Color Patches Research Articles

Explicit and Implicit Preference for Symmetry Across Object Categories

Symmetry affects aesthetic judgements, and it has been extensively studied at least for faces and abstract objects. We examined the role of bilateral symmetry on aesthetic judgements across different types of stimuli. It is important to test if symmetry is equally effective in the context of objects expected to be symmetrical, e.g., faces, and objects that are almost never symmetrical, e.g., landscapes. We used the following categories: angular shapes, smooth shapes, landscapes, flowers, female faces, and male faces. We selected these image categories considering their differing degrees of curvature, familiarity to the viewer, and tendency to be perceived as ensembles, as opposed to standalone objects. We also included blobs, manipulating landscapes into blurry tessellated patterns featuring patches of color, to remove familiarity while preserving the appearance of ensembles. For each item in these categories, images were modified to obtain perfect bilateral symmetry. We collected both explicit ratings and implicit measures of symmetry preference. For landscapes, there was a clear preference for the non-symmetrical (original) version. We observed a dissociation between explicit and implicit measures. Implicit measures demonstrated positive associations for all categories.

Object color knowledge representation occurs in the macaque brain despite the absence of a developed language system.

Animals guide their behaviors through internal representations of the world in the brain. We aimed to understand how the macaque brain stores such general world knowledge, focusing on object color knowledge. Three functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiments were conducted in macaque monkeys: viewing chromatic and achromatic gratings, viewing grayscale images of their familiar fruits and vegetables (e.g., grayscale strawberry), and viewing true- and false-colored objects (e.g., red strawberry and green strawberry). We observed robust object knowledge representations in the color patches, especially the one located around TEO: the activity patterns could classify grayscale pictures of objects based on their memory color and response patterns in these regions could translate between chromatic grating viewing and grayscale object viewing (e.g., red grating-grayscale images of strawberry), such that classifiers trained by viewing chromatic gratings could successfully classify grayscale object images according to their memory colors. Our results showed direct positive evidence of object color memory in macaque monkeys. These results indicate the perceptually grounded knowledge representation as a conservative memory mechanism and open a new avenue to study this particular (semantic) memory representation with macaque models.

Formulation and Characteristics of Hydrogel Patch Containing Pineapple Peel (Ananas comosus L.) Ethanol Extract

Abstract Pineapple peel (Ananas comosus L.) contains bioactive compounds such as flavonoids and the enzyme bromelain, which possess antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, and anticancer properties, and the ability to accelerate wound healing. Hydrogel patches, as a formulation for transdermal delivery, are effective in wound healing due to their hydrophilic properties that maintain moisture and prevent bacterial infection in open wounds. This study aims to develop and test the characteristics of hydrogel patch formulations containing ethanol extracts of pineapple peel with varying concentrations of 10%, 20%, and 30%, compared to a control (hydrogel patch without pineapple peel extract). A series of evaluation tests were conducted to assess the patch characteristics, including organoleptic tests, pH, absorbency, weight uniformity, swelling ratio, patch thickness, and folding endurance. The results showed that the concentration of pineapple peel extract affects the hydrogel patch characteristics. The higher the extract concentration, the darker the patch color, but the pH, absorbency, and swelling ratio decrease. Patches with higher extract concentrations also showed an increase in weight. Absorbency tests indicated that none of the formulas met the acceptance criteria (<10%), with absorbency results of 22.97%, 11.60%, and 21.95% for 10%, 20%, and 30% extract concentrations, respectively, and 23.43% for the control. Swelling ratio and thickness tests showed the best results for the control, followed by the 10%, 20%, and 30% extract concentrations. The folding endurance test showed that the control and 10% extract formula had good results (>300 folds), while higher extract concentrations reduced the folding endurance of the hydrogel patch .Keywords: extract, pineapple peel, hydrogel patch, formulation, patch characteristics

Color–emotion associations by speakers of Spanish and Mandarin in verbal and visual tasks: a comparison

