Connectivity-Enforcing Hough Transform for the Robust Extraction of Line Segments

Global voting schemes based on the Hough transform (HT) have been widely used to robustly detect lines in images. However, since the votes do not take line connectivity into account, these methods do not deal well with cluttered images. In opposition, the so-called local methods enforce connectivity but lack robustness to deal with challenging situations that occur in many realistic scenarios, e.g., when line segments cross or when long segments are corrupted. In this paper, we address the critical limitations of the HT as a line segment extractor by incorporating connectivity in the voting process. This is done by only accounting for the contributions of edge points lying in increasingly larger neighborhoods and whose position and directional content agree with potential line segments. As a result, our method, which we call STRAIGHT (Segment exTRAction by connectivity-enforcInG HT), extracts the longest connected segments in each location of the image, thus also integrating into the HT voting process the usually separate step of individual segment extraction. The usage of the Hough space mapping and a corresponding hierarchical implementation make our approach computationally feasible. We present experiments that illustrate, with synthetic and real images, how STRAIGHT succeeds in extracting complete segments in several situations where current methods fail.Comment: Submitted for publicatio

The effect of method, standard and sample components on the total antioxidant capacity of commercial waters assessed by optical conventional assays

The total antioxidant capacity (TAC) of 28 flavoured water samples was assessed by ferric reducing antioxidant potential (FRAP), oxygen radical absorbance capacity (ORAC), trolox equivalent antioxidant capacity (TEAC) and total reactive antioxidant potential (TRAP) methods. It was observed that flavoured waters had higher antioxidant activity than the corresponding natural ones. The observed differences were attributed to flavours, juice and vitamins. Generally, higher TAC contents were obtained on lemon waters and lower values on guava and raspberry flavoured waters. Lower and higher TACs were obtained by TRAP and ORAC method, respectively. Statistical analysis suggested that vitamins and flavours increased the antioxidant content of the commercial waters

Antimicrobial functionalized genetically engineered spider silk

Genetically engineered fusion proteins offer potential as multifunctional biomaterials for medical use. Fusion or chimeric proteins can be formed using recombinant DNA technology by combining nucleotide sequences encoding different peptides or proteins that are otherwise not found together in nature. In the present study, three new fusion proteins were designed, cloned and expressed and assessed for function, by combining the consensus sequence of dragline spider silk with three different antimicrobial peptides. The human antimicrobial peptides human neutrophil defensin 2 (HNP-2), human neutrophil defensins 4 (HNP-4) and hepcidin were fused to spider silk through bioengineering. The spider silk domain maintained its self-assembly features, a key aspect of these new polymeric protein biomaterials, allowing the formation of b-sheets to lock in structures via physical interactions without the need for chemical crosslinking. These new functional silk proteins were assessed for antimicrobial activity against Gram e Escherichia coli and Gram þ Staphylococcus aureus and microbicidal activity was demonstrated. Dynamic light scattering was used to assess protein aggregation to clarify the antimicrobial patterns observed. Attenuated-total reflectance Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (ATR-FTIR) and circular dichroism (CD) were used to assess the secondary structure of the new recombinant proteins. In vitro cell studies with a human osteosarcoma cell line (SaOs-2) demonstrated the compatibility of these new proteins with mammalian cells.Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) - Bolsa de doutoramento (SFRH/BD/28603/2006); Chimera project (PTDC/EBB-EBI/109093/2008); NIH and Tissue Engineering Resource Center EB003210, P41 EB002520, DE017207

The Triggering Receptor Expressed on Myeloid Cells 2 Inhibits Complement Component 1q Effector Mechanisms and Exerts Detrimental Effects during Pneumococcal Pneumonia

Phagocytosis and inflammation within the lungs is crucial for host defense during bacterial pneumonia. Triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells (TREM)-2 was proposed to negatively regulate TLR-mediated responses and enhance phagocytosis by macrophages, but the role of TREM-2 in respiratory tract infections is unknown. Here, we established the presence of TREM-2 on alveolar macrophages (AM) and explored the function of TREM-2 in the innate immune response to pneumococcal infection in vivo. Unexpectedly, we found Trem-2(-/-) AM to display augmented bacterial phagocytosis in vitro and in vivo compared to WT AM. Mechanistically, we detected that in the absence of TREM-2, pulmonary macrophages selectively produced elevated complement component 1q (C1q) levels. We found that these increased C1q levels depended on peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-δ (PPAR-δ) activity and were responsible for the enhanced phagocytosis of bacteria. Upon infection with S. pneumoniae, Trem-2(-/-) mice exhibited an augmented bacterial clearance from lungs, decreased bacteremia and improved survival compared to their WT counterparts. This work is the first to disclose a role for TREM-2 in clinically relevant respiratory tract infections and demonstrates a previously unknown link between TREM-2 and opsonin production within the lungs

Estimation of Rank Deficient Matrices from Partial Observations: Two-Step Iterative Algorithms

Abstract. Several computer vision applications require estimating a rank deficient matrix from noisy observations of its entries. When the observation matrix has no missing data, the LS solution of such problem is known to be given by the SVD. However, in practice, when several entries of the matrix are not observed, the problem has no closed form solution. In this paper, we study two iterative algorithms for minimizing the non-linear LS cost function obtained when estimating rank deficient matrices from partial observations. In the first algorithm, the iterations are the well known Expectation and Maximization (EM) steps that have succeeded in several estimation problems with missing data. The second algorithm, which we call Row-Column (RC), estimates, in alternate steps, the row and column spaces of the solution matrix. Our conclusions are that RC performs better than EM in what respects to the robustness to the initialization and to the convergence speed. We also demonstrate the algorithms when inferring 3D structure from video sequences.