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Haze imagery suffers from reduced clarity, which can be attributed to atmospheric conditions such as dust or water vapor, resulting in blurred visuals and heightened brightness due to light scattering. Conventional methods employing the dark channel prior (DCP) for transmission map estimation often excessively amplify fogged sky regions, causing image distortion. This paper presents a novel approach to improve transmission map granularity by utilizing multiple 1×1 DCPs derived from multiscale hazy, inverted, and Euclidean difference images. An adaptive airlight estimation technique is proposed to handle low-light, hazy images. Furthermore, an adaptive gamma correction method is introduced to refine the transmission map further. Evaluation of dehazed images using the Dehazing Quality Index showcases superior performance compared to existing techniques, highlighting the efficacy of the enhanced transmission map.

Smart devices have become the core ingredient in maintaining human society, where their applications span basic telecommunication, entertainment, education, and even critical security tasks. However, smartphone security measures have not kept pace with their ubiquitousness and convenience, exposing users to potential security breaches. Shading light on shortcomings of traditional security measures such as PINs gives rise to biometrics-based security measures. Open-set authentication with pretrained Transformers especially shows competitive performance in this context. Bringing this closer to practice, we propose CoreTemp, a greedy coreset sampled template, which offers substantially faster authentication speeds. In parallel with CoreTemp, we design a fast match algorithm where the combination shows robust performance in open-set mobile biometrics authentication. Designed to resemble the effects of ensembles with marginal increment in computation, we propose PIEformer+, where its application with CoreTemp has state-of-the-art performance. Benefiting from much more efficient authentication speeds to the best of our knowledge, we are the first to attempt identification in this context. Our proposed methodology achieves state-of-the-art results on HMOG and BBMAS datasets, particularly with much lower computational costs. In summary, this research introduces a novel integration of greedy coreset sampling with an advanced form of pretrained, implicitly ensembled Transformers (PIEformer+), greatly enhancing the speed and efficiency of mobile biometrics authentication, and also enabling identification, which sets a new benchmark in the relevant field.

Although celecoxib is quite effective in the management of inflammation-related diseases, especially arthritis, its use is limited by concerns including low bioavailability (BA), non-linear pharmacokinetic (PK) profile, and peak concentration-related toxicity. To overcome these issues, we designed and prepared hydrophilic celecoxib prodrugs, namely N-glycyl-aspart-1yl celecoxib (N-GA1C), glutam-1-yl celecoxib (G1C), and aspart-1yl celecoxib (A1C), for the sustained release of celecoxib in the intestine with limited systemic absorption. The celecoxib derivatives were converted to celecoxib in the intestinal contents. The conversion rates were in order of N-GA1C > G1C > A1C. Oral administration of the celecoxib derivatives (oral celecoxib derivatives) sustained the plasma concentration of celecoxib for 24 h, improving the BA and linearity of the PK profile of celecoxib. The peak concentrations (Cmax) of celecoxib after oral celecoxib derivatives were lower than that after oral celecoxib. In a carrageenan-induced rat paw edema model, oral N-GA1C exhibited greater anti-inflammatory activity for a longer duration compared with oral celecoxib. The order of efficacy of the celecoxib derivatives was N-GA1C > G1C > A1C. Taken together, the prodrug approach is a feasible strategy to improve the PK and therapeutic properties of celecoxib, and among the celecoxib derivatives, N-GA1C may be the most promising prodrug of celecoxib.

The Firmicutes are a phylum of bacteria that dominate numerous polymicrobial habitats of importance to human health and industry. Although these communities are often densely colonized, a broadly distributed contact-dependent mechanism of interbacterial antagonism utilized by Firmicutes has not been elucidated. Here we show that proteins belonging to the LXG polymorphic toxin family present in Streptococcus intermedius mediate cell contact- and Esx secretion pathway-dependent growth inhibition of diverse Firmicute species. The structure of one such toxin revealed a previously unobserved protein fold that we demonstrate directs the degradation of a uniquely bacterial molecule required for cell wall biosynthesis, lipid II. Consistent with our functional data linking LXG toxins to interbacterial interactions in S. intermedius, we show that LXG genes are prevalent in the human gut microbiome, a polymicrobial community dominated by Firmicutes. We speculate that interbacterial antagonism mediated by LXG toxins plays a critical role in shaping Firmicute-rich bacterial communities.

The possibility of EAPap as a vibration sensor based on piezoelectricity was investigated in this article. The EAPap was fabricated by regenerating and tape casting cellulose. The sample was coated by a thin laminating film for packaging. The capacitance of EAPap was measured and compared with commercial PVDF. Relative permittivity of EAPap was 12, which was the same as commercially available PVDF. This reveals that EAPap has sensing potential similar to synthetic piezo polymer film. The simple aluminum cantilevered beam was used for the vibration testing and EAPap was attached on the beam. The original EAPap sensor without grounding and shielding is greatly affected by surrounding noise, especially power noise. The power noise dropped dramatically when the sensor was grounded and shielded. The impulsive response of EAPap provided the correct dynamic characteristics of the beam, especially the twisting mode of the beam was observed clearly even though the EAPap was attached at the center of the beam. This is because the sensing capability of EAPap is based on piezoelectricity which is bidirectional strain characteristics. EAPap sensor based on piezoelectricity provided a great potential as a vibration sensor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined preboundary lengthening and other kinematic characteristics of articulatory gestures in CV.CV and CV.CVC before prosodic boundaries in Korean. Preboundary lengthening was found to be extended to initial syllables in both CV.CVand CV.CVC, while its magnitude was largest on the final syllable. The preboundary lengthening effect was also reflected in the time-to-peak velocity (acceleration duration), but only on gestures of the final syllable. Preboundary lengthening was accompanied by substantial increase in both displacement and peak velocity, showing domain-final articulatory strengthening. This articulatory strengthening effect on preboundary gestures (at the right edge of prosodic constituent) was largely dovetailed with the notion of an edge-prominence language where boundary marking is assumed to be closely related with prominence lending. These results were compared in two different conditions driven by information structure (‘new’ vs. ‘given’) and were discussed to understand the observed kinematic pattern in dynamical terms in the theoretical framework of the π-gesture model.