Abstract This study aims to determine if there are differences in color–emotion association between monolingual speakers of Spanish and Mandarin, depending on how colors are presented (verbally or visually). We tested two groups of 25 speakers of these two languages in two different tasks using the Geneva Emotion Wheel, which encompasses 20 types of emotions. In Task 1, 13 colors were presented to participants as color terms in their native language, whereas in Task 2 the same colors were presented as color patches from the Munsell chart. Participants were then asked to associate color terms or color patches to the set of emotion concepts (and intensities of emotion) in the Geneva Emotion Wheel. Overall, differences between languages were not significant, regarding either the type of emotion or individual dimensions of emotion (valence, arousal or power), although significant differences were observed for specific colors. Also, Spanish speakers tended to attribute higher intensity values and higher numbers of emotion values to colors. At the same time, speakers of both languages reacted similarly to color presentation, with color terms being associated with the same emotions as color patches, but eliciting stronger reactions with respect to intensity and the number of emotion values. Finally, we found less variability in color–emotion associations within the Spanish-speaking group. Overall, our study points to a mixed pattern of universality and culture-specificity regarding how colors are used for conveying emotions by people.

Flash behaviors protect prey from avian predators

Abstract It has been proposed that flash behaviors, defined as the transient display of conspicuous color patches during escape, serve as an anti-predator defense in camouflaged prey. While recent studies in humans have demonstrated the effectiveness of flash behaviors in improving the survival of artificial prey, it remains unclear whether these benefits also arise in more natural systems involving non-human predators. This study investigated the adaptive significance of flash behaviors using chicks (Gallus gallus domesticus) as predators and virtual prey. Our experiments revealed that prey employing flash behaviors consistently enhanced their survival rate compared to non-flashing prey. Additionally, prey with non-conspicuous escape colors, though distinct from their resting colors, also showed a higher survival rate than non-flashing prey, challenging the conventional belief that conspicuous colors are required for search interference. An interplay between prey size and flash behaviors in enhancing survival was evident, with larger prey benefiting more than smaller prey. We found no evidence to suggest that being hidden before initiating an escape confers a survival advantage to flashing prey compared to being visible before escape. This study sheds light on the adaptive benefits of flash behaviors against natural predators and contributes to our understanding of the widespread occurrence of hidden color signals in camouflaged prey. We encourage further studies to explore the effectiveness of remaining hidden in flashing prey when confronted with natural predators, as well as how predators might learn to overcome the deception of flash behaviors.

Divergent ornamentation within a single population of the barn swallow.

Differential migration strategies favour different sets of characteristics, including sexually selected ornamentation. Such phenotypic variation is particularly evident in a population with partial migration, where migrants and non-migrants co-exist. Partial migration provides insights into the link between migration, local environment and ornamentation, although empirical studies remain scarce. Here, we studied the plumage traits of barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) in southern Japan, where both winterings and migrants breed sympatrically. We further examined this relationship with multiple isotopes (δ2H, δ13C, δ15N and δ34S), which provides insight into their moulting habitat. Among males, winterings and migrants differed in their morphological traits: wintering males had shorter wings, which suggests the high demand for flight apparatus in migratory birds. Moreover, wintering males had larger white tail spots and less colourful throat patches than migratory males, indicating ornament divergence between them. Wintering males had a significantly smaller isotopic space when examining the combinations of δ34S with the other isotopes compared to migratory males, which indicates a differential geographic range between them, perhaps because of the limited variation in the distance to the sea in wintering males. As in males, wintering females had a significantly smaller isotopic space than migrant females, but there were few morphological differences between migratory and wintering females. Instead, some morphological traits were related to isotope values in females. These results indicate sex-specific linkage between migration, local environment, and ornamentation.

Ecological, genetic and geographical divergence explain differences in colouration among sunbird species (Nectariniidae).

