Correlation Filters for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle-Based Aerial Tracking: A Review and Experimental Evaluation

Aerial tracking, which has exhibited its omnipresent dedication and splendid performance, is one of the most active applications in the remote sensing field. Especially, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based remote sensing system, equipped with a visual tracking approach, has been widely used in aviation, navigation, agriculture,transportation, and public security, etc. As is mentioned above, the UAV-based aerial tracking platform has been gradually developed from research to practical application stage, reaching one of the main aerial remote sensing technologies in the future. However, due to the real-world onerous situations, e.g., harsh external challenges, the vibration of the UAV mechanical structure (especially under strong wind conditions), the maneuvering flight in complex environment, and the limited computation resources onboard, accuracy, robustness, and high efficiency are all crucial for the onboard tracking methods. Recently, the discriminative correlation filter (DCF)-based trackers have stood out for their high computational efficiency and appealing robustness on a single CPU, and have flourished in the UAV visual tracking community. In this work, the basic framework of the DCF-based trackers is firstly generalized, based on which, 23 state-of-the-art DCF-based trackers are orderly summarized according to their innovations for solving various issues. Besides, exhaustive and quantitative experiments have been extended on various prevailing UAV tracking benchmarks, i.e., UAV123, UAV123@10fps, UAV20L, UAVDT, DTB70, and VisDrone2019-SOT, which contain 371,903 frames in total. The experiments show the performance, verify the feasibility, and demonstrate the current challenges of DCF-based trackers onboard UAV tracking.Comment: 28 pages, 10 figures, submitted to GRS

1D-Touch: NLP-Assisted Coarse Text Selection via a Semi-Direct Gesture

Existing text selection techniques on touchscreen focus on improving the control for moving the carets. Coarse-grained text selection on word and phrase levels has not received much support beyond word-snapping and entity recognition. We introduce 1D-Touch, a novel text selection method that complements the carets-based sub-word selection by facilitating the selection of semantic units of words and above. This method employs a simple vertical slide gesture to expand and contract a selection area from a word. The expansion can be by words or by semantic chunks ranging from sub-phrases to sentences. This technique shifts the concept of text selection, from defining a range by locating the first and last words, towards a dynamic process of expanding and contracting a textual semantic entity. To understand the effects of our approach, we prototyped and tested two variants: WordTouch, which offers a straightforward word-by-word expansion, and ChunkTouch, which leverages NLP to chunk text into syntactic units, allowing the selection to grow by semantically meaningful units in response to the sliding gesture. Our evaluation, focused on the coarse-grained selection tasks handled by 1D-Touch, shows a 20% improvement over the default word-snapping selection method on Android

Advances in CRISPR/Cas gene therapy for inborn errors of immunity

Inborn errors of immunity (IEIs) are a group of inherited disorders caused by mutations in the protein-coding genes involved in innate and/or adaptive immunity. Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is a mainstay definitive therapy for many severe IEIs. However, the lack of HLA-matched donors increases the risk of developing severe immunological complications. Gene therapy provides long-term clinical benefits and could be an attractive therapeutic strategy for IEIs. In this review, we describe the development and evolution of clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeat (CRISPR)/CRISPR-associated proteins (Cas) gene-editing systems, including double-strand break (DSB)-based gene editing and DSB-free base editing or prime editing systems. Here, we discuss the advances in and issues associated with CRISPR/Cas gene editing tools and their potential as therapeutic alternatives for IEIs. We also highlight the progress of preclinical studies for the treatment of human genetic diseases, including IEIs, using CRISR/Cas and ongoing clinical trials based on this versatile technology