Towards Structured Analysis of Broadcast Badminton Videos

Sports video data is recorded for nearly every major tournament but remains archived and inaccessible to large scale data mining and analytics. It can only be viewed sequentially or manually tagged with higher-level labels which is time consuming and prone to errors. In this work, we propose an end-to-end framework for automatic attributes tagging and analysis of sport videos. We use commonly available broadcast videos of matches and, unlike previous approaches, does not rely on special camera setups or additional sensors. Our focus is on Badminton as the sport of interest. We propose a method to analyze a large corpus of badminton broadcast videos by segmenting the points played, tracking and recognizing the players in each point and annotating their respective badminton strokes. We evaluate the performance on 10 Olympic matches with 20 players and achieved 95.44% point segmentation accuracy, 97.38% player detection score ([email protected]), 97.98% player identification accuracy, and stroke segmentation edit scores of 80.48%. We further show that the automatically annotated videos alone could enable the gameplay analysis and inference by computing understandable metrics such as player's reaction time, speed, and footwork around the court, etc.Comment: 9 page

Experimental Study on the Effectiveness of Inorganic Bonding Materials for Near-Surface Mounting Shear Strengthening of Prestressed Concrete Beams

Use of organic resins such as epoxy and vinyl esters as bonding materials in fibre reinforced polymer (FRP) strengthening of concrete members is widely accepted. However, the performance of organic resins is compromised when exposed to high temperature and extreme weather conditions leading to reduced durability of the strengthened systems. The present study attempts to evaluate the effectiveness of inorganic (cement mortar and geopolymer mortar) bonding materials for shear strengthening of prestressed concrete (PSC) beams using the near-surface mounting (NSM) technique. Different types of bonding materials are used in this study for NSM shear strengthening including: (i) epoxy resin, (ii) high strength cement grout (HSCG) and (iii) geopolymer mortar. Bond tests were first conducted to evaluate the pull-out/bond strength of different bonding materials. Bond tests revealed that epoxy resin had the highest bond strength followed by geopolymer mortar and HSCG. Sixteen full-scale PSC beams were cast with and without stirrups. The beams were strengthened using NSM CFRP laminates oriented at 45-degree configuration and then tested under a three-point bending configuration. Experimental results revealed that the performance of high strength cement grout and geopolymer mortar was similar but with a lesser efficiency compared to the epoxy resin

Self-assembly of organostannoxanes: formation of gels in aromatic solvents

Organostannoxane drums [n-BuSn(O)O2C-C6H4-4-OR]6 [R = -CH3 (1); -C9H19 (2); -C11H23 (3)] and [n-BuSn(O)O2C-C6H3-3,5-(OR)2]6 [R = -CH3 (4); -C9H19 (5)] were synthesized by the reaction of n-BuSn(O)(OH) with the corresponding carboxylic acid in a 1:1 stoichiometry. Analogous reactions involving [n-Bu2SnO]n in a 1:1 stoichiometry afforded the diorganostannoxane ladders {[n-Bu2SnO2C-C6H4-4-OR]2O}2 [R = -CH3 (6); -C9H19 (7); -C11H23 (8)] and {[n-Bu2SnO2C-C6H3-3,5-(OR)2]2O}2 [R = -CH3 (9) and -C9H19 (10)]. Compounds 1-10 could also be prepared by a solventless methodology, which involved grinding the reactants together in a mortar and pestle at room temperature. Compounds 1-10 exhibit gelation behavior in aromatic solvents. In contrast, in aliphatic solvents gelation behavior was not observed. Among the organostannoxanes reported here, 2, 3, 5, and 8 were found to be extremely efficient gelators based on their critical gelation concentration values. The microstructure of the organometallic gels, investigated by optical and scanning electron microscopy, reveals the presence of cross-linked network structures. The gels formed from 2and 3 can be converted into xerogels by removal of solvent. The latter can be reconverted into the original gels by treatment with aromatic solvents

Vibrio parahaemolyticus Isolates from Asian Green Mussel: Molecular Characteristics, Virulence and Their Inhibition by Chitooligosaccharide-Tea Polyphenol Conjugates

Fifty isolates of Vibrio parahaemolyticus were tested for pathogenicity, biofilm formation, motility, and antibiotic resistance. Antimicrobial activity of chitooligosaccharide (COS)-tea polyphenol conjugates against all isolates was also studied. Forty-three isolates were randomly selected from 520 isolates from Asian green mussel (Perna viridis) grown on CHROMagarTM Vibrio agar plate. Six isolates were acquired from stool specimens of diarrhea patients. One laboratory strain was V. parahaemolyticus PSU.SCB.16S.14. Among all isolates tested, 12% of V. parahaemolyticus carried the tdh+trh− gene and were positive toward Kanagawa phenomenon test. All of V. parahaemolyticus isolates could produce biofilm and showed relatively strong motile ability. When COS-catechin conjugate (COS-CAT) and COS-epigallocatechin-3-gallate conjugate (COS-EGCG) were examined for their inhibitory effect against V. parahaemolyticus, the former showed the higher bactericidal activity with the MBC value of 1.024 mg/mL against both pathogenic and non-pathogenic strains. Most of the representative Asian green mussel V. parahaemolyticus isolates exhibited high sensitivity to all antibiotics, whereas one isolate showed the intermediate resistance to cefuroxime. However, the representative clinical isolates were highly resistant to nine types of antibiotics and had multiple antibiotic resistance (MAR) index of 0.64. Thus, COS-CAT could be used as potential antimicrobial agent for controlling V. parahaemolyticus-causing disease in Asian green mussel