How extravagant ornamental traits evolve is a key question in evolutionary biology. Bird plumages are among the most elaborate ornaments, displaying almost all colours of the rainbow. Why and how birds evolved to be so colourful remains an open question with multiple and sometimes competing hypotheses. Different colours in different patches (i.e. body parts) might have different functions and thus result from different forms of selection (e.g. natural vs. sexual selection). Here we test the influence of three factors on colour diversity in sunbirds: (1) geographical distance, (2) differences in light environment and (3) phylogenetic distances. We show that both natural and sexual selection affect the evolution of sunbird colouration, but that their extent and direction differs between sexes, and varies with the extent of species overlap and across different patches on the body. Even though overlap in light environment partially explains colour differences among species, no colour metric (brightness, hue or chroma) covaries with light environment. Our results suggest that multiple forms of selection influence the colouration of different colour patches in different ways across an organism's body, highlighting the need to investigate colouration as a network of individual but inter-connected colour patches. These results are likely to be generalizable across the multitude of colourful animals.

Pattern Matters in the Aposematic Colouration of Papilio polytes Butterflies.

Many toxic animals display bright colour patterns to warn predators about their toxicity. This sometimes leads other sympatric palatable organisms to evolve mimetic colour patterns to also evade predation. These mimics, however, are often imperfect, and it is unclear how much their colour patterns can vary away from the model before they become ineffective. In this study, we investigated how predation risk of the palatable Common Mormon butterfly (Papilio polytes) is affected by two alterations of its wing pattern that make it progressively more distinct from its model, the Common Rose (Pachliopta aristolochiae). We deployed butterfly paper models in the field, where all models displayed the same colours but had different patterns. In the first modification from the Wildtype pattern, we exchanged the position of the red and white colour patches but kept the overall pattern constant. In the second modification, we created an eyespot-like shape from the pre-existing pattern elements by moving their positions in the wing, altering the overall wing pattern. Both modifications increased attack risk from predators relative to Wildtype patterns, with the eyespot-like modification having the highest predation risk. Our results show that avian predators can distinguish between all three patterns tested, and that pattern is important in aposematic signals. Predators learn to avoid aposematic colours, not in isolation, but as part of specific patterns.

Behavioral threat and appeasement signals take precedence over static colors in lizard contests

Abstract The interplay between morphological (structures) and behavioral (acts) signals in contest assessment is still poorly understood. During contests, males of the common wall lizard (Podarcis muralis) display both morphological (i.e. static color patches) and behavioral (i.e. raised-body display, foot shakes) traits. We set out to evaluate the role of these putative signals in determining the outcome and intensity of contests by recording agonistic behavior in ten mesocosm enclosures. We find that contests are typically won by males with relatively more black coloration, which are also more aggressive. However, black coloration does not seem to play a role in rival assessment, and behavioral traits are stronger predictors of contest outcome and winner aggression than prior experience, morphology, and coloration. Contest intensity is mainly driven by resource- and self-assessment, with males probably using behavioral threat (raised-body displays) and de-escalation signals (foot shakes) to communicate their willingness to engage/persist in a fight. Our results agree with the view that agonistic signals used during contests are not associated with mutual evaluation of developmentally-fixed attributes, and instead animals monitor each other to ensure that their motivation is matched by their rival. We emphasize the importance of testing the effect of signals on receiver behavior and discuss that social recognition in territorial species may select receivers to neglect potential morphological signals conveying static information on sex, age, or intrinsic quality.

A 3D Reconstruction Method Based on Homogeneous De Bruijn-Encoded Structured Light

Structured light three-dimensional reconstruction is one of the important methods for non-contact acquisition of sparse texture object surfaces. Variations in ambient illumination and disparities in object surface reflectance can significantly impact the fidelity of three-dimensional reconstruction, introducing considerable inaccuracies. We introduce a robust method for color speckle structured light encoding, which is based on a variant of the De Bruijn sequence, termed the Homogeneous De Bruijn Sequence. This innovative approach enhances the reliability and accuracy of structured light techniques for three-dimensional reconstruction by utilizing the distinctive characteristics of Homogeneous De Bruijn Sequences. Through a pruning process applied to the De Bruijn sequence, a structured light pattern with seven distinct color patches is generated. This approach ensures a more equitable distribution of speckle information.

