Improving Object Detection Quality in Football Through Super-Resolution Techniques

This study explores the potential of super-resolution techniques in enhancing object detection accuracy in football. Given the sport's fast-paced nature and the critical importance of precise object (e.g. ball, player) tracking for both analysis and broadcasting, super-resolution could offer significant improvements. We investigate how advanced image processing through super-resolution impacts the accuracy and reliability of object detection algorithms in processing football match footage. Our methodology involved applying state-of-the-art super-resolution techniques to a diverse set of football match videos from SoccerNet, followed by object detection using Faster R-CNN. The performance of these algorithms, both with and without super-resolution enhancement, was rigorously evaluated in terms of detection accuracy. The results indicate a marked improvement in object detection accuracy when super-resolution preprocessing is applied. The improvement of object detection through the integration of super-resolution techniques yields significant benefits, especially for low-resolution scenarios, with a notable 12\% increase in mean Average Precision (mAP) at an IoU (Intersection over Union) range of 0.50:0.95 for 320x240 size images when increasing the resolution fourfold using RLFN. As the dimensions increase, the magnitude of improvement becomes more subdued; however, a discernible improvement in the quality of detection is consistently evident. Additionally, we discuss the implications of these findings for real-time sports analytics, player tracking, and the overall viewing experience. The study contributes to the growing field of sports technology by demonstrating the practical benefits and limitations of integrating super-resolution techniques in football analytics and broadcasting

Distance Metric Learning Loss Functions in Few-Shot Scenarios of Supervised Language Models Fine-Tuning

This paper presents an analysis regarding an influence of the Distance Metric Learning (DML) loss functions on the supervised fine-tuning of the language models for classification tasks. We experimented with known datasets from SentEval Transfer Tasks. Our experiments show that applying the DML loss function can increase performance on downstream classification tasks of RoBERTa-large models in few-shot scenarios. Models fine-tuned with the use of SoftTriple loss can achieve better results than models with a standard categorical cross-entropy loss function by about 2.89 percentage points from 0.04 to 13.48 percentage points depending on the training dataset. Additionally, we accomplished a comprehensive analysis with explainability techniques to assess the models' reliability and explain their results

Revisiting Distance Metric Learning for Few-Shot Natural Language Classification

Distance Metric Learning (DML) has attracted much attention in image processing in recent years. This paper analyzes its impact on supervised fine-tuning language models for Natural Language Processing (NLP) classification tasks under few-shot learning settings. We investigated several DML loss functions in training RoBERTa language models on known SentEval Transfer Tasks datasets. We also analyzed the possibility of using proxy-based DML losses during model inference. Our systematic experiments have shown that under few-shot learning settings, particularly proxy-based DML losses can positively affect the fine-tuning and inference of a supervised language model. Models tuned with a combination of CCE (categorical cross-entropy loss) and ProxyAnchor Loss have, on average, the best performance and outperform models with only CCE by about 3.27 percentage points -- up to 10.38 percentage points depending on the training dataset

Decolonizing Slavic Studies: On Builders, Destroyers, and Covert History of Institutions. Editorial

Editorial

Entity Graph Extraction from Legal Acts -- a Prototype for a Use Case in Policy Design Analysis

This paper presents research on a prototype developed to serve the quantitative study of public policy design. This sub-discipline of political science focuses on identifying actors, relations between them, and tools at their disposal in health, environmental, economic, and other policies. Our system aims to automate the process of gathering legal documents, annotating them with Institutional Grammar, and using hypergraphs to analyse inter-relations between crucial entities. Our system is tested against the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage from 2003, a legal document regulating essential aspects of international relations securing cultural heritage.Comment: 17 pages, 10 figure

Carbonaceous catalysts from orange pulp for limonene oxidation

The possibility of orange pulp utilization for nanoporous carbons production was investigated. Moreover, processing the obtained materials as limonene oxidation catalysts was studied as well. Limonene was separated from orange pulp obtained from fragmented orange peels—the waste from industrial fruits processing—by means of simple distillation. After the sepa-ration of limonene from the biomass, the dried orange pulp was converted to three types of nanoporous carbon catalysts: without activating agent, with NaOH, and with KOH. The catalysts were characterized by XRD, SEM, EDX, AFM, and sorption of N2 methods. The activities of the obtained catalysts were tested in the oxidation of limonene to perillyl alcohol (the main product), carveol, carvone, and 1,2-epoxylimonene and its diol. In the oxidation processes, hydrogen peroxide was used as the oxidizing agent. This work has shown for the first time that nanoporous carbons obtained from orange pulp waste, after separation of limonene, are active catalysts for limonene oxidation to industrially important value-added productsPeer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Treatment of patients with primary cutaneous lymphomas – real-life data

