Controllable Image-to-Video Translation: A Case Study on Facial Expression Generation

The recent advances in deep learning have made it possible to generate photo-realistic images by using neural networks and even to extrapolate video frames from an input video clip. In this paper, for the sake of both furthering this exploration and our own interest in a realistic application, we study image-to-video translation and particularly focus on the videos of facial expressions. This problem challenges the deep neural networks by another temporal dimension comparing to the image-to-image translation. Moreover, its single input image fails most existing video generation methods that rely on recurrent models. We propose a user-controllable approach so as to generate video clips of various lengths from a single face image. The lengths and types of the expressions are controlled by users. To this end, we design a novel neural network architecture that can incorporate the user input into its skip connections and propose several improvements to the adversarial training method for the neural network. Experiments and user studies verify the effectiveness of our approach. Especially, we would like to highlight that even for the face images in the wild (downloaded from the Web and the authors' own photos), our model can generate high-quality facial expression videos of which about 50\% are labeled as real by Amazon Mechanical Turk workers.Comment: 10 page

Study on multi-axis sine vibration test control techniques

This paper describes several key aspects about multi-axis sine vibration test control techniques including the identification of the system frequency response function, synchronization of the input and output signals, the generation of the sinewave, the control algorithm, etc. A multi-axis sine vibration controller is developed based on these key techniques and the major framework of the controller is introduced. Finally, a dual axial experiment is carried out by the controller. The test results show the feasibility of the control algorithm and the good control strategy of the multi-axis sine vibration controller in which the key techniques are realized

Antibacterial, injectable, and adhesive hydrogel promotes skin healing

With the development of material science, hydrogels with antibacterial and wound healing properties are becoming common. However, injectable hydrogels with simple synthetic methods, low cost, inherent antibacterial properties, and inherent promoting fibroblast growth are rare. In this paper, a novel injectable hydrogel wound dressing based on carboxymethyl chitosan (CMCS) and polyethylenimine (PEI) was discovered and constructed. Since CMCS is rich in -OH and -COOH and PEI is rich in -NH2, the two can interact through strong hydrogen bonds, and it is theoretically feasible to form a gel. By changing their ratio, a series of hydrogels can be obtained by stirring and mixing with 5 wt% CMCS aqueous solution and 5 wt% PEI aqueous solution at volume ratios of 7:3, 5:5, and 3:7. Characterized by morphology, swelling rate, adhesion, rheological properties, antibacterial properties, in vitro biocompatibility, and in vivo animal experiments, the hydrogel has good injectability, biocompatibility, antibacterial (Staphylococcus aureus: 56.7 × 107 CFU/mL in the blank group and 2.5 × 107 CFU/mL in the 5/5 CPH group; Escherichia coli: 66.0 × 107 CFU/mL in the blank group and 8.5 × 107 CFU/mL in the 5/5 CPH group), and certain adhesion (0.71 kPa in the 5/5 CPH group) properties which can promote wound healing (wound healing reached 98.02% within 14 days in the 5/5 CPH group) and repair of cells with broad application prospects

FPGA based filter design for self-mixing interferometry signals

Self-mixing interferometry (SMI) signals are observed from a sensing system consisting of a laser diode with external optical feedbacks. SMI signals carry the information associated to both of the displacement and parameters of the SL. To retrieve the information precisely, pre-processing of SMI signals is the first key step. For achieving real-time, and high quality sensing, this paper proposes a Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) based filtering and normalizing processing for SMI signals. According to the noise features contained in SMI signal, a median filter and a wavelet transform based filter are combined for our design. Hardware co-simulation verified that the performance for this FPGA used filter design

Cascade Network with Guided Loss and Hybrid Attention for Finding Good Correspondences

Finding good correspondences is a critical prerequisite in many feature based tasks. Given a putative correspondence set of an image pair, we propose a neural network which finds correct correspondences by a binary-class classifier and estimates relative pose through classified correspondences. First, we analyze that due to the imbalance in the number of correct and wrong correspondences, the loss function has a great impact on the classification results. Thus, we propose a new Guided Loss that can directly use evaluation criterion (Fn-measure) as guidance to dynamically adjust the objective function during training. We theoretically prove that the perfect negative correlation between the Guided Loss and Fn-measure, so that the network is always trained towards the direction of increasing Fn-measure to maximize it. We then propose a hybrid attention block to extract feature, which integrates the Bayesian attentive context normalization (BACN) and channel-wise attention (CA). BACN can mine the prior information to better exploit global context and CA can capture complex channel context to enhance the channel awareness of the network. Finally, based on our Guided Loss and hybrid attention block, a cascade network is designed to gradually optimize the result for more superior performance. Experiments have shown that our network achieves the state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. Our code will be available in https://github.com/wenbingtao/GLHA

