Visual-Quality-Driven Learning for Underwater Vision Enhancement

The image processing community has witnessed remarkable advances in enhancing and restoring images. Nevertheless, restoring the visual quality of underwater images remains a great challenge. End-to-end frameworks might fail to enhance the visual quality of underwater images since in several scenarios it is not feasible to provide the ground truth of the scene radiance. In this work, we propose a CNN-based approach that does not require ground truth data since it uses a set of image quality metrics to guide the restoration learning process. The experiments showed that our method improved the visual quality of underwater images preserving their edges and also performed well considering the UCIQE metric.Comment: Accepted for publication and presented in 2018 IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP

One hypnagogic dream and the I Ching : a plausible interpretation

In this brief report I give an account of one very simple but deeply intriguing hypnagogic dream which potential meanings were subsequently unfolded and analysed by means of the I Ching, an instrument that has been reputed to have the capacity to disclose hidden meanings in the situations that are scrutinized with its help. The brief report concludes for the possibility of amplifying the hermeneutics of one dream through the I Ching

Johnson & Johnson position in the pharmaceutical industry competitive landscape

This work project “Johnson & Johnson Place in the Pharmaceutical IndustryCompetitive Landscape” analyses Johnson & Johnson business within the pharmaceutical industry. Given the demand for JNJ products and the growth in revenues brought with COVID-19 due to the Janssen vaccine sales, we estimate a sales growth of 11.4% compared to last year. We will analyze the COVID-19 pandemic current and possible future implications for the industry and the company and compare it with other pharmaceutical companies which are COVID-19 vaccine producers. We will also investigate JNJ most relevant mergers and acquisitions as well as to examine the pharmaceutical industry and the current and future evolution of microeconomic indicators both in the US and the rest of the world. Our valuation of Johnson & Johnson yields a price target of 197.57$ which results in a return of 16.03% and therefore a BUY recommendatio

Image segmentation and reconstruction of 3D surfaces from carotid ultrasound images

Tese de doutoramento. Engenharia Electrotécnica e de Computadores. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Firms Output Growth And Financial Ratios

The central focus of this paper is on the relationship between output growth of the firm and its financial ratios. The analysis is based on managerial theories of the firm, in particular, on Baumols (1967) article that suggests sales revenue maximization as a goal of the firm instead of profit maximization. A cross-section equation was estimated for three Brazilian industries covering the year 2000. We regress a firms output growth on a constant and a vector of financial ratios. The results obtained from ordinary least-squares regressions show firms with good financial performance present higher output growth

Animotores: uma série animada para estimular a brincadeira da criança com deficiência

Este é um projeto sobre o desenvolvimento de um universo para uma série de animação, onde crianças com deficiência buscam se tornar verdadeiros super-heróis. A criação desse universo foi feita com a ajuda de profissionais da área da saúde, baseando suas vivências no dia a dia. Contém a elaboração de histórias, buscando criar aventuras inspiradas em exercícios utilizados em suas sessões de terapia com brincadeiras, tendo como objetivo mostrar que é possível estimular o brincar nesse público