Convnets have enabled significant progress in pedestrian detection recently, but there are still open questions regarding suitable architectures and training data. We revisit CNN design and point out ...key adaptations, enabling plain FasterRCNN to obtain state-of-the-art results on the Caltech dataset. To achieve further improvement from more and better data, we introduce CityPersons, a new set of person annotations on top of the Cityscapes dataset. The diversity of CityPersons allows us for the first time to train one single CNN model that generalizes well over multiple benchmarks. Moreover, with additional training with CityPersons, we obtain top results using FasterRCNN on Caltech, improving especially for more difficult cases (heavy occlusion and small scale) and providing higher localization quality.
While the presence of microplastics (MPs) in marine environments has been detected worldwide, the importance of MPs pollution in freshwater environments has also been emphasized in recent years. ...However, the body of knowledge regarding the biological effects of MPs on freshwater organisms is still much more limited than on marine organisms. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the accumulation and tissue distribution of MPs in the freshwater fish red tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus), as well as the biochemical effects of MPs on O. niloticus. During 14 days of exposure to 0.1 μm polystyrene-MPs at concentrations of 1, 10, and 100 μg L−1, the MPs concentrations in various tissues of O. niloticus generally increased over time following the order gut > gills > liver ≈ brain. Moreover, the acetylcholinesterase (AChE) activity in the fish brain was inhibited by MPs exposure, with a maximum inhibition rate of 37.7%, suggesting the potential neurotoxicity of MPs to freshwater fish. The activities of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes 7-ethoxyresorufin O-deethylase (EROD) and 7-benzyloxy-4-trifluoromethyl-coumarin O-dibenzyloxylase (BFCOD) in the fish liver exhibited clear temporal variabilities, with significant decreases followed by elevations compared to the control. The alterations of the EROD and BFCOD activities indicate the potential involvement of CYP enzymes for the metabolism of MPs. The activity of antioxidative enzyme superoxide dismutase (SOD) in the liver was significantly induced throughout the exposure period, while the malondialdehyde (MDA) content did not vary with MPs exposure, suggesting that the antioxidative enzymatic system in O. niloticus could prevent oxidative damage. These results highlight the ingestion and accumulation of MPs in different tissues of freshwater fish, which lead to perturbations in fish biological systems and should be considered in environmental risk assessment.
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•The accumulation level of PS-MPs followed the order gut > gills > liver ≈ brain.•Exposure to PS-MPs inhibited AChE activity in the brain of red tilapia.•Exposure to PS-MPs disturbed metabolism in the liver of red tilapia.•Antioxidant systems in red tilapia can cope with oxidative stress from PS-MPs.
Exposure to polystyrene-microplastics can result in obvious accumulation in red tilapia and provoke alterations in various biochemical endpoints.
Filtered channel features for pedestrian detection Shanshan Zhang; Benenson, Rodrigo; Schiele, Bernt
2015 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR),
06/2015
Conference Proceeding
This paper starts from the observation that multiple top performing pedestrian detectors can be modelled by using an intermediate layer filtering low-level features in combination with a boosted ...decision forest. Based on this observation we propose a unifying framework and experimentally explore different filter families. We report extensive results enabling a systematic analysis. Using filtered channel features we obtain top performance on the challenging Caltech and KITTI datasets, while using only HOG+LUV as low-level features. When adding optical flow features we further improve detection quality and report the best known results on the Caltech dataset, reaching 93% recall at 1 FPPI.
There are hundreds of thousands metric tons of microplastics (MPs) present in aquatic environments. The MPs coexist with other pollutants in water bodies, such as pharmaceuticals, and may carry and ...transfer them into aquatic organisms, consequently causing unpredictable ecological risks. The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the effect of the presence of polystyrene microplastics (PS-MPs) on the distribution and bioaccumulation of roxithromycin (ROX) in freshwater fish red tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) as well as their interactive biochemical effects in red tilapia. PS-MPs were found to enhance the bioaccumulation of ROX in fish tissues compared to ROX-alone exposure. In the treatment of PS-MPs (100 μg L−1) combined with ROX (50 μg L−1), the highest concentrations of ROX reached 39,672.9 ± 6311.4, 1767.9 ± 277.8, 2907.5 ± 225.0, and 4307.1 ± 186.5 μg kg−1 in gut, gills, brain, and liver, respectively. Furthermore, compared to the ROX alone, the neurotoxicity caused by ROX was alleviated due to the presence of MPs after 14 d of exposure. The activities of cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes 7-ethoxyresorufin O-deethylase (EROD) and 7-benzyloxy-4-trifluoromethyl-coumarin O-dibenzyloxylase (BFCOD) in fish livers exposed to all co-exposure treatments exhibited great variability compared to ROX alone after 14 d of exposure, suggesting that the presence of MPs may affect the metabolism of ROX in tilapia. Compared with ROX alone, the superoxide dismutase (SOD) activity increased significantly, and malondialdehyde (MDA) contents decreased in the co-exposure treatments, showing that oxidative damage in situations of co-exposure to MPs and ROX was mitigated in fish livers after 14 d of exposure. Collectively, the presence of MPs could affect the fate and toxicity of other organic pollutants in fish. The results emphasize the importance to study the interactions between MPs and other organic pollutants in aquatic environments.
