Single Face Research Articles

Temporal Order Judgements of Dynamic Gaze Stimuli Reveal a Postdictive Prioritisation of Averted Over Direct Shifts.

We studied temporal order judgements (TOJs) of gaze shift behaviours and evaluated the impact of gaze direction (direct and averted gaze) and face context information (both eyes set within a single face or each eye within two adjacent hemifaces) on TOJ performance measures. Avatar faces initially gazed leftwards or rightwards (Starting Gaze Direction). This was followed by sequential and independent left and right eye gaze shifts with various amounts of stimulus onset asynchrony. Gaze shifts could be either Matching (both eyes end up pointing direct or averted) or Mismatching (one eye ends up pointing direct, the other averted). Matching shifts revealed an attentional cueing mechanism, where TOJs were biased in favour of the eye lying in the hemispace cued by the avatar’s Starting Gaze Direction. For example, the left eye was more likely to be judged as shifting first when the avatar initially gazed toward the left side of the screen. Mismatching shifts showed biased TOJs in favour of the eye performing the averted shift, but only in the context of two separate hemifaces that does not violate expectations of directional gaze shift congruency. This suggests a postdictive inferential strategy that prioritises eye movements based on the type of gaze shift, independently of where attention is initially allocated. Averted shifts are prioritised over direct, as these might signal the presence of behaviourally relevant information in the environment.

Effect of Wetting and Drying Cycles on Behavior of Concrete Externally Strengthened with CFRP Laminates

This study describes an experimental work that was made to evaluate the effect of wetting and drying cycles on the behavior of concrete specimens externally strengthened with CFRP laminates. The experimental work included testing of twenty-three concrete specimens externally strengthened with CFRP laminates in different positions, with two compressive strength levels. The experimental variables considered in the test program include, compression strength of concrete, number of carbon fiber reinforced polymer (CFRP) strip layers, using CFRP strips throughout the total length of the specimen or within the middle third, and the number of wetting and drying cycles. The testing program included compression strength test, four-point flexural test, direct tension test, single and double face shear tests. The experimental results show that the increasing time of exposure to wetting and drying cycles lead to a significant increase in compressive strength, increasing the cracking loads which reached up to 22%., and decreasing the ultimate load carrying capacity.

Full Investigation of Angle Dependence in Dip-Coating Sol-Gel Films.

Dip-coating is one of the most convenient methods used in laboratory and industry to deposit a solid layer onto a surface with a controlled thickness from a chemical solution. The present Article investigates the influence of the withdrawal speed on the film thickness and homogeneity with respect to the dipping angle ranging from 90° (conventional vertical configuration) to 1° (quasi-horizontal configuration). Several advantages were found in the latter extreme low-dipping angle conditions that are (i) an available wider range of thickness, (ii) the elimination of the perturbations/effects induced by evaporation, and (iii) the compatibility with large surface and single face deposition at high throughput and using a minimal amount of solution. One shows that experimental data follow the Landau-Levich model, modified by Tallmadge for angle dependence, only for intermediate regimes of speed. A maximal thickness limited by the physical-chemical characteristics of the initial solution is reached at high speeds while a minimal thickness, corresponding to a single layer of solute interacting with the substrate surface can be obtained at very low speeds.

Adjusting the Focus of Attention: Helping Witnesses to Evolve a More Identifiable Composite

When perceiving faces under normal circumstances, the focus of attention is likely to be on the upper (e.g., hair, eyes) than lower (e.g., mouth, chin) facial half [1]. If such a bias were to extend to face construction, then it may hinder the effectiveness of forensic evidence collected from witnesses and victims of crime. In Experiment 1, participants constructed a single face using the EvoFIT holistic (police) composite system 24 hours after having seen an unfamiliar target identity. When constructing the face, participants were asked to select items from face arrays based on the whole face, or for upper and lower facial halves separately; these faces were presented in arrays either intact or horizontally-misaligned [2], and with external features (hair, ears, neck) present or absent. More-identifiable composites were predicted from (i) selection of separate facial halves (cf. currently-used whole-face selection), (ii) presence of horizontal misalignment and (iii) absence of external features. Experiment 2 used the same basic design but participants were requested to select for (i) upper-face half during evolution, (ii) the same as (i) but also for subsequent adjustments of the face, and (iii) overall face (Control). The composites constructed in both experiments were named and rated for likeness. Experiment 1 unexpectedly revealed that the Control group produced the highest-named composites. In Experiment 2, upper face selection during the evolution stage produced more-effective composites. In terms of practical implications, for the EvoFIT composite system, and potentially for other holistic systems, witnesses should be instructed to select faces for the upper facial half during evolution, to maximise subsequent identification of their composites.

