This paper proposes a new super-resolution (SR) scheme for landmark images by retrieving correlated web images. Using correlated web images significantly improves the exemplar-based SR. Given a ...low-resolution (LR) image, we extract local descriptors from its up-sampled version and bundle the descriptors according to their spatial relationship to retrieve correlated high-resolution (HR) images from the web. Though similar in content, the retrieved images are usually taken with different illumination, focal lengths, and shot perspectives, resulting in uncertainty for the HR detail approximation. To solve this problem, we first propose aligning these images to the up-sampled LR image through a global registration, which identifies the corresponding regions in these images and reduces the mismatching. Second, we propose a structure-aware matching criterion and adaptive block sizes to improve the mapping accuracy between LR and HR patches. Finally, these matched HR patches are blended together by solving an energy minimization problem to recover the desired HR image. Experimental results demonstrate that our SR scheme achieves significant improvement compared with four state-of-the-art schemes in terms of both subjective and objective qualities.
Microglial activation is a prominent feature of neuroinflammation, which is present in almost all neurodegenerative diseases. While an initial inflammatory response mediated by microglia is ...considered to be protective, excessive pro-inflammatory response of microglia contributes to the pathogenesis of neurodegeneration. Although autophagy is involved in the suppression of inflammation, its role and mechanism in microglia are unclear.
In the present study, we studied the mechanism by which lipopolysaccharide (LPS) affects microglial autophagy and the effects of autophagy on the production of pro-inflammatory factors in microglial cells by western blotting, immunocytochemistry, transfection, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and real-time PCR. In a mouse model of neuroinflammation, generated by intraventricular injection of LPS (5 μg/animal), we induced autophagy by rapamycin injection and investigated the effects of enhanced autophagy on microglial activation by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) and immunohistochemistry.
We found that autophagic flux was suppressed in LPS-stimulated N9 microglial cells, as evidenced by decreased expression of the autophagy marker LC3-II (lipidated form of MAP1LC3), as well as increased levels of the autophagy adaptor protein SQSTM1. LPS significantly decreased Vps34 expression in N9 microglial cells by activating the PI3KI/AKT/MTOR pathway without affecting the levels of lysosome-associated proteins and enzymes. More importantly, overexpression of Vps34 significantly enhanced the autophagic flux and decreased the accumulation of SQSTM1 in LPS-stimulated N9 microglial cells. Moreover, our results revealed that an LPS-induced reduction in the level of Vps34 prevented the maturation of omegasomes to phagophores. Furthermore, LPS-induced neuroinflammation was significantly ameliorated by treatment with the autophagy inducer rapamycin both in vitro and in vivo.
These data reveal that LPS-induced neuroinflammation in N9 microglial cells is associated with the inhibition of autophagic flux through the activation of the PI3KI/AKT/MTOR pathway, while enhanced microglial autophagy downregulates LPS-induced neuroinflammation. Thus, this study suggests that promoting the early stages of autophagy might be a potential therapeutic approach for neuroinflammation-associated diseases.
In a wireless charging system, non-alignment has been a big problem that affects the transmission efficiency. The uniform magnetic field can ensure the charging power stability and extension of ...battery life in a multi-load wireless charging system, which also expands the free charging area of the loads. In this article, the array circular coils of wireless power transfer (WPT) with a compensation structure have been proposed, which can be obtained by analyzing the magnetic field trajectory of the elementary unit of the array coils. Larger scale of the uniform magnetic field could be expended by the joint of several elementary units. The correctness and validity of the structure are verified by theoretical derivation and finite element simulation. Besides, the compensation method could be used for any forms of array coils.
Abstract
Aiming at the complexity and uncertainty of large-scale system requirements, this paper introduces the concept of ontology, through the requirement ontology model, the system requirements ...are formed into a unified modular unit, and each modular unit has a structured logical relationship. Finally, the structured and modularized requirement model will form a complete requirement management platform in the DOORS tool, which will realize the basis of civil aircraft requirement management and improve the capability and efficiency of civil aircraft product design.
Current image coding schemes make it hard to utilize external images for compression even if highly correlated images can be found in the cloud. To solve this problem, we propose a method of ...cloud-based image coding that is different from current image coding even on the ground. It no longer compresses images pixel by pixel and instead tries to describe images and reconstruct them from a large-scale image database via the descriptions. First, we describe an input image based on its down-sampled version and local feature descriptors. The descriptors are used to retrieve highly correlated images in the cloud and identify corresponding patches. The down-sampled image serves as a target to stitch retrieved image patches together. Second, the down-sampled image is compressed using current image coding. The feature vectors of local descriptors are predicted by the corresponding vectors extracted in the decoded down-sampled image. The predicted residual vectors are compressed by transform, quantization, and entropy coding. The experimental results show that the visual quality of reconstructed images is significantly better than that of intra-frame coding in HEVC and JPEG at thousands to one compression .
This paper proposes a depth super-resolution method with both transform and spatial domain regularization. In the transform domain regularization, nonlocal correlations are exploited via an ...auto-regressive model, where each patch is further sparsified with a locally-trained transform to consider intra-patch correlations. In the spatial domain regularization, we propose a multi-directional total variation (MTV) prior to characterize the geometrical structures spatially orientated at arbitrary directions in depth maps. To achieve adaptive regularization, the MTV is weighted for each directional finite difference considering local characteristics of RGB-D data. We develop an accelerated proximal gradient algorithm to solve the proposed model. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations compared with state-of-the-art methods demonstrate that the proposed method achieves superior depth super-resolution performance for various configurations of magnification factors and datasets.