A miniature world: Revealing warring states period shell paintings from zhongshan state by multiple-methods

The use of shells as a medium for painting is an exceptionally rare discovery in archaeology, representing a art form that has been largely overlooked. In this study, we present two shell paintings of the Warring States period (476–221 BCE) discovered in Zhongshan State, Hebei, China. Employing various techniques, including microscopic observation, computed tomography (CT), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), multispectral imaging, and Raman spectroscopy, we non-destructively unveil the exquisite images obscured by soil and reveal the unparalleled shallow relief technique employed in their creation. The identified pigments for the different paintings include cinnabar, charcoal black, and malachite. These elaborate depictions offer insights into the costume, rituals, life, hierarchy, and art of the Warring States period. The meticulous use of prominent lines emphasizes color patches rather than the brushstrokes relied upon in later stereotypical Chinese painting, significantly reshaping previous notions about the early development of Chinese painting. This unique expression undoubtedly refreshes our understanding of early ancient art.

Optimizing Vision Transformers for Histopathology: Pretraining and Normalization in Breast Cancer Classification.

This paper introduces a self-attention Vision Transformer model specifically developed for classifying breast cancer in histology images. We examine various training strategies and configurations, including pretraining, dimension resizing, data augmentation and color normalization strategies, patch overlap, and patch size configurations, in order to evaluate their impact on the effectiveness of the histology image classification. Additionally, we provide evidence for the increase in effectiveness gathered through geometric and color data augmentation techniques. We primarily utilize the BACH dataset to train and validate our methods and models, but we also test them on two additional datasets, BRACS and AIDPATH, to verify their generalization capabilities. Our model, developed from a transformer pretrained on ImageNet, achieves an accuracy rate of 0.91 on the BACH dataset, 0.74 on the BRACS dataset, and 0.92 on the AIDPATH dataset. Using a model based on the prostate small and prostate medium HistoEncoder models, we achieve accuracy rates of 0.89 and 0.86, respectively. Our results suggest that pretraining on large-scale general datasets like ImageNet is advantageous. We also show the potential benefits of using domain-specific pretraining datasets, such as extensive histopathological image collections as in HistoEncoder, though not yet with clear advantages.

Exploring the key deteriorative microorganisms on ancient ivories unearthed from the Sanxingdui Ruins site during temporary cold storage.

The ancient ivories unearthed from the Sanxingdui Ruins site are valuable cultural relics, however, the microbial biodeterioration on ivories during temporary cold storage poses a great threat to their later long-term preservation. Here, the combination of high-throughput sequencing and biochemical assays was applied for the in-depth investigation of the key deteriorative microorganisms colonizing on the ivories and the tracing of their origin, as well as the assessment of the ethanol disinfection impact on the microbial communities on ivories. It was observed that the surfaces of ivories were scattered by the fungal patches of white, dark grey, and hedge green colors during cold storage. The high-throughput sequencing results showed that the genera Mortierella (38.51%), Ilyonectria (14.43%), Penicillium (1.15%), and Aspergillus (1.09%) were the dominant fungi, while Pseudomonas (22.63%), Sphingopyxis (3.06%), and Perlucidibaca (2.92%) were the dominant bacteria on ivories. The isolated Aspergillus A-2 resulted in the highest amount of calcium releasing from the degradation of hydroxyapatite (HAP), the main component of ivory, by the organic acids produced, including oxalic acid and citric acid. The fast expectation-maximization for microbial source tracking (FEAST) analysis revealed that the majority of the fungi (57.45%) and bacteria (71.84%) colonizing on the ivories were derived from the soils surrounding ivories in the sacrifice pits, indicating soils as the primary source for the spoilage microbes growing on ivories. The dominant strains could degrade cellulose, the key components of wet cotton towels commonly applied on ivories for moisture maintenance, aiding the spoilage microbes colonizing on ivories. Notably, the ivory disinfection with 75% ethanol during the cleansing significantly decreased the relative abundance of the dominant genera of Ilyonectria, Aspergillus, and Pseudomonas, with Mortierella becoming the dominant one on ivories. Together, the fungi, particularly Aspergillus and Penicillium, played a significant role in the microbial biodeterioration of unearthed ancient ivories by producing the organic acids. These results may improve the control of the microbial biodeterioration and develop more efficient strategies for the long-time conservation of unearthed ancient ivories and other cultural relics.

