Localization Recall Precision (LRP): A New Performance Metric for Object Detection

Average precision (AP), the area under the recall-precision (RP) curve, is the standard performance measure for object detection. Despite its wide acceptance, it has a number of shortcomings, the most important of which are (i) the inability to distinguish very different RP curves, and (ii) the lack of directly measuring bounding box localization accuracy. In this paper, we propose 'Localization Recall Precision (LRP) Error', a new metric which we specifically designed for object detection. LRP Error is composed of three components related to localization, false negative (FN) rate and false positive (FP) rate. Based on LRP, we introduce the 'Optimal LRP', the minimum achievable LRP error representing the best achievable configuration of the detector in terms of recall-precision and the tightness of the boxes. In contrast to AP, which considers precisions over the entire recall domain, Optimal LRP determines the 'best' confidence score threshold for a class, which balances the trade-off between localization and recall-precision. In our experiments, we show that, for state-of-the-art object (SOTA) detectors, Optimal LRP provides richer and more discriminative information than AP. We also demonstrate that the best confidence score thresholds vary significantly among classes and detectors. Moreover, we present LRP results of a simple online video object detector which uses a SOTA still image object detector and show that the class-specific optimized thresholds increase the accuracy against the common approach of using a general threshold for all classes. At https://github.com/cancam/LRP we provide the source code that can compute LRP for the PASCAL VOC and MSCOCO datasets. Our source code can easily be adapted to other datasets as well.Comment: to appear in ECCV 201

Evaluation of effect of a vitamin-based barrier cream on the clinical severity of actinic cheilitis : a preliminary study

Actinic Cheilitis (AC) is a pathological condition of the labial mucosa considered potentially malignant. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of treatment of AC with daily use of a vitamin-based barrier cream. For this clinical study, 36 participants with lower-lip AC were recruited from three oral medicine services. At baseline, participants were evaluated by clinical examination and clinical severity of AC was classified as grade I to IV. All participants were dispensed a tube of a barrier cream containing vitamins A, D, E and ZnO to apply once nightly for 90 consecutive days. Monthly follow-up was performed to reclassify AC clinial severity. The primary outcome of interest was clinical remission of AC at 90-day follow-up compared to baseline. Progressive remission of AC lesions was observed as early as the first month and throughout the assessment period (p = 0.000). The 3-month period was insufficient for remission of lesions, especially among male participants (p = 0.002) and with a longer sun exposure in years (p = 0.007). Daily use of the vitamin-based barrier cream had a promissing positive impact on the severity of actinic cheilitis. However, a 90-day course of treatment was not sufficient to achieve lesions remission. The findings of this study suggest a promising new avenue for the treatment of lower-lip AC

Branonium

We study the bound states of brane/antibrane systems by examining the motion of a probe antibrane moving in the background fields of N source branes. The classical system resembles the point-particle central force problem, and the orbits can be solved by quadrature. Generically the antibrane has orbits which are not closed on themselves. An important special case occurs for some Dp-branes moving in three transverse dimensions, in which case the orbits may be obtained in closed form, giving the standard conic sections but with a nonstandard time evolution along the orbit. Somewhat surprisingly, in this case the resulting elliptical orbits are exact solutions, and do not simply apply in the limit of asymptotically-large separation or non-relativistic velocities. The orbits eventually decay through the radiation of massless modes into the bulk and onto the branes, and we estimate this decay time. Applications of these orbits to cosmology are discussed in a companion paper.Comment: 34 pages, LaTeX, 4 figures, uses JHEP

Evaluation of Aquaporins 1 and 5 Expression in Rat Parotid Glands After Volumetric Modulated Arc Radiotherapy and Use of Low-Level Laser Therapy at Different Times

Introduction: This experimental study investigated the mRNA expression of aquaporins (AQPs) 1 and 5 in the parotid glands of rats irradiated with volumetric modulated arc therapy (VMAT) and subjected to low-level laser therapy (LLLT) at different time points.Methods: The sample consisted of 30 Wistar rats (Rattus norvegicus) divided into the following groups: control, LLLT alone (LG), radiotherapy alone (RG), and experimental groups that received LLLT at 24 hours (early experimental group [EEG], n=12) and 120 hours (late experimental group [LEG], n=12) after radiotherapy. VMAT was delivered at a single dose (12 Gy) and LLLT was performed with an aluminium-gallium-arsenide diode laser (660 nm, 100 mW), spot area of 0.0028 cm2, energy of 2 J/cm2 applied to 3 spots in the region corresponding to the right parotid gland, for 10 consecutive days. The right parotid gland was resected and prepared for RNA extraction. The gene expression of AQPs was evaluated by quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) using specific TaqMan probes, with the HPRT gene as an internal control.Results: The lowest AQP1 gene expression was 0.83 (0.27) with the use of LLLT 24 hours after radiotherapy (EEG), and the highest was 1.56 (0.80) with the use of LLLT alone (LG). Likewise, the lowest AQP5 gene expression was found in the EEG (mean = 0.88; SD = 0.49) and the highest in the LG (mean = 1.29; SD = 0.33).Conclusion: The use of LLLT after radiotherapy may contribute to the maintenance and an increase of these proteins, even when used at a later time point after radiotherapy

