INERTIA SENSOR-BASED MOBILITY ANALYSIS FOR PARKINSON'S DISEASE

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

SPTS: Single-Point Text Spotting

Existing scene text spotting (i.e., end-to-end text detection and recognition) methods rely on costly bounding box annotations (e.g., text-line, word-level, or character-level bounding boxes). For the first time, we demonstrate that training scene text spotting models can be achieved with an extremely low-cost annotation of a single-point for each instance. We propose an end-to-end scene text spotting method that tackles scene text spotting as a sequence prediction task. Given an image as input, we formulate the desired detection and recognition results as a sequence of discrete tokens and use an auto-regressive Transformer to predict the sequence. The proposed method is simple yet effective, which can achieve state-of-the-art results on widely used benchmarks. Most significantly, we show that the performance is not very sensitive to the positions of the point annotation, meaning that it can be much easier to be annotated or even be automatically generated than the bounding box that requires precise positions. We believe that such a pioneer attempt indicates a significant opportunity for scene text spotting applications of a much larger scale than previously possible. The code will be publicly available

A Validated Smartphone-Based Assessment of Gait and Gait Variability in Parkinson’s Disease

Background: A well-established connection exists between increased gait variability and greater fall likelihood in Parkinson’s disease (PD); however, a portable, validated means of quantifying gait variability (and testing the efficacy of any intervention) remains lacking. Furthermore, although rhythmic auditory cueing continues to receive attention as a promising gait therapy for PD, its widespread delivery remains bottlenecked. The present paper describes a smartphone-based mobile application (“SmartMOVE”) to address both needs. Methods: The accuracy of smartphone-based gait analysis (utilizing the smartphone’s built-in tri-axial accelerometer and gyroscope to calculate successive step times and step lengths) was validated against two heel contact–based measurement devices: heel-mounted footswitch sensors (to capture step times) and an instrumented pressure sensor mat (to capture step lengths). 12 PD patients and 12 age-matched healthy controls walked along a 26-m path during self-paced and metronome-cued conditions, with all three devices recording simultaneously. Results: Four outcome measures of gait and gait variability were calculated. Mixed-factorial analysis of variance revealed several instances in which between-group differences (e.g., increased gait variability in PD patients relative to healthy controls) yielded medium-to-large effect sizes (eta-squared values), and cueing-mediated changes (e.g., decreased gait variability when PD patients walked with auditory cues) yielded small-to-medium effect sizes—while at the same time, device-related measurement error yielded small-to-negligible effect sizes. Conclusion: These findings highlight specific opportunities for smartphone-based gait analysis to serve as an alternative to conventional gait analysis methods (e.g., footswitch systems or sensor-embedded walkways), particularly when those methods are cost-prohibitive, cumbersome, or inconvenient

A New Exospheric Temperature Model Based on CHAMP and GRACE Measurements

In this study, the effective exospheric temperature, derived from CHAMP and GRACE density measurements during 2002–2010, was utilized to develop a new exospheric temperature model (ETM) with the aid of the NRLMSIS 2.0 empirical model. We characterized the dominant modes of global exospheric temperature using the principal component analysis (PCA) method, and the first five derived empirical orthogonal functions (EOFs) captured 98.2% of the total variability. The obtained mean field, first five EOFs and the corresponding amplitudes were applied to build ETM using the polynomial method. The ETM and NRLMSIS 2.0 models were independently validated by the SWARM-C and GRACE Follow-On (GRACE-FO) density measurements. ETM can reproduce thermospheric density much better than the NRLMSIS 2.0 model, and the Root Mean Square Errors (RMSE) of ETM predictions were approximately 26.45% and 26.17% for the SWARM-C and GRACE-FO tests, respectively, while they were 39.52% and 44.41% for the NRLMSIS 2.0 model. In addition, ETM can accurately capture the equatorial thermospheric anomaly feature, seasonal variation and hemispheric asymmetry in the thermosphere

The Antioxidant Activity and Catalytic Mechanism of Schiff Base Diphenylamines at Elevated Temperatures

A series of Schiff base diphenylamines (SDs) have been successfully prepared in a one-pot synthesis process. These novel antioxidants exhibit higher antioxidative activities than the traditional antioxidants at elevated temperatures. In order to investigate the antioxidant mechanism, the reaction between antioxidant and peroxyl radicals is carried out. The isolated N-(4-(phenylamino)phenyl)benzamide, which is confirmed by the X-ray diffraction is suggested to be the key intermediate during the antioxidation process. Combined with the DFT calculations, the antioxidant mechanism is proposed that shows that SDs can be regarded as multifunctional antioxidants due to the radical-trapping ability of diphenylamine moiety and peroxyl radical-decomposing ability of imine moiety. Moreover, for practical application, the mono SDs exhibited extraordinarily higher antioxidant activities under the operating conditions of lubricant oil