Efficacy Of Triamcinolone Injection In Management Of Oral Lichen Planus

Objective: To study the efficacy of triamcinolone injection in the treatment of oral lichen planus patients presented to the department of oral and maxillofacial surgery at KRL General Hospital Islamabad. Method: This study was conducted in the Department of Oral & Maxillofacial Surgery, Kahuta Research Laboratories Islamabad. 100 patients who fulfilled the inclusion-exclusion criteria were selected. All the enrolled patients were treated with intralesional TA injection once a week for 4 weeks. A 0.5ml TA (40mg/ml) dose was used. The subepithelial tissue just beneath the lesion and next to the normal mucosa was the exact location of the injection. The treatment was stopped earlier when all three of the symptoms of burning, pain and patch colour were removed. The patients were examined clinically on the 7th, 14th, and 21st day of treatment and based on the examination, the decision of the next dose was decided. The final examination of the patient was on the 28th day of treatment. To assess the oral pain and burning, we used the Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) having 10 grades (0-10). Results: The mean age of the patients in the study was 35.47±13.459 ranging from 18 to 65 years. In frequency of gender of the patients, there were 57(57%) male and 43(43.0%) female patients. In frequency of distribution of patients, 38(38.0%) patients had unilateral while the remaining 62(62.0%) had bilateral disorders. In frequency of efficacy, 87(87.0%) patients found with improved symptoms and 13(13.0%) were not improved/inefficient. Conclusion: This study concluded as much of previous literature concluded that the efficacy and safety of intralesional TA injection were found efficient after observation at 28th weeks of treatment. Keywords: Triamcinolone injection, Oral lichen planus, Efficacy, Reticular, Plaque.

Mammal coloration as a social signal

AbstractOtherwise, apparently cryptic mammals often have conspicuous patches of colour on distal regions of their body, possibly for signalling. To investigate ideas about communication within sociosexual contexts, we used a comparative dataset for 2726 terrestrial mammals to match the coloration and patterning of distal body areas (head, chest, rump and tail) to activity cycle, group size, sexual size dimorphism, mating system and congener overlap at both Class and Order levels. Using phylogenetic controls, we uncovered repeated associations between white colour patches and nocturnality, conspicuous rump patches and sexual selection and multicoloured, complex patterning on distal regions of the body being associated with small group size. Overall, however, we found rather few associations between conspicuous coloration and behavioural, social and morphological variables, suggesting that visual signalling is not a key driver of communication in mammals, perhaps because the majority are nocturnal and solitary, and rely on olfactory signalling.

CaMIL: Causal Multiple Instance Learning for Whole Slide Image Classification

Whole slide image (WSI) classification is a crucial component in automated pathology analysis. Due to the inherent challenges of high-resolution WSIs and the absence of patch-level labels, most of the proposed methods follow the multiple instance learning (MIL) formulation. While MIL has been equipped with excellent instance feature extractors and aggregators, it is prone to learn spurious associations that undermine the performance of the model. For example, relying solely on color features may lead to erroneous diagnoses due to spurious associations between the disease and the color of patches. To address this issue, we develop a causal MIL framework for WSI classification, effectively distinguishing between causal and spurious associations. Specifically, we use the expectation of the intervention P(Y | do(X)) for bag prediction rather than the traditional likelihood P(Y | X). By applying the front-door adjustment, the spurious association is effectively blocked, where the intervened mediator is aggregated from patch-level features. We evaluate our proposed method on two publicly available WSI datasets, Camelyon16 and TCGA-NSCLC. Our causal MIL framework shows outstanding performance and is plug-and-play, seamlessly integrating with various feature extractors and aggregators.

