Object Of Interest Research Articles

St. Dominic’s Church in Turobin – a Pearl of the Lublin Renaissance

The subject of the article is the historical and architectural analysis of the Church of St. Dominic in Turobin, which is a significant example of Renaissance sacred architecturein the Lublin region. The specific objectives include presenting the history of the town and the parish church, its architecture, and interior decoration. The article containsa formal-stylistic and comparative analysis of the Turobin church. Built in the 15th century, the church has undergone numerous phases of expansion and renovation, making it an interesting research object. As an example of “Lublin Renaissance” architecture, it is a valuable element of the region’s cultural heritage, combining rich history, traditions, and unique artistic qualities. The historical comparative method supplemented by the stylistic method was used.

Impacts of UC-MSCS on the quality of sperm in asthenoteratozoospermia

Introduction: Male infertility is caused by the condition of male partners, characterized by abnormal sperm shape and decreased motility, called asthenoteratozoospermia. Since active ingredients can regulate biological activity, secretory products from mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) have recently become objects of interest as drugs. Methods: The study hypothesis is that UC-MSC secretome impacts sperm quality in asthenoteratozoospermia-affected males depending on the parameters of sperm quality, antioxidant enzyme activity, and ROS concentration. The following sperm quality parameters were assessed, viability, intermotility, ultrastructure, SOD, 8OHdG, and catalase. Results: Altogether, findings highlight that the stem MSC secretome isolated from the umbilical cord enhances the quality of sperm and will enhance fertility when applied in the process. It also decreases the concentration of biochemical markers of oxidative stress during the sperm preparation process. For example, it leads to a decrease in OHdG and an increase in SOD. Discussion: The results imply that MSC secretome may be an important therapeutic factor in reproductive health and reduced oxidative stress. According to the data, MSC secretome is likely an anti-oxidative treatment for enhancing the reproductive system

Prompt-and-Transfer: Dynamic Class-aware Enhancement for Few-shot Segmentation.

For more efficient generalization to unseen domains (classes), most Few-shot Segmentation (FSS) would directly exploit pre-trained encoders and only fine-tune the decoder, especially in the current era of large models. However, such fixed feature encoders tend to be class-agnostic, inevitably activating objects that are irrelevant to the target class. In contrast, humans can effortlessly focus on specific objects in the line of sight. This paper mimics the visual perception pattern of human beings and proposes a novel and powerful prompt-driven scheme, called "Prompt and Transfer" (PAT), which constructs a dynamic class-aware prompting paradigm to tune the encoder for focusing on the interested object (target class) in the current task. Three key points are elaborated to enhance the prompting: 1) Cross-modal linguistic information is introduced to initialize prompts for each task. 2) Semantic Prompt Transfer (SPT) that precisely transfers the class-specific semantics within the images to prompts. 3) Part Mask Generator (PMG) that works in conjunction with SPT to adaptively generate different but complementary part prompts for different individuals. Surprisingly, PAT achieves competitive performance on 4 different tasks including standard FSS, Cross-domain FSS (e.g., CV, medical, and remote sensing domains), Weak-label FSS, and Zero-shot Segmentation, setting new state-of-the-arts on 11 benchmarks.

An Extensive Review on Image Classification Techniques for Expert Systems

Picture categorization is a fundamental task in vision recognition that aims to understand and label an image in its entirety. While object detection works with the categorization and placement of many elements inside an image, image classification often pertains to photographs containing a single object. The development of sophisticated parallel computers in tandem with the introduction of contemporary remote sensors has fundamentally changed the picture categorization theory. Various algorithms have been created to recognise objects of interest in pictures and then categorise them and practise. In recent years, a number of authors have offered a range of classification strategies. However, there are not many studies or comparisons of classification techniques in soft computing settings. These days, the use of soft computing techniques has improved the performance of classification methods. This work explores the use of soft computing for image classification for various applications. The study explores further details regarding new applications and various classification technique types. To promote greater study in this field, important problems and viable fixes for applications based on soft computing are also covered. As a result, researchers will find this survey study useful in implementing an optimal categorization method for multiple applications.

