Multi-scale and multi-patch transformer for sandstorm image enhancement

Sandstorm is a meteorological phenomenon common in arid and semi-arid regions. A sandstorm can carry large volumes of sand unexpectedly, which leads to severe color deviations and significantly degraded visibility when an image is taken in such a scenario. However, existing image enhancement methods cannot enhance sandstorm images well due to the challenging degradations and the scarcity of sandstorm training data. In this paper, we propose a Transformer with rotary position embedding to perform sandstorm image enhancement via building multi-scale and multi-patch dependencies. Our key insights in this work are 1) a multi-scale Transformer can globally eliminate the color deviations of sandstorm images via aggregating global information, 2) a multi-patch Transformer can recover local details well via learning the spatial variant degradations, and 3) a U-shape Transformer with rotary position embedding as the core unit of multi-scale and multi-patch Transformer can effectively build the long-range dependencies. We also contribute a real-world Sandstorm Image Enhancement (SIE) dataset including 1,400 sandstorm images with different degrees of degradations and various scenes. Experiments performed on synthetic images and real-world sandstorm images demonstrate that our proposed method not only obtains visually pleasing results but also outperforms state-of-the-art methods qualitatively and quantitatively.     

SiC/SiC mini-composites with multilayer ZrSiO4 interphase: Room-temperature properties and toughening mechanism

SiC/SiC mini-composites reinforced with SiC fibers coated with different numbers of ZrSiO₄ sublayers prepared via a non-hydrolytic sol-gel process were fabricated. The tensile strength and work of fracture of the prepared SiC/SiC mini-composites were determined, and the relationship between their mechanical properties and fracture morphologies was discussed. The toughening mechanism and the variation tendency of their mechanical properties were further elaborated by analyzing the interfacial debonding morphologies of the SiC/SiC mini-composites with 1 and 4 layers of ZrSiO₄ interphase as well as the results of prior studies. A relatively rare phenomenon—the delamination of the multilayer ZrSiO₄ interphase in the SiC/SiC mini-composites but not on the SiC fibers—was observed, which clearly demonstrated the weak bonding between the ZrSiO₄ sublayers in the SiC/SiC mini-composites. The ZrSiO₄ sublayer delamination mechanism was then explained based on the high-magnification morphologies found in and beside the ZrSiO₄ interphase.     

高光谱成像用高帧频CMOS图像传感器北大核心

针对高帧频、全局曝光和光谱平坦等成像应用需求,设计了一款高光谱成像用CMOS图像传感器。其光敏元采用PN型光电二极管,读出电路采用5T像素结构。采用列读出电路以及高速多通道模拟信号并行读出的设计方案来获得低像素固定图像噪声(FPN)和非均匀性抑制。芯片采用ASMC 0.35μm三层金属两层多晶硅标准CMOS工艺流片,为了抑制光电二极管的光谱干涉效应,后续进行了光谱平坦化VAE特殊工艺,并对器件的光电性能进行了测试评估。电路测试结果符合理论设计预期,成像效果良好,像素具备积分可调和全局快门功能,最终实现的像素规模为512×256,像元尺寸为30μm×30μm,最大满阱电子为400 ke^(-),FPN小于0.2%,动态范围为72 dB,帧频为450 f/s,相邻10 nm波段范围内量子效率相差小于10%,可满足高光谱成像系统对CMOS成像器件的要求。     

基于改进残差特征蒸馏的轻量级超分辨率网络

基于深度学习的图像超分辨率算法通常采用递归的方式或参数共享的策略来减少网络参数，这将增加网络的深度，使得运行网络花费大量的时间，从而很难将模型部署到现实生活中。为了解决上述问题，本文设计一种轻量级超分辨率网络，对中间特征的关联性及重要性进行学习，且在重建部分结合高分辨率图像的特征信息。首先，引入层间注意力模块，通过考虑层与层之间的相关性，自适应地分配重要层次特征的权重。其次，使用增强重建模块提取高分辨率图像中更精细的特征信息，以此得到更加清晰的重建图片。通过大量的对比实验表明，本文设计的网络与其他轻量级模型相比，有更小的网络参数量，并且在重建精度和视觉效果上都有一定的提升。     

Oxidative characteristics and gel properties of porcine myofibrillar proteins affected by l-lysine and l-histidine in a dose-dependent manner at a low and high salt concentration

