Learning to Caricature via Semantic Shape Transform

International Journal of Computer Vision - Caricature is an artistic drawing created to abstract or exaggerate facial features of a person. Rendering visually pleasing caricatures is a difficult...     

Study on related simulations between exit characteristics and evacuation performance

Microsystem Technologies - During a building disaster, building occupants typically engage in herd behavior, which results in friction, pushing, and even injury and death. Building occupants...     

Chemical stability and electrical and mechanical properties of BaZrxCe0.8-xY0.2O3 with CeO2 protection method

This study investigated the decline in the conductivity and mechanical strength after CO₂ poisoning and found a new protective method for BaZr_xCe_0.8-xY_0.2O₃ proton-conducting electrolyte. The high temperature solid state reaction (SSR) was used in synthesizing electrolyte to naturally generate CeO₂ on the surface. A comparison of the oxides in the conductivity decline test revealed that the sample with CeO₂ on the surface substantially improved the stability of conductivity, reducing the decline ratio from 56% to 7% for BCY electrolyte and 50% to 7% for BCZY sample. Raman mapping results indicate the naturally generated CeO₂ on electrolyte surface can considerably reduce impurity formation and maintain the microstructure of electrolyte. This work demonstrates that samples with CeO₂ on the surface effectively protect the BaCeO₃-based proton-conducting electrolyte from CO₂ poisoning. This method may be applied to similar BaCeO₃-based perovskite materials as a new protective method.     

The effect of alumina/water nanofluid particle size on thermal conductivity

This study examines the effect of particle size, temperature, and weight fraction on the thermal conductivity ratio of alumina(Al₂O₃)/water nanofluids. A Al₂O₃/water nanofluid produced by the direct synthesis method served as the experimental sample, and nanoparticles, each of a different nominal diameter (20, 50, and 100 nm), were dispersed into four different concentrations (0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 wt%). This experiment measured the thermal conductivity of nanofluids with different particle sizes, weight fractions, and working temperatures (10, 30, 50 °C). The results showed a correlation between high thermal conductivity ratios and enhanced sensitivity, and small nanoparticle size and higher temperature. This research utilized experimental data to construct a new empirical equation, taking the nanoparticle size, temperature, and lower weight fraction of the nanofluid into consideration. Comparing the regression results with the experimental values, the margin of error was within ?3.5% to +2.7%. The proposed empirical equation showed reasonably good agreement with our experimental results.     

Smooth Control of Adaptive Media Playout for Video Streaming

Client-side data buffering is a common technique to deal with media playout interruptions of streaming video caused by network jitters and packet losses of best-effort networks. However, stronger playout interruption protection inevitably amounts to larger data buffering and results in more memory requirements and longer playout delay. Adaptive media playout (AMP), also a client-side technique, can reduce the buffer requirement and avoid buffer outage but at the expense of visual quality degradation because of the fluctuation of playout speed. In this paper, we propose a novel AMP scheme to keep the video playout as smooth as possible while adapting to the channel condition. The triggering of the playout control is based on buffer variation rather than buffer fullness. Experimental results show that our AMP scheme surpasses conventional schemes in unfriendly network conditions. Unlike previous schemes that are tuned for a specific range of packet loss and network instability, the proposed AMP scheme maintains consistent performance across a wide range of network conditions.     

Cross-layer-based adaptive TCP algorithm for cloud computing services in 4G LTE-A relaying communication

Cloud computing provides various diverse services for users accessing big data through high data rate cellular networks, e.g., LTE-A, IEEE 802.11ac, etc. Although LTE-A supports very high data rate, multi-hop relaying, and cooperative transmission, LTE-A suffers from high interference, path loss, high mobility, etc. Additionally, the accesses of cloud computing services need the transport layer protocols (e.g., TCP, UDP, and streaming) for achieving end-to-end transmissions. Clearly, the transmission QoS is significantly degraded when the big data transmissions are done through the TCP protocol over a high interference LTE-A environment. The issue of providing high data rate and high reliability transmissions in cloud computing needs to be addressed completely. Thus, this paper proposes a cross-layer-based adaptive TCP algorithm to gather the LTE-A network states (e.g., AMC, CQI, relay link state, available bandwidth, etc.), and then feeds the state information back to the TCP sender for accurately executing the network congestion control of TCP. As a result, by using the accurate TCP congestion window (cwnd) under a high interference LTE-A, the number of timeouts and packet losses are significantly decreased. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms the compared approaches in goodput and fairness, especially in high interference environment. Especially, the goodput of the proposed approach is 139.42 % higher than that of NewReno when the wireless loss increases up to 4 %. Furthermore, the throughput and the response functions are mathematically analyzed. The analysis results can justify the claims of the proposed approach.     

