Feature Enhancement Network: A Refined Scene Text Detector

In this paper, we propose a refined scene text detector with a \textit{novel} Feature Enhancement Network (FEN) for Region Proposal and Text Detection Refinement. Retrospectively, both region proposal with \textit{only} $3\times 3$ sliding-window feature and text detection refinement with \textit{single scale} high level feature are insufficient, especially for smaller scene text. Therefore, we design a new FEN network with \textit{task-specific}, \textit{low} and \textit{high} level semantic features fusion to improve the performance of text detection. Besides, since \textit{unitary} position-sensitive RoI pooling in general object detection is unreasonable for variable text regions, an \textit{adaptively weighted} position-sensitive RoI pooling layer is devised for further enhancing the detecting accuracy. To tackle the \textit{sample-imbalance} problem during the refinement stage, we also propose an effective \textit{positives mining} strategy for efficiently training our network. Experiments on ICDAR 2011 and 2013 robust text detection benchmarks demonstrate that our method can achieve state-of-the-art results, outperforming all reported methods in terms of F-measure.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 2 tables. This paper is accepted to appear in AAAI 201

ASSESSING THE MODIFIED MERTON DISTANCE TO THE DEFAULT MODEL WITH CDS PRICE

This paper provides a way that a Merton-model approach can be modified to develop measures of the probability of default of companies indexed in Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (S&P 500) after a financial crisis. It also examines the accuracy and contribution of the modified Merton Distance to default model based on Merton’s (1974) bond pricing model. Credit Default Swap (CDS) spreads as a plausible indicator of default risk are used in the assessment. The tests are implemented by modeling results’ correlation with data obtained from 2008 to 2017. The sample is based on 112 firms indexed in S&P 500 and is selected according to the availability of outstanding CDS contracts between the test periods.It is found that the results generated by the modified Merton-style approach is consistent with the spreads of credit default swaps. Then it can be concluded that although the modified KMV Merton model fails to generate a sufficient result for the probability of default, it still can be used as a reference for default estimate

Spin Correlations in top quark pair production near threshold at the e−e+ e^- e^+ Linear Collider

We investigate the spin correlations in top quark pair production near threshold at the $e^- e^+$ linear collider. Comparing with the results above the threshold region, we find that near the threshold region the off-diagonal basis, the optimized decomposition of the top quark spins above the threshold region, does not exist, and the beamline basis is the optimal basis, in which there are the dominant spin components: the up-down (UD) component for $e_L^- e^+$ scattering and the down-up (DU) component for $e_R^- e^+$ scattering can make up more than 50% of the total cross section, respectively.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, minor modification