The VIA Annotation Software for Images, Audio and Video

In this paper, we introduce a simple and standalone manual annotation tool for images, audio and video: the VGG Image Annotator (VIA). This is a light weight, standalone and offline software package that does not require any installation or setup and runs solely in a web browser. The VIA software allows human annotators to define and describe spatial regions in images or video frames, and temporal segments in audio or video. These manual annotations can be exported to plain text data formats such as JSON and CSV and therefore are amenable to further processing by other software tools. VIA also supports collaborative annotation of a large dataset by a group of human annotators. The BSD open source license of this software allows it to be used in any academic project or commercial application.Comment: to appear in Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Multimedia (MM '19), October 21-25, 2019, Nice, France. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 page

Painting-to-3D Model Alignment Via Discriminative Visual Elements

International audienceThis paper describes a technique that can reliably align arbitrary 2D depictions of an architectural site, including drawings, paintings and historical photographs, with a 3D model of the site. This is a tremendously difficult task as the appearance and scene structure in the 2D depictions can be very different from the appearance and geometry of the 3D model, e.g., due to the specific rendering style, drawing error, age, lighting or change of seasons. In addition, we face a hard search problem: the number of possible alignments of the painting to a large 3D model, such as a partial reconstruction of a city, is huge. To address these issues, we develop a new compact representation of complex 3D scenes. The 3D model of the scene is represented by a small set of discriminative visual elements that are automatically learnt from rendered views. Similar to object detection, the set of visual elements, as well as the weights of individual features for each element, are learnt in a discriminative fashion. We show that the learnt visual elements are reliably matched in 2D depictions of the scene despite large variations in rendering style (e.g. watercolor, sketch, historical photograph) and structural changes (e.g. missing scene parts, large occluders) of the scene. We demonstrate an application of the proposed approach to automatic re-photography to find an approximate viewpoint of historical paintings and photographs with respect to a 3D model of the site. The proposed alignment procedure is validated via a human user study on a new database of paintings and sketches spanning several sites. The results demonstrate that our algorithm produces significantly better alignments than several baseline methods

Where was this picture painted ? - Localizing paintings by alignment to 3D models

National audienceCet article présente une technique qui peut de manière fiable aligner une représentation non photo-réaliste d'un site architectural, tel un dessin ou une peinture, avec un model 3D du site. Pour ce faire, nous représentons le model 3D par un ensemble d'éléments discriminatifs qui sont automatiquement découverts dans des vues du modèle. Nous montrons que les éléments trouvés sont reliés de manière robuste aux changements de style (aquarelle, croquis, photographies anciennes) et aux différences structurelles. D'avantage de détails sur notre méthode et une évaluation plus détaillée est disponible [1]

The impact of lead time on truckload transportation rates

Thesis (M. Eng. in Logistics)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, 2008.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 80-81).The objective of this thesis was to analyze truckload shipment transactions in order to determine if rates are impacted by tender lead time, which is the amount of time between when a carrier is offered a load to when the load needs to be picked up. The research specifically focused on how tender rejections by carriers are the ultimate driver of transportation cost variances since most rates are contractually fixed in advance. The data revealed a strong correlation between tender rejections and increased costs. Many factors affect transportation costs. The transportation model in the paper included three key baseline factors: distance, origin, and destination of the load. The model also included tender and pick up day of week activity, economies of scale, carrier size, and tender lead time to quantify how the factors influence the cost of a load. The research suggests that even though the baseline factors dominate the cost of most loads, shippers can create savings by modifying business policy with regard to tender lead time and other factors included in the model.by Erik R. Caldwell and Bryan C. Fisher.M.Eng.in Logistic

Arachidonic acid pathway alterations in cerebrospinal fluid of dogs with naturally occurring spinal cord injury

BACKGROUND: Canine intervertebral disc πherniation causes a naturally-occurring spinal cord injury (SCI) that bears critical similarities to human SCI with respect to both injury pathomechanisms and treatment. As such, it has tremendous potential to enhance our understanding of injury biology and the preclinical evaluation of novel therapies. Currently, there is limited understanding of the role of arachidonic acid metabolites in canine SCI. RESULTS: The CSF concentrations of PLA2 and PGE2 were higher in SCI dogs compared to control dogs (p = 0.0370 and 0.0273, respectively), but CSF LCT4 concentration in SCI dogs was significantly lower than that in control dogs (p < 0.0001). Prostaglandin E2 concentration in the CSF was significantly and positively associated with increased severity of SCI at the time of sampling (p = 0.041) and recovery 42 days post-injury (p = 0.006), as measured by ordinal behavioral scores. CONCLUSION: Arachidonic acid metabolism is altered in dogs with SCI, and these data suggest that these AA metabolites reflect injury severity and recovery, paralleling data from other model systems

Improving response rates using a monetary incentive for patient completion of questionnaires: an observational study

Background: Poor response rates to postal questionnaires can introduce bias and reduce the statistical power of a study. To improve response rates in our trial in primary care we tested the effect of introducing an unconditional direct payment of 5 pound for the completion of postal questionnaires. Methods: We recruited patients in general practice with knee problems from sites across the United Kingdom. An evidence-based strategy was used to follow-up patients at twelve months with postal questionnaires. This included an unconditional direct payment of 5 pound to patients for the completion and return of questionnaires. The first 105 patients did not receive the 5 pound incentive, but the subsequent 442 patients did. We used logistic regression to analyse the effect of introducing a monetary incentive to increase the response to postal questionnaires. Results: The response rate following reminders for the historical controls was 78.1% ( 82 of 105) compared with 88.0% ( 389 of 442) for those patients who received the 5 pound payment (diff = 9.9%, 95% CI 2.3% to 19.1%). Direct payments significantly increased the odds of response ( adjusted odds ratio = 2.2, 95% CI 1.2 to 4.0, P = 0.009) with only 12 of 442 patients declining the payment. The incentive did not save costs to the trial - the extra cost per additional respondent was almost 50 pound. Conclusion: The direct payment of 5 pound significantly increased the completion of postal questionnaires at negligible increase in cost for an adequately powered study