Peningkatan Pemahaman Digital Marketing Melalui Pelatihan di Desa Wisata Gerabah Putaran Miring Melikan Klaten

The digital marketing efforts carried out by the village tourism group partners remain basic and minimal. The product and service photos presented have not yet incorporated appealing and aesthetically pleasing photography elements. This activity aims to improve partners' skills in photography and digital content creation, which are very important in promoting their pottery products in the digital era. The main method of this program is to equip partners with basic photography skills, such as selecting interesting objects, the right shooting angles, and using natural and artificial lighting to produce professional photos. These skills are crucial because the quality of the photos affects the attractiveness of the product in the eyes of consumers. In addition to photography, partners are also guided in creating creative content in the form of videos of the pottery making process, which adds unique value to the product, as well as compiling informative and effective product descriptions. The training was attended by 48 participants, with 96% stating that there was an increase in understanding about digital marketing.

백제지역 출토 중국 도자의 양상과 특징

This paper aims to examine the period-specific aspects of Chinese ceramics imported into Baekje and to understand the characteristics of imported Chinese ceramics by comparing them with the aspects excavated in China where they were produced. By examining what types of Chinese ceramics were imported, we understand the characteristics and roles of Chinese ceramics imported into Baekje and further examine the influence of Chinese ceramics on Baekje. In particular, we examine the similarities and differences between the aspects and characteristics of Chinese ceramics excavated in the Baekje region and those excavated from historical sites in China to understand their characteristics. When comparing the Chinese ceramics excavated in the Baekje region with the appearance of the Six Dynasties and Sui and Tang Dynasties ceramics excavated from relics in China, it can be seen that only a very limited number of types were imported. In addition, there is no celadon with a strong decorative form, and there is no hieroglyphic inscription that depicts people or various shapes. This proves that the types of Chinese ceramics that appear in large numbers in the Baekje region were not imported for burial purposes, but were imported and used as everyday containers and buried together with other burial items. In addition, among the imported ceramics, the celadon inkstone and celadon bowl were converted into earthenware during the Baekje period and made into earthenware bowls and inkstones, which suggests that inkstones and bowls were the objects of special interest to the Baekje people when they encountered Chinese celadon. Understanding and analyzing the current status of excavations in relics in China is very important because it allows us to examine not only the actual state of the burial, but also the appearance and changes in the celadon produced by period, and the process of change in the nature of the burial items through organic relationships with burial items made of other materials. In the future, this part is expected to be further supplemented and play a preliminary role as comparative data with China in relation to Chinese ceramics in the Baekje region.

Islamic Communication: One Persuasive Step to Spread Da’wah Among Korean Lovers (Critical Discourse Analysis of Fuadh Naim's Youtube)

Making people closer to Islam is one of da'wah's primary goals. So, it takes creativity to package da'wah messages so that they can be accepted by the object of da'wah, which is increasingly diverse today. One of the interesting da'wah objects studied is Korean Lovers, a community of Korean culture lovers. A negative stigma has been pinned on Korean Lovers, that they are a community far from Islam and live with hedonistic nuances. Meanwhile, with the right da'wah approach, Korean Lovers can be touched and become part of Islamic da'wah. This study aims to analyze how da'wah content includes or removes actors from a central discourse. Furthermore, the analysis results are linked to the concept of Islamic communication. This is where the novelty lies. This research makes the Never Drowned video on Fuadh Naim's YouTube channel the main discourse (object of research). Fuadh Naim's YouTube channel discusses Korean culture and gets positive appreciation. The PernahTenggelam video can reference the style of delivering da'wah messages among Korean Lovers. To elaborate on the #PernahTenggelam video, the most appropriate method used is qualitative analysis with Theo van Leuween's critical discourse analysis model. The results showed that 18 data were analyzed. Of the 18 data, 3 showed an exclusion strategy, and 15 showed an inclusion strategy. After being analyzed, the results show that content creators do not intend to discredit Korean Lovers. Instead, the exclusion and inclusion made the delivery more elegant and persuasive. The strategy is connected with Islamic communication, including qaulan sadida, qaulan ma'rufa, qaulan baligha, qaulan maysura, and qaulan layyina.

