Simple Mapping Research Articles

Object detection and tracking for drones: A system design using dynamic visual SLAM

Abstract. Drones can play a quite crucial role in many walks of life today. Enhancing the visual perception ability of drones is crucial to their intelligence level. Among them, it is necessary to focus on strengthening the detection, tracking and mapping capabilities of drones for dynamic objects. However, the existing visual SLAM systems carried by drones do not perform well in dynamic environments. This project designs a monocular visual SLAM system specifically for drones, aiming to achieve efficient three-dimensional mapping and target tracking, surpassing the limitations of simple static mapping and positioning. Besides, this project constructs a drone dynamic SLAM system developed on the ORB-SLAM3 structure, uses drone images to detect, track and map object motion models, and reconstructs environmental maps to obtain motion parameters with real physical scales. This project strives to optimize the input pre-processing module, improve the validity of data and output environmental maps and raster maps. The outcomes demonstrate the system's strong accuracy and adaptability in dynamic installation procedures.

A Geometric Numerical Integration with Simple Cell Mapping for Global Analysis of Nonlinear Dynamical Systems

In order to improve the efficiency in computing the global properties of nonlinear systems, some effective methods have been proposed for the global analysis of these systems. However, there are only few investigations focusing on the numerical algorithms of the system response trajectories. This paper presents a higher-efficiency geometric numerical integration method with simple cell mapping for solving the basins of attraction of nonlinear systems. This numerical algorithm is based on the rule of Lie derivative, using it to calculate the trajectories of the nonlinear systems. Then, the global structure is studied by the numerical algorithm associated with a simple cell mapping method. Compared with the traditional Runge–Kutta methods of orders 4 and 5, it is demonstrated that the proposed Lie derivative iterative algorithm has significant advantages in efficiency.

CATransformer: A Cycle-Aware Transformer for High-Fidelity ECG Generation From PPG.

Electrocardiography (ECG) is the gold standard for monitoring heart function and is crucial for preventing the worsening of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). However, the inconvenience of ECG acquisition poses challenges for long-term continuous monitoring. Consequently, researchers have explored non-invasive and easily accessible photoplethysmography (PPG) as an alternative, converting it into ECG. Previous studies have focused on peaks or simple mapping to generate ECG, ignoring the inherent periodicity of cardiovascular signals. This results in an inability to accurately extract physiological information during the cycle, thus compromising the generated ECG signals' clinical utility. To this end, we introduce a novel PPG-to-ECG translation model called CATransformer, capable of adaptive modeling based on the cardiac cycle. Specifically, CATransformer automatically extracts the cycle using a cycle-aware module and creates multiple semantic views of the cardiac cycle. It leverages a transformer to capture detailed features within each cycle and the dynamics across cycles. Our method outperforms existing approaches, exhibiting the lowest RMSE across five paired PPG-ECG databases. Additionally, extensive experiments are conducted on four cardiovascular-related tasks to assess the clinical utility of the generated ECG, achieving consistent state-of-the-art performance. Experimental results confirm that CATransformer generates highly faithful ECG signals while preserving their physiological characteristics.

Topological comparison of flexible and semiflexible chains in polymer melts with θ-chains.

A central paradigm of polymer physics states that chains in melts behave like random walks as intra- and interchain interactions effectively cancel each other out. Likewise, θ-chains, i.e., chains at the transition from a swollen coil to a globular phase, are also thought to behave like ideal chains, as attractive forces are counterbalanced by repulsive entropic contributions. While the simple mapping to an equivalent Kuhn chain works rather well in most scenarios with corrections to scaling, random walks do not accurately capture the topology and knots, particularly for flexible chains. In this paper, we demonstrate with Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations that chains in polymer melts and θ-chains not only agree on a structural level for a range of stiffnesses but also topologically. They exhibit similar knotting probabilities and knot sizes, both of which are not captured by ideal chain representations. This discrepancy comes from the suppression of small knots in real chains, which is strongest for very flexible chains because excluded volume effects are still active locally and become weaker with increasing semiflexibility. Our findings suggest that corrections to ideal behavior are indeed similar for the two scenarios of real chains and that the structure and topology of a chain in a melt can be approximately reproduced by a corresponding θ-chain.

Topological recursion, symplectic duality, and generalized fully simple maps

For a given spectral curve, we construct a family of symplectic dual spectral curves for which we prove an explicit formula expressing the n-point functions produced by the topological recursion on these curves via the n-point functions on the original curve. As a corollary, we prove topological recursion for the generalized fully simple maps generating functions.