The Code for Facial Identity in the Primate Brain

Primates recognize complex objects such as faces with remarkable speed and reliability. Here, we reveal the brain's code for facial identity. Experiments in macaques demonstrate an extraordinarily simple transformation between faces and responses of cells in face patches. By formatting faces as points in a high-dimensional linear space, we discovered that each face cell's firing rate is proportional to the projection of an incoming face stimulus onto a single axis in this space, allowing a face cell ensemble to encode the location of any face in the space. Using this code, we could precisely decode faces from neural population responses and predict neural firing rates to faces. Furthermore, this code disavows the long-standing assumption that face cells encode specific facial identities, confirmed by engineering faces with drastically different appearance that elicited identical responses in single face cells. Our work suggests that other objects could be encoded by analogous metric coordinate systems. PAPERCLIP.

Best practices for emergency shelters that serve male populations

ABSTRACTHomeless men represent the majority of homeless people. While federal funding priorities have shifted to permanent housing solutions, quality emergency shelters are vital in communities to help these men. To determine the best practices in emergency shelter delivery to homeless men based on top agency representatives’ opinions. Leaders from 21 emergency shelters that serve single men throughout the U.S.A. were interviewed about their facilities, their opinions on the best practices of emergency shelters, and barriers that single men face in exiting homelessness. The main goal of emergency shelters is to offer a welcoming environment. Emergency shelters try to offer a variety of services on-site, but find it difficult to offer medical and dental services at facilities with smaller budgets. Access to beds, showers, drug and alcohol rehabilitation, case management, and access to medical services are seen as vital to the success of the emergency shelter. These emergency shelters have many services in place to help the single male population. The most important services are ones that address the basic needs of human beings first: food, showers, beds, medical services, and storage. Mental health and breaking substance dependency are also priorities.

Abstract 33: Activated Protein C Light Chain Provides an Extended Binding Surface for Anticoagulant Cofactor Protein S

Plasma protein S whose deficiency is linked to increased risk for thrombosis provides anticoagulant cofactor activity for activated protein C (APC) by enhancing rates of inactivation of factors Va and VIIIa. Previous APC mutagenesis studies showed that residues 35-39 in the gamma-carboxyglutamic acid domain are required for normal interactions with protein S, indicating the APC Gla domain binds protein S. Here we used mutagenesis of APC to interrogate the surface of APC’s light chain to identify the extended binding surface for protein S. We characterized the ability of protein S to enhance the anticoagulant activity of multiple recombinant APC variants using factor Xa-1-stage clotting assays using normal pooled plasma and protein S-depleted plasma. Mutations of residues L38, K43, I73, F95, and W115 in APC significantly reduced protein S’s cofactor activity. An APC variant carrying all of these five mutations lost all of protein S cofactor activity. On the crystallographic structure of APC, these five residues delineate an extended surface on only one side of the APC light chain that identifies the putative protein S binding site which is found on a face that is opposite APC’s catalytic triad site. Each of the APC variants with single or multiple L38, K43, I73, F95, and W115 mutations showed a normal ability to cleave SEAP-labeled PAR1 at Arg 41 and Arg 46, implying that the protein S-binding surface does not bind EPCR or PAR1. In summary, mutagenesis studies identify an extended surface on a single face of APC’s light chain for binding protein S. This knowledge will enable design and interpretation of new APC biologics with enhanced translational value.

Highly directional source radiation using isotropic transformation acoustics

Recent developments in transformation acoustics (TA) have taken advantage of the isotropic nature of conformal mappings to form gradient index lens devices, such as a two-dimensional monopole-to-quadropole lens. While this TA precisely maintains the wave equation solution within the lens the radiated field is still multi-directional and not fully efficient due to impedance mismatch and non-planar radiation. A three-fold strategy is outlined here to achieve highly directional and impedance matched devices. First, most of the rays leaving the original circular region are mapped to a single face of a polygon. Second, the center of the radiating face is impedance matched by simply scaling the size up or down. Finally, the polygon is replaced by a two-sided crescent moon mapping which optimizes the radiation across the face of higher curvature, allowing near-field focusing and quasi-planar far-field radiation. These ideas are illustrated by example simulations. Practical design methods, including water matrix and solid matrix devices, will be discussed. [Work supported through ONR MURI.]