Zgodnjenovoveški anali kranjskih mest

Slovenian territory cannot boast a plethora of annals and chronicles dating to the Middle Ages, and the number of such sources is not large for the early modern period either. This is especially true for proper town annals or chronicles. Given the reasons that dictated the recording of events by city officials, it is not surprising that very few of them produced systematic records of memorable events. There were certainly more documents to begin with than those which survived to the point of becoming the object of interest for preservationists and researchers, but the ratio between the material produced and the material preserved remains unclear. The existence of some (proto)annals can be inferred from their instrumentalization. When towns reported their troubles to higher authorities and addressed requests to them, they listed disasters and other events supported by years and, in some cases, dates. Two Car­niolan towns, Novo mesto and Kamnik, might have had some kind of annals or records of local historical events; they were the ones to respond to polymath J. V. Valvasor’s printed circular letter of 1680. But there cannot have been many Carniolan towns in Valvasor’s time that were in the habit of writing chronicles or annals. No such record has survived in the form of a separate document, nor is its existence unambiguously indicated in other sources. Even for Ljubljana, there are only two extant manuscript chronicles, and they were made by private individuals from the 17th and early 18th centuries. Thus, of city annals produced in city offices, one can only identify the Krško Annals (1601–1646), scattered in several places in the so-called city book, and extracts of the Kostanjevica Annals (1617–1686). Each was the result of the personal initiative and work of the city clerk, in both cases a long-standing scribe. The Krško City Book is a clear example of the gradual creation of annals in a book that was not in­tended solely for this genre of record, while the Kostanjevica extracts are an example of the instrumentalization of this type of written tes­timony. The Kostanjevica extracts have survived in two versions, their purpose being to show the authorities the reasons why the town was in such a poor state. The Krško and Kostanjevica town annals attracted attention as early as the mid-19th century. In the present paper, they are published in Slovenian translation in their integral form.

Per una filologia del copione: Adelaide Ristori e ‘Lady Macbeth’

Adelaide Ristori’s Macbeth is an interesting object for a study in the field of theatrical philology. In Ristori’s Archive at Museo Biblioteca dell’Attore in Genoa there are in fact many unpublished and little-valued materials which can be profitably used for the reconstructions of the metamorphosis of Ristori’s Macbeth over the 30 years that elapse between its complex (and still obscure) creation and its last performance. In fact, among the more than five hundred different dramaturgical writings kept in the Ristori Archive there is a vast section dedicated to Macbeth and its rewritings that meticulously documents the various phases of the work’s life. These materials, usually accompanied by epistolary, autobiographical, critical and iconographic documents, are here placed at the centre of the investigation, organised and interrogated with the tools of textual philology. The study of the literary materials relating to Macbeth provides a solid basis for the reconstruction of the scenic writing of the play and thus of Ristori’s work on the script, her cultural interests, the organisational system of her company and the network of international relations that sustained the editorial and compositional dynamics of her performances.

Crystallizing techniques: sample preparations, technical knowledge, and the characterization of blood crystals, 1840-1909.

Sample preparation is the process of altering a naturally occurring object into a representative form that is amenable to scientific inquiry. Preparation is an important preliminary to data collection, ubiquitous in the life sciences and elsewhere, yet relatively neglected in historical and philosophical literature. This paper presents a detailed historical case study involving the preparation and study of blood crystals in the nineteenth century. The case is used to highlight significant features of preparation, which aid our understanding of the epistemology of sciences in which preparations play an important role. First, it shows the role of technical knowledge in efforts to characterize a scientific phenomenon or object of interest. Especially in early stages of characterization, scientists improve their understanding of what they are preparing by better understanding their preparation procedures. Second, this case contributes to recent views of characterization as a relatively autonomous domain of scientific activity. It shows how preparation functions as a site for integrating different experimental methods, and the difficulties that ensue. In light of these considerations, the case shows how characterization is capable of shaping or constraining explanatory pursuits as much as it is guided by them.

From Voxels to Viruses: Using Deep Learning and Crowdsourcing to Understand a Virus Factory

Many bioimaging research projects require objects of interest to be identified, located, and then traced to allow quantitative measurement. Depending on the complexity of the system and imaging, instance segmentation is often done manually, and automated approaches still require weeks to months of an individual’s time to acquire the necessary training data for AI models. As such, there is a strong need to develop approaches for instance segmentation that minimize the use of expert annotation while maintaining quality on challenging image analysis problems. Herein, we present our work on a citizen science project we ran called Science Scribbler: Virus Factory on the Zooniverse platform, in which citizen scientists annotated a cryo-electron tomography volume by locating and categorising viruses using point-based annotations instead of manually drawing outlines. One crowdsourcing workflow produced a database of virus locations, and the other workflow produced a set of classifications of those locations. Together, this allowed mask annotation to be generated for training a deep learning–based segmentation model. From this model, segmentations were produced that allowed for measurements such as counts of the viruses by virus class. The application of citizen science–driven crowdsourcing to the generation of instance segmentations of volumetric bioimages is a step towards developing annotation-efficient segmentation workflows for bioimaging data. This approach aligns with the growing interest in citizen science initiatives that combine the collective intelligence of volunteers with AI to tackle complex problems while involving the public with research that is being undertaken in these important areas of science.

