395 research outputs found
Reflection confocal nanoscopy using a super-oscillatory lens
A Superoscillatory lens (SOL) is known to produce a sub-diffraction hotspot
which is useful for high-resolution imaging. However, high-energy rings called
sidelobes coexist with the central hotspot. Additionally, SOLs have not yet
been directly used to image reflective objects due to low efficiency and poor
imaging properties. We propose a novel reflection confocal nanoscope which
mitigates these issues by relaying the SOL intensity pattern onto the object
and use conventional optics for detection. We experimentally demonstrate
super-resolution by imaging double bars with 330 nm separation using a 632.8 nm
excitation and a 0.95 NA objective. We also discuss the enhanced contrast
properties of the SOL nanoscope against a laser confocal microscope, and the
degradation of performance while imaging large objects.Comment: 17 pages, 15 figures, supplementary include
Decreasing time consumption of microscopy image segmentation through parallel processing on the GPU
The computational performance of graphical processing units (GPUs) has improved significantly. Achieving speedup factors of more than 50x compared to single-threaded CPU execution are not uncommon due to parallel processing. This makes their use for high throughput microscopy image analysis very appealing. Unfortunately, GPU programming is not straightforward and requires a lot of programming skills and effort. Additionally, the attainable speedup factor is hard to predict, since it depends on the type of algorithm, input data and the way in which the algorithm is implemented. In this paper, we identify the characteristic algorithm and data-dependent properties that significantly relate to the achievable GPU speedup. We find that the overall GPU speedup depends on three major factors: (1) the coarse-grained parallelism of the algorithm, (2) the size of the data and (3) the computation/memory transfer ratio. This is illustrated on two types of well-known segmentation methods that are extensively used in microscopy image analysis: SLIC superpixels and high-level geometric active contours. In particular, we find that our used geometric active contour segmentation algorithm is very suitable for parallel processing, resulting in acceleration factors of 50x for 0.1 megapixel images and 100x for 10 megapixel images
Superpixel Convolutional Networks using Bilateral Inceptions
In this paper we propose a CNN architecture for semantic image segmentation.
We introduce a new 'bilateral inception' module that can be inserted in
existing CNN architectures and performs bilateral filtering, at multiple
feature-scales, between superpixels in an image. The feature spaces for
bilateral filtering and other parameters of the module are learned end-to-end
using standard backpropagation techniques. The bilateral inception module
addresses two issues that arise with general CNN segmentation architectures.
First, this module propagates information between (super) pixels while
respecting image edges, thus using the structured information of the problem
for improved results. Second, the layer recovers a full resolution segmentation
result from the lower resolution solution of a CNN. In the experiments, we
modify several existing CNN architectures by inserting our inception module
between the last CNN (1x1 convolution) layers. Empirical results on three
different datasets show reliable improvements not only in comparison to the
baseline networks, but also in comparison to several dense-pixel prediction
techniques such as CRFs, while being competitive in time.Comment: European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV), 201
Pharmacological targets in the ubiquitin system offer new ways of treating cancer, neurodegenerative disorders and infectious diseases
Recent advances in the development and discovery of pharmacological interventions within
the ubiquitin–proteasome system (UPS) have uncovered an enormous potential for
possible novel treatments of neurodegenerative disease, cancer, immunological disorder and
microbial infection. Interference with proteasome activity, although initially considered
unlikely to be exploitable clinically, has already proved to be very effective against
haematological malignancies, and more specific derivatives that target subsets of
proteasomes are emerging. Recent small-molecule screens have revealed inhibitors against
ubiquitin-conjugating and -deconjugating enzymes, many of which have been evaluated for
their potential use as therapeutics, either as single agents or in synergy with other
drugs. Here, we discuss recent advances in the characterisation of novel UPS modulators
(in particular, inhibitors of ubiquitin-conjugating and -deconjugating enzymes) and how
they pave the way towards new therapeutic approaches for the treatment of proteotoxic
disease, cancer and microbial infection
Model Adaptation with Synthetic and Real Data for Semantic Dense Foggy Scene Understanding
This work addresses the problem of semantic scene understanding under dense
fog. Although considerable progress has been made in semantic scene
understanding, it is mainly related to clear-weather scenes. Extending
recognition methods to adverse weather conditions such as fog is crucial for
outdoor applications. In this paper, we propose a novel method, named
Curriculum Model Adaptation (CMAda), which gradually adapts a semantic
segmentation model from light synthetic fog to dense real fog in multiple
steps, using both synthetic and real foggy data. In addition, we present three
other main stand-alone contributions: 1) a novel method to add synthetic fog to
real, clear-weather scenes using semantic input; 2) a new fog density
estimator; 3) the Foggy Zurich dataset comprising real foggy images,
with pixel-level semantic annotations for images with dense fog. Our
experiments show that 1) our fog simulation slightly outperforms a
state-of-the-art competing simulation with respect to the task of semantic
foggy scene understanding (SFSU); 2) CMAda improves the performance of
state-of-the-art models for SFSU significantly by leveraging unlabeled real
foggy data. The datasets and code are publicly available.Comment: final version, ECCV 201
(E)-3-[4-(Pentyloxy)phenyl]-1-phenylprop-2-en-1-one
The title compound, C20H22O2, crystallizes with two independent molecules in the asymmetric unit. In each molecule, all the non-H atoms lie in a common plane (r.m.s. deviations of 0.098 and 0.079 Å). There is a π–π stacking interaction in the crystal structure. The central aromatic rings of the two molecules, which are stacked head-to-tail one above the other, are separated by centroid-to-centroid distances of 3.872 (13) and 3.999 (10) Å
Resolution-Independent Meshes of Superpixels
The over-segmentation into superpixels is an important preprocessing step to
smartly compress the input size and speed up higher level tasks. A superpixel
was traditionally considered as a small cluster of square-based pixels that
have similar color intensities and are closely located to each other. In this
discrete model the boundaries of superpixels often have irregular zigzags
consisting of horizontal or vertical edges from a given pixel grid. However
digital images represent a continuous world, hence the following continuous
model in the resolution-independent formulation can be more suitable for the
reconstruction problem.
Instead of uniting squares in a grid, a resolution-independent superpixel is
defined as a polygon that has straight edges with any possible slope at
subpixel resolution. The harder continuous version of the over-segmentation
problem is to split an image into polygons and find a best (say, constant)
color of each polygon so that the resulting colored mesh well approximates the
given image. Such a mesh of polygons can be rendered at any higher resolution
with all edges kept straight.
We propose a fast conversion of any traditional superpixels into polygons and
guarantees that their straight edges do not intersect. The meshes based on the
superpixels SEEDS (Superpixels Extracted via Energy-Driven Sampling) and SLIC
(Simple Linear Iterative Clustering) are compared with past meshes based on the
Line Segment Detector. The experiments on the Berkeley Segmentation Database
confirm that the new superpixels have more compact shapes than pixel-based
superpixels
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