Feature-domain Adaptive Contrastive Distillation for Efficient Single Image Super-Resolution

Recently, CNN-based SISR has numerous parameters and high computational cost to achieve better performance, limiting its applicability to resource-constrained devices such as mobile. As one of the methods to make the network efficient, Knowledge Distillation (KD), which transfers teacher's useful knowledge to student, is currently being studied. More recently, KD for SISR utilizes Feature Distillation (FD) to minimize the Euclidean distance loss of feature maps between teacher and student networks, but it does not sufficiently consider how to effectively and meaningfully deliver knowledge from teacher to improve the student performance at given network capacity constraints. In this paper, we propose a feature-domain adaptive contrastive distillation (FACD) method for efficiently training lightweight student SISR networks. We show the limitations of the existing FD methods using Euclidean distance loss, and propose a feature-domain contrastive loss that makes a student network learn richer information from the teacher's representation in the feature domain. In addition, we propose an adaptive distillation that selectively applies distillation depending on the conditions of the training patches. The experimental results show that the student EDSR and RCAN networks with the proposed FACD scheme improves not only the PSNR performance of the entire benchmark datasets and scales, but also the subjective image quality compared to the conventional FD approaches.Comment: Under revie

Geochronologic evidence for Early Cretaceous volcanic activity on Barton Peninsula, King George Island, Antarctica

Ages of six volcanic and plutonic rocks on Barton Peninsula, King George Island, were determined using 40Ar/39Ar and K-Ar isotopic systems. The 40Ar/39Ar and K-Ar ages of basaltic andesite and diorite range from 48 My to 74 My and systematically decrease toward the upper stratigraphic section. Two specimens of basaltic andesite which occur in the lowermost sequence of the peninsula, however, apparently define two distinct plateau ages of 52-53 My and 119-120 My. The latter is interpreted to represent the primary cooling age of basaltic andesite, whereas the former is interpreted as the thermally-reset age caused by the intrusion of Tertiary granitic pluton. The isochron ages calculated from the isotope correlation diagram corroborate our interpretation based on the apparent plateau ages. It is therefore likely that volcanism was active during the Early Cretaceous on Barton Peninsula. When the K-Ar ages of previous studies are taken into account with our result, the ages of basaltic andesite in the northern part of the Barton Peninsula are significantly older than those in the southern part. Across the north-west-south-east trending Barton fault bounding the two parts, there are significant differences in geochronologic and geologic aspects

Skip-Concatenated Image Super-Resolution Network for Mobile Devices

Single-image super-resolution technology has been widely studied in various applications to improve the quality and resolution of degraded images acquired from noise-sensitive low-resolution sensors. As most studies on single-image super-resolution focused on the development of deep learning networks operating on high-performance GPUs, this study proposed an efficient and lightweight super-resolution network that enables real-time performance on mobile devices. To replace the relatively slow element-wise addition layer on mobile devices, we introduced a skip connection layer by directly concatenating a low-resolution input image with an intermediate feature map. In addition, we introduced weighted clipping to reduce the quantization errors commonly encountered during float-to-int8 model conversion. Moreover, a reparameterization method was selectively applied without increasing the cost in terms of inference time and number of parameters. Based on the contributions, the proposed network has been recognized as the best solution in Mobile AI & AIM 2022 Real-Time Single-Image Super-Resolution Challenge with PSNR of 30.03 dB and NPU runtime of 19.20 ms

Enzymatically degradable, starch-based layer-by-layer films: application to cytocompatible single-cell nanoencapsulation

The build-up and degradation of cytocompatible nanofilms in a controlled fashion have great potential in biomedical and nanomedicinal fields, including single-cell nanoencapsulation (SCNE). Herein, we report the fabrication of biodegradable films of cationic starch (c-ST) and anionic alginate (ALG) by electrostatically driven layer-by-layer (LbL) assembly technology and its application to the SCNE. The [c-ST/ALG] multilayer nanofilms, assembled either on individual Saccharomyces cerevisiae or on the 2D flat gold surface, degrade on demand, in a cytocompatible fashion, via treatment with α-amylase. Their degradation profiles are investigated, while systematically changing the α-amylase concentration, by several surface characterization techniques, including quartz crystal microbalance with dissipation monitoring (QCM-D) and ellipsometry. DNA incorporation in the LbL nanofilms and its controlled release, upon exposure of the nanofilms to an aqueous α-amylase solution, are demonstrated. The highly cytocompatible nature of the film-forming and -degrading conditions is assessed in the c-ST/ALG-shell formation and degradation of S. cerevisiae. We envisage that the cytocompatible, enzymatic degradation of c-ST-based nanofilms paves the way for developing advanced biomedical devices with programmed dissolution in vivo.publishe

Geochronologic evidence for Early Cretaceous volcanic activity on Barton Peninsula, King George Island, Antarctica

Ages of six volcanic and plutonic rocks on Barton Peninsula, King George Island, were determined using 40Ar/39Ar and K-Ar isotopic systems. The 40Ar/39Ar and K-Ar ages of basaltic andesite and diorite range from 48 My to 74 My and systematically decrease toward the upper stratigraphic section. Two specimens of basaltic andesite which occur in the lowermost sequence of the peninsula, however, apparently define two distinct plateau ages of 52-53 My and 119-120 My. The latter is interpreted to represent the primary cooling age of basaltic andesite, whereas the former is interpreted as the thermally-reset age caused by the intrusion of Tertiary granitic pluton. The isochron ages calculated from the isotope correlation diagram corroborate our interpretation based on the apparent plateau ages. It is therefore likely that volcanism was active during the Early Cretaceous on Barton Peninsula. When the K-Ar ages of previous studies are taken into account with our result, the ages of basaltic andesite in the northern part of the Barton Peninsula are significantly older than those in the southern part. Across the north-west-south-east trending Barton fault bounding the two parts, there are significant differences in geochronologic and geologic aspects

Intraoperative neurophysiology in tethered cord surgery:Techniques and results

©AANS, 2017. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to establish optimal electric stimulation parameters for intraoperatively monitoring the bulbocavernosus reflexes (BCRs) in infants. METHODS The authors retrospectively reviewed the medical records of all infants (age < 24 months) who had undergone an untethering operation for tethered cord syndrome between May 2013 and February 2014 at a single institution and whose baseline BCR had been elicited during surgery. Using different combinati ons of stimulation parameters-number of stimulation pulses: 4 or 8 pulses, interpulse interval: 1, 2, or 5 msec, and polarity of stimulation: biphasic or monophasic-the authors compared the relative mean amplitude of 10 BCR responses (rmaBCRs) to each combination of parameters. RESULTS The rmaBCRs were larger with the 8-pulse stimulations than with the 4-pulse stimulations (p < 0.0001). There was a tendency, though not statistically significant, for larger rmaBCRs to be obtained with the longer interpulse interval in the 8-pulse stimulation (p = 0.1289). The biphasic stimulation produced larger rmaBCRs than the monophasic stimulation (p = 0.0005). CONCLUSIONS Biphasic 8-pulse stimulations with 5-msec or 2-msec intervals yield the largest BCR responses. Considering that an 8-pulse stimulation with 5-msec intervals may overlap the onset of the BCR, a biphasic 8-pulse stimulation with 2-msec intervals is recommended as the optimal stimulation paradigm to monitor intraoperative BCRs in infants