Through the Citizen Scientists’ Eyes: Insights into Using Citizen Science with Machine Learning for Effective Identification of Unknown-Unknowns in Big Data

In the era of rapidly growing astronomical data, the gap between data collection and analysis is a significant barrier, especially for teams searching for rare scientific objects. Although machine learning (ML) can quickly parse large data sets, it struggles to robustly identify scientifically interesting objects, a task at which humans excel. Human-in-the-loop (HITL) strategies that combine the strengths of citizen science (CS) and ML offer a promising solution, but first, we need to better understand the relationship between human- and machine-identified samples. In this work, we present a case study from the Galaxy Zoo: Weird & Wonderful project, where volunteers inspected ~200,000 astronomical images—processed by an ML-based anomaly detection model—to identify those with unusual or interesting characteristics. Volunteer-selected images with common astrophysical characteristics had higher consensus, while rarer or more complex ones had lower consensus. This suggests low-consensus choices shouldn’t be dismissed in further explorations. Additionally, volunteers were better at filtering out uninteresting anomalies, such as image artifacts, which the machine struggled with. We also found that a higher ML-generated anomaly score that indicates images’ low-level feature anomalousness was a better predictor of the volunteers’ consensus choice. Combining a locus of high volunteer-consensus images within the ML learnt feature space and anomaly score, we demonstrated a decision boundary that can effectively isolate images with unusual and potentially scientifically interesting characteristics. Using this case study, we lay important guidelines for future research studies looking to adapt and operationalize human-machine collaborative frameworks for efficient anomaly detection in big data.

Framework for abnormal event detection and tracking based on effective sparse factorization strategy

The idea of tracking video objects has evolved to facilitate the area of surveillance systems. However, most current research efforts lie in speedy abnormal event detection and tracking of objects of interest tracking. However, the primary challenge is dealing with complex video structures' inherent redundancy. The existing research models for video tracking are more inclined towards improving accuracy. In contrast, the consideration of a more significant proportion of mobile object dynamics, e.g. abnormal events, in motion over the crowded video frame sequence is mainly overlooked, which is essential to study a specific movement pattern of the object of interest appearing in the frame sequence concerning the cost of computation factors. The study thereby introduces a unique strategy of speedy abnormal event detection and tracking, which facilitates video tracking to assess a specific pattern of object of interest movement over complex and crowded video scenes, considering a unique learning-based approach. The extensive simulation outcome further shows that the proposed tracking model accomplishes better tracking accuracy yet retains an optimized computation cost compared to the baseline studies. The computation of video tracking also accomplishes higher detection rates even in the challenging constraints of partial/complete occlusion, illumination variation and background clutter.

Localizing From Classification: Self-Directed Weakly Supervised Object Localization for Remote Sensing Images.

In recent years, object localization and detection methods in remote sensing images (RSIs) have received increasing attention due to their broad applications. However, most previous fully supervised methods require a large number of time-consuming and labor-intensive instance-level annotations. Compared with those fully supervised methods, weakly supervised object localization (WSOL) aims to recognize object instances using only image-level labels, which greatly saves the labeling costs of RSIs. In this article, we propose a self-directed weakly supervised strategy (SD-WSS) to perform WSOL in RSIs. To specify, we fully exploit and enhance the spatial feature extraction capability of the RSIs' classification model to accurately localize the objects of interest. To alleviate the serious discriminative region problem exhibited by previous WSOL methods, the spatial location information implicit in the classification model is carefully extracted by GradCAM ++ to guide the learning procedure. Furthermore, to eliminate the interference from complex backgrounds of RSIs, we design a novel self-directed loss to make the model optimize itself and explicitly tell it where to look. Finally, we review and annotate the existing remote sensing scene classification dataset and create two new WSOL benchmarks in RSIs, named C45V2 and PN2. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the proposed method and six mainstream WSOL methods with three backbones on C45V2 and PN2. The results demonstrate that our proposed method achieves better performance when compared with state-of-the-arts.

