1,461 research outputs found
The impact of fire on habitat use by the short-snouted elephant shrew ('Elephantulus brachyrhynchus') in North West Province, South Africa
Several studies have investigated the response of small mammal populations to fire, but few have investigated behavioural responses to habitat modification. In this study we investigated the impact of fire on home range, habitat use and activity patterns of the short-snouted elephant shrew (Elephantulus brachyrhynchus) by radio-tracking individuals before and after a fire event. All animals survived the passage of fire in termite mound refugia. Before the fire, grassland was used more than thickets, but habitat utilization shifted to thickets after fire had removed the grass cover. Thickets were an important refuge both pre- and post-fire, but the proportion of thicket within the home range was greater post-fire. We conclude that fire-induced habitat modification resulted in a restriction of E. brachyrhynchus movements to patches of unburned vegetation. This may be a behavioural response to an increase in predation pressure associated with a reduction in cover, rather than a lack of food. This study highlights the importance of considering the landscape mosaic in fire management and allowing sufficient island patches to remain post-fire ensures the persistence of the small mammal fauna
Structured Dropout for Weak Label and Multi-Instance Learning and Its Application to Score-Informed Source Separation
Many success stories involving deep neural networks are instances of
supervised learning, where available labels power gradient-based learning
methods. Creating such labels, however, can be expensive and thus there is
increasing interest in weak labels which only provide coarse information, with
uncertainty regarding time, location or value. Using such labels often leads to
considerable challenges for the learning process. Current methods for
weak-label training often employ standard supervised approaches that
additionally reassign or prune labels during the learning process. The
information gain, however, is often limited as only the importance of labels
where the network already yields reasonable results is boosted. We propose
treating weak-label training as an unsupervised problem and use the labels to
guide the representation learning to induce structure. To this end, we propose
two autoencoder extensions: class activity penalties and structured dropout. We
demonstrate the capabilities of our approach in the context of score-informed
source separation of music
Mask-ShadowGAN: Learning to Remove Shadows from Unpaired Data
This paper presents a new method for shadow removal using unpaired data,
enabling us to avoid tedious annotations and obtain more diverse training
samples. However, directly employing adversarial learning and cycle-consistency
constraints is insufficient to learn the underlying relationship between the
shadow and shadow-free domains, since the mapping between shadow and
shadow-free images is not simply one-to-one. To address the problem, we
formulate Mask-ShadowGAN, a new deep framework that automatically learns to
produce a shadow mask from the input shadow image and then takes the mask to
guide the shadow generation via re-formulated cycle-consistency constraints.
Particularly, the framework simultaneously learns to produce shadow masks and
learns to remove shadows, to maximize the overall performance. Also, we
prepared an unpaired dataset for shadow removal and demonstrated the
effectiveness of Mask-ShadowGAN on various experiments, even it was trained on
unpaired data.Comment: Accepted to ICCV 201
Improving Whole Slide Segmentation Through Visual Context - A Systematic Study
While challenging, the dense segmentation of histology images is a necessary
first step to assess changes in tissue architecture and cellular morphology.
Although specific convolutional neural network architectures have been applied
with great success to the problem, few effectively incorporate visual context
information from multiple scales. With this paper, we present a systematic
comparison of different architectures to assess how including multi-scale
information affects segmentation performance. A publicly available breast
cancer and a locally collected prostate cancer datasets are being utilised for
this study. The results support our hypothesis that visual context and scale
play a crucial role in histology image classification problems
- …