Extending Segment Anything Model into Auditory and Temporal Dimensions for Audio-Visual Segmentation

Audio-visual segmentation (AVS) aims to segment sound sources in the video sequence, requiring a pixel-level understanding of audio-visual correspondence. As the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has strongly impacted extensive fields of dense prediction problems, prior works have investigated the introduction of SAM into AVS with audio as a new modality of the prompt. Nevertheless, constrained by SAM's single-frame segmentation scheme, the temporal context across multiple frames of audio-visual data remains insufficiently utilized. To this end, we study the extension of SAM's capabilities to the sequence of audio-visual scenes by analyzing contextual cross-modal relationships across the frames. To achieve this, we propose a Spatio-Temporal, Bidirectional Audio-Visual Attention (ST-BAVA) module integrated into the middle of SAM's image encoder and mask decoder. It adaptively updates the audio-visual features to convey the spatio-temporal correspondence between the video frames and audio streams. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on AVS benchmarks, especially with an 8.3% mIoU gain on a challenging multi-sources subset.Comment: Accepted to ICIP 202

Fine-grained Background Representation for Weakly Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Generating reliable pseudo masks from image-level labels is challenging in the weakly supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) task due to the lack of spatial information. Prevalent class activation map (CAM)-based solutions are challenged to discriminate the foreground (FG) objects from the suspicious background (BG) pixels (a.k.a. co-occurring) and learn the integral object regions. This paper proposes a simple fine-grained background representation (FBR) method to discover and represent diverse BG semantics and address the co-occurring problems. We abandon using the class prototype or pixel-level features for BG representation. Instead, we develop a novel primitive, negative region of interest (NROI), to capture the fine-grained BG semantic information and conduct the pixel-to-NROI contrast to distinguish the confusing BG pixels. We also present an active sampling strategy to mine the FG negatives on-the-fly, enabling efficient pixel-to-pixel intra-foreground contrastive learning to activate the entire object region. Thanks to the simplicity of design and convenience in use, our proposed method can be seamlessly plugged into various models, yielding new state-of-the-art results under various WSSS settings across benchmarks. Leveraging solely image-level (I) labels as supervision, our method achieves 73.2 mIoU and 45.6 mIoU segmentation results on Pascal Voc and MS COCO test sets, respectively. Furthermore, by incorporating saliency maps as an additional supervision signal (I+S), we attain 74.9 mIoU on Pascal Voc test set. Concurrently, our FBR approach demonstrates meaningful performance gains in weakly-supervised instance segmentation (WSIS) tasks, showcasing its robustness and strong generalization capabilities across diverse domains

Asian women\u27s leadership in six countries/regions

To describe the leadership needs of emerging nursing leaders in six countries/regions (Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and the U.S.) and to provide directions for future development of Asian Women\u27s Leadership

Effect of tegoprazan on temporal variability of platelet reactivity in patients treated with clopidogrel after coronary stenting

Background/Aims Data on the interactions between clopidogrel and tegoprazan are limited. We compared the effects of tegoprazan and proton-pump inhibitors (PPIs) on platelet reactivity. Methods Using database data from March 2020 to January 2023, we retrospectively evaluated 262 patients who were taking either tegoprazan (n = 107) or PPIs (n = 155) combined with dual antiplatelet therapy, including aspirin and clopidogrel, after percutaneous coronary intervention. Platelet reactivity was assessed using VerifyNow P2Y12 assays. Results Platelet reaction unit (PRU) values at 3 (157 ± 8 vs. 162 ± 6, p = 0.659), 6 (167 ± 9 vs. 158 ± 7, p = 0.370), and 12 months (155 ± 10 vs. 164 ± 7, p = 0.448) were similar between groups. The prevalence of high on-treatment platelet reactivity, defined as ≥ 253 PRU, was also similar between the groups at 3 (10.3% vs. 10.2%, p = 0.976), 6 (7.0% vs. 8.2%, p = 1.000), and 12 months (4.3% vs. 9.0%, p = 0.503). Conclusions There was no significant difference in platelet reactivity between the tegoprazan and PPI groups in patients undergoing PCI and receiving dual antiplatelet therapy with clopidogrel

Development of a country-specific CO2 emission factor for domestic anthracite in Korea, 2007–2009

INTRODUCTION: Korea has been making efforts to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, including a voluntary commitment to the target of a 30% reduction, based on business-as-usual of the total GHG emission volume, by 2020; 2006 IPCC Guidelines provided default values, applying country-specific emission factors was recommended when estimating national greenhouse gas emissions. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: This study focused on anthracite produced in Korea in order to provide basic data for developing country-specific emission factor. This study has estimated CO(2) emission factors to use worksheet of which five steps consisted according to the fuel analysis method. CONCLUSION: As a result, the average of net colorific value for 3 years (2007∼2009) was 4,519 kcal/kg, and the CO(2) emission factor was calculated to be 111,446 kg/TJ, which is about 11.8% lower than the 2006 IPCC guidelines default value, and about 7.9% higher than the US EPA emission factor

Prognostic Value of p53 and bcl-2 Expression in Patients Treated with Breast Conservative Therapy

Prognostic value of p53 and bcl-2 expression on treatment outcome in breast cancer patients has been extensively evaluated, but the results were inconclusive. We evaluated the prognostic significance of these molecular markers in patients treated with breast conserving surgery and radiotherapy. One hundred patients whose immunostaining of p53 and bcl-2 expression was available among 125 patients who underwent radiotherapy after breast conserving surgery and axillary lymph node dissection were enrolled into this study. Eighty-seven patients also received adjuvant chemotherapy and/or hormonal therapy. Conventional clinicopathologic variables and treatment-related factors were also considered. The 5-yr loco-regional relapse-free and distant metastasis-free survival rates were 91.7% and 90.9%, respectively. On univariate analysis, age, T stage and the absence of bcl-2 & estrogen receptor (ER) expression were associated with loco-regional relapse-free survival. When incorporating these variables into Cox proportional hazard model, only bcl-2(-)/ER(-) phenotype was an adverse prognostic factor (P=0.018). As for the distant metastasis-free survival, age, T stage, and p53 expression were significant on univariate analysis. However, p53 expression was the only prognosticator on multivariate analysis (P=0.009). A bcl-2(-)/ER(-) phenotype and p53 expression are useful molecular markers predicting loco-regional relapse-free and distant metastasis-free survival, respectively, in patients treated with breast conserving surgery and radiotherapy