Personal Image Research Articles

Physical Attraction Measured Through a Body Figure Scale in an Age of Changing Body Ideals

There is a substantial body of research that uses figure rating scales for personal body image assessment and satisfaction. The aim of this research was to determine the difference in attractiveness of physical body image by age of men and women. 460 participants who were representative of the population of a major Australian regional city were sampled using face-to-face interviews and a computer-based figure rating scales survey tool. Women were found likely to identify thin images of women as more attractive to men; and men were found likely to identify more muscular images of men as more attractive to women. These findings replicate similar studies and have implications for clinical treatments related to body image, eating disorders, and compulsive exercise.

Content analysis of IQOS direct mail and email marketing in the US

ObjectiveNovel nicotine and tobacco products, including heated tobacco products (HTPs) like IQOS, are growing in global popularity. IQOS was the first HTP authorized for sale by the US Food and Drug Administration, entering the US market in 2019 and being removed in 2021 due to patent-related legal challenges, with the possibility of returning in 2024. Direct marketing is one method tobacco companies use to reach consumers of these products. The purpose of this study was to investigate the content of US IQOS direct mail and email marketing. MethodsDirect marketing items were collected between September 2019 and July 2021 by seven team members in the first US IQOS test market, Atlanta, Georgia. ResultsOverall, 101 marketing items were collected, 59 of which were unique. Among the unique items that showed images of persons (“models”), 70 % showed models appearing to be from racial/ethnic minoritized groups, 86.8 % showed at least one female-presenting model, and 37.5 % showed models appearing to be young adults (18–29 years). Items often had an embedded link/URL (91.5 %) and mentioned topics such as online services (54.2 %; for example, online ordering and tutorials), user experience (49.2 %), social media (44.1 %), and purchasing locations (37.3 %). When examined for their main purpose, items focused on subjects such as store experience (37.7 %), product introduction (18.6 %), and product use (15.3 %). ConclusionsOur study highlights the importance of better understanding how novel tobacco products are marketed, which can inform policymakers’ regulatory efforts and product authorization decisions.

Older People Reimagining and Envisioning Preventive Care Through Land Acquisition: Evidence From Rwanda

This article presents findings about older people reimagining and envisioning preventive care through land acquisition in the Karongi district, Rwanda. My primary objective was to understand how land acquisition constitutes a means for older people’s preventive care arrangement. Ethnographic data were collected from 15 older people’s households. Empirical findings indicate that land scarcity makes it a coveted resource that attracts care around older people possessing it. Those unable to use their land rent it out to someone else who accepts to use the land and share the harvest equally with the owners. Furthermore, caring relationships between the landowner and the land user go beyond sharing the harvest to provide other forms of caring practices, such as assistance to access health care, firewood, and water provision, as well as helping older people sell their harvest. Renting out the land displays the image of an older person actively engaged with the community and who attracts caring practices using the land. Besides, land acquisition is the basis for intergenerational care negotiation, as expectations to inherit the land encourage children to care for their older parents. Thus, this article shows preventive care that is happening outside the realm of the Western biomedical model, but rather within an imagined model of owning an asset that benefits older people, their kin, and the community.

SOCIO-PEDAGOGICAL LEVEL STRATIFICATION: PORTRAIT OF A VIRTUAL PERSONALITY

The authors tried to determine the psychological and pedagogical characteristics of the phenomenon of “virtual personality” in this article. The main purpose of this work is to show the results of the content analysis of socio- psychological reasons (anonymity and confidentiality, expression, and self-expression, research of roles and identities, social interaction and acceptance) for designing a portrait of a virtual personality in an “online community”. The quintessence of modeling the portrait of a virtual personality in the “online community” provides for the identification of a methodological concept for the analysis of socio-pedagogical stratification, applicable to establish a correlation between indicators of network communicative culture and behavioral patterns of Kazakhstani students. The quintessence of modeling the portrait of a virtual personality in the “online community” provides for the identification of a methodological concept for the analysis of socio-pedagogical stratification, applicable to establish a correlation between indicators of network communicative culture and behavioral patterns of Kazakhstani students. The results of the conducted research are presented, and the concepts are clarified: “virtual personality”, “virtual personality image”, and “virtual identity”. The algorithm of experimental research developed by us will allow: us to substantiate the deterministic features of social networks; reveal the dominant role of “online community” in the socialization of personality; to reveal its real influence on the value orientations of modern students. Keywords: online community, virtual personality image, virtual personality, virtual space, social networks, virtual self, virtual reality, virtual identity.

