Sketched symbol recognition with auto-completion

Sketching is a natural mode of communication that can be used to support communication among humans. Recently there has been a growing interest in sketch recognition technologies for facilitating human–computer interaction in a variety of settings, including design, art, and teaching. Automatic sketch recognition is a challenging problem due to the variability in hand drawings, the variation in the order of strokes, and the similarity of symbol classes. In this paper, we focus on a more difficult task, namely the task of classifying sketched symbols before they are fully completed. There are two main challenges in recognizing partially drawn symbols. The first is deciding when a partial drawing contains sufficient information for recognizing it unambiguously among other visually similar classes in the domain. The second challenge is classifying the partial drawings correctly with this partial information. We describe a sketch auto-completion framework that addresses these challenges by learning visual appearances of partial drawings through semi-supervised clustering, followed by a supervised classification step that determines object classes. Our evaluation results show that, despite the inherent ambiguity in classifying partially drawn symbols, we achieve promising auto-completion accuracies for partial drawings. Furthermore, our results for full symbols match/surpass existing methods on full object recognition accuracies reported in the literature. Finally, our design allows real-time symbol classification, making our system applicable in real world applications.     

Degradation of organophosphorus pesticides in wheat during cookie processing

For investigating carryover of some organophosphorus pesticide residues in the cereal food chain from grain to consumer, a study was set up on wheat bran, flour and cookies, with and without bran. Special emphasis was given to malathion and chlorpyrifos-methyl residues in cookies for better protection of consumers. Pesticide-free wheat was placed in a small-scale model of a commercial storage vessel and treated with these pesticides. The residue levels of insecticides were determined in wheat, as well as in bran, flour and cookies produced from stored wheat at various time intervals during storage. A multiresidue analysis was performed using GC–NPD and GC–MS. Malathion and chlorpyrifos-methyl residue levels were higher than the maximum residue limits (MRLs) in wheat after 240 days of storage. MRLs established by the EC for malathion and chlorpyrifos-methyl in wheat are 8 and 3 mg kg⁻¹, respectively. The residue levels of insecticides in flour samples also exceeded the MRL (2 mg kg⁻¹ for both insecticides). Eight months of storage were not effective for reducing the residues in wheat to the levels below MRLs. Although, considerable amounts of the insecticides remained in the bran and flour, the cookie processing significantly reduced the concentrations in general. Chlorpyrifos-methyl was more persistent than was malathion and comparatively less degradation occurred during milling and cookie processing due to its physicochemical properties.     

Antiviral activity and cytotoxicity of the lipophilic extracts of various edible plants and their fatty acids

The lipophilic extracts of a number of edible plants, including Anthemis tinctoria var. tinctoria, A. austriaca, Carduus acanthoides, C. nutans, Cirsium hypoleucum, Cynara scolymus (Asteraceae), Silene vulgaris (Caryophyllaceae), Ajuga chamaepitys ssp. chia var. ciliata (Lamiaceae), Lappula barbata (Boraginaceae), Rumex obtusifolius ssp. subalpinus (Polygonaceae), Digitalis lamarckii (Scrophulariaceae), and Sedum hispanicum (Crassulaceae) were tested against DNA virus Herpes simplex (HSV) and RNA virus Parainfluenza (PI-3) using Madin-Darby bovine kidney and Vero cell lines, and also analysed by capillary gas chromatography–mass spectrometry (GC–MS). Most of the extracts exerted quite appreciable antiviral effect against both viruses, as compared to acyclovir and oseltamivir. Cytotoxicity of the extracts was also determined as maximum non-toxic concentrations (MNTCs). Most of the extracts were found to be rich in saturated fatty acids. No correlation was found between antiviral activity and fatty acid contents of the extracts.