Search

The structural morphology of mesenteric artery vessels is of significant importance for the diagnosis and treatment of colorectal cancer. However, developing automated vessel segmentation methods for this purpose remains challenging. Existing convolution-based segmentation methods have limitations in capturing long-range dependencies, while transformer-based models require large datasets, making them less suitable for tasks with limited training samples. Moreover, over-segmentation, mis-segmentation, and vessel discontinuity are common challenges in vessel segmentation tasks. To address these issues, we propose a parallel encoding architecture that combines transformers and convolutions to retain the advantages of both approaches. The model effectively learns position deviations and enhances robustness for small-scale datasets. Additionally, we introduce a vessel edge capture module to improve vessel continuity and topology. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the improved performance of our model, with Dice Similarity Coefficient and Average Hausdorff Distance scores of 81.64% and 7.7428, respectively.

Despite the flexibility that a TEI-based workflow offers for preparing editions based on collating several manuscripts, textual scholars working with XML-TEI edition files face a lack of domain-specific auxiliary tools. The TEI-CAT partially fills this gap by providing interfaces for visualizing the transcription of different manuscripts and for exploring the encoded variations and detecting common mistakes. While not properly supporting several types of textual variation and editorial intervention, these tools satisfy most of the needs usually arising during transcription and collation. The image annotation tool complements them by allowing users to generate TEI-compliant code. This tool very flexibly describes or comments on facsimile layout and content and thus is particularly helpful in preparing digital editions. Finally, the PDF-via-LaTeX exporting facility extends the scope of the toolbox towards traditional paper-based publishing, which often remains an editor’s ultimate goal. However, this tool requires adopting specific encoding practices, which are not made explicit and may not match the user’s choices; its output needs manual modifications in some cases. Together, these tools partially illustrate how the XML-TEI format can be used to prepare critical editions. They constitute an important step towards creating a TEI-based digital environment in this field.

Copyright of Journal of Chongqing University of Posts & Telecommunications (Natural Science Edition) is the property of Chongqing University of Posts & Telecommunications and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The review presents and compares three open source and web-based text collation tools, namely Juxta Web Service, LERA, and Variance Viewer, and investigates their suitability especially for philological work with TEI. While all tools adequately fulfill the general requirements of text collation, each of them supports individual workflow concepts and visualization methods. It is recommended that future developments consider supporting TEI standoff markup and tool modularization.

In order to solve the delay caused by step-by-step calculation and the computational complexity caused by iterative “exclusive-or” computation during the encoding process,a dimensionality reduction strategy was proposed and defined.Based on this,system polarization code parallel coding algorithm for cracking strategy was proposed.Simulation and computational complexity analysis were carried out on AWGN channel.The results show that the coding gain of the above algorithm is slightly better than the traditional one or almost the same,but the computational complexity is up to 80.92%,which is more suitable for hardware implementation and engineering application.It is more suitable for hardware implementation and has a certain practical value.

Linguistic and psycholinguistic theories of speech planning typically assume serial phonological encoding. However, under some neurally-inspired speech models, phonological elements are initially co-active in a parallel planning space. Research using acoustic reaction times has perhaps mistakenly attributed execution-level phonetic effects to serial encoding. We used motion-tracked digital video to measure lip posture. In two form-preparation experiments, participants were sometimes primed with the nuclear vowels of CVC words. All words contained either /i/ (spread lips; e.g. "seed") or /u/ (rounded lips, e.g. "soup"). The initial consonants were uncertain. Analyses emphasised oral postures preceding stimulus presentation. In Experiment 1, participants' early postures anticipated the upcoming vowel when it was primed. Experiment 2 included two pairs of vowel-primed blocks. The words of one /i/-block began with rounded consonants. Primed vowels influenced anticipatory articulation except when superseded by conflicting demands from likely initial consonants. We discuss the implications for parallel encoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mounting neural evidence suggests that, in situations in which there are multiple potential targets for action, the brain prepares, in parallel, competing movements associated with these targets, prior to implementing one of them. Central to this interpretation is the idea that competing viewed targets, prior to selection, are rapidly and automatically transformed into corresponding motor representations. Here, by applying target-specific, gradual visuomotor rotations and dissociating, unbeknownst to participants, the visual direction of potential targets from the direction of the movements required to reach the same targets, we provide direct evidence for this provocative idea. Our results offer strong empirical support for theories suggesting that competing action options are automatically represented in terms of the movements required to attain them. The rapid motor encoding of potential targets may support the fast optimization of motor costs under conditions of target uncertainty and allow the motor system to inform decisions about target selection.

