 dielectric layer

Silver nanoparticles (Ag NPs) and the titanium dioxide (TiO2) dielectric layer produced by magnetron sputtering and subsequent annealing treatment, were integrated at the front side of crystalline silicon (c-Si) solar cells. A photovoltaic device was realized based on the c-Si substrate and stacked Ag NPs/TiO2/n/p/Ag layer. The results show that the energy conversion efficiency (ECE) can be improved by 9.9% with the introduction of well-sized Ag NPs and an ultrathin TiO2 dielectric layer to the c-Si solar cells. The presence of the dielectric layer enables Ag NPs to fully exert the advantage of localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) and light scattering, and the recombination of the photogenerated carriers originating from Ag NPs is effectively avoided at the surface or in the vicinity of Ag NPs. Moreover, COMSOL Multiphysics simulations were performed to investigate the reflection and absorption of incident light in the c-Si. The simulation results match well with the experimental data