Recent progresses in salient object detection have exploited the boundary prior, or background information, to assist other saliency cues such as contrast, achieving stateof-the-art results. However, their usage of boundary prior is very simple, fragile, and the integration with other cues is mostly heuristic. In this work, we present new methods to address these issues. First, we propose a robust background measure, called boundary connectivity. It characterizes the spatial layout of image regions with respect to image boundaries and is much more robust. It has an intuitive geometrical interpretation and presents unique benefits that are absent in previous saliency measures. Second, we propose a principled optimization framework to integrate multiple low level cues, including our background measure, to obtain clean and uniform saliency maps. Our formulation is intuitive, efficient and achieves state-of-the-art results on several benchmark datasets.

State-of-the-art human pose estimation methods are based on heat map representation. In spite of the good performance, the representation has a few issues in nature, such as non-differentiable postprocessing and quantization error. This work shows that a simple integral operation relates and unifies the heat map representation and joint regression, thus avoiding the above issues. It is differentiable, efficient, and compatible with any heat map based methods. Its effectiveness is convincingly validated via comprehensive ablation experiments under various settings, specifically on 3D pose estimation, for the first time.

We extends the previous 2D cascaded object pose regression work [9] in two aspects so that it works better for 3D articulated objects. Our first contribution is 3D poseindexed features that generalize the previous 2D parameterized features and achieve better invariance to 3D transformations. Our second contribution is a principled hierarchical regression that is adapted to the articulated object structure. It is therefore more accurate and faster. Comprehensive experiments verify the state-of-the-art accuracy and efficiency of the proposed approach on the challenging 3D hand pose estimation problem, on a public dataset and our new dataset.

Regression based methods are not performing as well as detection based methods for human pose estimation. A central problem is that the structural information in the pose is not well exploited in the previous regression methods. In this work, we propose a structure-aware regression approach. It adopts a reparameterized pose representation using bones instead of joints. It exploits the joint connection structure to define a compositional loss function that encodes the long range interactions in the pose. It is simple, effective, and general for both 2D and 3D pose estimation in a unified setting. Comprehensive evaluation validates the effectiveness of our approach. It significantly advances the state-of-the-art on Human3.6M [20] and is competitive with state-of-the-art results on MPII [3].

Thirty-six percent of Chinese adult patients with IgAN progress to end stage renal disease within 20 years. Five clinical features-higher proteinuria, hypertension, impaired renal function, hypoproteinemia and hyperuricemia-are independent predictors of an unfavorable renal outcome. The basic goal of anti-proteinuric therapy for Chinese patients is to lower proteinuria<1.0 g/day and the optimal goal is to lower proteinuria to <0.5 g/day.