Affine registration of three-dimensional point sets for improving the accuracy of eye position trackers

Existing methods for tracking three-dimensional (3-D) eye positions with a monocular color camera mostly rely on a generic 3-D face model and a certain face database. However, the performance of these methods is susceptible to the variations of head poses. For this reason, existing methods for estimating 3-D eye position from a single two-dimensional face image may yield erroneous results. To improve the accuracy of 3-D eye position trackers using a monocular camera, we present a compensation method as a postprocessing technique. We address the problem of determining an optimal registration function for fitting 3-D data consisting of the inaccurate estimates from the eye position tracker and their corresponding ground truths. To obtain the ground truths of 3-D eye positions, we propose two different systems by combining an optical motion capture system and checkerboards, which construct the form of the hand-eye and robot-world calibration. By solving a least-squares optimization problem, we can determine the optimal registration function in an affine form. Real experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can considerably improve the accuracy of 3-D eye position trackers using a single color camera.

Multi-view face recognition from single RGBD models of the faces

This work takes important steps towards solving the following problem of current interest: Assuming that each individual in a population can be modeled by a single frontal RGBD face image, is it possible to carry out face recognition for such a population using multiple 2D images captured from arbitrary viewpoints? Although the general problem as stated above is extremely challenging, it encompasses subproblems that can be addressed today. The subproblems addressed in this work relate to: (1) Generating a large set of viewpoint dependent face images from a single RGBD frontal image for each individual; (2) using hierarchical approaches based on view-partitioned subspaces to represent the training data; and (3) based on these hierarchical approaches, using a weighted voting algorithm to integrate the evidence collected from multiple images of the same face as recorded from different viewpoints. We evaluate our methods on three datasets: a dataset of 10 people that we created and two publicly available datasets which include a total of 48 people. In addition to providing important insights into the nature of this problem, our results show that we are able to successfully recognize faces with accuracies of 95% or higher, outperforming existing state-of-the-art face recognition approaches based on deep convolutional neural networks.

Measurement and optimization of the light collection uniformity in strongly tapered PWO crystals of the PANDA detector

The uniformity of the light collection is a crucial parameter for detectors based on inorganic scintillation crystals to guarantee a response proportional to the deposited energy. Especially in case of tapered crystals, like they are widely used to realize a 4π geometry of electromagnetic calorimeters (EMC) in high energy physics experiments, a strong non-uniformity is introduced by an additional focusing of the scintillation light due to the tapered geometry. The paper will discuss the determination and the reduction of the non-uniformity in strongly tapered lead tungstate crystals as used for the construction of the electromagnetic calorimeter of the PANDA detector at the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR). Among different concepts for an uniformization a single de-polished lateral side face provided the optimum result with a remaining non-uniformity below 5% in good agreement with similar studies for the CMS ECAL at LHC. The impact on the achievable energy resolution in the energy regime of photons below 800MeV is discussed in detail in comparison to GEANT4 simulations. The comparison of the response of two arrays with polished and de-polished crystals, respectively, shows in the latter case a significant improvement of the constant term of the parametrization of the energy resolution down to 0.5% accompanied by only very slight increase of the statistical term.