This study investigated the effects of l -lysine (Lys) and l -histidine (His) on the oxidative characteristics and gel properties of porcine myofibrillar proteins (MP). Results showed that Lys and His had a strong ferrous ion-chelating ability and hydroxyl radical-scavenging activity. Moreover, Lys and His inhibited the protein carbonyl formation and MP aggregation at 0.2 M and 0.6 M NaCl, respectively, in a dose-dependent manner. Furthermore, 2 and 4 mg mL⁻¹ Lys and His decreased the oxidation-induced loss of the tertiary structure of MP accompanied by the lower surface hydrophobicity. The water-holding capacity and gel strength of MP gels increased with increasing Lys and His concentrations due to more regular and lamellar structures with smaller and homogeneous pores at 0.6 M NaCl and more orderly crosslinking via fibrous filament at 0.2 M NaCl. In summary, Lys and His chelated the ferrous ions and scavenged hydroxyl radicals, decreased the oxidation-induced physicochemical changes, thus preventing oxidative damage during the formation of a three-dimensional gel network, which resulted in better gel quality.     

Experimental study on uplift behavior of shallow anchor plates in geogrid-reinforced soil

Geogrid reinforcement can significantly improve the uplift bearing capacity of anchor plates. However, the failure mechanism of anchor plates in reinforced soil and the contribution of geogrids need further investigation. This paper presents an experimental study on the anchor uplift behavior in geogrid-reinforced soil using particle image velocimetry (PIV) and the high-resolution optical frequency domain reflectometry (OFDR). A series of model tests were performed to identify the relationship between the failure mechanism and various factors, such as anchor embedment ratio, number of geogrid layers, and their location. The test results indicate that soil deformation and the uplift resistance of anchor plates are substantially influenced by anchor embedment ratio and location of geogrids, whereas the number of geogrid layers has limited influence. In reinforced soil, increasing the embedment ratio greatly improves the ultimate bearing capacities of anchor plates and affects the interlock between the soil and geogrids. As the embedment depth increases, the failure surfaces gradually change from a vertical slip surface to a bulb-shaped surface that is limited within the soil. The strain monitoring data shows that the deformations of geogrids are symmetrical, and the peak strains of geogrids can characterize the reinforcing effects.     

Accelerating BPC-PaCo through Visually Lossless Techniques

Fast image codecs are a current need in applications that deal with large amounts of images. Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) are suitable processors to speed up most kinds of algorithms, especially when they allow fine-grain parallelism. Bitplane Coding with Parallel Coefficient processing (BPC-PaCo) is a recently proposed algorithm for the core stage of wavelet-based image codecs tailored for the highly parallel architectures of GPUs. This algorithm provides complexity scalability to allow faster execution at the expense of coding efficiency. Its main drawback is that the speedup and loss in image quality is controlled only roughly, resulting in visible distortion at low and medium rates. This paper addresses this issue by integrating techniques of visually lossless coding into BPC-PaCo. The resulting method minimizes the visual distortion introduced in the compressed file, obtaining higher-quality images to a human observer. Experimental results also indicate 12% speedups with respect to BPC-PaCo.     

某福利院一起肠炎沙门菌食源性疾病的调查分析

目的 对某福利院一起肠炎沙门菌食源性疾病进行调查和溯源,为研究相关食源性疾病提供参考。方法采用流行病学、食品卫生学和脉冲场凝胶电泳(PFGE)同源性分析等方法,分析本次食源性疾病事件。结果 确认本次事件中病例23名,患病率5.65%(23/407)；现场采集病例肛拭子15份和厨房工作人员肛拭子3份、留样菜品3份、水果2份以及冰棒1份,其中从11份病例肛拭子中检出肠炎沙门菌,PFGE结果显示11株肠炎沙门菌的DNA条带图谱相似性为96.4%,聚类分析为同一型,结合流行病学调查,初步判断菌株来自同一克隆系。结论 综合流行病学、食品卫生学和实验室检测结果,确定为一起肠炎沙门菌引起的食源性疾病,福利院应加强对特殊人群的饮食安全管理,制定相应的食源性疾病突发事件应急处理预案,防止此类事故再发生。     

Quality assessment for color correction-based stitched images via bi-directional matching

With the deepening of social information, the panoramic image has drawn a significant interest of viewers and researchers as it can provide a very wide field of view (FoV). Since panoramic images are usually obtained by capturing images with the overlapping regions and then stitching them together, image stitching plays an important role in generating panoramic images. In order to effectively evaluate the quality of stitched images, a novel quality assessment method based on bi-directional matching is proposed for stitched images. Specifically, dense correspondences between the testing and benchmark stitched images are first established by bi-directional SIFT-flow matching. Then, color-aware, geometric-aware and structure-aware features are respectively extracted and fused via support vector regression (SVR) to obtain the final quality score. Experiments on our newly constructed database and ISIQA database demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve comparable performance compared with the conventional blind quality metrics and the quality metrics specially designed for stitched images.