Hephyronyms in the structure of the Samarkand text

INTRODUCTION. Recently, the peripheral categories of onomastics have become the object of onomastic research, which include the name of the proper bridge – gephyronyms. This term is not noted in the most famous Dictionary of Russian Onomastic Terminology by N.V. Podolskaya. Being a meaningful independent unit of knowledge in the onomastic consciousness of native speakers, gephironim exist in a system-centric form and in an anthropocentric dimension, implementing the urban text. Understanding the essence of the toponym as a text goes back to the ideas of M.V. Gorbanevsky, who believed that the versatility of the components of a toponym is related to the toponym-text. The purpose of the study is to consider the spatial locus of the city of Samarkand based on the material of gephironim texts, which can unfold and represent known extralinguistic and cultural knowledge, representing the city-text.MATERIALS AND METHODS. The following methods are used in the study: observation, semiotic and semantic analysis, interpretation method. Empirical context of the study of – gephyronyms of Samarkand, recorded on the city map and in reference books, which are the object of scientific interest of the author.RESULTS AND DISCUSSION. A person fills the space of the city with specific toponymic units involved in the formation of the urban text, which allows “to read” the city. The coherence and integrity of the urban text are formed by toponyms-texts, the meanings of which include the following components: address, chronological, historical and cultural, local history, national-cultural, text, and this series remains open.CONCLUSION. Certain properties of the Samarkand text are reflected in toponym texts. Since any toponym performs an iconic function and urban semiotics is intertextual, each individual toponym-text enters into an intertextual relationship with another toponym-text, forming an urban text with onomastic information.

New Insights into the Molecular Evolution of Tapirus pinchaque (Tapiridae, Perissodactyla) and the Rise and Fall of Tapirus kabomani as a Full Species.

Large wild mammals are extremely important in their respective ecological communities and are frequently considered to be emblematic. This is the case of the different tapir species, the largest terrestrial mammals from the Neotropics. Despite their large size and being objects of interest for many naturalists, the field still lacks critical genetics and systematics information about tapir species. In the current work, we analyzed four molecular datasets (mitogenomes, and three nuclear genes, RAG 1-2, IRBP, and BRCA1) of two South American tapirs: the Andean tapir (Tapirus pinchaque) and the alleged new species of tapir, Tapirus kabomani. We derived four main findings. (1) Our molecular phylogenetic analyses showed T. pinchaque as the youngest tapir branch in Neotropics and a sister species of Tapirus terrestris. This contradicts the traditional morphological observations of renowned zoologists and paleontologists, who considered T. pinchaque as the oldest Neotropical tapir. (2) Our data does not support that the alleged T. kabomani is a full species. Rather, it is a specific group within T. terrestris. (3) T. pinchaque is the Neotropical tapir species which yielded the lowest levels of genetic diversity (both for mitochondrial and nuclear data). (4) The spatial genetic structure for T. pinchaque shows differences depending on the type of molecular marker used. With mitogenomes, the spatial structure is relatively weak, whereas with two nuclear genes (RAG 1-2 and IRBP), the spatial structure is highly significant. Curiously, for the other nuclear gene (BRCA1), the spatial structure is practically nonexistent. In any case, the northernmost population of T. pinchaque we studied (Los Nevados National Park in Colombia) was in a peripatric situation and was the most genetically differentiated. This is important for the adequate conservation of this population. (5) T. pinchaque showed clear evidence of population expansion during the last part of the Pleistocene, a period during which the dryness and glacial cold extinguished many large mammals in the Americas. However, T. pinchaque survived and spread throughout the Northern Andes.

Interest paradigm for early identification of autism spectrum disorder: an analysis from electroencephalography combined with eye tracking.

Early identification of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is critical for effective intervention. Restricted interests (RIs), a subset of repetitive behaviors, are a prominent but underutilized domain for early ASD diagnosis. This study aimed to identify objective biomarkers for ASD by integrating electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking (ET) to analyze toddlers' visual attention and cortical responses to RI versus neutral interest (NI) objects. The study involved 59 toddlers aged 2-4 years, including 32 with ASD and 27 non-ASD controls. Participants underwent a 24-object passive viewing paradigm, featuring RI (e.g., transportation items) and NI objects (e.g., balloons). ET metrics (fixation time and pupil size) and EEG time-frequency (TF) power in theta (4-8 Hz) and alpha (8-13 Hz) bands were analyzed. Statistical methods included logistic regression models to assess the predictive potential of combined EEG and ET biomarkers. Toddlers with ASD exhibited significantly increased fixation times and pupil sizes for RI objects compared to NI objects, alongside distinct EEG patterns with elevated theta and reduced alpha power in occipital regions during RI stimuli. The multimodal logistic regression model, incorporating EEG and ET metrics, achieved an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.75, demonstrating robust predictive capability for ASD. This novel integration of ET and EEG metrics highlights the potential of RIs as diagnostic markers for ASD. The observed neural and attentional distinctions underscore the utility of multimodal biomarkers for early diagnosis and personalized intervention strategies. Future work should validate findings across broader age ranges and diverse populations.