Look Closer to Supervise Better: One-Shot Font Generation via Component-Based Discriminator

Automatic font generation remains a challenging research issue due to the large amounts of characters with complicated structures. Typically, only a few samples can serve as the style/content reference (termed few-shot learning), which further increases the difficulty to preserve local style patterns or detailed glyph structures. We investigate the drawbacks of previous studies and find that a coarse-grained discriminator is insufficient for supervising a font generator. To this end, we propose a novel Component-Aware Module (CAM), which supervises the generator to decouple content and style at a more fine-grained level, i.e., the component level. Different from previous studies struggling to increase the complexity of generators, we aim to perform more effective supervision for a relatively simple generator to achieve its full potential, which is a brand new perspective for font generation. The whole framework achieves remarkable results by coupling component-level supervision with adversarial learning, hence we call it Component-Guided GAN, shortly CG-GAN. Extensive experiments show that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art one-shot font generation methods. Furthermore, it can be applied to handwritten word synthesis and scene text image editing, suggesting the generalization of our approach.Comment: Accepted by CVPR2022(oral

Spectral insight into thiosulfate-induced mercury speciation transformation in a historically polluted soil

We studied the effect of different doses (0.5%, 2% and 5% (w/w)) of ammonium thiosulfate on mercury (Hg) speciation fractionation following its addition to the soil, as well as its accumulation by oilseed rape (Brassica napus L), corn (Zea mays L.), and sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L.), and compared them to a non-treated control in a historically polluted soil. The oilseed rape, corn, and sweet potato were planted consecutively in the same soils on days 30, 191, and 276, respectively after the addition of thiosulfate to the soil. The key results showed that bioavailable Hg contents in the rhizosphere soils ranged from 0.18 to 2.54 mu g kg(-1), 0.28 to 2.77 mu g kg(-1), and 0.24 to 2.22 mu g kg(-1), respectively, for the 0.5%, 2% and 5% thiosulfate treatments, which were close to the control soil (025 to 1.98 mu g kg(-1)). The Hg L-3-edge X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) results showed a tendency of the Hg speciation to transform from the Hg(SR)(2) (initial soil, 56%; day-191 soil, 43%; day-276 soil, 46%, and day-356 soil, 16%) to nano particulated HgS (initial soil, 26%; day-191 soil, 42%; day-276 soil, 42%, and day-356 soil, 73%) with time in the soil treated with a 5% close of thiosulfate. The Hg contents in the tissues of the crops, except for oilseed rape, were slightly affected by the addition of thiosulfate to the soil at all dosages, compared to the control. The addition of thiosulfate did not induce the movement of bioavailable Hg to the lower layer of the soil profile. We conclude a promotion of Hg immobilization by thiosulfate in the soil for over one year, offering a promising method for in-situ Hg remediation at Hg mining regions in China. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All tights reserved

Spectral insight into thiosulfate-induced mercury speciation transformation in a historically polluted soil

We studied the effect of different doses (0.5%, 2% and 5% (w/w)) of ammonium thiosulfate on mercury (Hg) speciation fractionation following its addition to the soil, as well as its accumulation by oilseed rape (Brassica napus L), corn (Zea mays L.), and sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L.), and compared them to a non-treated control in a historically polluted soil. The oilseed rape, corn, and sweet potato were planted consecutively in the same soils on days 30, 191, and 276, respectively after the addition of thiosulfate to the soil. The key results showed that bioavailable Hg contents in the rhizosphere soils ranged from 0.18 to 2.54 mu g kg(-1), 0.28 to 2.77 mu g kg(-1), and 0.24 to 2.22 mu g kg(-1), respectively, for the 0.5%, 2% and 5% thiosulfate treatments, which were close to the control soil (025 to 1.98 mu g kg(-1)). The Hg L-3-edge X-ray absorption near edge structure (XANES) results showed a tendency of the Hg speciation to transform from the Hg(SR)(2) (initial soil, 56%; day-191 soil, 43%; day-276 soil, 46%, and day-356 soil, 16%) to nano particulated HgS (initial soil, 26%; day-191 soil, 42%; day-276 soil, 42%, and day-356 soil, 73%) with time in the soil treated with a 5% close of thiosulfate. The Hg contents in the tissues of the crops, except for oilseed rape, were slightly affected by the addition of thiosulfate to the soil at all dosages, compared to the control. The addition of thiosulfate did not induce the movement of bioavailable Hg to the lower layer of the soil profile. We conclude a promotion of Hg immobilization by thiosulfate in the soil for over one year, offering a promising method for in-situ Hg remediation at Hg mining regions in China. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All tights reserved