145 research outputs found
PL-EVIO: Robust Monocular Event-based Visual Inertial Odometry with Point and Line Features
Event cameras are motion-activated sensors that capture pixel-level
illumination changes instead of the intensity image with a fixed frame rate.
Compared with the standard cameras, it can provide reliable visual perception
during high-speed motions and in high dynamic range scenarios. However, event
cameras output only a little information or even noise when the relative motion
between the camera and the scene is limited, such as in a still state. While
standard cameras can provide rich perception information in most scenarios,
especially in good lighting conditions. These two cameras are exactly
complementary. In this paper, we proposed a robust, high-accurate, and
real-time optimization-based monocular event-based visual-inertial odometry
(VIO) method with event-corner features, line-based event features, and
point-based image features. The proposed method offers to leverage the
point-based features in the nature scene and line-based features in the
human-made scene to provide more additional structure or constraints
information through well-design feature management. Experiments in the public
benchmark datasets show that our method can achieve superior performance
compared with the state-of-the-art image-based or event-based VIO. Finally, we
used our method to demonstrate an onboard closed-loop autonomous quadrotor
flight and large-scale outdoor experiments. Videos of the evaluations are
presented on our project website: https://b23.tv/OE3QM6
Skin Mast Cells Contribute to Sporothrix schenckii Infection
Background: Sporothrix schenckii (S. schenckii), a dimorphic fungus, causes sporotrichosis. Mast cells (MCs) have been described to be involved in skin fungal infections. The role of MCs in cutaneous sporotrichosis remains largely unknown.
Objectives: To characterize the role and relevance of MCs in cutaneous sporotrichosis.
Methods: We analyzed cutaneous sporotrichosis in wild-type (WT) mice and two different MC-deficient strains. In vitro, MCs were assessed for S. schenckii-induced cytokine production and degranulation after incubation with S. schenckii. We also explored the role of MCs in human cutaneous sporotrichosis.
Results: WT mice developed markedly larger skin lesions than MC-deficient mice (> 1.5 fold) after infection with S. schenckii, with significantly increased fungal burden. S. schenckii induced the release of tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF), interleukin (IL)-6, IL-10, and IL-1β by MCs, but not degranulation. S. schenckii induced larger skin lesions and higher release of IL-6 and TNF by MCs as compared to the less virulent S. albicans. In patients with sporotrichosis, TNF and IL-6 were increased in skin lesions, and markedly elevated levels in the serum were linked to disease activity.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that cutaneous MCs contribute to skin sporotrichosis by releasing cytokines such as TNF and IL-6
Spiking PointNet: Spiking Neural Networks for Point Clouds
Recently, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), enjoying extreme energy efficiency,
have drawn much research attention on 2D visual recognition and shown gradually
increasing application potential. However, it still remains underexplored
whether SNNs can be generalized to 3D recognition. To this end, we present
Spiking PointNet in the paper, the first spiking neural model for efficient
deep learning on point clouds. We discover that the two huge obstacles limiting
the application of SNNs in point clouds are: the intrinsic optimization
obstacle of SNNs that impedes the training of a big spiking model with large
time steps, and the expensive memory and computation cost of PointNet that
makes training a big spiking point model unrealistic. To solve the problems
simultaneously, we present a trained-less but learning-more paradigm for
Spiking PointNet with theoretical justifications and in-depth experimental
analysis. In specific, our Spiking PointNet is trained with only a single time
step but can obtain better performance with multiple time steps inference,
compared to the one trained directly with multiple time steps. We conduct
various experiments on ModelNet10, ModelNet40 to demonstrate the effectiveness
of Spiking PointNet. Notably, our Spiking PointNet even can outperform its ANN
counterpart, which is rare in the SNN field thus providing a potential research
direction for the following work. Moreover, Spiking PointNet shows impressive
speedup and storage saving in the training phase.Comment: Accepted by NeurIP
Simulating the Integration of Urban Air Mobility into Existing Transportation Systems: A Survey
Urban air mobility (UAM) has the potential to revolutionize transportation in
metropolitan areas, providing a new mode of transportation that could alleviate
congestion and improve accessibility. However, the integration of UAM into
existing transportation systems is a complex task that requires a thorough
understanding of its impact on traffic flow and capacity. In this paper, we
conduct a survey to investigate the current state of research on UAM in
metropolitan-scale traffic using simulation techniques. We identify key
challenges and opportunities for the integration of UAM into urban
transportation systems, including impacts on existing traffic patterns and
congestion; safety analysis and risk assessment; potential economic and
environmental benefits; and the development of shared infrastructure and routes
for UAM and ground-based transportation. We also discuss the potential benefits
of UAM, such as reduced travel times and improved accessibility for underserved
areas. Our survey provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of
research on UAM in metropolitan-scale traffic using simulation and highlights
key areas for future research and development
FocalDreamer: Text-driven 3D Editing via Focal-fusion Assembly
While text-3D editing has made significant strides in leveraging score
distillation sampling, emerging approaches still fall short in delivering
separable, precise and consistent outcomes that are vital to content creation.
