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Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have recently developed a new model that enables fast and accurate object detection in high-resolution 4K and 8K video footage using GPUs. Their attention pipeline method carries out a two-stage evaluation of every image or video frame under rough and refined resolution, limiting the total number of evaluations necessary.

In recent years, machine learning has attained remarkable results in computer vision tasks, including . However, most recognition models typically perform best on images with a relatively low resolution. As the resolution of recording devices is rapidly improving, there is a rising need for tools that can process data.

“We were interested in finding and overcoming the limitations of current approaches,” Vít Růžička, one of the researchers who carried out the study told TechXplore. “While plenty of data sources record in high resolution, current state-of-the-art object detection models, such as YOLO, Faster RCNN, SSD, etc., work with images that have a relatively low resolution of approximately 608 × 608 px. Our main objective was to scale the object detection task to 4K-8K videos (up to 7680 × 4320 px) while maintaining high processing speed. We also wanted to understand if and by how much we can benefit from high resolution compared to using low-resolution images, in terms of accuracy of the models.”

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#ParkerSolarProbe


Parker Solar Probe is alive and well after skimming by the Sun at just 15 million miles from our star’s surface. This is far closer than any spacecraft has ever gone — the previous record was set by Helios B in 1976 and broken by Parker on Oct. 29 — and this maneuver has exposed the spacecraft to intense heat and solar radiation in a complex solar wind environment.

“Parker Solar Probe was designed to take care of itself and its precious payload during this close approach, with no control from us on Earth — and now we know it succeeded,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency headquarters in Washington. “Parker is the culmination of six decades of scientific progress. Now, we have realized humanity’s first close visit to our star, which will have implications not just here on Earth, but for a deeper understanding of our universe.”

We hear a lot about Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and that’s because we have extremely fancy hardware floating around and, in some cases, cruising on the surface of those planets. The planets that lie further away from the Sun don’t get nearly as much attention, but they may soon, as NASA is currently spitballing some missions that will give us a better look at Uranus than we’ve ever gotten.

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These maps sketch out the remnants of long-lost landmasses trapped within drifting continental plates called cratons. While some cratons are already well-understood, Antarctica’s lithospheric structure is tough to examine because of its remote location and the enormous ice sheets that obscure its underlying geology.

“These gravity images are revolutionizing our ability to study the least understood continent on Earth—Antarctica,” said study co-author Fausto Ferraccioli, science leader of geology and Geophysics at the British Antarctic Survey, in a statement. “In East Antarctica, we see an exciting mosaic of geological features that reveal fundamental similarities and differences between the crust beneath Antarctica and other continents it was joined to until 160 million years ago.”

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