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Creating and understanding art has long been a hallmark of human ability. When presented with finished digital artwork, professional graphic artists can intuitively deconstruct and replicate it using various drawing tools, such as the line tool, paint bucket, and layer features, including opacity and blending modes. While most recent research in this field has focused on art generation, proposing a range of methods, these often rely on the concept of artwork being represented as a final image. To bridge the gap between pixel-level results and the actual drawing process, we present an approach that treats a set of drawing tools as executable programs. This method predicts a sequence of steps to achieve the final image, allowing for understandable and resolution-independent reproductions under the usage of a set of drawing commands. Our experiments demonstrate that our program synthesizer, Art2Prog, can comprehensively understand complex input images and reproduce them using high-quality executable programs. The experimental results evidence the potential of machines to grasp higher-level information from images and generate compact program-level descriptions., Comment: ICPR 2024

In contrast to the well-established technique of rasterization, vectorization of images poses a significant challenge in the field of computer graphics. Recent learning-based methods for converting raster images to vector formats frequently suffer from incomplete shapes, redundant path prediction, and a lack of accuracy in preserving the semantics of the original content. These shortcomings severely hinder the utility of these methods for further editing and manipulation of images. To address these challenges, we present DeepIcon, a novel hierarchical image vectorization network specifically tailored for generating variable-length icon vector graphics based on the raster image input. Our experimental results indicate that DeepIcon can efficiently produce Scalable Vector Graphics (SVGs) directly from raster images, bypassing the need for a differentiable rasterizer while also demonstrating a profound understanding of the image contents., Comment: Accepted as Oral Presentation at DICTA 2024

This study utilized the Tempotron, a robust classifier based on a third-generation neural network model, for pulse shape discrimination. By eliminating the need for manual feature extraction, the Tempotron model can process pulse signals directly, generating discrimination results based on prior knowledge. The study performed experiments using GPU acceleration, resulting in over 500 times faster compared to the CPU-based model, and investigated the impact of noise augmentation on the Tempotron performance. Experimental results substantiated that Tempotron serves as a formidable classifier, adept at accomplishing high discrimination accuracy on both AmBe and time-of-flight PuBe datasets. Furthermore, analyzing the neural activity of Tempotron during training shed light on its learning characteristics and aided in selecting its hyperparameters. Moreover, the study addressed the constraints and potential avenues for future development in utilizing the Tempotron for pulse shape discrimination. The dataset used in this study and the GPU-based Tempotron are publicly available on GitHub at https://github.com/HaoranLiu507/TempotronGPU., Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures

Multi-year observations of aerosol microphysical and optical properties, obtained through ground-based remote sensing at 50 China Aerosol Remote Sensing Network (CARSNET) sites, were used to characterize the aerosol climatology for representative remote, rural, and urban areas over China to assess effects on climate. The annual mean effective radii for total particles (ReffT) decreased from north to south and from rural to urban sites, and high total particle volumes were found at the urban sites. The aerosol optical depth at 440 nm (AOD440 nm) increased from remote and rural sites (0.12) to urban sites (0.79), and the extinction Ångström exponent (EAE440–870 nm) increased from 0.71 at the arid and semi-arid sites to 1.15 at the urban sites, presumably due to anthropogenic emissions. Single-scattering albedo (SSA440 nm) ranged from 0.88 to 0.92, indicating slightly to strongly absorbing aerosols. Absorption AOD440 nm values were 0.01 at the remote sites versus 0.07 at the urban sites. The average direct aerosol radiative effect (DARE) at the bottom of atmosphere increased from the sites in the remote areas (−24.40 W m−2) to the urban areas (−103.28 W m−2), indicating increased cooling at the latter. The DARE for the top of the atmosphere increased from −4.79 W m−2 at the remote sites to −30.05 W m−2 at the urban sites, indicating overall cooling effects for the Earth–atmosphere system. A classification method based on SSA440 nm, fine-mode fraction (FMF), and EAE440–870 nm showed that coarse-mode particles (mainly dust) were dominant at the rural sites near the northwestern deserts, while light-absorbing, fine-mode particles were important at most urban sites. This study will be important for understanding aerosol climate effects and regional environmental pollution, and the results will provide useful information for satellite validation and the improvement of climate modelling.