Document analysis with neural net circuits

Document analysis is one of the main applications of machine vision today and offers great opportunities for neural net circuits. Despite more and more data processing with computers, the number of paper documents is still increasing rapidly. A fast translation of data from paper into electronic format is needed almost everywhere, and when done manually, this is a time consuming process. Markets range from small scanners for personal use to high-volume document analysis systems, such as address readers for the postal service or check processing systems for banks. A major concern with present systems is the accuracy of the automatic interpretation. Today's algorithms fail miserably when noise is present, when print quality is poor, or when the layout is complex. A common approach to circumvent these problems is to restrict the variations of the documents handled by a system. In our laboratory, we had the best luck with circuits implementing basic functions, such as convolutions, that can be used in many different algorithms. To illustrate the flexibility of this approach, three applications of the NET32K circuit are described in this short viewgraph presentation: locating address blocks, cleaning document images by removing noise, and locating areas of interest in personal checks to improve image compression. Several of the ideas realized in this circuit that were inspired by neural nets, such as analog computation with a low resolution, resulted in a chip that is well suited for real-world document analysis applications and that compares favorably with alternative, 'conventional' circuits

Reactivity of Cyanide and Thiocyanate Towards the Nitrosyl Carbonyl [Co(CO)3(NO)]

The reaction of equimolar amounts of [Co(CO)3(NO)] and [PPN]CN, PPN+ = (PPh3)2N+, in THF at room temperature resulted in ligand substitution of a carbonyl towards the cyanido ligand presumably affording the complex salt PPN[Co(CO)2(NO)(CN)] as a reactive intermediate species which could not be isolated. Applying the synthetic protocol using the nitrosyl carbonyl in excess, the title reaction afforded unexpectedly the novel complex salt PPN[Co2(μ‐CN)(CO)4(NO)2] (1) in high yield. Because of many disorder phenomena in crystals of 1 the corresponding NBu4+ salt of 1 has been prepared and the molecular structure of the dinuclear metal core in NnBu4[Co2(μ‐CN)(CO)4(NO)2] (2) was determined by X‐ray crystal diffraction in a more satisfactory manner. In contrast to the former result, the reaction of [PPN]SCN with [Co(CO)3(NO)] yielded the mononuclear complex salt PPN[Co(CO)2(NO)(SCN‐κN)] (3) in good yield whose molecular structure in the solid was even determined and its composition additionally confirmed by spectroscopic means

Attend and Interact: Higher-Order Object Interactions for Video Understanding

Human actions often involve complex interactions across several inter-related objects in the scene. However, existing approaches to fine-grained video understanding or visual relationship detection often rely on single object representation or pairwise object relationships. Furthermore, learning interactions across multiple objects in hundreds of frames for video is computationally infeasible and performance may suffer since a large combinatorial space has to be modeled. In this paper, we propose to efficiently learn higher-order interactions between arbitrary subgroups of objects for fine-grained video understanding. We demonstrate that modeling object interactions significantly improves accuracy for both action recognition and video captioning, while saving more than 3-times the computation over traditional pairwise relationships. The proposed method is validated on two large-scale datasets: Kinetics and ActivityNet Captions. Our SINet and SINet-Caption achieve state-of-the-art performances on both datasets even though the videos are sampled at a maximum of 1 FPS. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work modeling object interactions on open domain large-scale video datasets, and we additionally model higher-order object interactions which improves the performance with low computational costs.Comment: CVPR 201

Cytotoxic Activity of Some Half‐sandwich Rhodium(III) Complexes Containing 4,4’‐disubstituted‐2,2’‐bipyridine Ligands

The synthesis and characterization of three compounds [Rh(η5-C5Me5)Cl(N^N)]PF6 (N^N=4,4’-disubstituted-2,2’-bipyridines, 1–3) are described. The cationic complexes contain the bidentate ligands N^N=4,4'-di-tert-butyl-2,2'-bipyridine (1), N^N=4,4'-dinonyl-2,2'-bipyridine (2) and N^N=4,4'-diamino-2,2'-bipyridine (3). The complex salts were obtained by the bridge-splitting reaction from the precursor [{Rh(η5-C5Me5)(μ-Cl)Cl}2] and subsequent salt metathesis affording their corresponding hexafluorido phosphate salts. All compounds were characterized by elemental analysis and spectroscopic means. Additionally, the molecular structure of compound 3 in the solid was determined by a single-crystal X-ray diffraction study. The cytotoxicity of all three compounds was examined by MTT assay against two cancer cell lines – HT-29 (colon adenocarcinoma) and MCF-7 (human breast adenocarcinoma) - and normal human fibroblast cells (GM5657T). Compound 1 has moderate cytotoxicity against both cell lines, while compound 2 is seven to nine times more cytotoxic than cisplatin against MCF-7 and HT-29, respectively. In contrast to cisplatin, both compounds are more active against cancer cells than fibroblasts, thus showing some cancer selectivity

Cytotoxic Activities of Half‐sandwich M(III) Complexes (M=Rh, Ir) Bearing Chloro‐substituted Bidentate‐coordinated Phenanthroline or Terpyridine Ligands

The synthesis and characterization of four compounds [M(η5-C5Me5)(N^N)Cl]PF6 [N^N=4,7-dichloro-1,10-phenanthroline with M=Rh, 1, and M=Ir, 2, and N^N=4'-(4-chlorophenyl)-2,2':6',2''-terpyridine in the κ2N,N'-coordination mode with M=Rh, 3, and M=Ir, 4] are described. All compounds were characterized by spectroscopic means and their molecular structures in the crystal were confirmed by single-crystal X-ray diffraction studies. The cytotoxicity of all compounds was evaluated by MTT assay against the three cancer cell lines HeLa (cervical carcinoma), HT-29 (colon adenocarcinoma) and MCF-7 (human breast adenocarcinoma). The complexes 3 and 4 display promising activity with IC50 values of 1 μM. The rhodium(III) complex 1 also shows highly improved cytotoxicity compared to cisplatin against the cancer cell lines HT-29 and MCF-7. In contrast to this, the iridium(III) complex 2 is even less active against the HeLa cell line than cisplatin