Hierarchical Pyramid Structure Research Articles

Understanding Chinese Bureaucracy: A Systematic Literature Review

An in-depth study of Chinese bureaucracy and its characteristics is an inseparable research topic in the field of social science in contemporary China. The historical lineage of Chinese bureaucracy shows a development from monarchical bureaucracy to cadre system. The Chinese bureaucratic organization is regarded as a cadre system with Chinese characteristics, characterized by hierarchy, centralization, political loyalty, meritocracy, and personification; the pressure system, administrative contract system, and project system are its operation mechanisms. China's bureaucracy has been transformed from a revolutionary group to a modern bureaucracy, and has now entered a period of adjustment and improvement. Chinese officials pay attention to moral cultivation and character building, and their selection and appointment emphasizes the principles of both virtue and talent, and puts virtue first. The structure of Chinese officials represents a hierarchical pyramid structure, and relationship is the core concept in understanding the interpersonal network of Chinese officials. The emphasis on informatization, transparency, specialization, and innovation is the focus and trend of future research on Chinese bureaucracy.

AGPN: Action Granularity Pyramid Network for Video Action Recognition

Video action recognition is a fundamental task for video understanding. Action recognition in complex spatio-temporal contexts generally requires fusing of different multi-granularity action information. However, existing works do not consider spatio-temporal information modeling and fusion from the perspective of action granularity. To address this problem, this paper proposes an Action Granularity Pyramid Network (AGPN) for action recognition, which can be flexibly integrated into 2D backbone networks. The core module is the Action Granularity Pyramid Module (AGPM), a hierarchical pyramid structure with residual connections, which is established to fuse multi-granularity action spatio-temporal information. From top to bottom level in the designed pyramid structure, the receptive field decreases and action granularity becomes more refined. To enrich temporal information of the inputs, a Multiple Frame Rate Module (MFM) is proposed to mix different frame rates at a fine-grained pixel-wise level. Moreover, a Spatio-temporal Anchor Module (SAM) is employed to fix spatio-temporal feature anchors to promote the effectiveness of feature extraction. We conduct extensive experiments on three large-scale action recognition datasets, Something-Something V1 & V2 and Kinetics-400. The results demonstrate that our proposed AGPN outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for the tasks of video action recognition.

Touchable Gustation via a Hoffmeister Gel Iontronic Sensor

A particular sense, touchable gustation, was achieved. We proposed a chemical-mechanical interface strategy with an iontronic sensor device. A conductive hydrogel, amino trimethylene phosphonic acid (ATMP) assisted poly(vinyl alcohol) (PVA), was employed as the dielectric layer of the gel iontronic sensor. The Hofmeister effect of the ATMP-PVA hydrogel was well investigated to establish the quantitative description of the gel elasticity modulus to chemical cosolvents. The mechanical properties of hydrogels can be transduced extensively and reversibly by regulating the aggregation state of polymer chains with hydrated ions or cosolvents. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) images of ATMP-PVA hydrogel microstructures stained with different soaked cosolvents present different networks. The information on different chemical components will be stored in the ATMP-PVA gels. The flexible gel iontronic sensor with a hierarchical pyramid structure performed high linear sensitivity of 3224.2 kPa-1 and wide pressure response in the range of 0-100 kPa. The finite element analysis proved the pressure distribution at the gel interface of the gel iontronic sensor and the capacitation-stress response relation. Various cations, anions, amino acids, and saccharides can be discriminated, classified, and quantified with the gel iontronic sensor. The Hofmeister effect regulated chemical-mechanical interface performs the response and conversion of biological/chemical signals into electrical output in real time. The particular function to tactile with gustation percept will contribute promising applications in the human-machine interaction, humanoid robot, clinic treatment, or athletic training optimization.

