Improved Sketch-to-Photo Generation Using Filter Aided Generative Adversarial Network

Generating a photographic face image from given input sketch is most challenging task in computer vision. Mainly the sketches drawn by sketch artist used in human identification. Sketch to photo synthesis is very important applications in law enforcement as well as character design, educational training. In recent years Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) shows excellent performance on sketch to photo synthesis problem.  Quality of hand drawn sketches affects the quality generated photo. It might be possible that while handling the hand drawn sketches, accidently by touching the user hand on pencil sketch or similar activities causes noise in given sketch. Likewise different styles like shading, darkness of pencil used by sketch artist may cause unnecessary noise in sketches. In recent year many sketches to photo synthesis methods are proposed, but they are mainly focused on network architecture to get better performance. In this paper we proposed Filter-aided GAN framework to remove such noise while synthesizing photo images from hand drawn sketches. Here we implement and compare different filtering methods with GAN.  Quantitative and qualitative result shows that proposed Filter-aided GAN generate the photo images which are visually pleasant and closer to ground truth image

Using Semantic Recommenders for Personalized Recommendations

With the ever increasing information overload on the internet, recommender systems have long become a necessity. The popularity of e-commerce sites is increasing by the day and an abundance of shopping sites are presenting users with an increasing number of choices. It has become a challenging task to meet expectations of customers to better understand their needs and provide them with information and suggestions of their interest. With the e-commerce field being fiercely competitive, businesses have started to feel the need of personalization which helps them in building customer loyalty [17]. Personalized recommendations can prove to be the most important aspect of the evolution of the recommender systems. Personalized recommendation services provide opportunities to promote new products, increase sales, click-through and conversion rates [18]. The use of semantic web technologies in recommender systems can effectively enhance the quality of recommendation. Semantic web has provided structured knowledge representation tools such as taxonomies, ontologies, powerful languages such as Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), etc. which can be used to represent rich, complex knowledge about things and their relationships and query languages such as SPARQL, reasoning engines that can infer logical consequences from a set of assertions. Semantics enable machines to process natural languages in a manner close to human cognition and mimic human reasoning to a certain extent [12]. This can greatly help to generate personalized predictions in the recommender framework [6]

Differential cross section measurements for the production of a W boson in association with jets in proton–proton collisions at √s = 7 TeV

Measurements are reported of differential cross sections for the production of a W boson, which decays into a muon and a neutrino, in association with jets, as a function of several variables, including the transverse momenta (pT) and pseudorapidities of the four leading jets, the scalar sum of jet transverse momenta (HT), and the difference in azimuthal angle between the directions of each jet and the muon. The data sample of pp collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 7 TeV was collected with the CMS detector at the LHC and corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 5.0 fb[superscript −1]. The measured cross sections are compared to predictions from Monte Carlo generators, MadGraph + pythia and sherpa, and to next-to-leading-order calculations from BlackHat + sherpa. The differential cross sections are found to be in agreement with the predictions, apart from the pT distributions of the leading jets at high pT values, the distributions of the HT at high-HT and low jet multiplicity, and the distribution of the difference in azimuthal angle between the leading jet and the muon at low values.United States. Dept. of EnergyNational Science Foundation (U.S.)Alfred P. Sloan Foundatio