The high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard has opened the door to high-quality multimedia contents and new formats such as ultra-high definition as a result of the unceasing demands of the market. This standard is able to outperform prior standards by up to 50% in terms of perceptual video quality, but at the cost of extremely large computational complexities. For this reason, the development of fast coding algorithms is now a requirement to make HEVC an adequate candidate for real-world scenarios. In this regard, this paper proposes a collaborative CPU + GPU coding architecture for this standard, in which the CPU performs a coarse-grained parallelization of the encoder, while the GPU carries out a fast motion estimation. Given that the GPU algorithm can work together with a wide variety of parallel algorithms, this paper evaluates two of them: tiles, defined in the standard, and slices, already present in previous standards. Results indicate that slices are more adequate in terms of parallel efficiency (10.75 × speedup on average using 12 threads), while tiles achieve better coding efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structural morphology of mesenteric artery vessels is of significant importance for the diagnosis and treatment of colorectal cancer. However, developing automated vessel segmentation methods for this purpose remains challenging. Existing convolution-based segmentation methods have limitations in capturing long-range dependencies, while transformer-based models require large datasets, making them less suitable for tasks with limited training samples. Moreover, over-segmentation, mis-segmentation, and vessel discontinuity are common challenges in vessel segmentation tasks. To address these issues, we propose a parallel encoding architecture that combines transformers and convolutions to retain the advantages of both approaches. The model effectively learns position deviations and enhances robustness for small-scale datasets. Additionally, we introduce a vessel edge capture module to improve vessel continuity and topology. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the improved performance of our model, with Dice Similarity Coefficient and Average Hausdorff Distance scores of 81.64% and 7.7428, respectively., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Zhang, Xu, Wang, Lin, Crookes, He and Hua.)

Copyright of Journal on Communication / Tongxin Xuebao is the property of Journal on Communications Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The most recent video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), is able to significantly improve the compression performance at the expense of a huge computational complexity increase with respect to its predecessor, H.264/AVC. Parallel versions of the HEVC encoder may help to reduce the overall encoding time in order to make it more suitable for practical applications. In this work, we study two parallelization strategies. One of them follows a coarse-grain approach, where parallelization is based on frames, and the other one follows a fine-grain approach, where parallelization is performed at subpicture level. Two different frame-based approaches have been developed. The first one only uses MPI and the second one is a hybrid MPI/OpenMP algorithm. An exhaustive experimental test was carried out to study the performance of both approaches in order to find out the best setup in terms of parallel efficiency and coding performance. Both frame-based and subpicture-based approaches are compared under the same hardware platform. Although subpicture-based schemes provide an excellent performance with high-resolution video sequences, scalability is limited by resolution, and the coding performance worsens by increasing the number of processes. Conversely, the proposed frame-based approaches provide the best results with respect to both parallel performance (increasing scalability) and coding performance (not degrading the rate/distortion behavior). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Faust Edition is a historical-critical edition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust (1808/1832). Considered to be one of the most important works of German literature, it took until 2009 before a DFG-funded project started to produce a modern scholarly edition with the purpose of tracing the genesis of the two-part play. The edition is supported by the Freies Deutsches Hochstift (Frankfurter Goethe-Haus), the Klassik Stiftung Weimar and the University of Würzburg; the main editors are Prof. Dr. Anne Bohnenkamp, Dr. Silke Henke und Prof. Dr. Fotis Jannidis. In 2016, a first beta version of the edition went online. The version under review here is the beta version 2, released on 17 October 2016, although beta version 3 has by now been published as well (on 28 August 2017). This conundrum befits the main theme of the review which focuses on the challenges posed by the perpetual "beta status" of digital editions and the consequences this yields in the context of academia.

