Modified Liu-Carter Compression Model for Natural Clays with Various Initial Water Contents

The initial water content has a significant effect on the compression behaviour of reconstituted clays. This effect has to be considered in the Liu-Carter model to ensure the addition voids ratio only related to soil structure. A modified Liu-Carter compression model is proposed by introducing the empirical equations for reconstituted clays at different initial water contents into the Liu-Carter model. The proposed model is verified against the experimental results from the literature. The simulations by the proposed method are also compared with that by old method where the influence of initial water content is not considered. The results show that the predicted virgin compression curves of natural clays are similar, but the values of b and Δey may be very different

Robust Outdoor Vehicle Visual Tracking Based on k-Sparse Stacked Denoising Auto-Encoder

Robust visual tracking for outdoor vehicle is still a challenging problem due to large object appearance variations caused by illumination variation, occlusion, and fast motion. In this chapter, k-sparse constraint is added to the encoder part of stacked auto-encoder network to learn more invariant feature of object appearance, and a stacked k-sparse-auto-encoder–based robust outdoor vehicle tracking method under particle filter inference is further proposed to solve the problem of appearance variance during the tracking. Firstly, a stacked denoising auto-encoder is pre-trained to learn the generic feature representation. Then, a k-sparse constraint is added to the stacked denoising auto-encoder, and the encoder of k-sparse stacked denoising auto-encoder is connected with a classification layer to construct a classification neural network. Finally, confidence of each particle is computed by the classification neural network and is used for online tracking under particle filter framework. Comprehensive tracking experiments are conducted on a challenging single-object tracking benchmark. Experimental results show that our tracker outperforms most state-of-the-art trackers

5-[(3,4-Dimethoxy­benzyl)­aminomethyl­ene]-2,2-dimethyl-1,3-dioxane-4,6-dione

The title compound, C15H17NO6, is approximately planar, with dihedral angles of 3.11 (4) and 2.12 (4)° between the connecting amino­methyl­ene unit and the planar part of the dioxane ring, and between the dimethoxy­benzyl ring and the amino­methyl­ene group, respectively. The dioxane ring exhibits a half-boat conformation, in which the C atom between the dioxane O atoms is 0.5471 (8) Å out of the plane. The mol­ecule has an intra­molecular N—H⋯O hydrogen bond which may stabilize the planar conformation. In the crystal, weak inter­molecular C—H⋯O hydrogen-bonding contacts, result in the formation of sheets parallel to the ab plane

Editorial: The Clinical Application of Neoantigens

Editorial on the Research Topic The Clinical Application of Neoantigen

Rapeseed Seedling Stand Counting and Seeding Performance Evaluation at Two Early Growth Stages Based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Imagery

The development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and image processing algorithms for field-based phenotyping offers a non-invasive and effective technology to obtain plant growth traits such as canopy cover and plant height in fields. Crop seedling stand count in early growth stages is important not only for determining plant emergence, but also for planning other related agronomic practices. The main objective of this research was to develop practical and rapid remote sensing methods for early growth stage stand counting to evaluate mechanically seeded rapeseed (Brassica napus L.) seedlings. Rapeseed was seeded in a field by three different seeding devices. A digital single-lens reflex camera was installed on an UAV platform to capture ultrahigh resolution RGB images at two growth stages when most rapeseed plants had at least two leaves. Rapeseed plant objects were segmented from images of vegetation indices using typical Otsu thresholding method. After segmentation, shape features such as area, length-width ratio and elliptic fit were extracted from the segmented rapeseed plant objects to establish regression models of seedling stand count. Three row characteristics (the coefficient of variation of row spacing uniformity, the error rate of the row spacing and the coefficient of variation of seedling uniformity) were further calculated for seeding performance evaluation after crop row detection. Results demonstrated that shape features had strong correlations with ground-measured seedling stand count. The regression models achieved R-squared values of 0.845 and 0.867, respectively, for the two growth stages. The mean absolute errors of total stand count were 9.79 and 5.11% for the two respective stages. A single model over these two stages had an R-squared value of 0.846, and the total number of rapeseed plants was also accurately estimated with an average relative error of 6.83%.Moreover, the calculated row characteristics were demonstrated to be useful in recognizing areas of failed germination possibly resulted from skipped or ineffective planting. In summary, this study developed practical UAV-based remote sensing methods and demonstrated the feasibility of using the methods for rapeseed seedling stand counting and mechanical seeding performance evaluation at early growth stages

Expression and Localization of Stanniocalcin-1 in Bovine Osteoblasts

As a novel glycoprotein hormone, Stanniocalcin-1 (STC-1) was first identified in teleost species, and it is involved in the regulation of mineral homeostasis in bony fish and mammals. STC-1 can not only affect the mammals bone development, but also protect neurons from the damage of ischemia, and stimulate the angiogenic response. Although it is widely expressed in rodent skeletons, whether this hormone is expressed in the skeleton of ruminant animals, like bovines, is still unknown. Here, we investigated the expression of STC-1 in bovine osteoblasts by using immunocytochemical staining and RT-PCR. Our results show that the mRNA and protein of STC-1 are expressed in the bovine osteoblasts during later differentiation periods 10th day in vitro. The present data support the notion that STC-1 may play a role in the process of bovine bone development