Enhanced visible–infrared person re-identification based on cross-attention multiscale residual vision transformer

Visible–infrared (VI) person re-identification (Re-ID) is a critical identification task that involves retrieving and matching images of an individual using both infrared and visible imaging modalities. To improve the performance, researchers have developed methods to obtain implicit feature information; however, this degrades with fewer discriminative features. To address this issue, we propose a weighted fused cross-attention multi-scale residual vision transformer (WF-CAMReViT) approach to re-identify the appropriate person from visible–infrared modality images by integrating the cross-attention multi-scale residual vision transformer architecture with Opposition-based Dove Swarm Optimization (ODSO). The proposed framework aims to bridge the domain gap between the visible and infrared modalities and significantly improve the re-identification performance. RGB (visible) and infrared (IR) images of persons are gathered from standard datasets, subjected to a cross-attention multi-scale residual vision transformer network to collect features, and then fuse using minimal weight. We also propose Opposition-based DSO to find the minimal weight. The weighted fused features are then subjected to the final decoder layer of CAMReViT to perceive the characteristics of each modality. In this study, model-aware enhancement (MAE) loss is develop to improve the modality information capacity of modality-shared features. Then, the experimental results on the SYSU-MM01 and RegDB datasets are compared with state-of-the-art transformer-based visible–infrared person Re-ID tasks to verify the efficacy of the proposed model.

Electrophysiological correlates of face and object perception: A comparative analysis of 2D laboratory and virtual reality conditions.

Human face perception is a specialized visual process with inherent social significance. The neural mechanisms reflecting this intricate cognitive process have evolved in spatially complex and emotionally rich environments. Previous research using VR to transfer an established face perception paradigm to realistic conditions has shown that the functional properties of face-sensitive neural correlates typically observed in the laboratory are attenuated outside the original modality. The present study builds on these results by comparing the perception of persons and objects under conventional laboratory (PC) and realistic conditions in VR. Adhering to established paradigms, the PC- and VR modalities both featured images of persons and cars alongside standard control images. To investigate the individual stages of realistic face processing, response times, the typical face-sensitive N170 component, and relevant subsequent components (L1, L2; pre-, post-response) were analyzed within and between modalities. The between-modality comparison of response times and component latencies revealed generally faster processing under realistic conditions. However, the obtained N170 latency and amplitude differences showed reduced discriminative capacity under realistic conditions during this early stage. These findings suggest that the effects commonly observed in the lab are specific to monitor-based presentations. Analyses of later and response-locked components showed specific neural mechanisms for identification and evaluation are employed when perceiving the stimuli under realistic conditions, reflected in discernible amplitude differences in response to faces and objects beyond the basic perceptual features. Conversely, the results do not provide evidence for comparable stimulus-specific perceptual processing pathways when viewing pictures of the stimuli under conventional laboratory conditions.

The Soviet approach to the Lithuanian partisan movement (1944-1990)