Topological recursion for fully simple maps from ciliated maps

Topological recursion for fully simple maps from ciliated maps

Mitigation and Prevention of Landslide Hazard of Himachal Pradesh in the Lesser Himalaya

Landslides are destructive geological processes that have globally caused deaths and destruction to property worth billion dollars. Landslide occurrences are widespread and prolific in India covering more than 15 per cent of the total area. These are mostly concentrated in the Himalayan belt, parts of Meghalaya Plateau, Nilgiri Hills, Western and Eastern Ghats. The slope failure in the hilly terrain is due to geological processes and events. The frequency and magnitude of slope failure also increased due to anthropogenic activities such as road construction, deforestation and urban expansion. Keeping all these problems in mind research focuses on the Lesser Himalaya of Himachal Himalaya as it falls under very high risk zone in case of landslides and comprise of three objectives. They are: a) to analyse the spatial pattern of landslides in the Lesser Himalaya, b) to assess the causes of landslides vulnerability in the study region and c) to suggests some preventive measures to mitigate landslides. In this work an attempt has been made to collect data on landslides incidences and damage from the secondary sources like Geological Survey of India, Building Material and Technology Promotion council from Ministry of Urban Affairs. The methodologies adopted for data analysis are simple tabulations, bar diagrams, statistical and mapping techniques to represent the Landslide vulnerability of the Lesser Himalaya. The analysis of the study reveals that there is increase in the number of landslides. The spatial pattern of landslide shows linear patterns, viz. along roads, rivers or lineaments/ faults. Besides, heavy rainfall, floods and earthquakes enhance the vulnerability condition. The landslides may be part and parcel of the Himalayan landscape, but they can be mitigated by some suitable measures. Few methods of landslide prevention in the study region have been suggested.

Modeling Ligands into Maps Derived from Electron Cryomicroscopy.

Deciphering the protein-ligand interactions in a macromolecular complex is crucial for understanding the molecular mechanism, underlying biological processes, and drug development. In recent years, cryogenic sample electron microscopy (cryoEM) has emerged as a powerful technique to determine the structures of macromolecules and to investigate the mode of ligand binding at near-atomic resolution. Identifying and modeling non-protein molecules in cryoEM maps is often challenging due to anisotropic resolution across the molecule of interest and inherent noise in the data. In this article, the readers are introduced to various software and methods currently used for ligand identification, model building, and refinement of atomic coordinates using selected macromolecules. One of the simplest ways to identify the presence of a ligand, as illustrated with the enolase enzyme, is to subtract the two maps obtained with and without the ligand. The extra density of the ligand is likely to stand out in the difference map even at a higher threshold. There are instances, as shown in the case of metabotropic Glutamate receptor mGlu5, when such simple difference maps cannot be generated. The recently introduced method of deriving the Fo-Fc omit map can serve as a tool for validating and demonstrating the presence of the ligand. Finally, using the well-studied β-galactosidase as an example, the effect of resolution on modeling the ligands and solvent molecules in cryoEM maps is analyzed, and an outlook on how cryoEM can be used in drug discovery is presented.

Identifying and fitting eclipse maps of exoplanets with cross-validation

ABSTRACT Eclipse mapping uses the shape of the eclipse of an exoplanet to measure its two-dimensional structure. Light curves are mostly composed of longitudinal information, with the latitudinal information only contained in the brief ingress and egress of the eclipse. This imbalance can lead to a spuriously confident map, where the longitudinal structure is constrained by out-of-eclipse data and the latitudinal structure is wrongly determined by the priors on the map. We present a new method to address this issue. The method tests for the presence of an eclipse mapping signal using k-fold cross-validation to compare the performance of a simple mapping model to the null hypothesis of a uniform disc. If a signal is found, the method fits a map with more degrees of freedom, optimizing its information content. The information content is varied by penalizing the model likelihood by a factor proportional to the spatial entropy of the map, optimized by cross-validation. We demonstrate this method for simulated data sets then apply it to three observational data sets. The method identifies an eclipse mapping signal for JWST MIRI/LRS observations of WASP-43b but does not identify a signal for JWST NIRISS/SOSS observations of WASP-18b or Spitzer Space Telescope observations of HD 189733b. It is possible to fit eclipse maps to these data sets, but we suggest that these maps are overfitting the eclipse shape. We fit a new map with more spatial freedom to the WASP-43b data set and show a flatter east–west structure than previously derived.

