A Dilated Inception Network for Visual Saliency Prediction

Recently, with the advent of deep convolutional neural networks (DCNN), the improvements in visual saliency prediction research are impressive. One possible direction to approach the next improvement is to fully characterize the multi-scale saliency-influential factors with a computationally-friendly module in DCNN architectures. In this work, we proposed an end-to-end dilated inception network (DINet) for visual saliency prediction. It captures multi-scale contextual features effectively with very limited extra parameters. Instead of utilizing parallel standard convolutions with different kernel sizes as the existing inception module, our proposed dilated inception module (DIM) uses parallel dilated convolutions with different dilation rates which can significantly reduce the computation load while enriching the diversity of receptive fields in feature maps. Moreover, the performance of our saliency model is further improved by using a set of linear normalization-based probability distribution distance metrics as loss functions. As such, we can formulate saliency prediction as a probability distribution prediction task for global saliency inference instead of a typical pixel-wise regression problem. Experimental results on several challenging saliency benchmark datasets demonstrate that our DINet with proposed loss functions can achieve state-of-the-art performance with shorter inference time.Comment: Accepted by IEEE Transactions on Multimedia. The source codes are available at https://github.com/ysyscool/DINe

Generalizations of Weighted Trapezoidal Inequality for Monotonic Mappings and Its Applications

In this paper, we establish some generalizations of weighted trapezoid inequality for monotonic mappings, and give several applications for r − moment, the expectation of a continuous random variable and the Beta mapping

Towards Robust Curve Text Detection with Conditional Spatial Expansion

It is challenging to detect curve texts due to their irregular shapes and varying sizes. In this paper, we first investigate the deficiency of the existing curve detection methods and then propose a novel Conditional Spatial Expansion (CSE) mechanism to improve the performance of curve text detection. Instead of regarding the curve text detection as a polygon regression or a segmentation problem, we treat it as a region expansion process. Our CSE starts with a seed arbitrarily initialized within a text region and progressively merges neighborhood regions based on the extracted local features by a CNN and contextual information of merged regions. The CSE is highly parameterized and can be seamlessly integrated into existing object detection frameworks. Enhanced by the data-dependent CSE mechanism, our curve text detection system provides robust instance-level text region extraction with minimal post-processing. The analysis experiment shows that our CSE can handle texts with various shapes, sizes, and orientations, and can effectively suppress the false-positives coming from text-like textures or unexpected texts included in the same RoI. Compared with the existing curve text detection algorithms, our method is more robust and enjoys a simpler processing flow. It also creates a new state-of-art performance on curve text benchmarks with F-score of up to 78.4$\%$.Comment: This paper has been accepted by IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR 2019

Search for anomalous top quark production at the early LHC

We present a detailed study of the anomalous top quark production with subsequent decay at the LHC induced by model-independent flavor-changing neutral-current couplings, incorporating the complete next-to-leading order QCD effects. Our results show that, taking into account the current limits from the Tevatron, the LHC with $\sqrt{s}=7$ TeV may discover the anomalous coupling at 5$\sigma$ level for a very low integrated luminosity of 61 pb$^{-1}$. The discovery potentials for the anomalous couplings at the LHC are examined in detail. We also discuss the possibility of using the charge ratio to distinguish the $tug$ and $tcg$ couplings.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures, version appears in Phys. Rev. Let

Soft Gluon Resummation Effects in Single Graviton Production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider in the Randall-Sundrum Model

We study QCD effects in single graviton production at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in the Randall-Sundrum (RS) Model. We present in detail the complete next-to-leading order (NLO) QCD corrections to the inclusive total cross sections. The NLO QCD corrections enhance significantly the total cross sections and decrease efficiently the dependence of the total cross sections on the factorization and renormalization scales. We also examine the uncertainty of the total cross sections due to the parton distribution function (PDF) uncertainties. For the differential cross sections on the transverse momentum ($q_T$) of the graviton, within the CSS resummation formalism, we resum the logarithmically-enhanced terms at small $q_T$ to all orders up to NLO logatithmic accuracy. Combined with the fixed order calculations, we give consistent predictions for both small $q_T$ and large $q_T$.Comment: 26 pages, 13 figures; minor changes and misprints corrected; version to appear in PR

A new bamboo-feeding planthopper genus Aodingus Chen & Li (Hemiptera: Fulgoroidea: Delphacidae: Tropidocephalini) with descriptions of three new species from China and Vietnam

Chen, Xiang-Sheng, Yang, Lin (2023): A new bamboo-feeding planthopper genus Aodingus Chen & Li (Hemiptera: Fulgoroidea: Delphacidae: Tropidocephalini) with descriptions of three new species from China and Vietnam. European Journal of Taxonomy 891: 151-166, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5852/ejt.2023.891.2279, URL: https://europeanjournaloftaxonomy.eu/index.php/ejt/article/download/2279/982

Threshold Resummation Effects in Direct Top Quark Production at Hadron Colliders

We investigate the threshold-enhanced QCD corrections to the cross sections for direct top quark productions induced by model-independent flavor changing neutral current couplings at hadron colliders. We use the soft-collinear effective theory to describe the incoming massless partons and use the heavy quark effective theory to treat the top quark. Then we construct the flavor changing operator based on the above effective theories, and resum the large logarithms near threshold arising from soft gluon emission. Our results show that the resummed QCD corrections further enhance the next-to-leading order cross sections significantly. Moreover, the resummation effects vastly reduce the dependence of the cross sections on the renormalization and factorization scales, especially in cases where the next-to-leading order results behave worse than the leading order results. Our results are more sensitive to the new physics effects. If signals of direct top quark production are found in future experiments, it is more appropriate to use our results as the theoretical inputs for extracting the anomalous couplings.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures, use revtex4 and amsmath; version to appear in Phys. Rev.