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Emotion recognition in user‐generated videos plays an essential role in affective computing. In general, visual information directly affects human emotions, so the visual modality is significant for emotion recognition. Most classic approaches mainly focus on local temporal information of videos, which potentially restricts their capacity to encode the correlation of long‐range context. To address this issue, a novel network is proposed to recognize emotions in videos. To be specific, a spatio‐temporal correlation‐aware block is designed to depict the long‐range correlations between input tokens, where the convolutional layers are used to learn the local correlations and the inter‐image cross‐attention is designed to learn the long‐range and spatio‐temporal correlations between input tokens. To generate diverse and challenging samples, a dual‐augmentation fusion layer is devised, which fuses each frame with its corresponding frame in the temporal domain. To produce rich video clips, a long‐range sampling layer is designed, which generates clips in a wide range of spatial and temporal domains. Extensive experiments are conducted on two challenging video emotion datasets, namely VideoEmotion‐8 and Ekman‐6. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method obtains better performance than baseline methods. Moreover, the proposed method achieves state‐of‐the‐art results on the two datasets. The source code of the proposed network is available at: https://github.com/JinChow/LRCANet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Methods based on deep learning have achieved great success in the field of video action recognition. When these methods are applied to real-world scenarios that require fine-grained analysis of actions, such as being tested on a tea ceremony, limitations may arise. To promote the development of fine-grained action recognition, a fine-grained video action dataset is constructed by collecting videos of tea ceremony actions. This dataset includes 2745 video clips. By using a hierarchical fine-grained action classification approach, these clips are divided into 9 basic action classes and 31 fine-grained action subclasses. To better establish a fine-grained temporal model for tea ceremony actions, a method named TSM-ConvNeXt is proposed that integrates a TSM into the high-performance convolutional neural network ConvNeXt. Compared to a baseline method using ResNet50, the experimental performance of TSM-ConvNeXt is improved by 7.31%. Furthermore, compared with the state-of-the-art methods for action recognition on the FineTea and Diving48 datasets, the proposed approach achieves the best experimental results. The FineTea dataset is publicly available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Organic montmorillonite (OMMT) was prepared from Na-montmorillonite (MMT) by Hexadecylamine (HDA) modification. The composite material has good smoothness, acidity, and salt resistance. OMMT was characterized using small-angle X-ray diffraction, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, scanning electron microscopy, and a video optical contact angle measuring instrument. The results showed that the layer spacing was enlarged from 1.44 nm to 2.87 nm after the modification, and the hydrophobicity performance was greatly improved. The organic modification of MMT was successful. The surface morphology, roughness, and anticorrosion properties of the organic montmorillonite/epoxy (OMMT/EP) composite coating were investigated and compared with those of the epoxy (EP) coating. The OMMT/EP composite coating had a flatter surface than the EP coating. The roughness was reduced from 65.5 nm to 10.3 nm. The electrochemical impedance spectroscopy showed that the composite coating's thickness positively affected its anticorrosion performance, the corrosion current density (Icorr) decreased with the increase in thickness, and its maximum impedance was much larger than that of EP coating. The protection efficiency of the OMMT/EP composite coating was 77.90%, which is a significant improvement over the EP's 31.27%. In addition, the corrosion resistance of the composite coating gradually decreased with increasing immersion time, but the change was insignificant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The residence time of particles in the flow field is highly sensitive to the fluid's flow characteristics and the particles' motion. We proposed a dynamic entry mode with the constant-pulse (CP) condition in response to the conditions of symmetric impinging streams and asymmetric impinging streams. Single-particle motion behaviors and particle residence time in a novel cross-type structure reactor we designed were studied and discussed in this article. This was done by looking at how these variables changed depending on the impulse inlet velocity conditions, the reactor geometry, and the particle properties. The results demonstrate that when particle relaxation time is short, those particles without oscillatory motions were directly accelerated to leave the active area. When its relaxation time is reasonably set, even a single particle can hugely elevate the oscillatory motions. With the structure of the novel cross type, the particle merely exhibits three oscillatory under the condition of the symmetric pulse inlet flow and asymmetric pulse inlet flow, notwithstanding, CP contains at least three oscillatory motions. The ttot is the duration that an individual particle spends in the working region. The ttot and active area were affected by inlet velocity, parameters of particles and the shape of the reactor parameters of particles and the shape of the reactor. The ttot raised with τ* increased in a certain range. T is the inlet velocity variation period. The particle resides time at T = Tb reaches a maximum in the CP. The maximum residence times Tb was affected by particle relaxation time, under CP with a diameter ratio of 5 and inlet velocity difference of 0.8. The particle retention time in the novel cross-type structure reactor was heightened by 7 times. The CP and the novel cross-type structure reactor can improve the retention time of particles in the flow field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is one of the most common complications of