62.1 Visualizing Mental Representations of Emotional Faces in Schizophrenia

Background: The ability to perceive, recognize and process own and others’ emotions is crucial for efficient and effective social communication. Many different tasks have been used to investigate impairments herein in patients with schizophrenia. Evidence suggests that perception, discrimination and recognition of affective facial expressions are impaired in schizophrenia patients (Green, Horan & Lee, 2015; Chan et al 2010). Importantly, not everyone may interpret the same facial expression similarly. People match their internal representation of specific facial expressions to perceived faces and variation in these internal representations may result in distortions of social reality. The impairments in face and/or emotion processing and the bias toward a more negative experience may be causally related to degradation of the internal representation itself or to disturbances in the higher order evaluation of visual input against functionally intact internal representations. Methods: We use a data-driven technique of psychophysical reverse correlation, which makes it possible to visualize internal representations on computer screens. Participants judge noisy images of faces that are created by superimposing random noise on a single constant base face. The random noise distorts the base face at the pixel level, generating facial variation across stimuli that is fully unconstrained and unaffected by researchers’ a priori expectations. The participants’ responses to a large number of faces are then used to model the facial information that was idiosyncratically diagnostic for the judgments. This analysis yields a classification image (CI) for each participant, which visualizes the facial characteristics that drive judgments of emotional expressions (i.e., their internal representation). Specifically, we used reverse correlation image classification (RCIC) to investigate and reconstruct the mental representation of trustworthiness as expressed on the face. Results: Thus far, we have reliable data from 11 patients and 9 controls. While our results are preliminary, they show that patients are capable of performing the task adequately. Both a visual inspection of the group-level visualizations of the 3 constructs probed (i.e., untrustworthy, neutral, and trustworthy) as well as the computed correlations between these visualizations suggest that the internal representation of these constructs is less expressive in patients when compared to controls. Conclusion: Being able to visualize mental representations of trustworthy and untrustworthy faces in patients with schizophrenia opens up the possibility of further use of RCIC tasks in the investigation of emotion-processing deficiencies in schizophrenia.

Multiple feature descriptors based model for individual identification in group photos

Detection of person in the crowd is most exigent facial recognition aspect. Faces in a group can comprise the criticality of face localization, partial occlusion, and facial overlapping and real time background scenes. In this paper, single and multiple persons recognition is provided for group pictures. This offered method at first localized the facial area of the individuals. These identified faces are divided in full or the partial view clusters by observing the oval map. While performing the recognition, separate algorithms will be applied to both facial groups. Full face recognition is here implied using LBP, Gabor and structured feature fusion based distance analysis method. These methods will be applied individually and jointly to identify the facial image. Partial face recognition is here implied using discriminative structural analysis. This structural formation is here obtained using structure points and base curve identification. Maximum structural points and curve ratio map is considered as the identified image. Group images are captured at home, office, classroom and roadside with multiple situations. The experimentation interpretation is measured disjointedly for full view and partial view images obtained from complex scenes and scenarios. The evaluation is here applied to perform the facial region identification and the group photo recognition. The facial region extraction is applied on eight datasets. These datasets are IMM, Caltech, CMU, Bau, FDDB, LFW, Pointing and Self Collected Dataset. The facial extraction is applied on complex background images with single and multiple faces. The comparative evaluation shows that the localization stage of proposed model has reduced the FAR and FRR. The complete recognition model is applied on real time family dataset, random web celebrity dataset associated with LFW and FDDB datasets. The evaluation is provided for recognition of front and partial face images in different scenarios. The comparative results of facial recognition are evaluated against PCA, ICA and PCA-LDA methods. The results conclude that the proposed methods have improved the accuracy for both full and partial faces.

Ice and anti-nucleating activities of an ice-binding protein from the annual grass, Brachypodium distachyon.

Plants exposed to sub-zero temperatures face unique challenges that threaten their survival. The growth of ice crystals in the extracellular space can cause cellular dehydration, plasma membrane rupture and eventual cell death. Additionally, some pathogenic bacteria cause tissue damage by initiating ice crystal growth at high sub-zero temperatures through the use of ice-nucleating proteins (INPs), presumably to access nutrients from lysed cells. An annual species of brome grass, Brachypodium distachyon (Bd), produces an ice-binding protein (IBP) that shapes ice with a modest depression of the freezing point (~0.1 °C at 1 mg/mL), but high ice-recrystallization inhibition (IRI) activity, allowing ice crystals to remain small at near melting temperatures. This IBP, known as BdIRI, is unlike other characterized IBPs with a single ice-binding face, as mutational analysis indicates that BdIRI adsorbs to ice on two faces. BdIRI also dramatically attenuates the nucleation of ice by bacterial INPs (up to -2.26 °C). This 'anti-nucleating' activity is significantly higher than previously documented for any IBP.

