Well now this will be useful! Microsoft is adding a text recognition function (OCR) to the Windows 11 Snipping Tool. The new feature will let you to copy text from screenshots and paste it into word processing programs, for example. Currently, only Windows Insider testers from the Canary and Dev channels can try the new text copying feature in the Snipping Tool, though if all goes well you can expect to see it hit all Windows 11 machines at some point in the future. The new function, called "Text Actions," is available in Snipping Tool version 11.2308.33.0.

Powered ankle prostheses effectively assist people with lower limb amputation to perform daily activities. High performance prostheses with adjustable compliance and capability to predict and implement amputee's intent are crucial for them to be comparable to or better than a real limb. However, current designs fail to provide simple yet effective compliance of the joint with full potential of modification, and lack accurate gait prediction method in real time. This paper proposes an innovative design of powered ankle prosthesis with serial elastic actuator (SEA), and puts forward a MLP based gait recognition method that can accurately and continuously predict more gait parameters for motion sensing and control. The prosthesis mimics biological joint with similar weight, torque, and power which can assist walking of up to 4 m/s. A new design of planar torsional spring is proposed for the SEA, which has better stiffness, endurance, and potential of modification than current designs. The gait recognition system simultaneously generates locomotive speed, gait phase, ankle angle and angular velocity only utilizing signals of single IMU, holding advantage in continuity, adaptability for speed range, accuracy, and capability of multi-functions.

The rapid progress of deep speech synthesis models has posed significant threats to society such as malicious content manipulation. Therefore, many studies have emerged to detect the so-called deepfake audio. However, existing works focus on the binary detection of real audio and fake audio. In real-world scenarios such as model copyright protection and digital evidence forensics, it is needed to know what tool or model generated the deepfake audio to explain the decision. This motivates us to ask: Can we recognize the system fingerprints of deepfake audio? In this paper, we present the first deepfake audio dataset for system fingerprint recognition (SFR) and conduct an initial investigation. We collected the dataset from the speech synthesis systems of seven Chinese vendors that use the latest state-of-the-art deep learning technologies, including both clean and compressed sets. In addition, to facilitate the further development of system fingerprint recognition methods, we provide extensive benchmarks that can be compared and research findings. The dataset will be publicly available. .

Crowdsourced platforms provide huge amounts of street-view images that contain valuable building information. This work addresses the challenges in applying Scene Text Recognition (STR) in crowdsourced street-view images for building attribute mapping. We use Flickr images, particularly examining texts on building facades. A Berlin Flickr dataset is created, and pre-trained STR models are used for text detection and recognition. Manual checking on a subset of STR-recognized images demonstrates high accuracy. We examined the correlation between STR results and building functions, and analysed instances where texts were recognized on residential buildings but not on commercial ones. Further investigation revealed significant challenges associated with this task, including small text regions in street-view images, the absence of ground truth labels, and mismatches in buildings in Flickr images and building footprints in OpenStreetMap (OSM). To develop city-wide mapping beyond urban hotspot locations, we suggest differentiating the scenarios where STR proves effective while developing appropriate algorithms or bringing in additional data for handling other cases. Furthermore, interdisciplinary collaboration should be undertaken to understand the motivation behind building photography and labeling. The STR-on-Flickr results are publicly available at https://github.com/ya0-sun/STR-Berlin.

Objective: The objective of the study is to efficiently increase the expressivity of surface electromyography-based (sEMG) gesture recognition systems. Approach: We use a problem transformation approach, in which actions were subset into two biomechanically independent components - a set of wrist directions and a set of finger modifiers. To maintain fast calibration time, we train models for each component using only individual gestures, and extrapolate to the full product space of combination gestures by generating synthetic data. We collected a supervised dataset with high-confidence ground truth labels in which subjects performed combination gestures while holding a joystick, and conducted experiments to analyze the impact of model architectures, classifier algorithms, and synthetic data generation strategies on the performance of the proposed approach. Main Results: We found that a problem transformation approach using a parallel model architecture in combination with a non-linear classifier, along with restricted synthetic data generation, shows promise in increasing the expressivity of sEMG-based gestures with a short calibration time. Significance: sEMG-based gesture recognition has applications in human-computer interaction, virtual reality, and the control of robotic and prosthetic devices. Existing approaches require exhaustive model calibration. The proposed approach increases expressivity without requiring users to demonstrate all combination gesture classes. Our results may be extended to larger gesture vocabularies and more complicated model architectures.

Deformable image registration aims to find a dense non-linear spatial correspondence between a pair of images, which is a crucial step for many medical tasks such as tumor growth monitoring and population analysis. Recently, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been widely recognized for their ability to perform fast end-to-end registration. However, DNN-based registration needs to explore the spatial information of each image and fuse this information to characterize spatial correspondence. This raises an essential question: what is the optimal fusion strategy to characterize spatial correspondence? Existing fusion strategies (e.g., early fusion, late fusion) were empirically designed to fuse information by manually defined prior knowledge, which inevitably constrains the registration performance within the limits of empirical designs. In this study, we depart from existing empirically-designed fusion strategies and develop a data-driven fusion strategy for deformable image registration. To achieve this, we propose an Automatic Fusion network (AutoFuse) that provides flexibility to fuse information at many potential locations within the network. A Fusion Gate (FG) module is also proposed to control how to fuse information at each potential network location based on training data. Our AutoFuse can automatically optimize its fusion strategy during training and can be generalizable to both unsupervised registration (without any labels) and semi-supervised registration (with weak labels provided for partial training data). Extensive experiments on two well-benchmarked medical registration tasks (inter- and intra-patient registration) with eight public datasets show that our AutoFuse outperforms state-of-the-art unsupervised and semi-supervised registration methods.

