Yuehu Liu

Low-power and high-speed VLSI architecture for lifting-based forward and inverse wavelet transform

A low-power, high-speed architecture which performs two-dimension forward and inverse discrete wavelet transform (DWT) for the set of filters in JPEG2000 is proposed by using a line-based and lifting scheme. It consists of one row processor and one column processor each of which contains four sub-filters. And the row processor which is time-multiplexed performs in parallel with the column processor. Optimized shift-add operations are substituted for multiplications, and edge extension is implemented by an embedded circuit. The whole architecture which is optimized in the pipeline design way to speed up and achieve higher hardware utilization has been demonstrated in FPGA. Two pixels per clock cycle can be encoded at 100 MHz. The architecture can he used as a compact and independent IP core for JPEG2000 VLSI implementation and various real-time image/video applications.

Multi-target tracking by learning local-to-global trajectory models

The multi-target tracking problem is challenging when there exist occlusions, tracking failures of the detector and severe interferences between detections. In this paper, we propose a novel detection based tracking method that links detections into tracklets and further forms long trajectories. Unlike many previous hierarchical frameworks which split the data association into two separate optimization problems (linking detections locally and linking tracklets globally), we introduce a unified algorithm that can automatically relearn the trajectory models from the local and global information for finding the joint optimal assignment. In each temporal window, the trajectory models are initialized by the local information to link those easy-to-connect detections into a set of tracklets. Then the trajectory models are updated by the reliable tracklets and reused to link separated tracklets into long trajectories. We iteratively update the trajectory models by more information from more frames until the result converges. The iterative process gradually improves the accuracy of the trajectory models, which in turn improves the target ID inferences for all detections by the MRF model. Experiment results revealed that our proposed method achieved state-of-the-art multi-target tracking performance. HighlightsA unified framework to online learn local-to-global trajectory models is proposed.The iterative algorithm can alternately update the trajectory models.We solve inferences of target IDs for all the detections by using the MRF model.Our method has low complexity compared with most state-of-the-art methods.

Antimicrobial susceptibility of Staphylococcus aureus isolated from children with impetigo in China from 2003 to 2007 shows community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus to be uncommon and heterogeneous

Background  The number of patients with impetigo caused by community‐associated methicillin‐resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA‐MRSA) has been increasing.

Fast communication: Hybrid constraint SVR for facial age estimation

In this paper, facial age estimation is discussed in a novel viewpoint - how to jointly exploit the supervised training data and human annotations to improve the age estimation precision. This is motivated by the lacking of data problem in age estimation and the current web booming. To do so, fuzzy age label is firstly defined, and it is then merged into the Support Vector Regression (SVR) framework together with the traditional data labels. The new learning problem is finally formulated into a similar dual form with the standard SVR, which can be easily solved using existing solvers. In experiments, we have compared with the state of the art regression based methods, and the results are very competitive.

Robust iterative closest point algorithm for registration of point sets with outliers

The problem of registering point sets with outliers including noises and missing data is discussed in this paper. To solve this problem, a novel objective function is proposed by introducing an overlapping percentage for partial registration. Moreover, a novel robust iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm is proposed which can compute rigid transformation, correspondence, and overlapping percentage automatically at each iterative step. This new algorithm uses as many point pairs as possible to yield a more reliable and accurate registration result between two m-D point sets with outliers. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm is more robust than the traditional ICP and the state-of-the-art algorithms.

Detecting multilingual text in natural scene

In this paper, a multilingual text detection method is proposed, which focus on finding all of the text regions in natural scene regardless of their language type. According to rules of writing system, three different texture features are selected to describe the multilingual text: histogram of oriented gradient (HOG), mean of gradients (MG) and local binary patterns (LBP). Finally, cascade AdaBoost classifier is adopted to combine the influence of different features to decide the text regions. Experiments conducted on the public English dataset and the multilingual text dataset show that the proposed method is encouraging.

Two frameshift mutations of the double-stranded RNA-specific adenosine deaminase gene in Chinese pedigrees with dyschromatosis symmetrica hereditaria

Dyschromatosis symmetrica hereditaria (DSH) (also called ‘reticulate acropigmentation of Dohi’ or ‘symmetric dyschromatosis of the extremities’) (MIM 127400) is characterized by a mixture of hyperpigmented and hypopigmented macules and is localized on the back of the hands and feet. Many patients with DSH also have small freckle-like pigmented macules on their faces. The lesions usually appear in infancy or early childhood, commonly stop spreading before adolescence, and last for life. DSH has been reported mainly in Japan, but a similar condition has been reported among Chinese; about 34 pedigrees including 227 cases and two sporadic cases from China have been reported since 1980. Several cases of DSH have been reported among Koreans, Indians, Europeans and South Americans. No racial difference in the condition has been observed, but the disorder might be distributed mainly in East Asia. The DSH locus has been mapped to chromosome 1q21 and then, in 2003, pathogenic mutations were identified in the double-stranded RNA-specific adenosine deaminase (DSRAD) gene. DSRAD spans 30 kb and contains 15 exons. It encodes RNA-specific adenosine deaminase composed of 1226 amino acid residues, with a calculated molecular mass of 139 kDa. In this study, we performed mutation detection of the DSRAD gene in two typical Chinese families with DSH in which two heterozygous mutations were identified.

Parameter analysis of fractal image compression and its applications in image sharpening and smoothing

In recent years, numerous fractal image compression (FIC) schemes and their applications in image processing have been proposed. However, traditional FIC ignores the importance of affine parameters in the iterated function system (IFS) and affine parameters are kept invariant for a certain image in almost all of these schemes. By analyzing fractal compression technology in this paper, we show that the affine parameters in IFS can vary with different image quality measurements. A positive correlation exists between the image contrast of fractal decoded image and affine scalar multiplier. This strong correlation demonstrates that an image can be sharpened or smoothed using fractal compression technology.

A new hybrid method to detect text in natural scene

In this paper, a new hybrid method for text detection in natural scene is proposed. According the linguistics rules, this algorithm mainly consists of three parts. First, considering both unary property and binary relationship, the conditional random field (CRF) model is introduced for text region detection. Second, connected components (CCs) are extracted by similar stroke width, and filtered coarsely by stroke width analysis. Candidate CCs are then filtered by candidate regions. Finally, text CCs are clustered into words by geometry heuristics. Experiments on the public benchmark ICDAR 2003 dataset show that proposed algorithm can detect text with various font sizes in natural scene.

Zinc finger protein A20 is involved in the antipsoriatic effect of calcipotriol.

Calcipotriol ameliorates psoriasis through inducing keratinocyte apoptosis and inhibiting nuclear factor kappa B (NF‐κB) activation, while zinc finger protein A20 exhibits an anti‐apoptotic effect on various types of cells.