diabetes and has become a major global cause of blindness. Curcumin, an extract of Curcuma longa (turmeric), is effective in preventing and treating diabetes. Recent studies have shown that curcumin can delay DR development. However, there has been no systematic review of its treatment of DR. This study will conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of currently published randomized controlled trials (RCT) of curcumin for treating DR patients to evaluate its efficacy and safety. Methods: We will search the relevant studies of curcumin in the treatment of DR in PubMed, Medline, EMBASE, Cochrane Library, China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), VIP, and Wanfang databases from their respective inception dates to May 2022. A meta-analysis of the data extracted from qualified RCTs will be conducted, including the progression of DR, visual acuity, visual field, macular edema, quality of life, and adverse events. The meta-analysis will be performed using Review Manager 5.4.1 software, and the results will be based on either random-effects or fixed-effects models, depending on the heterogeneity. The Grading of Recommendations, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) system will be used to evaluate the reliability and quality of evidence. Results: The results of this study will provide sound and high-quality evidence for the efficacy and safety of curcumin in the treatment of DR. Conclusion: This study will be the first meta-analysis to comprehensively assess the efficacy and safety of curcumin in the treatment of DR and will provide helpful evidence for the clinical management of this disease. Systematic review registration: INPLASY202250002. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wholly aromatic polyimide (PI) films with good solution processability, light colors, good optical transparency, high storage modulus, and improved heat resistance were prepared and characterized. For this purpose, a multi-component copolymerization methodology was performed from a fluoro-containing dianhydride, 4,4′-(hexafluoroisopropylidene)diphthalic anhydride (6FDA), a rigid dianhydride, 3,3′,4,4′-biphenyltetracarboxylic dianhydride (BPDA), and a fluoro-containing diamine, 2,2′-bis(trifluoromethyl)-4,4′-bis [4-(4-amino-3-methyl)benzamide]biphenyl (MABTFMB). One homopolymer, FPI-1 (6FDA-MABTFMB), and five copolymers, FPI-2~FPI-6, containing the BPDA units from 10 mol% to 50 mol% in the dianhydride moieties, were prepared, respectively. The derived PI resins showed good solubility in the polar aprotic solvents, such as N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP) and N,N-dimethylacetamide (DMAc). The flexible PI films obtained by the solution casting procedure showed good optical properties with the transmittances higher than 74.0% at the wavelength of 450 nm. The PI films exhibited excellent thermal properties, including 5% weight loss temperatures (T5%) over 510 °C, together with glass transition temperatures (Tg) over 350.0 °C according to the peak temperatures of the loss modulus in dynamical mechanical analysis (DMA) measurements. The FPI-6 film also showed the lowest linear coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) value of 23.4 × 10−6/K from 50 to 250 °C according to the thermomechanical analysis (TMA) measurements, which was obviously lower than that of FPI-1 (CTE = 30.6 × 10−6/K). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an efficient approach for detecting zero quantized discrete cosine transform (ZQDCT) coefficients using the sum of absolute transformed difference (SATD). Previously, all the ZQDCT prediction approaches employ the sum of absolute difference (SAD) available ahead of DCT and quantization (Q) for early detection. However, when the Hadamard transform is enabled for H.264/AVC encoding, only the SATD instead of SAD is available before DCT and Q, and all the prediction approaches can not be directly applied. To solve this problem, the Gaussian distribution is applied to study the integer 4 x 4 DCT coefficients in H.264/AVC and hence an adaptive scheme with multiple thresholds against SATD is derived to realize different types of DCT and Q implementations. In addition, another two SATD based sufficient conditions are proposed for early detecting zero quantized DC coefficients for the luma components encoded with the intra16 x 16 mode and the chroma components. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can greatly reduce the DCT and Q computations and obtain almost the same rate-distortion performance as the original encoder. Index Terms--Discrete cosine transform (DCT), Gaussian distribution, Hadamard transform, H.264/AVC, quantization (Q).

A rate-distortion (R-D) optimization rate control (RC) algorithm with adaptive [Q.sub.p] initialization is presented for H.264. First, a linear distortion-quantization (D-Q) model is introduced and thus a close-form solution is developed to derive optimal quantization parameters ([Q.sub.p]) for encoding each macroblock. Then we exploit to determine the initial [Q.sub.p] efficiently and adaptively according to the content of video sequences. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve better R-D performance than that of other two RC algorithms including the algorithm JVT-G012 which is the current recommended RC scheme implemented in the H.264 reference software JM9.5. Index Terms--H.264, initial quantization parameter, rate control, rate-distortion optimization.

This paper presents a novel efficient prediction algorithm to reduce redundant discrete cosine transform (DCT) and quantization computations for H.264 encoding optimization. A theoretical analysis is performed to study the sufficient condition for DCT coefficients to be quantized to zeros. As a result, three sufficient conditions corresponding to three types of transform and quantization methods in H.264 are proposed. Compared with other algorithms in the literature, the proposed algorithm derives more precise and efficient conditions to predict zero quantized DCT coefficients. Both the theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is superior to other algorithms in terms of the computational complexity reduction, encoded video quality, false acceptance rate, and false rejection rate. Index Terms--H.264, integer DCT, quantization.