MSSDet: Multi-Scale Ship-Detection Framework in Optical Remote-Sensing Images and New Benchmark

Ships comprise the only and most important ocean transportation mode. Thus, ship detection is one of the most critical technologies in ship monitoring, which plays an essential role in maintaining marine safety. Optical remote-sensing images contain rich color and texture information, which is beneficial to ship detection. However, few optical remote-sensing datasets are open publicly due to the issue of sensitive data and copyrights, and only the HRSC2016 dataset is built for the ship-detection task. Moreover, almost all general object detectors suffer from the failure of multi-scale ship detection because of the diversity of spatial resolution and ship size. In this paper, we re-annotate the HRSC2016 dataset and supplement 610 optical remote-sensing images to build a new open source ship-detection benchmark dataset with rich multi-scale ship objects named the HRSC2016-MS dataset. In addition, we further explore the potential of a recursive mechanism in the field of object detection and propose a novel multi-scale ship-detection framework (MSSDet) in optical remote-sensing images. The success of detecting multi-scale objects depends on the hierarchical pyramid structure in the object-detection framework. However, the inherent semantic and spatial gaps among hierarchical pyramid levels seriously affect detection performance. To alleviate this problem, we propose a joint recursive feature pyramid (JRFP), which can generate semantically strong and spatially refined multi-scale features. Extensive experiments were conducted on the HRSC2016-MS, HRSC2016, and DIOR datasets. Detailed ablation studies directly demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed JRFP architecture and also showed that the proposed method has excellent generalizability. Comparisons with state-of-the-art methods showed that the proposed method achieves competitive performance, i.e., 77.3%, 95.8%, and 73.3% mean average precision accuracy on the HRSC2016-MS, HRSC2016, and DIOR datasets, respectively.

Formation of Hierarchical Pyramid-structured Si with Nanoholes by Using Thermally Dewetted Ag Thin Films

Si surface texturing generally requires an etching process to improve the anti-reflection and the self-cleaning properties of the surface. Among the various etching techniques for surface texturing, the wet etching method has been widely adopted as a relatively simple and inexpensive manufacturing method. In this study, we report the effects of hierarchical pyramid-structured Si with nanoholes formed using a chemical wet etching process with thermally dewetted Ag thin films. First, alkaline etching was performed on a Si wafer to fabricate micrometer-sized random pyramid structures. Then, Ag thin film was thermally grown on the pyramid-structured Si. Finally, nanopores were formed on the random pyramid structure via metal-assisted chemical etching. The final morphology of Si was a hierarchical random pyramid structure with nanoholes, exhibiting both anti-reflection and superhydrophobicity. The average reflectance decreased to ∼4%, and the contact angle increased to 170.5°, allowing these surfaces to be used in various wettability-controlled optoelectronic devices, such as Si solar cells for where light trapping and self-cleaning are essential.

Pyramidal Temporal Pooling With Discriminative Mapping for Audio Classification

Audio signals are temporally-structured data, and learning their discriminative representations containing temporal information is crucial for the audio classification. In this article, we propose an audio representation learning method with a hierarchical pyramid structure called pyramidal temporal pooling (PTP) which aims to capture the temporal information of an entire audio sample. By stacking a global temporal pooling layer on multiple local temporal pooling layers, the PTP can capture the high-level temporal dynamics of the input feature sequence in an unsupervised way. Furthermore, in the top global temporal pooling layer, we jointly optimize a learnable discriminative mapping (DM) and a softmax classifier. Such that, a joint learning method for the discriminative audio representations and the classifier called DM-PTP is also presented. By treating the temporal encoding as a low-level constraint of a bi-level optimization problem, the DM-PTP can produce the discriminative representation while maintaining the temporal information of the whole sequence. For an audio sample with an arbitrary time duration, both our PTP and DM-PTP can encode the input feature sequence with arbitrary length into a fixed-length representation. Without using any data augmentation and ensemble learning methods, both PTP and DM-PTP outperform the state-of-the-art CNNs on the audio event recognition (AER) dataset, and can achieve comparable performance on the DCASE 2018 acoustic scene classification (ASC) dataset compared with other best models in the challenge.

Assessment & Improvement of Children Road Safety: A Pyramid & Honeycomb Structure Approach

