Blog
G.E.M.'s Concert in Hefei on March 30
Last Saturday night (March 30), I was fortunate to attend G.E.M. Gloria Tang Tsz Kei’s “G.E.M. I AM GLORIA World Tour” concert in Hefei. This was my first concert in three years since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the experience was fantastic! G.E.M.’s vocal performance was as impressive as ever. I’m looking forward to attending her concert again, though I hope next time it will be in Germany (haha).
April 4, 2024
Pre-trained Low-light Image Enhancement Transformer
Graphical Abstract Abstract Low-light image enhancement is a long-standing low-level vision problem because low-light images frequently have serious aesthetic quality flaws. Current low-light image enhancement methods based on deep neural networks have achieved impressive progress on this task. Unlike the mainstream CNN-based methods, we propose an effective low-light enhancement solution inspired by the Transformer that has demonstrated impressive performance in various tasks to address such problems. The key of this solution includes an image synthesis pipeline and a powerful Transformer-based pre-trained model named LIET. Precisely, the image synthesis pipeline consists of illumination simulation and realistic noise simulation, which can simulate more realistic low-light images to alleviate the bottleneck of data scarcity. LIET consists of a pair of streamlined CNN-based encoder- decoders and a Transformer body, which can effectively perform global/local contextual feature extraction with relatively low computational cost. We extensively evaluate the proposed approach through extensive experiments, and the results demonstrate that our solution is highly competitive with state-of-the-art methods. All the codes will be released soon.
March 12, 2024
The 10 Best AI Tools in My Mind as of Today
10th: LUMA AI 3D scene generation tool - Utilizing NeRf technology to generate high-quality 3D scenes from two photos, suitable for capturing life moments, and could be combined with VR/AR for immersive experiences. The most dazzling AI tool LUMA AI: https://lumalabs.ai/ 9th: Gamma PPT design AI tool - Simplifies the PPT creation process by automatically selecting images, adjusting fonts, and finding templates, but currently cannot fully automate PPT generation.
March 5, 2024
New Start of My Homepage
Recently, I decided to rejuvenate my personal homepage with a thorough style update. While the previous design was cherished for its simplicity, over time, the continuous addition of new features gradually made the page lose its initial clarity and minimalism. Seizing this opportunity, I redesigned and deployed a brand-new style for my homepage and standardized my blog production process, making it more efficient and easier to manage. This overhaul wasn’t just a pursuit of aesthetics but also a special birthday gift to myself🍰.
March 1, 2024
"Chronic deaths" during isolation of COVID-19
Recently, Omicron swept through Hefei, causing this city of ten million people to enter a state close to semi-shutdown. All day, you could see the so-called “Da Bai” (healthcare workers in protective suits) and countless ambulances outside. Similarly, on various social media platforms, there was a constant flow of information like “a certain community is under lockdown” or “residents of a certain building are being taken away in buses for quarantine.” Honestly, I used to think it was no big deal. After all, it’s been three years since the Covid-19 outbreak, and I hadn’t been infected yet (of course, even if I were infected, it wouldn’t be a big deal, as I have confidence in my body’s resistance). However, unfortunately, on October 24th, which is also “1024 Programmers’ Day,” I was required by the community to go into centralized quarantine. Initially, I was quite resistant, especially after seeing those terrible quarantine sites on the internet. I felt that staying there for a week without anyone to talk to, unable to go outside and move around… losing the freedom of a normal person, I would go crazy (of course, the reality is that I didn’t go crazy). But in the end, I found out that I was actually taken to a “four-star” hotel for quarantine. This instantly lifted my spirits quite a bit, after all, staying in this hotel normally costs 300-400 yuan per night, so this was a bit of a win…
October 28, 2022
How NAT Traversal Works (Tailscale)
Translator’s Foreword This article is a translation of a 2020 English blog post: How NAT Traversal Works. Imagine this scenario: you have one machine in Beijing and another in Shanghai, both on local area networks (e.g., a desktop at home and a laptop connected to Starbucks Wi-Fi). Both have private IP addresses but can access the public internet. How can these two machines communicate directly?
July 7, 2022
NVIDIA DALI Tutorials
First Encounter The origin of this matter dates back to when I read a paper a long time ago. The core of the paper was to discuss the role of pre-training strategies in low-level vision tasks. Since it’s about pre-training strategies, inevitably, a larger dataset is required. The reason pre-training has been rarely applied in low-level vision tasks in recent years is mainly due to the lack of large-scale datasets. This paper focuses on three tasks in low-level vision tasks: SR (Super-Resolution), DeRain (Rain Removal), and DeNoise (Noise Reduction). The authors used images from ImageNet as the base images and obtained low-resolution images for the SR task using bicubic interpolation, while rain streaks and Gaussian noise were directly added to the clean base images for the DeRain and DeNoise tasks.
June 8, 2022
Cython Basics
Getting Started Concept of Cython Cython is essentially Python with C data types. With few exceptions, nearly all Python code is valid Cython code. The Cython compiler translates the code into equivalent C code that calls the Python/C API. Since Cython’s parameters and variables can be declared with C data types, codes that operate on both Python values and C values can be freely mixed, with Cython automatically converting where necessary. Additionally, reference counting and error checking in Python are automatic, and Python’s exception handling mechanism, including try-except and try-finally, works just as well, even when operating on C data.
May 11, 2022
We Stand With Ukraine!
We stand in solidarity with Ukraine against Russia’s aggression, condemning President Putin’s actions, and have made donations to support charitable causes aiding those affected.
April 23, 2022
Farewell, Mriya!
The conflict between Russia and Ukraine has escalated recently and shows no sign of stopping. On domestic social media, I see that most Chinese people verbally support Russia, and given the current strong relationship between China and Russia, this attitude is understandable. But I think, war is a complex thing, you can’t say which side is right and which is wrong, because every side in a war is considering from the perspective of protecting their country’s interests, so there’s no right or wrong. Zelensky’s desire to join the EU may be to improve Ukraine’s declining economy; the desire to join NATO may also be due to the huge sense of crisis brought to the Ukrainian people by the Crimea crisis in 2014. Putin’s annexation of Crimea was also to protect Russia’s national interests, after all, the Black Sea Fleet can’t be without an outlet to the sea; the invasion of Ukraine was also caused by the United States’ step by step provocation… The United States’ betrayal was first, and NATO’s five expansions made Russia feel increasingly insecure…
March 2, 2022