Secondary nomination as a means of creating the image of the enemy (based on the material of the online resource)

In the context of the Russian-Ukrainian war, the media play a significant role, firstly, by disseminating information promptly, and secondly, by actively influencing the minds and emotions of readers/listeners and thus shaping public opinion. Various aspects of media development have been covered in the works of B.O. Kovalenko, T.A. Kots, M.I. Navlna, O.A. Styshov and others. Researchers, in particular, note that a feature of the language of the mass media is the constant replenishment of new means of expressive speech against the background of standard clichés. The study of the language of periodicals has always attracted the attention of scholars and has intensified significantly during the period of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. The discourse of the media during the period of Russian aggression against Ukraine has become an object of interest for such scholars as: S.Z. Bulyk-Verkhola, I.M. Kalynovska, E.K. Koliada, I.M. Koshman, etc. The development of scientific and technological progress has led to the fact that the print media are significantly inferior to the electronic media. Many newspapers (if not all) are now in electronic format, and online and blog news have emerged. The purpose of the article is to identify and study the secondary nomination of the Russian Federation, its inhabitants and its leader in the discourse of electronic media during the Russian-Ukrainian war. In the article the methods of linguistic observation and descriptive methods related to the study of the usual and occasional motivation of the secondary nomination are used. The electronic media form the information components of the image of Russia, its inhabitants and its leader. As a result of the study of the selected corpus of names, we conclude that secondary nominations and periphrastic descriptive phrases make political and informational texts more imaginative, expressive, emotional, evaluative, fresh, original, and allow for the most accurate expression of the author's vision of the facts and events, and make the material interesting and witty.) Negative semantics reflects disdain for the enemy, ridicules Russia's military power, motivates the public, and strengthens international support for Ukraine. Further research will focus on the coverage of the enemy image in regional media.

Combining Unity with machine vision to create low latency, flexible and simple virtual realities

Abstract In recent years, virtual reality arenas have become increasingly popular for quantifying visual behaviours. By using the actions of a constrained animal to control the visual scenery, the animal perceives that it is moving through a virtual world. Importantly, as the animal is constrained in space, behavioural quantification is facilitated. Furthermore, using computer‐generated visual scenery allows for identification of visual triggers of behaviour. We created a novel virtual reality arena combining machine vision with the gaming engine Unity. For tethered flight, we enhanced an existing multi‐modal virtual reality arena, MultiMoVR, but tracked wing movements using DeepLabCut‐live (DLC‐live). For tethered walking animals, we used FicTrac to track the motion of a trackball. In both cases, real‐time tracking was interfaced with Unity to control the location and rotation of the tethered animal's avatar in the virtual world. We developed a user‐friendly Unity Editor interface, CAVE, to simplify experimental design and data storage without the need for coding. We show that both the DLC‐live‐Unity and the FicTrac‐Unity configurations close the feedback loop effectively and quickly. We show that closed‐loop feedback reduces behavioural artefacts exhibited by walking crabs in open‐loop scenarios, and that flying Eristalis tenax hoverflies navigate towards virtual flowers in closed loop. We show examples of how the CAVE interface can enable experimental sequencing control including use of avatar proximity to virtual objects of interest. Our results show that combining Unity with machine vision tools provides an easy and flexible virtual reality environment that can be readily adjusted to new experiments and species. This can be implemented programmatically in Unity, or by using our new tool CAVE, which allows users to design new experiments without additional programming. We provide resources for replicating experiments and our interface CAVE via GitHub, together with user manuals and instruction videos, for sharing with the wider scientific community.

Slippage-robust linear features for eye tracking

Regression-based gaze estimation for wearable eye-tracking headsets inevitably suffers from headset slippage. Despite good calibration accuracy (< 2°), over time, slippage can cause the gaze estimation accuracy to deteriorate significantly, ranging from 2° to 40°. Existing corrective measures typically cater to large viewing depths (> 1 meter). However, these measures are unsuitable for lower depth, such as industrial or office settings, where objects of interest lie within arm’s reach. For a dataset with natural slippage, we propose a set of slippage-robust features along with a linear regression function to improve gaze estimation accuracy. We also propose metrics that are more informative about gaze estimation accuracy over the entire field of view. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed features improve the gaze estimation accuracy by nearly 30%. These contributions pave the way for improved performance and reliability of eye-tracking headsets, enabling their use in diverse research domains and real-world applications.