Evaluation of the Moso Bamboo Age Determination Based on Laser Echo Intensity

Determination of bamboo age is an important task for bamboo forest management and bamboo utilization. However, the bamboo age is usually manually determined in the field, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Due to the ability to generate very high-density point clouds, terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) has been applied in forestry to acquire forest parameters. This study evaluated the potential of using the laser echo intensity data generated by TLS technology to determine the Moso bamboo age represented by “du.” The intensity data were first corrected for the distance and incidence angle effects using an intensity correction method that constructed an empirical correction model by fitting piecewise polynomials to the intensity data collected based on a reference target. Then the models expressing the relationship between intensity and bamboo culm section number were constructed for different bamboo du by fitting polynomials to the intensity data of individual bamboo culms through least-squares adjustment. For a bamboo plant whose age is determined, the bamboo du could be determined based on the constructed intensity-culm section models. The proposed bamboo age determination method was tested at a site in a managed Moso bamboo forest in Lin’an District, Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province, China. From the test site, 56 and 120 bamboo plants with known bamboo ages were selected to construct the intensity-culm section models and to validate the bamboo age determination method, respectively. The bamboo age determination accuracies for each bamboo du were all above 90%. The result indicates a great potential for automatic determination of bamboo age in practice using TLS technology

Human sperm acrosome function assays are predictive of fertilization rate in vitro: a retrospective cohort study and meta-analysis

Abstract Objective To determine whether acrosome function scoring—including acrosomal enzyme (AE) levels and acrosome reaction (AR) results—can predict fertilization rate in vitro. Methods We examined the predictive value of acrosomal enzymes (AE) determined by spectrophotometry/N-α-benzoyl-dl-arginine-p-nitroanilide for fertilization rate (FR) in vitro in a retrospective cohort study of 737 infertile couples undergoing IVF therapy. Additionally, a meta-analysis was done for prospective cohort or case-control studies; the following summary measures were reported to expand upon the findings: pooled spearman correlation coefficient (Rs), standardized mean difference (SMD), sensitivity (SEN), specificity (SPE), positive likelihood ratio (PLR), negative likelihood ratio (NLR), diagnostic score (DS), diagnostic odds ratio (DOR), and area under the summary receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Results Lower AE levels determined by spectrophotometry with a cut-off value of   0.05). Lower AE levels determined by fluorometry or substrate assay were used for predicting lower FR with low sensitivity and high specificity; the spectrophotometry assay had an uncertain predictive value. For induced AR assay, the diagnostic performance in the other areas was inferior to that in Africa (Rs = 0.65, SMD = 1.86). No preparation or double preparation yielded inferior results as compared to one preparation (Rs = 0.41); discontinuous gradient (Rs = 0.17, SMD = 0.47) was inferior to swim up (Rs =0.65, SMD = 1.51). Nonphysiological triggers (SMD = 0.81) did not differ from physiological triggers (SMD = 0.95) in general; ZP (Rs = 0.63) or mannose (Rs = 0.59) was superior to other physiological or nonphysiological triggers; and there was no correlation for human follicle fluid, progesterone, cyclic adenosine 3′-5′-phosphate analogue and phorbol ester–BSA-GlcNAc Neoglycoproteins with N-acetylglucosamine residues. Lower induced AR% determined by indirect immunofluorescence, direct immunofluorescence with lection, or triple stain was used for predicting lower FR, with moderate sensitivity/high specificity, moderate sensitivity/high specificity, or high sensitivity/low specificity. Conclusions Although the correlation between acrosome function scoring and FR was significant, the assays were neither highly sensitive nor specific. Additionally, the diagnostic performance showed regional effects as well as an effect of the sperm preparation or assay method. More studies of multicenter, large-scale, careful design and synthesizing multiple sperm functional assays and oocyte quality assays are still needed in clinical settings to better predict fertilization outcome in IVF