Electricity grids have become an essential part of daily life, even if they are often not noticed in everyday life. We usually only become particularly aware of this dependence by the time the electricity grid is no longer available. However, significant changes, such as the transition to renewable energy (photovoltaic, wind turbines, etc.) and an increasing number of energy consumers with complex load profiles (electric vehicles, home battery systems, etc.), pose new challenges for the electricity grid. To address these challenges, we propose two first-of-its-kind datasets based on measurements in a broadband powerline communications (PLC) infrastructure. Both datasets FiN-1 and FiN-2, were collected during real practical use in a part of the German low-voltage grid that supplies around 4.4 million people and show more than 13 billion datapoints collected by more than 5100 sensors. In addition, we present different use cases in asset management, grid state visualization, forecasting, predictive maintenance, and novelty detection to highlight the benefits of these types of data. For these applications, we particularly highlight the use of novel machine learning architectures to extract rich information from real-world data that cannot be captured using traditional approaches. By publishing the first large-scale real-world dataset, we aim to shed light on the previously largely unrecognized potential of PLC data and emphasize machine-learning-based research in low-voltage distribution networks by presenting a variety of different use cases.

The translation of thermal infrared (TIR) images to visible light (VI) images presents a challenging task with potential applications spanning various domains such as TIR-VI image registration and fusion. Leveraging supplementary information derived from TIR image conversions can significantly enhance model performance and generalization across these applications. However, prevailing issues within this field include suboptimal image fidelity and limited model scalability. In this paper, we introduce an algorithm, LadleNet, based on the U-Net architecture. LadleNet employs a two-stage U-Net concatenation structure, augmented with skip connections and refined feature aggregation techniques, resulting in a substantial enhancement in model performance. Comprising 'Handle' and 'Bowl' modules, LadleNet's Handle module facilitates the construction of an abstract semantic space, while the Bowl module decodes this semantic space to yield mapped VI images. The Handle module exhibits extensibility by allowing the substitution of its network architecture with semantic segmentation networks, thereby establishing more abstract semantic spaces to bolster model performance. Consequently, we propose LadleNet+, which replaces LadleNet's Handle module with the pre-trained DeepLabv3+ network, thereby endowing the model with enhanced semantic space construction capabilities. The proposed method is evaluated and tested on the KAIST dataset, accompanied by quantitative and qualitative analyses. Compared to existing methodologies, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of image clarity and perceptual quality. The source code will be made available at https://github.com/Ach-1914/LadleNet/tree/main/.

One of the most challenging problems in fingerprint recognition continues to be establishing the identity of a suspect associated with partial and smudgy fingerprints left at a crime scene (i.e., latent prints or fingermarks). Despite the success of fixed-length embeddings for rolled and slap fingerprint recognition, the features learned for latent fingerprint matching have mostly been limited to local minutiae-based embeddings and have not directly leveraged global representations for matching. In this paper, we combine global embeddings with local embeddings for state-of-the-art latent to rolled matching accuracy with high throughput. The combination of both local and global representations leads to improved recognition accuracy across NIST SD 27, NIST SD 302, MSP, MOLF DB1/DB4, and MOLF DB2/DB4 latent fingerprint datasets for both closed-set (84.11%, 54.36%, 84.35%, 70.43%, 62.86% rank-1 retrieval rate, respectively) and open-set (0.50, 0.74, 0.44, 0.60, 0.68 FNIR at FPIR=0.02, respectively) identification scenarios on a gallery of 100K rolled fingerprints. Not only do we fuse the complimentary representations, we also use the local features to guide the global representations to focus on discriminatory regions in two fingerprint images to be compared. This leads to a multi-stage matching paradigm in which subsets of the retrieved candidate lists for each probe image are passed to subsequent stages for further processing, resulting in a considerable reduction in latency (requiring just 0.068 ms per latent to rolled comparison on a AMD EPYC 7543 32-Core Processor, roughly 15K comparisons per second). Finally, we show the generalizability of the fused representations for improving authentication accuracy across several rolled, plain, and contactless fingerprint datasets.

Multi-modal image registration is a crucial pre-processing step in many medical applications. However, it is a challenging task due to the complex intensity relationships between different imaging modalities, which can result in large discrepancy in image appearance. The success of multi-modal image registration, whether it is conventional or learning based, is predicated upon the choice of an appropriate distance (or similarity) measure. Particularly, deep learning registration algorithms lack in accuracy or even fail completely when attempting to register data from an "unseen" modality. In this work, we present Modality Agnostic Distance (MAD), a deep image distance}] measure that utilises random convolutions to learn the inherent geometry of the images while being robust to large appearance changes. Random convolutions are geometry-preserving modules which we use to simulate an infinite number of synthetic modalities alleviating the need for aligned paired data during training. We can therefore train MAD on a mono-modal dataset and successfully apply it to a multi-modal dataset. We demonstrate that not only can MAD affinely register multi-modal images successfully, but it has also a larger capture range than traditional measures such as Mutual Information and Normalised Gradient Fields.