Lymphangioma of the oral cavity: Case report

The lymphangiomas are hamarthomatous lesions of the limphatic vases. There are benign proliferations that envolve the lymphatic system has a predilection for the head, neck and oral cavity. They represent benign proliferations that involve the lymphatic system, has a predilection for the head, neck and oral cavity. The prognostic for the linfangiomas located in the tongue is good for the most of the patients, although the voluminous lesions can cause obstruction of the aerial ways and consequently the death. The purpose of this study is to report two clinical cases of the lymphangioma located on the tongue, as well as to revise the pertinent literature focusing the clinical aspects and therapeutic possibilities

Localization recall precision (LRP): A new performance metric for object detection

Average precision (AP), the area under the recall-precision (RP) curve, is the standard performance measure for object detection. Despite its wide acceptance, it has a number of shortcomings, the most important of which are (i) the inability to distinguish very different RP curves, and (ii) the lack of directly measuring bounding box localization accuracy. In this paper, we propose “Localization Recall Precision (LRP) Error”, a new metric specifically designed for object detection. LRP Error is composed of three components related to localization, false negative (FN) rate and false positive (FP) rate. Based on LRP, we introduce the “Optimal LRP” (oLRP), the minimum achievable LRP error representing the best achievable configuration of the detector in terms of recall-precision and the tightness of the boxes. In contrast to AP, which considers precisions over the entire recall domain, oLRP determines the “best” confidence score threshold for a class, which balances the trade-off between localization and recall-precision. In our experiments, we show that oLRP provides richer and more discriminative information than AP. We also demonstrate that the best confidence score thresholds vary significantly among classes and detectors. Moreover, we present LRP results of a simple online video object detector and show that the class-specific optimized thresholds increase the accuracy against the common approach of using a general threshold for all classes. Our experiments demonstrate that LRP is more competent than AP in capturing the performance of detectors. Our source code for PASCAL VOC AND MSCOCO datasets are provided at https://github.com/cancam/LRP

Inflation on the Brane with Vanishing Gravity

Many existing models of brane inflation suffer from a steep irreducible gravitational potential between the branes that causes inflation to end too early. Inspired by the fact that point masses in 2+1 D exert no gravitational force, we propose a novel unwarped and non-supersymmetric setup for inflation, consisting of 3-branes in two extra dimensions compactified on a sphere. The size of the sphere is stabilized by a combination of a bulk cosmological constant and a magnetic flux. Computing the 4D effective potential between probe branes in this background, we find a non-zero contribution only from exchange of level-1 KK modes of the graviton and radion. Identifying antipodal points on the 2-sphere projects out these modes, eliminating entirely the troublesome gravitational contribution to the inflationary potential.Comment: 19 pages, 11 figures, JHEP forma

S-Brane Thermodynamics

The description of string-theoretic s-branes at g_s=0 as exact worldsheet CFTs with a (lambda cosh X^0) or (lambda e^(X^0)) boundary interaction is considered. Due to the imaginary-time periodicity of the interaction under X^0 -> X^0 + 2 pi i, these configurations have intriguing similarities to black hole or de Sitter geometries. For example, the open string pair production as seen by an Unruh detector is thermal at temperature T = 1/4 pi. It is shown that, despite the rapid time dependence of the s-brane, there exists an exactly thermal mixed state of open strings. The corresponding boundary state is constructed for both the bosonic and superstring cases. This state defines a long-distance Euclidean effective field theory whose light modes are confined to the s-brane. At the critical value of the coupling lambda=1/2, the boundary interaction simply generates an SU(2) rotation by pi from Neumman to Dirichlet boundary conditions. The lambda=1/2 s-brane reduces to an array of sD-branes (D-branes with a transverse time dimension) on the imaginary time axis. The long range force between a (bosonic) sD-brane and an ordinary D-brane is shown from the annulus diagram to be 11/12 times the force between two D-branes. The linearized time-dependent RR field F=dC produced by an sD-brane in superstring theory is explicitly computed and found to carry a half unit of s-charge Q_s=\int_S *F=1/2, where S is any transverse spacelike slice.Comment: 42 page

Thermodynamical Metrics and Black Hole Phase Transitions

An important phase transition in black hole thermodynamics is associated with the divergence of the specific heat with fixed charge and angular momenta, yet one can demonstrate that neither Ruppeiner's entropy metric nor Weinhold's energy metric reveals this phase transition. In this paper, we introduce a new thermodynamical metric based on the Hessian matrix of several free energy. We demonstrate, by studying various charged and rotating black holes, that the divergence of the specific heat corresponds to the curvature singularity of this new metric. We further investigate metrics on all thermodynamical potentials generated by Legendre transformations and study correspondences between curvature singularities and phase transition signals. We show in general that for a system with n-pairs of intensive/extensive variables, all thermodynamical potential metrics can be embedded into a flat (n,n)-dimensional space. We also generalize the Ruppeiner metrics and they are all conformal to the metrics constructed from the relevant thermodynamical potentials.Comment: Latex, 25 pages, reference added, typos corrected, English polished and the Hawking-Page phase transition clarified; to appear in JHE

Kahler Moduli Inflation Revisited

We perform a detailed numerical analysis of inflationary solutions in Kahler moduli of type IIB flux compactifications. We show that there are inflationary solutions even when all the fields play an important role in the overall shape of the scalar potential. Moreover, there exists a direction of attraction for the inflationary trajectories that correspond to the constant volume direction. This basin of attraction enables the system to have an island of stability in the set of initial conditions. We provide explicit examples of these trajectories, compute the corresponding tilt of the density perturbations power spectrum and show that they provide a robust prediction of n_s approximately 0.96 for 60 e-folds of inflation.Comment: 27 pages, 9 figure