Four-scanning attack on hierarchical digital watermarking method for image tamper detection and recovery

In a recent paper presented by Lin et al., a block-based hierarchical watermarking algorithm for digital images is proposed. It adopts parity check and the intensity-relation check to conduct the experiment of image tamper detection. Their experimental results indicate that the precision of tamper detection and localization is 99.6% and 100% after level-2 and level-3 inspections, respectively. The proposed attacks demonstrate that this watermarking algorithm is fundamentally flawed in that the attacker can tamper a watermarked image easily without being detected. In this paper, a four-scanning attack aimed to Lin et al.'s watermarking method is presented to create tampered images. Furthermore, in case they use encryption to protect their 3-tuple-watermark, we proposed a blind attack to tamper watermarked images without being detected. Experimental results are given to support and enhance our conclusions, and demonstrate that our attacks are successful in tampering watermarked images.     

A Regression Approach to Music Emotion Recognition

Content-based retrieval has emerged in the face of content explosion as a promising approach to information access. In this paper, we focus on the challenging issue of recognizing the emotion content of music signals, or music emotion recognition (MER). Specifically, we formulate MER as a regression problem to predict the arousal and valence values (AV values) of each music sample directly. Associated with the AV values, each music sample becomes a point in the arousal-valence plane, so the users can efficiently retrieve the music sample by specifying a desired point in the emotion plane. Because no categorical taxonomy is used, the regression approach is free of the ambiguity inherent to conventional categorical approaches. To improve the performance, we apply principal component analysis to reduce the correlation between arousal and valence, and RReliefF to select important features. An extensive performance study is conducted to evaluate the accuracy of the regression approach for predicting AV values. The best performance evaluated in terms of the R ² statistics reaches 58.3% for arousal and 28.1% for valence by employing support vector machine as the regressor. We also apply the regression approach to detect the emotion variation within a music selection and find the prediction accuracy superior to existing works. A group-wise MER scheme is also developed to address the subjectivity issue of emotion perception.     

Preparation and characterization of mesoporous bioactive glass/polycaprolactone nanofibrous matrix for bone tissues engineering

A polycaprolactone (PCL) nanofibrous composite matrix having mesoporous bioactive glass nanoparticles (MBG) was fabricated using the electrospinning method, and the microstructural, physical and biological properties of the composite matrix were characterized. The fiber diameters of PCL, 5?% MBG/PCL (5?M-PCL) and 10?% MBG/PCL (10?M-PCL) were 575?±?162?nm, 312?±?134?nm and 321?±?144?nm, respectively. The bioactivity of the composite matrix was evaluated by soaking the matrix in 1.5× simulated body fluid; the MBG/PCL matrix showed a better biomineralization capability than did the PCL matrix. The biological performance of the PCL and the MBG/PCL were evaluated using an in vitro culture of MG63 osteoblast-like cells. We found that the cell attachment and proliferation rates were significantly higher on the 10?M-PCL than on the PCL. Moreover, the expression of several genes, including ANX-V, type I collagen and OCN, ALP activity, the deposition of calcium, and the BSP protein, were also significantly higher on 10?M-PCL than PCL. These results indicated that MBG/PCL has the ability to support cell attachment, growth, and differentiation and can also yield high bioactivity. Therefore, MBG/PCL could be potentially applied in bone implants.     

Enhancing the performance of dye-sensitized solar cells by incorporating nanosilicate platelets in gel electrolyte

Two kinds of gel-type dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs), composed of two types of electrolytes, were constructed and the respective cell performance was evaluated in this study. One electrolyte, TEOS-Triton X-100 gel, was based on a hybrid organic/inorganic gel electrolyte made by the sol–gel method and the other was based on poly(vinyidene fluoride-co-hexafluoro propylene) (PVDF-HFP) copolymer. TEOS-Triton X-100 gel was based on the reticulate structure of silica, formed by hydrolysis, and condensation of tetraethoxysilane (TEOS), while its organic subphase was a mixture of surfactant (Triton X-100) and ionic liquid electrolytes. Both DSSC gel-type electrolytes were composed of iodine, 1-propy-3-methyl-imidazolium iodide, and 3-methoxypropionitrile to create the redox couple of I₃⁻/I⁻. Based on the results obtained from the I–V characteristics, it was found that the optimal iodine concentrations for the TEOS-Triton X-100 gel electrolyte and PVDF-HFP gel electrolyte are 0.05 M and 0.1 M, respectively. Although the increase in the iodine concentration could enhance the short-circuit current density (J_SC), a further increase in the iodine concentration would reduce the J_SC due to increased dark current. Therefore, the concentration of I₂ is a significant factor in determining the performance of DSSCs.In order to enhance cell performance, the addition of nanosilicate platelets (NSPs) in the above-mentioned gel electrolytes was investigated. By incorporating NSP-Triton X-100 into the electrolytes, the J_SC of the cells increased due to the decrease of diffusion resistance, while the open circuit voltage (V_OC) remained almost the same. As the loading of the NSP-Triton X-100 in the TEOS-Triton X-100 gel electrolyte increased to 0.5 wt%, the J_SC and the conversion efficiency increased from 8.5 to 12 mA/cm² and from 3.6% to 4.7%, respectively. However, the J_SC decreased as the loading of NSP-Triton X-100 exceeded 0.5 wt%. At higher NSP-Triton X-100 loading, NSPs acted as a barrier interface between the electrolyte and the dye molecules, hindering electron transfer, hence, reducing the cell's photocurrent density. The same behavior was also observed in the PVDF-HFP gel electrolyte DSSC system.