The resolution enhancement of textual images poses a significant challenge mainly in the presence of noise. The inherent difficulties are twofold. First is the reconstruction of an upscaled version ...of the input low-resolution image without amplifying the effect of noise. Second is the achievement of an improved visual image quality and a better OCR accuracy. Classically, the issue is addressed by the application of a denoising step used as a preprocessing or a post-processing to the magnification process. Starting by a denoising process could be more promising to avoid any magnified artifacts while proceeding otherwise. However, the state of the art underlines the limitations of denoising approaches faced with the low spatial resolution of textual images. Recently, sparse coding has attracted increasing interest due to its effectiveness in different reconstruction tasks. This study proves that the application of an efficient sparse coding-based denoising process followed by the magnification process can achieve good restoration results even if the input image is highly noisy. The main specificities of the proposed sparse coding-based framework are: (1) cascading denoising and magnification of each image patch, (2) the use of sparsity stemmed from the non-local self-similarity given in textual images and (3) the use of dual dictionary learning involving both online and offline dictionaries that are selected adaptively for each local region of the input degraded image to recover its corresponding noise-free high-resolution version. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real low-resolution noisy textual images are carried out to validate visually and quantitatively the effectiveness of the proposed system. Promising results, in terms of image visual quality as well as character recognition rates, are achieved when compared it with the state-of-the-art approaches.
Human adenovirus (HAdV) represents a major cause of mortality and morbidity in pediatric recipients of allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplants (HSCT). HAdV species F type 41 (HAdV-F41) ...infections in HSCT patients are scarce, whereas HAdV-F41 circulates commonly in healthy individuals. Between March and July 2018, HAdV-F41 infections were identified in four children (A, B, C, and E) who received allogeneic HSCT and one child before HSCT (D) at Robert Debré Hospital, Paris, France. We report here the clinical course of HAdV-F41 infection and the phylogenetic investigation to identify interpatient transmission. HAdV DNA was quantified in stool and plasma samples by real-time PCR. HAdV type was determined by sequencing of the fiber and hexon genes. Phylogenetic investigation was done with whole-genome sequences obtained by next-generation sequencing. HAdV loads in stool samples ranged from 6.60 to 10.10 log
copies/ml. HAdV-F41 detection in plasma was observed in four patients, but no disseminated disease was reported. Two patients died, but neither death was attributed to HAdV. While sequencing limited to the fiber gene suggested a cluster with four patients, phylogenetic analysis with whole-genome sequencing (WGS) and HVR7 revealed a cluster that included three patients (C, D, and E), suggesting an interpatient transmission in that cluster and two other independent infections. HAdV-F41 levels in stool specimens of pediatric HSCT patients are high and represent a risk of interpatient transmission. WGS helped to identify related cases. Prompt detection of HAdV in stool and control measures are warranted to limit any risk of nosocomial transmission.
•The aging process has a significant effect on fatigue life asphalt.•Warm mixtures containing sasobit had a higher fatigue life than hot mix.•Simple performance test failed to predict fatigue life of ...asphalt aging.•DE method, were able to characterize the fatigue behavior of mixtures aging.
The aging process has a significant effect on the mechanical properties of asphalt mixtures, especially on fatigue parameter. Many approaches have been suggested to better understanding of the fatigue behavior of asphalt mixes. However, in many of these cases, the effects of aging are not considered. In this study, investigations were conducted to more accurately predict the fatigue life of asphalt mixes, independent of their ages. In this regard, the responses of the existing fatigue models in a wider range of asphalt mixtures were validated. For this purpose, hot and warm asphalt mixtures were used in both aged and unaged conditions. For the production of warm mixtures, Sasobit and RheoFalt were used as modifier additives. Indirect tension (IDT) test, resilient modulus and four-point bending fatigue beam test were performed separately WMA and HMA specimens. The results indicated that in all specimens, the aging of the asphalt mixture was always accompanied by increasing fracture energy and failure resistance. In addition, it was also found that those fatigue models that were based on simple performance tests failed to well predict the fatigue life of mixtures independently of the type of compounds, aging and loading conditions. Eventually, validations indicated that the behavior of dissipated energy during repeated loading to failure, have a significant role to precisely characterize the fatigue behavior independent of their age.
The increasing age of our society is connected to a rising number of people suffering from disorders. One such disorder is Parkinson's disease (PD). Predictions indicate that the number of ...individuals affected by PD will more, than double in the future. Neurologists and data scientists consider handwriting as one of the motor symptoms of PD and recognize it as a valuable resource for detecting this disorder. Within this framework, we introduce an innovative system for Parkinson's disease detection, which encompasses several key stages. The process commences with data augmentation and preprocessing, subsequently leading to the segmentation of online handwriting into Beta strokes. Following that, feature extraction is carried out utilizing the Beta-elliptical approach and the fuzzy perceptual detector. Finally, we employ bidirectional long short-term memory (BLSTM) for the classification task. To assess the performance of our system, we created a new online Arabic handwriting dataset designed for detecting Parkinson's disease. The results we obtained affirm the efficacy of our proposed system. Through comprehensive evaluations conducted on the PaHaW dataset, we achieved good accuracy, thereby highlighting that our system surpasses the performance of existing systems.