Ultra-fast semantic map perception model for autonomous driving

Autonomous driving relies on real-time perception of environmental semantic maps to make decisions, accurate and real-time perception of environmental semantics is crucial for safe navigation, as well as for efficient construction of high-definition maps in the backend. Our research found that when the output space of the semantic map perception model is an orthogonal projection subspace of the input perception space, it significantly improves the accuracy and real-time performance of map semantic segmentation while reducing learning pressure on deep network models. Based on this, we propose a simple yet efficient semantic map segmentation network that aims to achieve extremely fast speed and precision. Furthermore, we implement a semantic map fusion process using a Bayesian framework that promotes global semantic information accumulation in local semantics over time and space. Our experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method, achieving state-of-the-art performance in network speed and mIoU metrics. At the same spatial resolution of semantic maps, our method reaches over 350+ frames per second, which is at least 15 times faster than the previous state-of-the-art method. Code released at https://github.com/xzx-ai/MDSegMap.

Appearance-Preserved Portrait-to-Anime Translation via Proxy-Guided Domain Adaptation.

Converting a human portrait to anime style is a desirable but challenging problem. Existing methods fail to resolve this problem due to the large inherent gap between two domains that cannot be overcome by a simple direct mapping. For this reason, these methods struggle to preserve the appearance features in the original photo. In this article, we discover an intermediate domain, the coser portrait (portraits of humans costuming as anime characters), that helps bridge this gap. It alleviates the learning ambiguity and loosens the mapping difficulty in a progressive manner. Specifically, we start from learning the mapping between coser and anime portraits, and present a proxy-guided domain adaptation learning scheme with three progressive adaptation stages to shift the initial model to the human portrait domain. In this way, our model can generate visually pleasant anime portraits with well-preserved appearances given the human portrait. Our model adopts a disentangled design by breaking down the translation problem into two specific subtasks of face deformation and portrait stylization. This further elevates the generation quality. Extensive experimental results show that our model can achieve visually compelling translation with better appearance preservation and perform favorably against the existing methods both qualitatively and quantitatively. Our code and datasets are available at https://github.com/NeverGiveU/PDA-Translation.

Multi-layered computational gene networks by engineered tristate logics

So far, biocomputation strictly follows traditional design principles of digital electronics, which could reach their limits when assembling gene circuits of higher complexity. Here, by creating genetic variants of tristate buffers instead of using conventional logic gates as basic signal processing units, we introduce a tristate-based logic synthesis (TriLoS) framework for resource-efficient design of multi-layered gene networks capable of performing complex Boolean calculus within single-cell populations. This sets the stage for simple, modular, and low-interference mapping of various arithmetic logics of interest and an effectively enlarged engineering space within single cells. We not only construct computational gene networks running full adder and full subtractor operations at a cellular level but also describe a treatment paradigm building on programmable cell-based therapeutics, allowing for adjustable and disease-specific drug secretion logics invivo. This work could foster the evolution of modern biocomputers to progress toward unexplored applications in precision medicine.

Retrieving and reconstructing conceptually similar images from fMRI with latent diffusion models and a neuro-inspired brain decoding model

Objective. Brain decoding is a field of computational neuroscience that aims to infer mental states or internal representations of perceptual inputs from measurable brain activity. This study proposes a novel approach to brain decoding that relies on semantic and contextual similarity. Approach. We use several functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) datasets of natural images as stimuli and create a deep learning decoding pipeline inspired by the bottom-up and top-down processes in human vision. Our pipeline includes a linear brain-to-feature model that maps fMRI activity to semantic visual stimuli features. We assume that the brain projects visual information onto a space that is homeomorphic to the latent space of last layer of a pretrained neural network, which summarizes and highlights similarities and differences between concepts. These features are categorized in the latent space using a nearest-neighbor strategy, and the results are used to retrieve images or condition a generative latent diffusion model to create novel images. Main results. We demonstrate semantic classification and image retrieval on three different fMRI datasets: Generic Object Decoding (vision perception and imagination), BOLD5000, and NSD. In all cases, a simple mapping between fMRI and a deep semantic representation of the visual stimulus resulted in meaningful classification and retrieved or generated images. We assessed quality using quantitative metrics and a human evaluation experiment that reproduces the multiplicity of conscious and unconscious criteria that humans use to evaluate image similarity. Our method achieved correct evaluation in over 80% of the test set. Significance. Our study proposes a novel approach to brain decoding that relies on semantic and contextual similarity. The results demonstrate that measurable neural correlates can be linearly mapped onto the latent space of a neural network to synthesize images that match the original content. These findings have implications for both cognitive neuroscience and artificial intelligence.

