Free-viewpoint image-based rendering (IBR) is a standing challenge. IBR methods combine warped versions of input photos to synthesize a novel view. The image quality of this combination is directly affected by geometric inaccuracies of multi-view stereo (MVS) reconstruction and by view- and image-dependent effects that produce artifacts when contributions from different input views are blended. We present a new deep learning approach to blending for IBR, in which we use held-out real image data to learn blending weights to combine input photo contributions. Our Deep Blending method requires us to address several challenges to achieve our goal of interactive free-viewpoint IBR navigation. We first need to provide sufficiently accurate geometry so the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) can succeed in finding correct blending weights. We do this by combining two different MVS reconstructions with complementary accuracy vs. completeness tradeoffs. To tightly integrate learning in an interactive IBR system, we need to adapt our rendering algorithm to produce a fixed number of input layers that can then be blended by the CNN. We generate training data with a variety of captured scenes, using each input photo as ground truth in a held-out approach. We also design the network architecture and the training loss to provide high quality novel view synthesis, while reducing temporal flickering artifacts. Our results demonstrate free-viewpoint IBR in a wide variety of scenes, clearly surpassing previous methods in visual quality, especially when moving far from the input cameras.

Characterization of disease using stationary resting-state functional connectivity (FC) has provided important hallmarks of abnormal brain activation in many domains. Recent studies of resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), however, suggest there is a considerable amount of additional knowledge to be gained by investigating the variability in FC over the course of a scan. While a few studies have begun to explore the properties of dynamic FC for characterizing disease, the analysis of dynamic FC over multiple networks at multiple time scales has yet to be fully examined. In this study, we combine dynamic connectivity features in a multi-network, multi-scale approach to evaluate the method's potential in better classifying childhood autism. Specifically, from a set of group-level intrinsic connectivity networks (ICNs), we use sliding window correlations to compute intra-network connectivity on the subject level. We derive dynamic FC features for all ICNs over a large range of window sizes and then use a multiple kernel support vector machine (MK-SVM) model to combine a subset of these features for classification. We compare the performance our multi-network, dynamic approach to the best results obtained from single-network dynamic FC features and those obtained from both single-and multi-network static FC features. Our experiments show that integrating multiple networks on different dynamic scales has a clear superiority over these existing methods.

Internet addiction disorder (IAD) is increasingly recognized as a mental health disorder, particularly among adolescents. The pathogenesis associated with IAD, however, remains unclear. In this study, we aim to explore the encephalic functional characteristics of IAD adolescents at rest using functional magnetic resonance imaging data. We adopted a graph-theoretic approach to investigate possible disruptions of functional connectivity in terms of network properties including small-worldness, efficiency, and nodal centrality on 17 adolescents with IAD and 16 socio-demographically matched healthy controls. False discovery rate-corrected parametric tests were performed to evaluate the statistical significance of group-level network topological differences. In addition, a correlation analysis was performed to assess the relationships between functional connectivity and clinical measures in the IAD group. Our results demonstrate that there is significant disruption in the functional connectome of IAD patients, particularly between regions located in the frontal, occipital, and parietal lobes. The affected connections are long-range and inter-hemispheric connections. Although significant alterations are observed for regional nodal metrics, there is no difference in global network topology between IAD and healthy groups. In addition, correlation analysis demonstrates that the observed regional abnormalities are correlated with the IAD severity and behavioral clinical assessments. Our findings, which are relatively consistent between anatomically and functionally defined atlases, suggest that IAD causes disruptions of functional connectivity and, importantly, that such disruptions might link to behavioral impairments.