The main goal behind this work is to examine how the armed anti-Soviet Lithuanian resistance was depicted in Soviet literature, and which meanings it created and conveyed to readers. The work will show which written methods were used in the formation of this approach, and how they changed in different periods. Specific topics will also be analysed where they were especially emphasised in Soviet publications.
 The scientific novelty. This is one of the few works which specifically presents the image of Lithuanian partisans which was created through Soviet propaganda. The Soviet attitude towards Lithuanian partisans was analysed mainly in works which were written in Lithuanian, so this also remains relevant to modern analyses in foreign publications. The Soviet image distorted the historical circumstances of the past. This image is not an irrelevant event of the past but a tool of modern propaganda, one which is constantly being modified to adapt it to the times.
 Conclusions. Soviet propaganda referred negatively and contemptuously to anti-Soviet Lithuanian partisans, and the terms ‘bandits’ and ‘bourgeois nationalists’ came into force to describe them. The authors of propaganda-related materials relied on the concept of class theory. The attitude which they expressed in their written work was characterised by tendency and uniformity, both of which reflected the official position of the Soviet government. During the most active periods of partisan fighting, the Soviet press published relatively little information about the partisans. The selected and published information – all of which was somewhat tendentious – was intended to intimidate resisters, would-be resisters, and their supporters. Between 1950 and 1990, the production and publication of materials was part of a propaganda enterprise which was firmly controlled and coordinated by the Soviet authorities. Their purpose in carrying out this industry was to portray the anti-Soviet resistance in the darkest colours and shades.. It was not possible to form a general picture of the resistance from such prints, written as they were with multiple errors and omissions. The image of the partisan movement as a non-autonomous phenomenon, an image which was formed through the use of propaganda, presents a negative social and personal image. The Catholic Church is considered to be a promoter and supporter of the partisan resistance.

The Effect of Personal Selling "Yakult Lady" and Brand Image on Consumer Loyalty

The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of personal selling and brand image on consumer loyalty for yakult drinks in Indonesia. The research was conducted in Indonesia, the research period was July - September 2023. The research population is consumers of drinks with the yakult brand in Indonesia, of which the exact number cannot be known. This study used Non-probability Purposive Sampling technique and for a sample of 100 respondents, but less than 100 complete questionnaires were considered usable. The results showed that personal selling and brand image have an effect on consumer loyalty, including through repat orders and consumer satisfaction with the yakult lady as personal selling

A progressive distillation network for practical image-based virtual try-on

The image-based virtual try-on technology aims to match in-store clothing to person's image wearing clothes. Previous methods require a large amount of input information for each try-on result, which is not practical, and slight deviations in input information can cause a large number of artifacts in the try-on results. In recent years, researchers have paid attention to parsing-free virtual try-on methods, and a groundbreaking work used knowledge distillation techniques to eliminate the redundant input. This method uses the parsing-based virtual try-on model as the supervision information to train a student network model, which can generate try-on results without extra input. However, due to the huge knowledge gap between the teacher-student networks, direct distillation makes it difficult for the student network to fully simulate the teacher network. To solve this problem, we propose a progressive distillation scheme for image-based virtual try-on called PD-VTON, using an assistant network to alleviate this huge knowledge gap. Our method can generate more realistic and reasonable try-on results without requiring extra body parsing information or body pose information. Specifically, unlike existing distillation-based parsing-free virtual try-on methods, we adopt an assistant-supported progressive distillation network to alleviate the insufficient learning caused by the large knowledge gap and design an Adaptive Choose Teacher (ACT) module to optimize the distillation. Moreover, we introduce a novel cross attention-based stitching structure when generating try-on images, aiming to better constrain the alignment between the high-level semantic features of person image and warped clothing image, and use a transformer-assisted generator to generate the results. Finally, extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the unique advantages of our method.

Identifying People’s Faces in Smart Banking Systems Using Artificial Neural Networks

Due to the exponential rise of ICT technologies, the digital banking industry has made tremendous advancements in user-friendly, effective, and quick financial transactions. Numerous new banking services, products, and business opportunities have resulted as a result. Smart facial authentication is a cutting-edge technology used in mobile banking. Users can utilize this technology to verify their identification by using the facial recognition feature of the camera on their mobile device. This method makes use of complex algorithms that can analyze a person’s face and extract the distinctive characteristics that can be seen there. The attributes of the images of distinct persons are then categorized using learning algorithms and the K-means clustering method. An artificial neural network (ANN), adaptive neural fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), and decision tree (DT) computer system are used to authenticate persons. In this inquiry, the face is used. Additionally, the Wild Horse Optimizer (WHO) method has been used to enhance the precision and optimization of machine learning systems by weighting cluster features. Fuzzy logic is used to make decisions about authentication based on the results of machine learning algorithms. The best feature from a broad dataset is selected using a technique based on evolutionary algorithms. The simulation findings for diverse users have a precision of about 99.78% for user authentication of test samples. Notably, the suggested method reduced the FAR, FRR, and ERR errors by 0.23, 1.13, and 1.1, respectively. It has been proven that using people’s image data may enhance the quality of everyday cameras, and it is anticipated that this work will be applied to mobile banking applications to ensure the verification of rightful owners.