Smart insect-computer hybrid robots empowered with enhanced obstacle avoidance capabilities using onboard monocular camera

Insect-computer hybrid robots are receiving increasing attention as a potential alternative to small artificial robots due to their superior locomotion capabilities and low manufacturing costs. Controlling insect-computer hybrid robots to travel through terrain littered with complex obstacles of various shapes and sizes is still challenging. While insects can inherently deal with certain obstacles by using their antennae to detect and avoid obstacles, this ability is limited and can be interfered with by control signals when performing navigation tasks, ultimately leading to the robot being trapped in a specific place and having difficulty escaping. Hybrid robots need to add additional sensors to provide accurate perception and early warning of the external environment to avoid obstacles before getting trapped, ensuring smooth navigation tasks in rough terrain. However, due to insects’ tiny size and limited load capacity, hybrid robots are very limited in the sensors they can carry. A monocular camera is suitable for insect-computer hybrid robots because of its small size, low power consumption, and robust information acquisition capabilities. This paper proposes a navigation algorithm with an integrated obstacle avoidance module using a monocular camera for the insect-computer hybrid robot. The monocular cameras equipped with a monocular depth estimation algorithm based on deep learning can produce depth maps of environmental obstacles. The navigation algorithm generates control commands that can drive the hybrid robot away from obstacles according to the distribution of obstacle distances in the depth map. To ensure the performance of the monocular depth estimation model when applied to insect-computer hybrid robotics scenarios, we collected the first dataset from the viewpoint of a small robot for model training. In addition, we propose a simple but effective depth map processing method to obtain obstacle avoidance commands based on the weighted sum method. The success rate of the navigation experiment is significantly improved from 6.7% to 73.3%. Experimental results show that our navigation algorithm can detect obstacles in advance and guide the hybrid robots to avoid them before they get trapped.

Fractal Tent Map with Application to Surrogate Testing

Discrete chaotic maps are a mathematical basis for many useful applications. One of the most common is chaos-based pseudorandom number generators (PRNGs), which should be computationally cheap and controllable and possess necessary statistical properties, such as mixing and diffusion. However, chaotic PRNGs have several known shortcomings, e.g., being prone to chaos degeneration, falling in short periods, and having a relatively narrow parameter range. Therefore, it is reasonable to design novel simple chaotic maps to overcome these drawbacks. In this study, we propose a novel fractal chaotic tent map, which is a generalization of the well-known tent map with a fractal function introduced into the right-hand side. We construct and investigate a PRNG based on the proposed map, showing its high level of randomness by applying the NIST statistical test suite. The application of the proposed PRNG to the task of generating surrogate data and a surrogate testing procedure is shown. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach possesses superior accuracy in surrogate testing across three distinct signal types—linear, chaotic, and biological signals—compared to the MATLAB built-in randn() function and PRNGs based on the logistic map and the conventional tent map. Along with surrogate testing, the proposed fractal tent map can be efficiently used in chaos-based communications and data encryption tasks.

Parallel Spatio-Temporal Attention Transformer for Video Frame Interpolation

Traditional video frame interpolation methods based on deep convolutional neural networks face challenges in handling large motions. Their performance is limited by the fact that convolutional operations cannot directly integrate the rich temporal and spatial information of inter-frame pixels, and these methods rely heavily on additional inputs such as optical flow to model motion. To address this issue, we develop a novel framework for video frame interpolation that uses Transformer to efficiently model the long-range similarity of inter-frame pixels. Furthermore, to effectively aggregate spatio-temporal features, we design a novel attention mechanism divided into temporal attention and spatial attention. Specifically, spatial attention is used to aggregate intra-frame information, integrating both attention and convolution paradigms through the simple mapping approach. Temporal attention is used to model the similarity of pixels on the timeline. This design achieves parallel processing of these two types of information without extra computational cost, aggregating information in the space–time dimension. In addition, we introduce a context extraction network and multi-scale prediction frame synthesis network to further optimize the performance of the Transformer. Our method and state-of-the-art methods are extensively quantitatively and qualitatively experimented on various benchmark datasets. On the Vimeo90K and UCF101 datasets, our model achieves improvements of 0.09 dB and 0.01 dB in the PSNR metrics over UPR-Net-large, respectively. On the Vimeo90K dataset, our model outperforms FLAVR by 0.07 dB, with only 40.56% of its parameters. The qualitative results show that for complex and large-motion scenes, our method generates sharper and more realistic edges and details.

