Object Detection based on Region Decomposition and Assembly

Region-based object detection infers object regions for one or more categories in an image. Due to the recent advances in deep learning and region proposal methods, object detectors based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have been flourishing and provided the promising detection results. However, the detection accuracy is degraded often because of the low discriminability of object CNN features caused by occlusions and inaccurate region proposals. In this paper, we therefore propose a region decomposition and assembly detector (R-DAD) for more accurate object detection. In the proposed R-DAD, we first decompose an object region into multiple small regions. To capture an entire appearance and part details of the object jointly, we extract CNN features within the whole object region and decomposed regions. We then learn the semantic relations between the object and its parts by combining the multi-region features stage by stage with region assembly blocks, and use the combined and high-level semantic features for the object classification and localization. In addition, for more accurate region proposals, we propose a multi-scale proposal layer that can generate object proposals of various scales. We integrate the R-DAD into several feature extractors, and prove the distinct performance improvement on PASCAL07/12 and MSCOCO18 compared to the recent convolutional detectors.Comment: Accepted to 2019 AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI

Guidelines Aimed at Reducing the Risks of User Acceptance Delay in the Context of an IT Service Project Management Plan

Delays in the user acceptance of information technology (IT) service projects in Korea have occurred frequently due to various risk factors. User acceptance delays may hinder the achievement of the client’s project objectives and cause schedule delays or cost overruns. Furthermore, the client may impose a delay charge and claim for additional damages, causing serious disputes between buyer and supplier. The main causes of user acceptance delays are unclear user requirements, changes in user requirements, poor-quality development outputs, excessive functional and non-functional errors, lack of user involvement, unclear user roles and responsibilities, and unclear criteria of user acceptance test.We help foster the timely completion of user acceptance by proposing a method of identifying the risk factors in user acceptance delay and creating a project management plan to weed out the identified risks. We propose a guideline for an IT service management plan that weeds out or lowers the risk factors well in advance. To validate the guideline’s utility, we apply it to IT service projects. The results show that the guideline is effective in identifying and removing risk factors affecting delays in the user acceptance of IT service projects

Sex differences in atheroma burden and endothelial function in patients with early coronary atherosclerosis

Aims Women and men have different clinical presentations and outcomes in coronary artery disease (CAD). We tested the hypothesis that sex differences may influence coronary atherosclerotic burden and coronary endothelial function before development of obstructive CAD. Methods and results A total of 142 patients (53 men, 89 women; mean ± SD age, 49.3 ± 11.7 years) with early CAD simultaneously underwent intravascular ultrasonography and coronary endothelial function assessment. Atheroma burden in the left main and proximal left anterior descending (LAD) arteries was significantly greater in men than women (median, 23.0% vs. 14.1%, P = 0.002; median, 40.1% vs. 29.3%, P = 0.001, respectively). Atheroma eccentricity in the proximal LAD artery was significantly higher in men than women (median, 0.89 vs. 0.80, P = 0.04). The length of the coronary segments with endothelial dysfunction was significantly longer in men than women (median, 39.2 vs. 11.1 mm, P = 0.002). In contrast, maximal coronary flow reserve was significantly lower in women than men (2.80 vs. 3.30, P < 0.001). Sex was an independent predictor of atheroma burden in the left main and proximal LAD arteries (both P < 0.05) by multivariate analysis. Conclusion Men have greater atheroma burden, more eccentric atheroma, and more diffuse epicardial endothelial dysfunction than women. These results suggest that men have more severe structural and functional abnormalities in epicardial coronary arteries than women, even in patients with early atherosclerosis, which may result in the higher incidence rates of CAD and ST-segment myocardial infarction in men than wome

The effects of ambient He pressure on the oxygen density of Er-doped SiO x thin films grown by laser ablation of a Si:Er 2 O 3 target

Abstract Er-doped SiO x thin films were fabricated by laser ablation of a Si:Er 2 O 3 target in He atmosphere. We have measured the photoluminescence (PL) at 1.54 mm for the films grown at different He pressures and found that the oxygen density of the grown film that strongly influences the PL intensity is highly correlated with the ambient He pressure. This manifests that oxygen density of the film can be controlled in an inert atmosphere to maximize PL intensity when we adopt pulsed laser deposition (PLD) technique to deposit Er-doped SiO x thin films. Also, we have examined the temperature dependence of PL and observed that the thermal quenching is greatly reduced for the PLD-grown films.

Learning to Detect and Track Visible and Occluded Body Joints in a Virtual World

Multi-People Tracking in an open-world setting requires a special effort in precise detection. Moreover, temporal continuity in the detection phase gains more importance when scene cluttering introduces the challenging problems of occluded targets. For the purpose, we propose a deep network architecture that jointly extracts people body parts and associates them across short temporal spans. Our model explicitly deals with occluded body parts, by hallucinating plausible solutions of not visible joints. We propose a new end-to-end architecture composed by four branches (visible heatmaps, occluded heatmaps, part affinity fields and temporal affinity fields) fed by a time linker feature extractor. To overcome the lack of surveillance data with tracking, body part and occlusion annotations we created the vastest Computer Graphics dataset for people tracking in urban scenarios by exploiting a photorealistic videogame. It is up to now the vastest dataset (about 500.000 frames, almost 10 million body poses) of human body parts for people tracking in urban scenarios. Our architecture trained on virtual data exhibits good generalization capabilities also on public real tracking benchmarks, when image resolution and sharpness are high enough, producing reliable tracklets useful for further batch data association or re-id modules

Enhancement of seawater corrosion resistance in copper using acetone-derived graphene coating

We show that acetone-derived graphene coating can effectively enhance the corrosion efficiency of copper (Cu) in a seawater environment (0.5-0.6 M (???3.0-3.5%) sodium chloride). By applying a drop of acetone (???20 ??l cm-2) on Cu surfaces, rapid thermal annealing allows the facile and rapid synthesis of graphene films on Cu surfaces with a monolayer coverage of almost close to ???100%. Under optimal growth conditions, acetone-derived graphene is found to have a relatively high crystallinity, comparable to common graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition. The resulting graphene-coated Cu surface exhibits 37.5 times higher corrosion resistance as compared to that of mechanically polished Cu. Further, investigation on the role of graphene coating on Cu surfaces suggests that the outstanding corrosion inhibition efficiency (IE) of 97.4% is obtained by protecting the underlying Cu against the penetration of both dissolved oxygen and chlorine ions, thanks to the closely spaced atomic structure of the graphene sheets. The increase of graphene coating thickness results in the enhancement of the overall corrosion IE up to ???99%, which can be attributed to the effective blocking of the ionic diffusion process via grain boundaries. Overall, our results suggest that the acetone-derived graphene film can effectively serve as a corrosion-inhibiting coating in the seawater level and that it may have a promising role to play for potential offshore coating.close0