Haar-wavelet based texture inpainting for human pose transfer

Human Image Generation is an important information processing technique. Producing realistic-looking texture is crucial for Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) based person image generation. Existing methods follow a “downscale-upscale” strategy that source images are usually downscaled to extract features and saved the cost of storage. Meanwhile, the upscaling process is applied to recover the details based on these features. The loss of high-frequency components during the downscaling process, however, is in accordance with the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem, which creates an ill-posed difficulty during the upscaling process. In this paper, we design a Haar-wavelet based texture inpainting network (HWTIN) to mitigate the ill-posed problem in pose transfer task. In the downscaling process, to divide the source image into high-frequency and low-frequency contents, we construct a Haar-based Wavelet Module (HBM). In this way, We can preserve these high-frequency information in the generation process. We also design an inverse HBM (IHBM) to utilize these high-frequency information in the upscaling process. Extensive results on mainstream datasets demonstrate that HWTIN outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods quantitatively.

Bildethik praktisch. Verantwortungsvoller Umgang mit personenbezogenem Bildmaterial in der Wissenschaft

The article examines research-related ethical challenges in dealing with personal image material in science. Based on a literature review and analysis of existing approaches and anonymization methods, the need for differentiated image ethics is emphasized, especially in new publication contexts such as Open Science. Based on this, the article develops practical recommendations for the responsible use of personal images. The central result is the interactive tool “EthicLens”, which supports researchers in ethical reflection when dealing with personal images and thus promotes the integrity and transparency of scientific work.

Visual Rhetoric in Wechat Moments—A Research Based on Virtual Ethnography

As a typical representative, Wechat Moments highly integrates virtual sapce and real life, within which the communication mostly takes place between acquaintances. Therefore, Wechat Moments has become an important stage for individuals, especially college students, to express themselves and establish and manage their personal images. Self-compiled information, including various visual elements such as texts, photos, emojis, pictures etc. in Wechat Moments is often carefully designed and selected, which will have an ideological influence on the reader. Therefore, this paper takes the visual rhetoric theory as the theoretical framework, and the virtual ethnography as the research method, to investigate the behavior of college students in using Wechat Moments to achieve rhetorical purposes to establish their personal images. The results of the categorical analysis indicate that most of the people's Wechat Moments is about their daily life, generally for sharing or remembering, wanting to show their positive side of life. Then, the content analysis suggests that both the denotative meaning and the connotative meaning of the visual elements should be noticed. Finally, the rhetorical analysis provides an interpretation of the connotations of posting Wechat Moments.

МЕДИАИМИДЖ КОРПОРАТИВНОГО ЛИДЕРА: КЛАССИФИКАЦИЯ И ДИАГНОСТИЧЕСКИЕ КРИТЕРИИ

The formation of a media image today takes place in the special conditions of the modern public environment functioning, in the situation of the mediatization of public space. Diagnostics of the actual media image of a chief executive is considered as an important part of the organization’s communication audit. Using the example of publications in the media, social networks and other open sources of information and mentions of the heads of PJSC Gazprom gas production subsidiaries in the media, the current characteristics of the media image of the company’s chief executive were identified and diagnostic criteria for its correction were proposed. It is established that the image of the head has a significant impact on the image of the organization and is an integral part of it. One of the important components of a corporate leaders’ professionogram is their media images as necessary components of the leaders’ personal image. A well-designed image of the head of an organization, including media image, is able to legitimize high incomes, use the right to make difficult decisions and ensure the stability of the company's reputation in crisis situations. The presented method of diagnosing the media image of the chief executive of the company allows us to identify not only quantitative and qualitative indicators of the media representation of a person, but also to identify the type of media image. The article highlights such types of media image (as the image of a public person that has developed in the mass media) as active, passive, situational / reactive.