In this research, a 4 hierarchical pyramid structure approach is proposed to assess children road safety. The first is referred to as the road safety pyramid representing children road safety components and levels including root, at accident and post accident levels and factors. The second, referred to as the children road safety assessment pyramid, includes 3 cornerstones that are required to represent a detailed methodological children road safety diagnostics. These 3 cornerstones include children safety culture, safety indicators and accident data analysis. The third pyramid, referred to as the children road safety indicators, shows the levels and types of indicators that when computed can be used for in depth analysis and historical comparison of children road safety. The core of the paper is the development of a conceptual model of factors affecting the road behavior of children including traffic exposure and experience, cognitive skills and abilities, perceptual skills, knowledge and attitude. Towards this end, the paper presents the fourth pyramid, referred to as the children road safety behavior pyramid. This includes a 7-level hierarchal structure starting from exposure leading to experience and then skills/abilities, to knowledge to perception to attitudes and eventually culminating into children road safety behavior. The paper concludes by developing a generic integrated children road safety package of policies, measures, initiatives. The package is composed of 18 fields of action. In pursuing such integrated safety package this research also enhanced the classical 3Es concept (Engineering—Education—Enforcement) and introduced instead the 14Es honeycomb structure including (Engineer-ing—Education—Environment—Enforcement—Egalitarianism—Exposure—Ethics—Emergency—Ergonomics—Encouragement—Empowerment—Enabling—Economics—Evaluation). All in all this is meant to act as a generic benchmark guide/checklist for countries in compiling and tailoring children road safety programmes.

Managing civic activities by performance: impacts of the government’s performance-based funding system and the domain structure in Finnish sports policy

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on a turning point in Finnish sports policy at which the new performance-based governmental steering model replaced the old corporatist operational model. This shift is approached through a long-term analysis of Finnish sports policy and structures. The government’s power increased when the old hierarchical and representation-based pyramid structure of the sports movement crumbled and was replaced by a sports community that was based on looser collaboration. The article reviews the performance-based funding system applied by the Finnish government to sports organisations and the structural reform of the sports movement. The aim is to estimate the impacts of these changes on large national sport federations, in particular. The article analyses the effects of the new steering model and the development process of the various domains in the areas of youth sports, elite sports, adapted physical activities and adult sports. The results of the analysis show that the structural reform was never fully completed and that the impact of performance-based steering has waned in the activities of the large sport federations in the 2000s.

A scalable video compression technique based on wavelet transform and MPEG coding

We present a scalable coding scheme based on the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and MPEG coding for video applications. It utilizes the hierarchical pyramid structure that provides multiple resolutions. The DWT decomposes the image into several bands. In each band, a fixed-size motion compensated MPEG coder with custom-designed quantization tables and scanning direction is employed. This scheme has the advantages of reusing the widely available MPEG hardware and software as well as relieving the limitation of the image size imposed by the MPEG hardware technology. The simulation results show that the DWT-MPEG coding method improves the image quality over ordinary MPEG coding by 0.3/spl sim/1.5 dB.

Developing self‐directed work teams

Over the past decade many manufacturing organisations around the world have been changing their structures from the traditional hierarchical pyramid structure to a flatter, more responsive and lean structure. Team work and employee participation have become the key tasks for managers in all types of industries. This paper discusses team work and self‐directed work teams. It presents some of the key findings from a survey conducted in Australia and describes the four stages of developing self‐directed work teams. Some recommendations for companies adopting work teams are also made.

Image compression using nonlinear pyramid vector quantization

In this paper, we present a new image compression scheme that exploits the VQ technique in a hierarchical nonlinear pyramid structure. We use multistage median filters (MMF) to build the image pyramids. Image pyramids generated by MMF show a better details preservation than the ones generated by Burt's kernel. It is shown that MMF effectively decorrelates the difference pyramids, resulting in smaller first order entropy. Our simulations on natural images show that NPVQ yields a higher SNR as well as better image quality, in comparison with LPVQ. The NPVQ scheme is also appropriate for progressive image transmission.

A pyramid image coder using classified transform vector quantization

This paper describes a progressive image coding scheme that employs a discrete cosine transform-classified vector quantization (DCT-CVQ) in a hierarchical pyramid structure. This paper also proposes a new method for designing filters to construct an image pyramid. In designing the filter, by minimizing the maximum error energy between the input and the actual decimated-interpolated signals the optimal half band FIR filter for pyramid construction is described. Computer simulation results show that the proposed half-band filter yields a higher peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) as well as better image quality, in comparison with other currently used filters of the same computational complexity. Compression is achieved by applying the DCT-CVQ coding scheme to each stage. Since a classification is based upon the AC energy of the subblock, progressive transmission can be achieved by transmitting from the topmost to the lowest level of planes in the Laplacian pyramid, and from the higher to the lower AC energy class in the plane. The computer simulation demonstrates that the reconstructed image by the proposed scheme shows a high PSNR (33.78 dB) as well as good visual quality at 0.409 bit per pixel (bpp).