Improving Lens Flare Removal with General Purpose Pipeline and Multiple Light Sources Recovery

When taking images against strong light sources, the resulting images often contain heterogeneous flare artifacts. These artifacts can importantly affect image visual quality and downstream computer vision tasks. While collecting real data pairs of flare-corrupted/flare-free images for training flare removal models is challenging, current methods utilize the direct-add approach to synthesize data. However, these methods do not consider automatic exposure and tone mapping in image signal processing pipeline (ISP), leading to the limited generalization capability of deep models training using such data. Besides, existing methods struggle to handle multiple light sources due to the different sizes, shapes and illuminance of various light sources. In this paper, we propose a solution to improve the performance of lens flare removal by revisiting the ISP and remodeling the principle of automatic exposure in the synthesis pipeline and design a more reliable light sources recovery strategy. The new pipeline approaches realistic imaging by discriminating the local and global illumination through convex combination, avoiding global illumination shifting and local over-saturation. Our strategy for recovering multiple light sources convexly averages the input and output of the neural network based on illuminance levels, thereby avoiding the need for a hard threshold in identifying light sources. We also contribute a new flare removal testing dataset containing the flare-corrupted images captured by ten types of consumer electronics. The dataset facilitates the verification of the generalization capability of flare removal methods. Extensive experiments show that our solution can effectively improve the performance of lens flare removal and push the frontier toward more general situations.Comment: ICCV 202

Multimodal Molecular Pretraining via Modality Blending

Self-supervised learning has recently gained growing interest in molecular modeling for scientific tasks such as AI-assisted drug discovery. Current studies consider leveraging both 2D and 3D molecular structures for representation learning. However, relying on straightforward alignment strategies that treat each modality separately, these methods fail to exploit the intrinsic correlation between 2D and 3D representations that reflect the underlying structural characteristics of molecules, and only perform coarse-grained molecule-level alignment. To derive fine-grained alignment and promote structural molecule understanding, we introduce an atomic-relation level "blend-then-predict" self-supervised learning approach, MoleBLEND, which first blends atom relations represented by different modalities into one unified relation matrix for joint encoding, then recovers modality-specific information for 2D and 3D structures individually. By treating atom relationships as anchors, MoleBLEND organically aligns and integrates visually dissimilar 2D and 3D modalities of the same molecule at fine-grained atomic level, painting a more comprehensive depiction of each molecule. Extensive experiments show that MoleBLEND achieves state-of-the-art performance across major 2D/3D molecular benchmarks. We further provide theoretical insights from the perspective of mutual-information maximization, demonstrating that our method unifies contrastive, generative (cross-modality prediction) and mask-then-predict (single-modality prediction) objectives into one single cohesive framework

Reducing toxicity and increasing efficiency: aconitine with liquiritin and glycyrrhetinic acid regulate calcium regulatory proteins in rat myocardial cell

Background: Compatibility of Radix Aconiti Carmichaeli and Liquorice is known to treat heart diseases such as heart failure and cardiac arrhythmias. This work answers the question that whether the active components (Aconitine, Liquiritin and Glycyrrhetinic Acid) of Radix Aconiti Carmichaeli and Liquorice could result in regulating intracellular calcium homeostasis and calcium cycling, and thereby verifies the therapeutic material basis.Materials and Methods: The myocardial cells were divided into twelve groups randomly as control group, Aconitine group, nine different dose groups that orthogonal combined with Aconitine, Liquiritin and Glycyrrhetinic Acid, and Verapamil group. The myocardial cellular survival rate and morphology were assessed. The expression of calcium regulation protein(RyR2、NCX1、DHPR-a1) in the myocardial cell by Western-blotting.Results: The results exhibited that Aconitine (120 uM) significantly damaged on myocardial cell, decreased the survival rate and expression of Na+/Ca2+ exchangers (NCX1) and dihydropteridine reducta-α1 (DHPR-a1), and increased the expression of ryanodine receptor type2 (RyR2) obviously. The compatibility groups (Aconitine, Liquiritin and Glycyrrhetinic Acid) all could against the damage on the myocardial cell by Aconitine at different levels.Conclusion: Aconitine with Liquiritin and Glycyrrhetinic Acid may regulate the expression of calcium-regulated proteins to protect myocardial cells from damage.Keywords: Aconitine, Liquiritin, Glycyrrhetinic Acid, myocardial cell, calcium regulator

Dihydro­allocryptopine

In the title compound [systematic name: 7,8-dimeth­oxy-11-methyl-17,19-dioxa-11-aza­tetra­cyclo­[12.7.0.04,9.016,20]henicosa-1(21),4,6,8,14,16 (20)-hexaen-2-ol], C21H25NO5, the benzene rings are inclined at a dihedral angle of 23.16 (5)°. One of the meth­oxy C atoms is close to coplanar with its attached ring [deviation = 0.129 (3) Å], whereas the other is orientated away from the ring [deviation = −1.124 (2) Å]. The 10-membered ring is highly puckered, and the OH and CH3 substituents project to the same side of the ring. In the crystal, O—H⋯O hydrogen bonds link the mol­ecules into [010] chains and C—H⋯O and C—H⋯π inter­actions consolidate the packing

Effects of Different Heat Treatment Temperatures on Eating Quality of Sweet-Scented Osmanthus Flowers

The chemical components of edible sweet-scented osmanthus flowers (Osmanthus fragrans (Thunb.) Lour.) vary at different heat treatment temperatures, so it is extremely necessary to explore the effect of different heating temperatures on the eating quality of sweet-scented osmanthus. In this work, changes in the bioactive ingredients, antioxidant property, color and flavor substances of unheated (control) and heated (at 80, 100 or 120 °C for 20 min) flowers of Osmanthus fragrans ‘Boyejingui’, ‘Echengdangui’ and ‘Wanyingui’ were determined. The results showed that with an increase in heating temperature, the content of bioactive ingredients decreased significantly (P < 0.05), and the loss rates of flavonoids, polyphenols and anthocyanins were up to 37.44%, 28.74% and 49.10%, respectively. The antioxidant capacity decreased initially and then increased, and the radical scavenging capacity of the sample heated at 120 ℃ increased by 6.52% compared with that of the sample heated at 100 ℃. The color difference significantly increased (P < 0.05), the bitterness increased, and the astringency decreased first and then increased. Compared with the control group, furans, nitrogen-containing heterocycles and phenols were exclusively found in the sample heated at 120 ℃ at a level of 6.21%. The number of species of characteristic aroma components progressively decreased but a caramel-like aroma was formed. Therefore, medium and low temperature processing is suitable for the production of sweet-scented osmanthus products with health benefits, and high-temperature processing is suitable for the production of sweet-scented osmanthus-based snacks. ‘Boyejingui’ is suitable for low temperature processing, ‘Echengdangui’ is suitable for high temperature processing, and the quality of ‘Wanyingui’ is poor after heat treatment. Processing temperature and varieties should be reasonably selected according to practical demands. This study can provide a theoretical basis for the development of thermally processed products of sweet-scented osmanthus