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•Interactive effects of microplastics and roxithromycin on fish were studied.•PS-MPs could enhance ROX bioaccumulation in red tilapia.•PS-MPs could mitigate the neurotoxicity and oxidative damage caused by ROX.•The presence of PS-MPs could affect the metabolism of ROX.
New technology is altering business strategies and innovation capabilities while increasing the possibilities of production and process innovation. Supply chain collaboration undertaken for the sake ...of sustainability is currently speeding up this process of change; a growing pool of research is exploring the links between sustainability collaboration and company performance on economic, environmental, and social metrics. It is a good time to review the literature to reveal what has been studied and what are the gaps in the current body of knowledge, and also to comment on what the future research agenda should include. For these purposes, the authors conducted a systematic literature review and a quantitative bibliometric analysis. Results indicate that research about supply chain collaboration for the purpose of sustainability is gaining growing attention in the business field; however, environmental and economic considerations still dominate the research, while there is a lack of consideration about social concerns such as child labor and personal development. In addition, the collaboration partners under investigation have mainly been the company and its customers and suppliers, whereas competitors and other horizontal collaboration partners have received little attention.
Encouraged by the recent progress in pedestrian detection, we investigate the gap between current state-of-the-art methods and the "perfect single frame detector". We enable our analysis by creating ...a human baseline for pedestrian detection (over the Caltech pedestrian dataset). After manually clustering the frequent errors of a top detector, we characterise both localisation and background-versus-foreground errors. To address localisation errors we study the impact of training annotation noise on the detector performance, and show that we can improve results even with a small portion of sanitised training data. To address background/foreground discrimination, we study convnets for pedestrian detection, and discuss which factors affect their performance. Other than our in-depth analysis, we report top performance on the Caltech pedestrian dataset, and provide a new sanitised set of training and test annotations.
As important oxygenic photoautotrophs, cyanobacteria are also generally considered as one of the most promising microbial chassis for photosynthetic biomanufacturing. Diverse synthetic biology and ...metabolic engineering approaches have been developed to enable the efficient harnessing of carbon and energy flow toward the synthesis of desired metabolites in cyanobacterial cell factories. Glycogen metabolism works as the most important natural carbon sink mechanism and reserve carbon source, storing a large portion of carbon and energy from the Calvin-Benson-Bassham (CBB) cycle, and thus is traditionally recognized as a promising engineering target to optimize the efficacy of cyanobacterial cell factories. Multiple strategies and approaches have been designed and adopted to engineer glycogen metabolism in cyanobacteria, leading to the successful regulation of glycogen synthesis and storage contents in cyanobacteria cells. However, disturbed glycogen metabolism results in weakened cellular physiological functionalities, thereby diminishing the robustness of metabolism. In addition, the effects of glycogen removal as a metabolic engineering strategy to enhance photosynthetic biosynthesis are still controversial. This review focuses on the efforts and effects of glycogen metabolism engineering on the physiology and metabolism of cyanobacterial chassis strains and cell factories. The perspectives and prospects provided herein are expected to inspire novel strategies and tools to achieve ideal control over carbon and energy flow for biomanufacturing.
•Strategies, approaches, and effects of regulating glycogen synthesis and storage.•Impaired glycogen metabolism reduced physiological fitness of cyanobacterial cells.•Removal of glycogen storage impaired cyanobacterial robustness to nutrition fluctuations.•Glycogen metabolism has complex effects on cyanobacterial photosynthetic biosynthesis.•Prospects of future directions for cyanobacterial glycogen metabolism engineering.