Influence of incubation period on membrane patch color for insoluble contaminant measurement in degraded hydraulic oils

Insoluble contaminants and varnish, resulting from oil degradation byproducts and sometimes depleted additive molecules, are initiated primarily due to thermal stress on the oil. This poses significant challenges in tribology, particularly for the lubrication systems of modern complex machinery, leading to severe debilitating effects such as loss of operating clearances and impaired heat transfer. Addressing varnish buildup is crucial, and timely oil analysis emerges as a valuable tool, offering essential insights into the oil degradation level and the potential presence of insoluble contaminants. Among the various laboratory testing methods available to assess varnish potential, colorimetric analysis, specifically Membrane Patch Colorimetry (MPC), is widely applied owing to its efficiency and cost-effectiveness. This study extends the application of MPC test principles, commonly utilized for turbine oils, to measure insoluble contaminants generated by degraded hydraulic fluids. Adhering to the ASTM D7843-21 standard, which stipulates the precision of this testing method for turbine oils is contingent upon the sample’s incubation period, our investigation focuses on exploring modifications to the standard 72-hour incubation period. We aim to assess the viability of shortening or extending this duration for conducting MPC tests on used hydraulic fluids, thereby potentially enhancing the precision and relevance of MPC tests in hydraulic fluid analysis.

Lesion segmentation using 3D scan and deep learning for the evaluation of facial portwine stain birthmarks

BackgroundPortwine stain (PWS) birthmarks are congenital vascular malformations. The quantification of PWS area is an important step in lesion classification and treatment evaluation. AimsThe aim of this study was to evaluate the combination of 3D scan with deep learning for automated PWS area quantization. Materials and methodsPWS color was measured using a portable spectrophotometer. PWS patches (29.26–45.82 cm2) of different color and shape were generated for 2D and 3D PWS model. 3D images were acquired by a handheld 3D scanner to create texture maps. For semantic segmentation, an improved DeepLabV3+ network was developed for PWS lesion extraction from texture mapping of 3D images. In order to achieve accurate extraction of lesion regions, the convolutional block attention module (CBAM) and DENSE were introduced and the network was trained under Ranger optimizer. The performance of different backbone networks for PWS lesion extraction were also compared. ResultsIDeepLabV3+ (Xception) showed the best results in PWS lesion extraction and area quantification. Its mean Intersection over Union (MIou) was 0.9797, Mean Pixel Accuracy (MPA) 0.9908, Accuracy 0.9989, Recall 0.9886 and F1-score 0.9897, respectively. In PWS area quantization, the mean value of the area error rate of this scheme was 2.61 ± 2.33. ConclusionsThe new 3D method developed in this study was able to achieve accurate quantification of PWS lesion area and has potentials for clinical applications.

Relationship between brightness perception and skin color influenced by experimental method

AbstractFacial brightness perception is affected by skin color. It was reported that reddish skin was matched with a higher lightness scale stimulus than yellowish skin among Japanese observers. However, this trend is inconsistent among Thai, Korean, Chinese, and European observers, implying the influence factors, such as ethnicity, environment, and judgment criteria. In this study, we investigated the influence of the experimental method on facial brightness perception using test stimulus images with constant lightness and different hue angles. We examined two instructions (“Appearance match” vs. “Brightness match”) and the scale stimulus for matching (a uniform color patch vs. a face image). We further conducted an impression evaluation experiment of the whole face. The matching results from the Japanese showed a similar trend in both instructions and scale stimuli under most conditions, suggesting that matched brightness is not influenced by instruction and the complexity of scale stimuli. The impression evaluation results were similar for Thai, Japanese, and Chinese observers, with reddish faces being evaluated with higher scores in brightness. Our findings suggest the influence of experimental methods on facial brightness judgment. The holistic judgment of facial brightness would be universal among different East Asian groups, at least for the range of variation in skin color we used.

Seasonal changes in color patches and parasite load of male torquate lizards (Sceloporus torquatus)

Seasonal changes in color patches and parasite load of male torquate lizards (Sceloporus torquatus)