In this paper, we propose an erasure-coded data archival system called aHDFS for Hadoop clusters, where $RS(k+r,k)$ codes are employed to archive data replicas in the Hadoop distributed file system or HDFS. We develop two archival strategies (i.e., aHDFS-Grouping and aHDFS-Pipeline) in aHDFS to speed up the data archival process. aHDFS-Grouping - a MapReduce-based data archiving scheme - keeps each mapper’s intermediate output Key-Value pairs in a local key-value store. With the local store in place, aHDFS-Grouping merges all the intermediate key-value pairs with the same key into one single key-value pair, followed by shuffling the single Key-Value pair to reducers to generate final parity blocks. aHDFS-Pipeline forms a data archival pipeline using multiple data node in a Hadoop cluster. aHDFS-Pipeline delivers the merged single key-value pair to a subsequent node’s local key-value store. Last node in the pipeline is responsible for outputting parity blocks. We implement aHDFS in a real-world Hadoop cluster. The experimental results show that aHDFS-Grouping and aHDFS-Pipeline speed up Baseline’s shuffle and reduce phases by a factor of 10 and 5, respectively. When block size is larger than 32 MB, aHDFS improves the performance of HDFS-RAID and HDFS-EC by approximately 31.8 and 15.7 percent, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Summary Mounting neural evidence suggests that, in situations in which there are multiple potential targets for action, the brain prepares, in parallel, competing movements associated with these targets, prior to implementing one of them. Central to this interpretation is the idea that competing viewed targets, prior to selection, are rapidly and automatically transformed into corresponding motor representations. Here, by applying target-specific, gradual visuomotor rotations and dissociating, unbeknownst to participants, the visual direction of potential targets from the direction of the movements required to reach the same targets, we provide direct evidence for this provocative idea. Our results offer strong empirical support for theories suggesting that competing action options are automatically represented in terms of the movements required to attain them. The rapid motor encoding of potential targets may support the fast optimization of motor costs under conditions of target uncertainty and allow the motor system to inform decisions about target selection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The most recent video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), is able to significantly improve the compression performance at the expense of a huge computational complexity increase with respect to its predecessor, H.264/AVC. Parallel versions of the HEVC encoder may help to reduce the overall encoding time in order to make it more suitable for practical applications. In this work, we study two parallelization strategies. One of them follows a coarse-grain approach, where parallelization is based on frames, and the other one follows a fine-grain approach, where parallelization is performed at subpicture level. Two different frame-based approaches have been developed. The first one only uses MPI and the second one is a hybrid MPI/OpenMP algorithm. An exhaustive experimental test was carried out to study the performance of both approaches in order to find out the best setup in terms of parallel efficiency and coding performance. Both frame-based and subpicture-based approaches are compared under the same hardware platform. Although subpicture-based schemes provide an excellent performance with high-resolution video sequences, scalability is limited by resolution, and the coding performance worsens by increasing the number of processes. Conversely, the proposed frame-based approaches provide the best results with respect to both parallel performance (increasing scalability) and coding performance (not degrading the rate/distortion behavior).

