Fast Preprocessing for Robust Face Sketch Synthesis

Exemplar-based face sketch synthesis methods usually meet the challenging problem that input photos are captured in different lighting conditions from training photos. The critical step causing the failure is the search of similar patch candidates for an input photo patch. Conventional illumination invariant patch distances are adopted rather than directly relying on pixel intensity difference, but they will fail when local contrast within a patch changes. In this paper, we propose a fast preprocessing method named Bidirectional Luminance Remapping (BLR), which interactively adjust the lighting of training and input photos. Our method can be directly integrated into state-of-the-art exemplar-based methods to improve their robustness with ignorable computational cost.Comment: IJCAI 2017. Project page: http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~yibisong/ijcai17_sketch/index.htm

Stylizing Face Images via Multiple Exemplars

We address the problem of transferring the style of a headshot photo to face images. Existing methods using a single exemplar lead to inaccurate results when the exemplar does not contain sufficient stylized facial components for a given photo. In this work, we propose an algorithm to stylize face images using multiple exemplars containing different subjects in the same style. Patch correspondences between an input photo and multiple exemplars are established using a Markov Random Field (MRF), which enables accurate local energy transfer via Laplacian stacks. As image patches from multiple exemplars are used, the boundaries of facial components on the target image are inevitably inconsistent. The artifacts are removed by a post-processing step using an edge-preserving filter. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm consistently produces visually pleasing results.Comment: In CVIU 2017. Project Page: http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~yibisong/cviu17/index.htm

Learning to Hallucinate Face Images via Component Generation and Enhancement

We propose a two-stage method for face hallucination. First, we generate facial components of the input image using CNNs. These components represent the basic facial structures. Second, we synthesize fine-grained facial structures from high resolution training images. The details of these structures are transferred into facial components for enhancement. Therefore, we generate facial components to approximate ground truth global appearance in the first stage and enhance them through recovering details in the second stage. The experiments demonstrate that our method performs favorably against state-of-the-art methodsComment: IJCAI 2017. Project page: http://www.cs.cityu.edu.hk/~yibisong/ijcai17_sr/index.htm

Application of Artificial Neural Networks in Predicting Abrasion Resistance of Solution Polymerized Styrene-Butadiene Rubber Based Composites

Abrasion resistance of solution polymerized styrene-butadiene rubber (SSBR) based composites is a typical and crucial property in practical applications. Previous studies show that the abrasion resistance can be calculated by the multiple linear regression model. In our study, considering this relationship can also be described into the non-linear conditions, a Multilayer Feed-forward Neural Networks model with 3 nodes (MLFN-3) was successfully established to describe the relationship between the abrasion resistance and other properties, using 23 groups of data, with the RMS error 0.07. Our studies have proved that Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) model can be used to predict the SSBR-based composites, which is an accurate and robust process

Insight into improving antidepressant adherence and symptoms by pharmacist intervention: A review

Purpose: To assess the effectiveness of antidepressant medication adherence-improving intervention by a pharmacist and its impact on clinical symptoms of depression among outdoor depressive patients.Methods: Various databases such as PubMed, Embase, and Scopus were used sources for the literature published during the last 20 years. Pharmacist intervention studies involving adult depressed patients (≥ 17 years old) and treated with antidepressants were included. Twelve studies met the inclusion criteria.Results: These studies depicted various levels of interventions in which pharmacist counseled and educated the patients to support medication adherence. In only one of the studies, pharmacist intervention exercised significant effect on the depression features of patients.Conclusion: The findings suggest that the implication of antidepressant medication adherenceimproving intervention by pharmacist leads to the improved adherence of adult depressive patients to antidepressants. However, pharmacist intervention did not show any significant influence on depression symptomology, necessitating further studies on the topic.Keywords: Pharmacist care, Depression, Antidepressants, Intervention, Medication adherenc

Adoption and implication of the Biased-Annotator Competence Estimation (BACE) model into COVID-19 vaccine Twitter data: Human annotation for latent message features

Traditional quantitative content analysis approach (human coding method) has weaknesses, such as assuming all human coders are equally accurate once the intercoder reliability for training reaches a threshold score. We applied the Biased-Annotator Competence Estimation (BACE) model (Tyler, 2021), which draws on Bayesian modeling to improve human coding. An important contribution of this model is it takes each coder's potential biases and reliability into consideration and treats the "true" label of each message as a latent parameter, with quantifiable estimation uncertainties. In contrast, in conventional human coding, each message will receive a fixed label without estimates for measurement uncertainties. In this extended abstract, we first summarize the weaknesses of conventional human coding; and then apply the BACE model to COVID-19 vaccine Twitter data and compare BACE with other statistical models; finally, we discuss how the BACE model can be applied to improve human coding of latent message features