Limb-Aware Virtual Try-On Network With Progressive Clothing Warping

Image-based virtual try-on aims to transfer an in-shop clothing image to a person image. Most existing methods adopt a single global deformation to perform clothing warping directly, which lacks fine-grained modeling of in-shop clothing and leads to distorted clothing appearance. In addition, existing methods usually fail to generate limb details well because they are limited by the used clothing-agnostic person representation without referring to the limb textures of the person image. To address these problems, we propose Limb-aware Virtual Try-on Network named PL-VTON, which performs fine-grained clothing warping progressively and generates high-quality try-on results with realistic limb details. Specifically, we present Progressive Clothing Warping (PCW) that explicitly models the location and size of in-shop clothing and utilizes a two-stage alignment strategy to progressively align the in-shop clothing with the human body. Moreover, a novel gravity-aware loss that considers the fit of the person wearing clothing is adopted to better handle the clothing edges. Then, we design Person Parsing Estimator (PPE) with a non-limb target parsing map to semantically divide the person into various regions, which provides structural constraints on the human body and therefore alleviates texture bleeding between clothing and body regions. Finally, we introduce Limb-aware Texture Fusion (LTF) that focuses on generating realistic details in limb regions, where a coarse try-on result is first generated by fusing the warped clothing image with the person image, then limb textures are further fused with the coarse result under limb-aware guidance to refine limb details. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our PL-VTON outperforms the state-of-the-art methods both qualitatively and quantitatively.

Disentangled Sample Guidance Learning for Unsupervised Person Re-Identification.

Unsupervised person re-identification (Re-ID) is challenging due to the lack of ground truth labels. Most existing methods employ iterative clustering to generate pseudo labels for unlabeled training data to guide the learning process. However, how to select samples that are both associated with high-confidence pseudo labels and hard (discriminative) enough remains a critical problem. To address this issue, a disentangled sample guidance learning (DSGL) method is proposed for unsupervised Re-ID. The method consists of disentangled sample mining (DSM) and discriminative feature learning (DFL). DSM disentangles (unlabeled) person images into identity-relevant and identity-irrelevant factors, which are used to construct disentangled positive/negative groups that contain discriminative enough information. DFL incorporates the mined disentangled sample groups into model training by a surrogate disentangled learning loss and a disentangled second-order similarity regularization, to help the model better distinguish the characteristics of different persons. By using the DSGL training strategy, the mAP on Market-1501 and MSMT17 increases by 6.6% and 10.1% when applying the ResNet50 framework, and by 0.6% and 6.9% with the vision transformer (VIT) framework, respectively, validating the effectiveness of the DSGL method. Moreover, DSGL surpasses previous state-of-the-art methods by achieving higher Top-1 accuracy and mAP on the Market-1501, MSMT17, PersonX, and VeRi-776 datasets. The source code for this paper is available at https://github.com/jihaoxuanye/DiseSGL.

AAformer: Auto-Aligned Transformer for Person Re-Identification.

In person re-identification (re-ID), extracting part-level features from person images has been verified to be crucial to offer fine-grained information. Most of the existing CNN-based methods only locate the human parts coarsely, or rely on pretrained human parsing models and fail in locating the identifiable nonhuman parts (e.g., knapsack). In this article, we introduce an alignment scheme in transformer architecture for the first time and propose the auto-aligned transformer (AAformer) to automatically locate both the human parts and nonhuman ones at patch level. We introduce the "Part tokens (PARTs)", which are learnable vectors, to extract part features in the transformer. A PART only interacts with a local subset of patches in self-attention and learns to be the part representation. To adaptively group the image patches into different subsets, we design the auto-alignment. Auto-alignment employs a fast variant of optimal transport (OT) algorithm to online cluster the patch embeddings into several groups with the PARTs as their prototypes. AAformer integrates the part alignment into the self-attention and the output PARTs can be directly used as part features for retrieval. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of PARTs and the superiority of AAformer over various state-of-the-art methods.

