Abstract

With the increasing use of Internet of Things (IoT)- enabled drones for various purposes, including photography, de- livery, and surveillance, concerns related to privacy and security have arisen. Drones have the potential to capture sensitive infor- mation, invade privacy, and cause security breaches. Therefore, the need for advanced technology for the automated detection of drones has become crucial. In this paper, we propose an ensemble-based IoT-enabled drones detection scheme (in short, EDDSBS). The presented model is part of a computer vision- based module and uses transfer learning for improved perfor- mance. Transfer learning allows the reuse of pre-trained models and their knowledge in a different but related domain, enabling better performance with less training data. To evaluate the performance of the proposed EDDSBS, we test it on benchmark datasets, including the Drone–vs–Bird Dataset and the UAVDT dataset. The proposed EDDSBS outperforms the existing schemes of drone detection (i.e., in terms of accuracy). The results of the presented scheme demonstrate the potential of deep learning- based technology for automated drone detection in critical areas, such as airports, military bases, and other high-security areas. Thus the paper introduces a comprehensive process methodology for drone detection that can be applied in real-world settings for a sustainable and secure environment, which is required for a safe community

Abstract

Drought is a natural hazard due to the lack of water availability in terms of precipitation and the consequent shortage of streamflow and soil moisture affecting the socioeconomics of a country. Although drought impacts on water quantity in terms of precipitation, streamflow, and soil moisture are widely recognized, the impacts on water quality are less known. Specifically, hydrological drought is observed to be impacted by climate change, which in turn probably increased the frequency and intensity of low river flows, affecting the water quality. Hydrological drought in combination with high water temperatures may deteriorate river water quality. This study analyzes hydrological drought impacts on river water quality for a peninsular river system, the Tunga-Bhadra River in India. A drought assessment has been done over the Tunga-Bhadra River Basin with a keen focus on studying the impact of hydrological drought on the water quality by observing the behavior of water quality parameters between the drought period and the reference years. The impact of hydrological drought on water quality during a drought period was assessed by calculating the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) and Streamflow Drought Index (SDI) for the studied period from June 1, 2005, to May 31, 2017. A statistical analysis has been done to study the significance of the impact on the water quality over the river basin. Time series of water quality parameters were investigated at three monitoring stations during the common drought period, occurring in the year 2013. A total amount of five water quality parameters were involved in the analysis: water temperature, pH, dissolved oxygen (DO), biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), and nitrates. The behavioral changes of the parameters were studied, analyzed, and justified. An increase in river water temperature (3.4°C) with a decrease in discharge (25%) have resulted in lower DO (0.3 mg/l) values during the drought year of 2013 compared to the 2012 reference period along with the Bhadravathi station along the Bhadra River. A decrease in discharge during drought events along with an increase in river water temperature under an increase of air temperature resulted in the lowering of oxygen saturation concentrations and decrease in DO levels. The results indicate deterioration of river water quality of the Tunga-Bhadra River during drought, with respect to high water temperatures, reduction in dilution

Abstract

Text-based VQA aims at answering questions by reading the text present in the images. It requires a large amount of scene-text relationship understanding compared to the VQA task. Recent studies have shown that the question-answer pairs in the dataset are more focused on the text present in the image but less importance is given to visual features and some questions do not require understanding the image. The models trained on this dataset predict biased answers due to the lack of understanding of visual context. For example, in questions like "What is written on the signboard?", the answer predicted by the model is always "STOP" which makes the model to ignore the image. To address these issues, we propose a method to learn visual features (making V matter in TextVQA) along with the OCR features and question features using VQA dataset as external knowledge for Text-based VQA. Specifically, we combine the TextVQA dataset and VQA dataset and train the model on this combined dataset. Such a simple, yet effective approach increases the understanding and correlation between the image features and text present in the image, which helps in the better answering of questions. We further test the model on different datasets and compare their qualitative and quantitative results.

Abstract

We present Continuous Volumetric Embeddings (ConVol-E), a novel robust representation for dense correspondence-matching across RGB images of different human subjects in arbitrary poses and appearances under non-rigid deformation scenarios. Unlike existing representations [8], [14], ConVol-E captures the deviation from the underlying parametric body model by choosing suitable anchor/key points on the underlying parametric body surface and then representing any point in the volume based on its euclidean relationship with the anchor points. It allows us to represent any arbitrary point around the parametric body (clothing details, hair, etc.) by an embedding vector. Subsequently, given a monocular RGB image of a person, we learn to predict per-pixel ConVol-E embedding, which carries a similar meaning across different subjects and is invariant to pose and appearance, thereby acting as a descriptor to establish robust dense correspondences across different images of humans. We empirically evaluate our proposed embedding using a novel metric and show superior performance compared to the state-of-the-art for the task of in-the-wild dense correspondence matching across different subjects, camera views, and appearance.