Abstract This study focuses on the labour market dimensions of temporary migration by quantitatively exploring the relationship between temporary migration and wage inequality. Over recent decades, ...there has been a growing emphasis on migration management in shaping migration policies across the world, especially in the Anglophone settler societies. At the same time, temporary migration policies have been criticized for contributing to the creation of inequalities. This study investigates wage inequality among temporary migrants between 2010 and 2019 in Aotearoa New Zealand, a period when the number of people holding temporary visas more than doubled. Despite the increase in this population of temporary migrants, our analysis of administrative data has shown that the overall level of wage inequality of temporary migrants holding work visas declined between 2010 and 2019. The study uses the Shapley‐value decomposition approach to quantify the contributions of skills, nationality and migration status on wage inequality, factors that are associated with the migration system and the composition of migrants. Results suggest that skills and nationality were the key factors that have led to decrease wage inequality over the period. In contrast, migration status has a small countervailing effect on the decreases in wage inequality. Our analysis concludes that wage inequality is shaped by two factors in the case of temporary migration. The first is the migration system itself which sets different conditions for migrants in terms of skills and migration status, and the second is the composition of the migrant population.
•The IGD indicator is employed as selection criteria to face the challenge of the large ratio of non-dominated solutions that exist in MaPs.•A multi-agent system is used to model the intelligent ...behavior of multi-swarms.•A new strategy of knowledge sharing based on automated negotiation is proposed.•Empirical studies demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in solving MaOPs.
Most evolutionary algorithms, including particle swarm optimization (PSO), use Pareto dominance as a major selection criterion and face significant challenges when dealing with many-objective problems. To tackle this issue, this paper proposes a novel algorithm, termed: Many- Objective PSO with Cooperative Agents (MaOPSO-CA). This exploits an Inverted Generational Distance (IGD) indicator in two innovative ways: firstly, as a leader selection method to select the preferable solution in terms of convergence and diversity, and, secondly, as an archiving method to decide which non-dominated solutions are kept in a bounded archive. The proposed strategy significantly promotes selection pressure toward the Pareto front. The results indicate that the IGD-based selection circumvents the issue of a large ratio of non-dominated solutions that exist in MaOPs. Moreover, a multi-swarm is investigated and modeled as a Multi-Agent System (MAS), so that knowledge sharing among different sub-swarms is easily improved through automated negotiation. The effectiveness of our proposed algorithm is validated with numerous experimental studies in solving 110 benchmark testing instances with up to twenty objectives. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the new algorithm compared to recent state-of-the-art methods. Finally, the application of MaOPSO-CA to a challenging, real-world water resource-management problem is shown to produce very encouraging results, demonstrating its potential as a benchmark resource for the research community.
This paper proposes a hierarchical multi-dimensional differential evolution (HMDDE) algorithm, which is an automatic computational frame work for the optimization of beta basis function neural ...network (BBFNN) wherein the neural network architecture, weights connection, learning algorithm and its parameters are adapted according to the problem. In the HMDDE-designed neural network, the number of individuals of the population multi-dimensions is the number of beta neural networks. The population of HMDDE forms multiple beta networks with different structures at the higher level and each individual of the previous population is optimized at a lower hierarchical level to improve the performance of each individual. For the beta neural network consisting of m neurons, n individuals (different lengths) are formed in the upper level to optimize the structure of the beta neural network. In the lower level, the population within the same length is to optimize the free parameters of the beta neural network. To evaluate the comparative performance, we used benchmark problems drawn from identification system and time series prediction area. Empirical results illustrate that the HMDDE produces a better generalization performance.
Following the importance of distance measures in pattern classification, and their application to many kinds of data, crisp, fuzzy, etc, distance measures between intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs) are ...proposed and generalized to distances between interval valued intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IVIFSs). The measures are applied to pattern classification and to a decision making problem. The measures shows their efficiency in the both domains comparing to some measures from literature.
Observations of colliding galaxy clusters with high relative velocity probe the tail of the halo pairwise velocity distribution with the potential of providing a powerful test of cosmology. As an ...example it has been argued that the discovery of the Bullet Cluster challenges standard Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model predictions. Halo catalogues from N-body simulations have been used to estimate the probability of Bullet-like clusters. However, due to simulation volume effects previous studies had to rely on a Gaussian extrapolation of the pairwise velocity distribution to high velocities. Here, we perform a detail analysis using the halo catalogues from the Dark Energy Universe Simulation Full Universe Runs (DEUS-FUR), which enables us to resolve the high-velocity tail of the distribution and study its dependence on the halo mass definition, redshift and cosmology. Building upon these results, we estimate the probability of Bullet-like systems in the framework of Extreme Value Statistics. We show that the tail of extreme pairwise velocities significantly deviates from that of a Gaussian, moreover it carries an imprint of the underlying cosmology. We find the Bullet Cluster probability to be two orders of magnitude larger than previous estimates, thus easing the tension with the ΛCDM model. Finally, the comparison of the inferred probabilities for the different DEUS-FUR cosmologies suggests that observations of extreme interacting clusters can provide constraints on dark energy models complementary to standard cosmological tests.
Traditional Chinese medicine practitioners believed that the maintenance of the health status of any individual or animal is by the harmonious flow of
(life force) along a pathway known as the ...meridian. Interruption or blockage of
brings about disorders, pain, and diseases. Acutherapy, therefore, aims at correcting the interruption or blockage of the harmonious flow of
along the meridian to restore the healthy condition of the body system. This correction could be accomplished by either acupuncture or acupressure, and are both collectively referred to as acutherapy. This form of therapy has been used in both humans and animals for several decades. It is, however, just gaining popularity in the treatment of humans and is still not yet in practice among veterinarians for animal patients in most developing countries like Nigeria. This review, therefore, is aimed at exposing veterinarians from the developing countries to the general application of acutherapy with emphasis on the musculoskeletal system and associated pain where it is most applied. It is highly recommended that the universities, where Veterinary Medicine is studied in developing countries, should endeavor to train their veterinary surgeons in this area and see to how acutherapy can be included in the curriculum.
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