Archetypes, plots, and images of old Ukrainian mythology in the lyrics of Yurii Darahan

The relevance of the study is due to the need for a detailed analysis of mythologemes in Yurii Darahan’s work for a sufficiently deep reading of his texts. The subject of the study is the archetypes, plots, and images of Ukrainian mythology in his lyrics. The study aims to find out the conceptual and aesthetic significance of Ukrainian mythological plots and images in Darahan’s artistic picture of the world. Using the methods of mythocritical (archetypal) and intertextual analysis, autobiographical and descriptive methods the author examines all of Yurii Darahan’s published poetry, including the collection Sahaidak (“Quiver”, 1925), and texts outside the collection published in periodicals. Thus, mythologemes — the smallest semantic units of the text that refer to the old Ukrainian mythology — were distinguished, and their influence on the essence of the author’s poetic texts and their role in his artistic picture of the world was revealed. As a result of the study, the following archetypes, plots, and images of old Ukrainian mythology in Darahan’s poetry were identified: the sophisticated and deep archetype of the Great Mother, the productive and inspiring archetype of the Defender (the image of an ideal person), a wide range of solar images, images of mediators, the concept of the Genus, motifs of synergy of the elements and sacrifice, as well as images of old Ukrainian gods. Ukrainian mythology enables him to reveal his vision of the world, reflect on basic ontological categories, and form the basis of his artistic picture of the world; through its distinctive archetypes, images, and plots, he seeks to actualize national memory, identity, and the collective unconscious. The novelty of the study lies in the fact that it allows us to deepen the interpretation of Yurii Darahan’s texts and to develop the mythocritical (archetypal) method of text analysis through the prism of national mythology, which is relevant for the study of the Prague School poets and the literary process of the 20th–21st centuries.

Cемантико-функційна характеристика порівнянь в есеї Оксани Забужко «Найдовша подорож»

Today, more and more Ukrainian writers are turning to the essay genre, as it is this genre that makes it possible to respond more quickly to the changes taking place in society. According to O. Taranenko, one of the most important pictorial means of language expression is comparison. Therefore, the purpose of the proposed article is to analyze the semantic, structural and functional features of comparisons in Oksana Zabuzhko’s essay «The Longest Journey». In the analyzed work, comparisons are presented in various grammatical forms, such as: degrees of comparison of adjectives, adverbialized word forms of the instrumental case with a comparative meaning, adverbs, as well as comparative phrases and complex sentences with a subordinate comparative. Using adverbialized word forms of the instrumental case, the writer supplements them with bright meanings, thereby creating certain positive or negative images in the reader's mind according to the author's intention. Comparative phrases and complex sentences with a subordinate comparative are most widely presented in the analyzed essay, which present a wide corpus of comparison objects, among which we can distinguish such thematic groups as «Man», «Artifacts», «Medical terms», «Animal world», «Intertextual vocations», «Names of the elements». With the help of comparisons, Oksana Zabuzhko analyzes the presented facts, gives them an assessment, and also interests the recipient in the information, creates in his mind certain positive or negative images of individual personalities, described events and phenomena, involves the reader in interaction, empathy and search for solutions to the problematic issue.

«Рыльский имянной гражданин», Гаврила Державин и «горестная вдова»: надгробие Григория Шелихова в Иркутске и мемориальные практики в России конца ⅩⅤⅢ – начала ⅩⅠⅩ века

The article discusses memorial practices at a cemetery, i.e., the practices that represent earliest attempts to communicate a late person’s status and his/her lifetime deeds. The tombstone is considered as a set of elements containing semantic load (epitaphs, visuals, design features, etc.), which help to consolidate the image of a de-ceased person. The gravestone of Grigory Shelikhov, an Irkutsk merchant known for organizing expeditions to Russian America and founding the North-Eastern Company, is selected as a notable example. This monument was constructed on the territory of the Znamensky Monastery of Irkutsk in 1800. It combines typical features as well as some unique elements of gravestones of the late 18th – early 19th centuries (such as indicating poetic epi-taphs authorship and the cost of the tombstone, as well as an unconventional image of Empress Catherine II). The authors explore the features of Grigory Shelikhov’s tombstone and the historical context around the Shelikhovs’ activities after the merchant’s death. They demonstrate that the tombstone was an attempt to demon-strate the role of the deceased in establishing the future Russian-American Company. The Shelikhov family used the monument as a tool to secure their right to control the company and to signify the family’s social capital at the local level. The authors make use of field research database “Memorial Culture in Russia: Tombstones of the 18th – 20th Centuries”, collected at the National Research University Higher School of Economics.