Abstract

Growing interest in conversational agents promote two- way human-computer communications involving asking and answering visual questions have become an active area of research in AI. Thus, generation of visual question- answer pair(s) becomes an important and challenging task. To address this issue, we propose a weakly-supervised vi- sual question answer generation method that generates a relevant question-answer pairs for a given input image and associated caption. Most of the prior works are supervised and depend on the annotated question-answer datasets. In our work, we present a weakly supervised method that synthetically generates question-answer pairs procedurally from visual information and captions. The proposed method initially extracts list of answer words, then does near- est question generation that uses the caption and answer word to generate synthetic question. Next, the relevant question generator converts the nearest question to rele- vant language question by dependency parsing and in-order tree traversal, finally, fine-tune a ViLBERT model with the question-answer pair(s) generated at end. We perform an exhaustive experimental analysis on VQA dataset and see that our model significantly outperform SOTA methods on BLEU scores. We also show the results wrt baseline models and ablation study

Abstract

Nucleobase π–π stacking is one of the crucial organizing interactions within three-dimensional (3D) RNA architectures. Characterizing the structural variability of these contacts in RNA crystal structures will help delineate their subtleties and their role in determining function. This analysis of different stacking geometries found in RNA X-ray crystal structures is the largest such survey to date; coupled with quantum-mechanical calculations on typical representatives of each possible stacking arrangement, we determined the distribution of stacking interaction energies. A total of 1,735,481 stacking contacts, spanning 359 of the 384 theoretically possible distinct stacking geometries, were identified. Our analysis reveals preferential occurrences of specific consecutive stacking arrangements in certain regions of RNA architectures. Quantum chemical calculations suggest that 88 of the 359 contacts possess intrinsically stable stacking geometries, whereas the remaining stacks require the RNA backbone or surrounding macromolecular environment to force their formation and maintain their stability. Our systematic analysis of π–π stacks in RNA highlights trends in the occurrence and localization of these noncovalent interactions and may help better understand the structural intricacies of functional RNA-based molecular architectures.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a decentralized learning algorithm to restore communication connectivity during multi-agent formation control. The time-varying connectivity profile of a mobile multi-agent system represents the dynamic information exchange capabilities among agents. While connected to the neighbors, each mobile agent in the proposed scheme learns to raise the team connectivity. When the inter-agent communication is lost, the associated trained neural network generates appropriate control actions to restore connectivity. The proposed learning technique leverages an adaptive control formalism, wherein a neural network tries to mimic the negative gradient of a value that relies on the agent-to-neighbor distances. All agents use the conventional consensus protocol during the connected multi-agent dynamics, and under communication loss, only the lost agent executes the neural network predicted actions to come back to the fleet. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach for single/multiple agent loss even in the presence of velocity disturbances.

Abstract

n = 66) to compare the efficacy of Linseeds (Linum usitatissimum L.), Psyllium (Plantago ovata Forssk.), and honey in uncomplicated pelvic inflammatory disease (uPID) with standard drugs using experi- mental and computational analysis. The pessary group received placebo capsules orally twice daily plus a per vaginum cotton pessary of powder from linseeds and psyllium seeds, each weighing 3 gm, with honey (5 mL) at bedtime. The standard group received 100 mg of doxycycline twice daily and 400 mg of metronidazole TID orally plus a placebo cotton pessary per vaginum at bedtime for 14 days. The primary outcomes were clinical features of uPID (vaginal discharge, lower abdominal pain (LAP), low backache (LBA), and pelvic tenderness. The secondary outcomes included leucocytes (WBCs) in vaginal discharge on saline microscopy and the SF-12 health questionnaire. In addition, we also classified both (pessary and standard) groups using machine learning models such as Decision Tree (DT), Random Forest (RF), Logistic Regression (LR), and AdaBoost (AB). The pessary group showed a higher percentage reduction than the standard group in abnormal vaginal discharge (87.05% vs. 77.94%), Visual Analogue Scale (VAS)-LAP (80.57% vs. 77.09%), VAS-LBA (74.19% vs. 68.54%), McCormack pain scale (McPS) score for pelvic tenderness (75.39% vs. 67.81%), WBC count of vaginal discharge (87.09% vs. 83.41%) and improvement in SF-12 HRQoL score (94.25% vs. 86.81%). Addition- ally, our DT 5-fold model achieved the maximum accuracy (61.80%) in the classification. We propose that the pessary group is cost-effective, safer, and more effective as standard drugs for treating uPID and improving the HRQoL of women. Aucubin, Plantamajoside, Herbacetin, secoisolariciresinol diglucoside, Secoisolariciresinol Monoglucoside, and other various natural bioactive molecules of psyllium and linseeds have beneficial effects as they possess anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, antimi- crobial, and immunomodulatory properties. The anticipated research work is be a better alternative treatment for genital infections

Abstract

The major impulse-like excitation in the speech signal is due to abrupt closure of the vocal folds, which takes place at the glottal closure instant (GCI) or epoch in each cycle. GCIs are used in many areas of speech science and technology, such as in prosody modification, voice source analysis, formant extraction and speech synthesis. It is difficult to observe these discontinuities (corresponding to GCIs) in the speech signal because of the superimposed time-varying response of the vocal tract system. This paper examines the phase part of different frequency components of the speech signal to extract epochs. Three analysis methods to decompose the speech signal into different frequency components are considered. These methods are the short-time Fourier transform (STFT), narrow bandpass filtering (NBPF), and single frequency filtering (SFF). The locations of the discontinuities in the speech signal are obtained from the instantaneous frequency (IF) (i.e., the time derivative of the phase) of each of the frequency components. A method for automatic detection of epochs using the amplitude weighted IF

Abstract

In drug discovery applications, high throughput virtual screening exercises are rou- tinely performed to determine an initial set of candidate molecules referred to as “hits”. In such an experiment, each molecule from large small-molecule drug library is evalu- ated for physical property such as the binding affinity (docking score) against a target receptor. In real-life drug discovery experiments, the drug libraries are extremely large but still a minor representation of the essentially infinite chemical space , and evaluation