•A novel framework is proposed for anomaly detection in videos.•The innovation lies in the combination of prediction and reconstruction methods.•This work is more robust to noise and suitable for ...real-world surveillance videos.•This work outperforms both prediction (baseline) and reconstruction approaches.
Anomaly detection in videos refers to identifying events that rarely or shouldn’t happen in a certain context. Among all existing methods, the idea of reconstruction or future frame prediction is predominant for detecting anomalies. Reconstruction methods try to minimize the reconstruction errors of training data, but cannot guarantee large reconstruction errors for abnormal events. Future frame prediction methods follow the concept that normal events are predictable while abnormal ones are unpredictable. However, the results may drop rapidly since prediction is not robust to the noise in real-world surveillance videos. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines the advantages and balances the disadvantages of these two methods. An end-to-end network is designed to conduct future frame prediction and reconstruction sequentially. Future frame prediction makes the reconstruction errors large enough to facilitate the identification of abnormal events, while reconstruction helps enhance the predicted future frames from normal events. Specifically, we connect two U-Net blocks in the generator. One block works in the form of frame prediction, and the other tries to reconstruct the frames generated by the former block. Experiments over several benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method over previous state-of-the-art approaches, while running in real-time at 30 frames per second.
Understanding and engineering mechanisms toward more efficient photosynthesis in cyanobacteria. To improve the efficiency of photosynthesis in cyanobacteria chassis cells, several synthetic biology ...strategies and approaches have been adopted (introduction of new devices and new pathways, artificial regulation of the native metabolism) to enhance the absorption and utilization of solar energy and carbon dioxide. Several systems biology approaches (including transcriptomics, metabolomics, metabolic flux models, etc.) have also been adopted to explore the mechanisms of Synechococcus elongatus UTEX2973 to tolerate and utilize high light intensities for rapid growth. Several effective strategies have been confirmed from the two perspectives of ‘understanding’ and ‘engineering’. Increased efficiency of solar energy utilization by cyanobacteria photosystems could be obtained by expanding absorption spectra to get more available photons, minimizing antenna to enhance strong illumination tolerance, and enhancing the electron transport chain for efficient energy transfer. To further achieve the efficient photosynthetic carbon fixation and utilization, cyanobacteria metabolism should be engineered toward enhanced carbon uptake, carbon fixation, and reduced carbon loss.
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•Competitive cyanobacterial photosynthetic factories need efficient photosynthesis.•The proteorhopsin–retinal system is promising for cyanobacterial spectra expansion.•An enhanced electron transport chain improved efficiency of solar energy utilization.•Overexpressing essential CBB cycle enzymes stimulated photosynthetic carbon fixation.•Reduced carbon-loss increased carbon yield of cyanobacteria photosynthetic metabolism.
Cyanobacteria photosynthetic biomanufacturing provides a promising technology route for green development, but an efficient photosynthesis system is required for economical competitive performance. Synthetic biology approaches have been adopted to improve photosynthesis productivity in cyanobacteria chassis cells and cell factories by remodeling cyanobacterial metabolism and physiology for more efficient absorption and utilization of solar energy and carbon dioxide. In addition, systematic assays of a newly identified cyanobacterium which performs efficient photosynthesis has provided extensive data elucidating new directions for tailoring cyanobacteria chassis cells with improved productivity. In this review, we summarize these two aspects of recent progress and suggest trends for future development.
Indoleamine 2, 3-dioxygenases (IDO1 and IDO2) and tryptophan 2, 3-dioxygenase (TDO) are tryptophan catabolic enzymes that catalyze the conversion of tryptophan into kynurenine. The depletion of ...tryptophan and the increase in kynurenine exert important immunosuppressive functions by activating T regulatory cells and myeloid-derived suppressor cells, suppressing the functions of effector T and natural killer cells, and promoting neovascularization of solid tumors. Targeting IDO1 represents a therapeutic opportunity in cancer immunotherapy beyond checkpoint blockade or adoptive transfer of chimeric antigen receptor T cells. In this review, we discuss the function of the IDO1 pathway in tumor progression and immune surveillance. We highlight recent preclinical and clinical progress in targeting the IDO1 pathway in cancer therapeutics, including peptide vaccines, expression inhibitors, enzymatic inhibitors, and effector inhibitors.
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