Separation of video clips into foreground and background components is a useful and important technique, making recognition, classification, and scene analysis more efficient. In this paper, we ...propose a motion-assisted matrix restoration (MAMR) model for foreground-background separation in video clips. In the proposed MAMR model, the backgrounds across frames are modeled by a low-rank matrix, while the foreground objects are modeled by a sparse matrix. To facilitate efficient foreground-background separation, a dense motion field is estimated for each frame, and mapped into a weighting matrix which indicates the likelihood that each pixel belongs to the background. Anchor frames are selected in the dense motion estimation to overcome the difficulty of detecting slowly moving objects and camouflages. In addition, we extend our model to a robust MAMR model against noise for practical applications. Evaluations on challenging datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms many other state-of-the-art methods, and is versatile for a wide range of surveillance videos.
Aconiti Lateralis Radix Praeparata (Chinese name: Fuzi), the root of Aconitum carmichaelii Debx., is a representative medicine for restoring yang and rescuing patient from collapse. However, less ...studies had been reported on the reproductive toxicity and genotoxicity of Fuzi. According to the principle of reducing toxicity and preserving efficiency, only processed products of Fuzi are commonly applied in clinic, including Baifupian, Heishunpian and Danfupian. However, whether processing could alleviate the reproductive toxicity and genotoxicity of Fuzi had not been revealed.
To assess the effect and possible mechanism of Fuzi and its processed products on reproductive toxicity and genotoxicity in male mice.
Aqueous extracts of Fuzi and its processed products (Baifupian, Heishunpian and Danfupian, 5.85 g/kg) were administrated by gavage once daily for fourteen consecutive days. The reproductive toxicity was evaluated by testis weight, testis ratio, testis histopathology, sperm count, sperm viability rate and sperm deformity rate. The genotoxicity was evaluated by comet assay and micronucleus test in sperm, peripheral blood cell and bone marrow cell. Possible mechanisms of attenuating toxicity by processing were analyzed by detecting the level of testosterone, superoxide dismutase (SOD), glutathione (GSH), malondialdehyde (MDA) and catalase (CAT).
Fuzi significantly caused different degrees of reproductive toxicity and genotoxicity, specifically reducing the weight and testicular coefficient of testis, causing obvious pathological changes in testicular tissue, reducing sperm count and sperm viability rate, increasing sperm deformity rate and DNA damage in sperm/peripheral blood cells/bone marrow cells. Moreover, Fuzi decreased the level of testosterone, SOD, GSH and CAT, while increased the level of MDA in serum. Notably, the reproductive toxicity and genotoxicity induced by the processed products, especially Heishunpian and Danfupian, were significantly lowered compared to Fuzi. Processing could increase the level of testosterone, SOD, GSH, CAT and decrease the level of MDA compared to Fuzi.
Fuzi and its processed products had reproductive toxicity and genotoxicity, but the toxicity of processed products was significantly weakened compared to Fuzi. The protective mechanism of processing to reduce the toxicity of Fuzi might be related to increasing the level of testosterone and decreasing oxidative stress.
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•Fuzi and its processed products had reproductive toxicity and genotoxicity.•The toxicity of processed products was significantly weakened compared to Fuzi.•The protective mechanism of processing might be related to increasing level of testosterone and decreasing oxidative stress.
In this study, the hepatoprotective effects of apple polyphenols (AP, Appjfnol) against CCl4-induced acute liver damage in Kunming mice as well as the possible mechanisms were investigated. Mice were ...treated with AP (200, 400, and 800 mg/kg, ig) for seven consecutive days prior to the administration of CCl4 (0.1%, intraperitoneally). The serum levels of alanine aminotransferase (ALT) and aspartate aminotransferase (AST), the malondialdehyde (MDA), superoxide dismutase (SOD), and reduced glutathione (GSH) concentrations in the hepatic homogenate, and histopathological changes in mouse liver sections were determined. Levels of ferrous sulfate-l-cysteine (FeSO4-l-Cys)-induced lipid peroxidation and 1,1-diphenyl-2-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) were also determined in vitro. AP significantly prevented the increase in serum ALT and AST levels in acute liver injury induced by CCl4 and produced a marked amelioration in the histopathological hepatic lesions coupled to weight loss. The extent of MDA formation was reduced; the SOD activity was enhanced, and the GSH concentration was increased in the hepatic homogenate in AP-treated groups compared with the CCl4-intoxicated group. AP also exhibited antioxidant effects on FeSO4-l-Cys-induced lipid peroxidation in rat liver homogenate and DPPH free radical scavenging activity in vitro. These results indicate that AP has a significant protective effect against acute hepatotoxicity induced by CCl4 in mice, which may be due to its free radical scavenging effect, inhibition of lipid peroxidation, and its ability to increase antioxidant activity.
Most tensor completion methods assume that missing entries are randomly distributed in incomplete tensors, and the low-rank prior or its variants are used to well pose the problem. However, this ...could be violated in practical applications where missing entries are not only randomly but also structurally distributed. To remedy this, this paper proposes a novel tensor completion method equipped with double priors on the latent tensor, named tensor completion from structurally-missing entries by low tensor train (TT) rankness and fiber-wise sparsity. In the proposed model, the underlying tensor is regularized by a low-TT-rankness prior to exploit the inter-fibers/-slices correlations, and its fibers are regularized by a sparsity prior under dictionaries to exploit intra-fibers correlations. The proposed model is solved by an alternating direction method under the augmented Lagrangian multiplier framework. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model in completing tensors with both random and structural missing entries, compared with state-of-the-art tensor completion approaches.
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