Silhouette Matching Research Articles

The association between global self-esteem, physical self-concept and actual vs ideal body size rating in Chinese primary school children.

To investigate whether the discrepancy between actual and ideal body size rating is related to Chinese children's global self-esteem and global physical self-concept. A cross-sectional study of school children who completed questionnaires related to global self-esteem, global physical self-concept, and actual vs ideal body size. A total of 386 Chinese children (44% girls and 56% boys) aged 7-13 y from a primary school in Hong Kong, China. Global self-esteem and physical self-concept were measured using the physical self-descriptive questionnaire. Actual vs ideal body size discrepancy was established using the silhouette matching task. No significant relationship was found between global self-esteem and actual-ideal body size discrepancy of children. Global physical self-concept had a moderate negative correlation (r=-0.12) with the body size discrepancy score and the discrepancy score explained very limited variance (R(2)=0.015; F(1, 296)=4.51; P<0.05) in global physical self-concept. Three body size discrepancy groups (none, positive, and negative) were examined to see if there were any significant differences in global self-esteem, global physical self-concept, and specific dimensions of physical self-concept. A significant overall difference was found between groups for global physical self-concept (F=3.73, P<0.05) and the physical self-concept subscales of physical activity (F=3.25, P<0.05), body fat (F=61.26, P<0.001), and strength (F=5.26, P<0.01). Boys scored significantly higher than girls on global physical self-concept-especially in the sport competence, strength, and endurance subscales. This study revealed that the actual-ideal body size discrepancy rating of Chinese children was not predictive of global physical self-concept and global self-esteem. These findings are contrary to those reported in Western children, which may mean that culture plays a role in the formation of body attitude.

ENERGY INTAKE PATTERN AND SELF-ASSESSMENT OF BODY IMAGE ACCORDING TO BMI IN ACTIVE WOMEN OVER 50 YEARS OF AGE

1975 There are few researchers publications analyzing body image and nutritional intake in elderly people. The aim of this study was to establish the relationship between Body Mass Index (BMI) and: a- the energy intake, and b- the body image in elderly active women. Sample consisted of 85 women from 51 to 78 years old (X = 64 ± 6.5 years). Divided according to BMI in: Normal range (BMI < 24.9), Overweight (BMI: 25 to 29,9) and Obese (BMI > 30). To determine the daily energy intake pattern, 41 women completed a 4-day-food recall. The anthropometric variables measured were body weight, body height and adiposity trough the mean of 3 skinfolds (SKF). The self-assessment of the body image was done using the Silhouette Matching Task proposed by Stunkhard where the subjects classify their actual and ideal body image according to a 1 - 12 point scale. The statistical analysis used was "t Student" test to compare "actual" x "ideal" body images and "One Way" ANOVA, with Post hoc "Scheffé" test to compare the three groups. The level of significance adopted was p<.01 (Table)TableThe normal range group presented lower values of body weight, adiposity and body image than the other groups (p<.01). Energy intake tended to be higher in groups with higher BMI. "Actual" image scores were higher than the "ideal" in all three groups, although only overweight and obese groups presented higher adiposity values. Data permit to conclude that overweight and obese women perceived their body image adequately; and that normal range BMI subjects body image was probably influenced by cultural factors.

Flexible syntactic matching of curves and its application to automatic hierarchical classification of silhouettes

Curve matching is one instance of the fundamental correspondence problem. Our flexible algorithm is designed to match curves under substantial deformations and arbitrary large scaling and rigid transformations. A syntactic representation is constructed for both curves and an edit transformation which maps one curve to the other is found using dynamic programming. We present extensive experiments where we apply the algorithm to silhouette matching. In these experiments, we examine partial occlusion, viewpoint variation, articulation, and class matching (where silhouettes of similar objects are matched). Based on the qualitative syntactic matching, we define a dissimilarity measure and we compute it for every pair of images in a database of 121 images. We use this experiment to objectively evaluate our algorithm. First, we compare our results to those reported by others. Second, we use the dissimilarity values in order to organize the image database into shape categories. The veridical hierarchical organization stands as evidence to the quality of our matching and similarity estimation.