In response, we introduce FocalDreamer, a framework that merges base shape with
editable parts according to text prompts for fine-grained editing within
desired regions. Specifically, equipped with geometry union and dual-path
rendering, FocalDreamer assembles independent 3D parts into a complete object,
tailored for convenient instance reuse and part-wise control. We propose
geometric focal loss and style consistency regularization, which encourage
focal fusion and congruent overall appearance. Furthermore, FocalDreamer
generates high-fidelity geometry and PBR textures which are compatible with
widely-used graphics engines. Extensive experiments have highlighted the
superior editing capabilities of FocalDreamer in both quantitative and
qualitative evaluations.Comment: Project website: https://focaldreamer.github.i
Membrane Potential Batch Normalization for Spiking Neural Networks
As one of the energy-efficient alternatives of conventional neural networks
(CNNs), spiking neural networks (SNNs) have gained more and more interest
recently. To train the deep models, some effective batch normalization (BN)
techniques are proposed in SNNs. All these BNs are suggested to be used after
the convolution layer as usually doing in CNNs. However, the spiking neuron is
much more complex with the spatio-temporal dynamics. The regulated data flow
after the BN layer will be disturbed again by the membrane potential updating
operation before the firing function, i.e., the nonlinear activation.
Therefore, we advocate adding another BN layer before the firing function to
normalize the membrane potential again, called MPBN. To eliminate the induced
time cost of MPBN, we also propose a training-inference-decoupled
re-parameterization technique to fold the trained MPBN into the firing
threshold. With the re-parameterization technique, the MPBN will not introduce
any extra time burden in the inference. Furthermore, the MPBN can also adopt
the element-wised form, while these BNs after the convolution layer can only
use the channel-wised form. Experimental results show that the proposed MPBN
performs well on both popular non-spiking static and neuromorphic datasets. Our
code is open-sourced at \href{https://github.com/yfguo91/MPBN}{MPBN}.Comment: Accepted by ICCV202
RMP-Loss: Regularizing Membrane Potential Distribution for Spiking Neural Networks
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) as one of the biology-inspired models have
received much attention recently. It can significantly reduce energy
consumption since they quantize the real-valued membrane potentials to 0/1
spikes to transmit information thus the multiplications of activations and
weights can be replaced by additions when implemented on hardware. However,
this quantization mechanism will inevitably introduce quantization error, thus
causing catastrophic information loss. To address the quantization error
problem, we propose a regularizing membrane potential loss (RMP-Loss) to adjust
the distribution which is directly related to quantization error to a range
close to the spikes. Our method is extremely simple to implement and
straightforward to train an SNN. Furthermore, it is shown to consistently
outperform previous state-of-the-art methods over different network
architectures and datasets.Comment: Accepted by ICCV202
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