Do movement plans, like representations in working memory, share a limited pool of resources? If so, the precision with which each individual movement plan is specified should decrease as the total number of movement plans increases. To explore this, human participants made speeded reaching movements toward visual targets. We examined if preparing one movement resulted in less variability than preparing two movements. The number of planned movements was manipulated in a delayed response cueing procedure that limited planning to a single target (experiment 1) or hand (experiment 2) or required planning of movements toward two targets (or with two hands). For both experiments, initial movement direction variability was higher in the two-plan condition than in the one-plan condition, demonstrating a cost associated with planning multiple movements, consistent with the limited resource hypothesis. In experiment 3, we showed that the advantage in initial variability of preparing a single movement was present only when the trajectory could be fully specified. This indicates that the difference in variability between one and two plans reflects the specification of full motor plans, not a general preparedness to move. The precision cost related to concurrent plans represents a novel constraint on motor preparation, indicating that multiple movements cannot be planned independently, even if they involve different limbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The popularity of the new standard H.265 (High Efficiency Video Coding) depends on two factors: the rapidity of deploying clients for the most outstanding platforms and the capacity of service providers to develop efficient encoders for serving demanding multimedia services such as Live TV. Both encoders and decoders should inter-operate efficiently with the streaming protocols to limit the risks of implementation incompatibilities. This paper presents a synergy framework between High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) that increases the compression capabilities of the encoder and opens new parallel encoding points for accelerating the video content coding and formatting processes. The synergy takes advantage of inter-motion prediction in HEVC for delimiting the segments of DASH protocol, which increases the motion compensation in each segment. Moreover, the impact of encoding multiple DASH representations is limited due to the parallel encoding presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Arıkan has shown that systematic polar codes (SPC) outperform non-SPC (NSPC). However, the performance gain comes at the price of elevated encoding complexity, i.e., compared with NSPC, the available encoding methods for SPC require higher memory and computation. In this letter, we propose an efficient encoding algorithm requiring only $N$ bits of memory and having ({N}/{2})\log _{2}N XOR operations. Moreover, the auxiliary variables in the algorithm can share the memory to reduce extra memory requirement. Furthermore, a parallel 2-bit encoding algorithm is also presented to improve the encoding throughput. Remarkably, we show that parallel encoding can be implemented with the same number of XOR operations and memory bits. Finally, the proposed encoding algorithm can be directly used for NSPC with the same complexity. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Highlights: [•] High synthetic accuracy of prosody achieved for Thai, Mandarin and English. [•] Many-to-one mapping from contextually variable F0 to invariant functional targets. [•] Effectively handling of both contextual and non-contextual variability. [•] Large-scale and full-detailed prosody synthesis as tool for theory testing. [•] Freely available as a Praat scripts and plug-ins to the speech science community. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Highlights: [•] One hardware friendly parallel fast inter mode decision algorithm is proposed for H.264/AVC encoding. [•] Motion estimation for different block sizes are conducted in parallel. [•] Simplified distortion and bitrate estimation methods are used for efficient hardware implementation. [•] Dependencies among coding units are removed for parallel processing. [•] The coding cost of each mode can be obtained simultaneously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The role of different substructures of electroreceptor organs in signal encoding was explored using a heuristic computational model. This model consists of four modules representing the pre-receptor structures, the transducer cells, the synapses and the afferent fiber, respectively. Simulations reproduced previously obtained experimental data. We showed that different electroreceptor types described in the literature can be qualitative modeled with the same set of equations by changing only two parameters, one affecting the filtering properties of the pre-receptor, and the other affecting the transducer module. We studied the responses of different electroreceptor types to natural stimuli using simulations derived from an experimentally-obtained database in which the fish were exposed to resistive or capacitive objects. Our results indicate that phase and frequency spectra are differentially encoded by different subpopulations of tuberous electroreceptors. A different type of receptor responses to the same input is a necessary condition for encoding a multidimensional space of stimuli as in the waveform of the EOD. Our simulation analysis suggested that the electroreceptive mosaic may perform a waveform analysis of electrosensory signals. As in color vision or tactile texture perception, a secondary attribute, “electric color” may be encoded as a parallel activity of various electroreceptor types. This article is part of a Special Issue entitled Neural Coding. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

A constant-rate encoder-decoder pair is presented for a fairly large family of two-dimensional (2-D) constraints. Encoding and decoding is done in a row-by-row manner, and is sliding-block decodable. Essentially, the 2-D constraint is turned into a set of independent and relatively simple one-dimensional (l-D) constraints; this is done by dividing the array into fixed-width vertical strips. Each row in the strip is seen as a symbol, and a graph presentation of the respective 1-D constraint is constructed. The maxentropic stationary Markov chain on this graph is next considered: a perturbed version of the corresponding probability distribution on the edges of the graph is used in order to build an encoder which operates in parallel on the strips. This perturbation is found by means of a network flow, with upper and lower bounds on the flow through the edges. A key part of the encoder is an enumerative coder for constant-weight binary words. A fast realization of this coder is shown, using floating-point arithmetic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this letter, a passive integrated device is presented that enables cost-effective parallel encoding and decoding in a spectral amplitude encoded optical code-division multiple-access transmission system. The device is monolithically integrated in InP-InGaAsP. Simulation and experimental results are given [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]