Background. Primary cutaneous lymphomas (PCL) comprise a heterogeneous group of neoplasms of mature lymphocytes with skin tropism. Although, by definition, these lymphomas are restricted to the skin at the time of diagnosis, during the course of the disease it may involve also lymph nodes and visceral organs. A close cooperation between a dermatologist and oncologist is required to ensure proper treatment. We present in a real-life data on treatment of patients with PCL between dermatology and oncology department. Material and methods. 104 patients were registered in a joined database of Oncology Department of Oncology Centre in Bydgoszcz and Dermatology Department of Medical University in Toruń between 2007 and 2017. Due to different clinical and prognostic features data from MF/SS (44 patients), non-MF/SS CTCLs and CBCLs were presented separately. Results. Median overall survival for patients with MF/SS was 76.7 months. Median follow-up time was 5 years.Background. Primary cutaneous lymphomas (PCL) comprise a heterogeneous group of neoplasms of mature lymphocytes with skin tropism. Although, by definition, these lymphomas are restricted to the skin at the time of diagnosis, during the course of the disease it may involve also lymph nodes and visceral organs. A close cooperation between a dermatologist and oncologist is required to ensure proper treatment. We present in a real-life data on treatment of patients with PCL between dermatology and oncology department. Material and methods. 104 patients were registered in a joined database of Oncology Department of Oncology Centre in Bydgoszcz and Dermatology Department of Medical University in Toruń between 2007 and 2017. Due to different clinical and prognostic features data from MF/SS (44 patients), non-MF/SS CTCLs and CBCLs were presented separately. Results. Median overall survival for patients with MF/SS was 76.7 months. Median follow-up time was 5 years

Treatment of patients with primary cutaneous lymphomas – real-life data

Background. Primary cutaneous lymphomas (PCL) comprise a heterogeneous group of neoplasms of mature lymphocytes with skin tropism. Although, by definition, these lymphomas are restricted to the skin at the time of diagnosis, during the course of the disease it may involve also lymph nodes and visceral organs. A close cooperation between a dermatologist and oncologist is required to ensure proper treatment. We present in a real-life data on treatment of patients with PCL between dermatology and oncology department.  Material and methods. 104 patients were registered in a joined database of Oncology Department of Oncology Centre in Bydgoszcz and Dermatology Department of Medical University in Toruń between 2007 and 2017. Due to different clinical and prognostic features data from MF/SS (44 patients), non-MF/SS CTCLs and CBCLs were presented separately.  Results. Median overall survival for patients with MF/SS was 76.7 months. Median follow-up time was 5 years

Changes in preterm birth and stillbirth during COVID-19 lockdowns in 26 countries.

Preterm birth (PTB) is the leading cause of infant mortality worldwide. Changes in PTB rates, ranging from -90% to +30%, were reported in many countries following early COVID-19 pandemic response measures ('lockdowns'). It is unclear whether this variation reflects real differences in lockdown impacts, or perhaps differences in stillbirth rates and/or study designs. Here we present interrupted time series and meta-analyses using harmonized data from 52 million births in 26 countries, 18 of which had representative population-based data, with overall PTB rates ranging from 6% to 12% and stillbirth ranging from 2.5 to 10.5 per 1,000 births. We show small reductions in PTB in the first (odds ratio 0.96, 95% confidence interval 0.95-0.98, P value <0.0001), second (0.96, 0.92-0.99, 0.03) and third (0.97, 0.94-1.00, 0.09) months of lockdown, but not in the fourth month of lockdown (0.99, 0.96-1.01, 0.34), although there were some between-country differences after the first month. For high-income countries in this study, we did not observe an association between lockdown and stillbirths in the second (1.00, 0.88-1.14, 0.98), third (0.99, 0.88-1.12, 0.89) and fourth (1.01, 0.87-1.18, 0.86) months of lockdown, although we have imprecise estimates due to stillbirths being a relatively rare event. We did, however, find evidence of increased risk of stillbirth in the first month of lockdown in high-income countries (1.14, 1.02-1.29, 0.02) and, in Brazil, we found evidence for an association between lockdown and stillbirth in the second (1.09, 1.03-1.15, 0.002), third (1.10, 1.03-1.17, 0.003) and fourth (1.12, 1.05-1.19, <0.001) months of lockdown. With an estimated 14.8 million PTB annually worldwide, the modest reductions observed during early pandemic lockdowns translate into large numbers of PTB averted globally and warrant further research into causal pathways