Quantifying the reduction in coal and increase in renewables in OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries: Proposal for a coal-renewable energy index and map

Reducing coal use and increasing renewable energy use are two major policies that have been recommended in many countries and regions to address climate change. However, the progress toward meeting these policy goals is unclear. Therefore, this study proposes the “C–R map”, which is a correlation map between the share of coal-fired plants and renewable energy in terms of annual consumption, and the “CR index”, which is an index composed of the above two indicators. The proposed methods objectively visualise and quantitatively analyse statistical data on global climate change associated with “reducing coal and increasing renewables”, whose trends or tendencies could only be obtained through fragmented statistical data and documents. Using the proposed C–R map and CR index, an international comparative analysis was conducted on the share of coal and renewables from 1990 to 2020 in 37 Organisation for Economic Cooperation Development member countries. The results quantitatively showed that 31 member countries clearly exhibited a trend of decreasing their share of coal and increasing their share of renewables, while only five countries, i.e. Chile, Turkey, Mexico, Japan, and Korea, showed unique and inconsistent trends relative to that of the other member countries. By using the highly transparent and simple map and index proposed here based on published statistical information and objective methods, the global trend of “reducing coal and increasing renewables” can be quantitatively visualised in graphs and numerical values, which are easily understood and interpretable, even for laymen.

Hierarchical path planner combining probabilistic roadmap and deep deterministic policy gradient for unmanned ground vehicles with non-holonomic constraints

Path planning plays a vital role in autonomous driving as it needs to guide the vehicle to achieve the target position without collision while satisfying the vehicle's non-holonomic constraints. A good path planner should be able to cope with sophisticated environments and try to make the planned path as short as possible. Traditional path planning methods when being applied on four-wheel vehicles may suffer from one of the following disadvantages including conflicting with non-holonomic constraints, far from close-optimal length solution, or easy to get stuck in specific environments. In this paper, a hierarchical path planning method for a four-wheel vehicle combining probabilistic roadmap (PRM) and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) is proposed to address existing problems. In the upper level, PRM is used to generate a guidance path quickly, which doesn't consider the vehicle's non-holonomic constraints but gives the sketch of the path that helps the vehicle to jump out of some dilemmas in specific environments while maintaining a relatively short path distance. In the lower level, reinforcement learning, specifically DDPG, is used to optimize the guidance path generated by PRM considering multiple factors including non-holonomic constraints and obstacle avoidance. The proposed method is validated in four different environments including a simple map, an easy-to-stuck specific map, a maze-like complex map and an office-like complex map. Results show that the proposed method could generate a smooth path satisfying non-holonomic constraints while demonstrating desirable obstacle avoidance performance. The planned path of the proposed method is superior to that of both traditional and state-of-the-art methods in terms of path length and smoothness, which could be 1.3–12.9 % shorter and 2.6–52.1 % smoother in different environments.

Map conformational landscapes of intrinsically disordered proteins with polymer physics quantities

Disordered proteins are conformationally flexible proteins that are biologically important and have been implicated in devastating diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease and cancer. Unlike stably folded structured proteins, disordered proteins sample a range of different conformations that needs to be accounted for. Here, we treat disordered proteins as polymer chains, and compute a dimensionless quantity called instantaneous shape ratio (Rs), as Rs = Ree2/Rg2, where Ree is end-to-end distance and Rg is radius of gyration. Extended protein conformations tend to have high Ree compared with Rg, and thus have high Rs values, whereas compact conformations have smaller Rs values. We use a scatter plot of Rs (representing shape) against Rg (representing size) as a simple map of conformational landscapes. We first examine the conformational landscape of simple polymer models such as Random Walk, Self-Avoiding Walk, and Gaussian Walk (GW), and we notice that all protein/polymer maps lie within the boundaries of the GW map. We thus use the GW map as a reference and, to assess conformational diversity, we compute the fraction of the GW conformations (fC) covered by each protein/polymer. Disordered proteins all have high fC scores, consistent with their disordered nature. Each disordered protein accesses a different region of the reference map, revealing differences in their conformational ensembles. We additionally examine the conformational maps of the nonviral gene delivery vector polyethyleneimine at various protonation states, and find that they resemble disordered proteins, with coverage of the reference map decreasing with increasing protonation state, indicating decreasing conformational diversity. We propose that our method of combining Rs and Rg in a scatter plot generates a simple, meaningful map of the conformational landscape of a disordered protein, which in turn can be used to assess conformational diversity of disordered proteins.

Two simple memristive maps with adaptive energy regulation and digital signal process verification

Two simple memristive maps with adaptive energy regulation and digital signal process verification