RESUMO
Natural image matting is an essential technique for image processing that enables various applications, such as image synthesis, video editing, and target tracking. However, the existing image matting methods may fail to produce satisfactory results when computing resources are limited. Sampling-based methods can reduce the dimensionality of the decision space and, therefore, reduce computational resources by employing different sampling strategies. While these approaches reduce computational consumption, they may miss an optimal pixel pair when the number of available high-quality pixel pairs is limited. To address this shortcoming, we propose a novel multi-criterion sampling strategy that avoids missing high-quality pixel pairs by incorporating multi-range pixel pair sampling and a high-quality sample selection method. This strategy is employed to develop a multi-criterion matting algorithm via Gaussian process, which searches for the optimal pixel pair by using the Gaussian process fitting model instead of solving the original pixel pair objective function. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperformed other methods, even with 1% computing resources, and achieved alpha matte results comparable to those yielded by the state-of-the-art optimization algorithms.
RESUMO
In sampling-based matting methods, the alpha is estimated by choosing the best pair of foreground and background color samples. The lack of true samples is the major obstacle in obtaining high-quality alpha mattes. Regrettably, several proposed approaches did not address the conflicts among multiple sampling criteria and the effects of incomplete sample spaces. To address this issue, we propose a pixel-level discrete multiobjective sampling (PDMS) method. The color sampling process at each unknown pixel is formalized as a multiobjective optimization problem (MOP). The strength of PDMS includes its ability to minimize both color difference and spatial distance between unknown and known pixels, and its capacity to adaptively make trade-offs among conflicting sampling criteria. To mitigate the effects of incomplete sample spaces, the sample space is extended to complete known regions in PDMS, which means that the colors of all known pixels can be sampled, instead of mean colors of superpixels. Our experimental results show that PDMS collects a small set of samples while achieving smaller minimum absolute difference in alpha estimation. Moreover, PDMS implements pixel-level sampling by using the proposed multiobjective optimization algorithm to efficiently solve sampling MOPs. The PDMS-based matting method provides high-quality alpha mattes with sharp boundaries and thus outperforms those prior image matting methods in terms of gradient error.
RESUMO
Conceptions of acute public health events typically assume that they are tackled exclusively or principally through technical and medical solutions. Yet health and politics are inexorably linked. To better understand this link, this paper adopts a disaster diplomacy perspective for analysing and assessing the impacts of acute public health events on diplomatic outcomes. Two gaps in understanding disaster-health-politics connections are addressed: (i) how health interventions can impact diplomatic endeavours, especially for (ii) acute public health events. Three diverse case studies are interpreted from a disaster diplomacy perspective: Cuba's medical diplomacy, China and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and polio vaccination. Disaster diplomacy permits deeper investigation and analysis of connections amongst health, disaster, and diplomatic activities by viewing efforts on acute public health events as being political through disaster risk reduction (beforehand) and disaster response (during and afterwards). Understanding improves how health interventions affect diplomacy and on disaster diplomacy's limitations.