Judging guilt and accuracy: highly confident eyewitnesses are discounted when they provide featural justifications

ABSTRACTJurors are heavily swayed by confident eyewitnesses. Are they also influenced by how eyewitnesses justify their level of confidence? Here we document a counter-intuitive effect: when eyewitnesses identified a suspect from a lineup with absolute certainty (‘I am completely confident’) and justified their confidence by referring to a visible feature of the accused (‘I remember his nose’), participants judged the suspect as less likely to be guilty than when eyewitnesses identified a suspect with absolute certainty but offered an unobservable justification (‘I would never forget him’) or no justification at all. Moreover, people perceive an eyewitness’s identification as nearly 25% less accurate when the eyewitness has provided a featural justification than an unobservable justification or simply no justification. Even when an eyewitness’s level of confidence is clear because s/he has expressed it numerically (e.g. ‘I am 100% certain’) participants perceive eyewitnesses as not credible (i.e. inaccurate) when the eyewitness has provided a featural justification. However, the effect of featural justifications – relative to a confidence statement only – is maximal when there is an accompanying lineup of faces, moderate when there is a single face and minimal when there is no face at all. The results support our Perceived-Diagnosticity account.

Updating the coal quality parameters in multiple production benches based on combined material measurement: a full case study

An efficient resource model updating framework concept was proposed aiming for the improvement of raw material quality control and process efficiency in any type of mining operation. The concept integrates sensor data measured online on the production line into the resource or grade/quality control model and continuously provides locally more accurate estimates. The concept has been applied in a lignite field with the aim of identifying local impurities in a coal seam and to improve the prediction of coal quality attributes in neighbouring blocks. A significant improvement was demonstrated which led to better coal quality management. So far, the proposed concept and the application in coal mining was limited to a case where online measurements were unambiguously trackable due to a single extraction face being the point of origin for the material. This contribution presents an extension to the case, where characteristics from blended material, originating from two or three simultaneously operating extraction faces, are measured. The challenge tackled in this contribution is the updating of local coal quality estimates in different production benches based on measurements of a blended material stream. For a practical application of the updating concept, which is based on the Ensemble Kalman Filter, a simple method for generating prior ensemble members based on block geometries defined in the short-term model and the variogram, is discussed. This method allows for a fast, semi-automated and rather simple generation of prior models instead of generating a fully simulated deposit model using conditional simulation in geostatistics. It should foster operational implementation in an industrial environment. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the applicability of the developed framework with a simplified prior resource model. In addition to this any model improvements due to the integration of sensor data obtained by observing a blend of coal from multiple extraction faces is investigated.

Single face hallucination via local neighbor patches

Based on learning neighborhood patches a new single face hallucination method is proposed in this paper. In the proposed method, each input low-resolution (LR) position-patch and all patches in a local window centered at the same position of training images are used to hallucinate a high-resolution (HR) face patch, meanwhile two local similarity measurements between each input LR patch and all local LR and HR neighborhood patches of training images are computed to constrain the hallucination. Additionally, a residue image is estimated for the further improvement of the reconstructed result. Experimental results show that the proposed method can obtain superior or competitive results.

Robust watch-list screening using dynamic ensembles of SVMs based on multiple face representations

Still-to-video face recognition (FR) is an important function in video surveillance (VS), where faces captured over a network of video cameras are matched against reference stills of target individuals. Screening faces against a watch-list is a challenging VS application because the appearance of faces varies due to changing capture conditions and operational domains. The facial models used for matching may not be representative of faces captured with video cameras because they are typically designed a priori with only one reference still. In this paper, a multi-classifier framework is proposed for robust still-to-video FR based on multiple and diverse face representations of a single reference face still. During enrollment of a target individual, the single reference face still is modeled using an ensemble of SVM classifiers based on different patches and face descriptors. Multiple feature extraction techniques are applied to patches isolated in the reference still to generate a diverse SVM pool that provides robustness to common nuisance factors (e.g., variations in illumination and pose). The estimation of discriminant feature subsets, classifier parameters, decision thresholds, and ensemble fusion functions is achieved using the high-quality reference still and a large number of faces captured in lower-quality video of non-target individuals in the scene. During operations, the most competent subset of SVMs is dynamically selected according to capture conditions. Finally, a head-face tracker gradually regroups faces captured from different people appearing in a scene, while each individual-specific ensemble performs face matching. The accumulation of matching scores per face track leads to a robust spatiotemporal FR when accumulated ensemble scores surpass a detection threshold. Experimental results obtained with the Chokepoint and COX-S2V datasets show a significant improvement in performance w.r.t. reference systems, especially when individual-specific ensembles (1) are designed using exemplar-SVMs rather than one-class SVMs and (2) exploit score-level fusion of local SVMs (trained using features extracted from each patch), rather than using either decision-level or feature-level fusion with a global SVM (trained by concatenating features extracted from patches).

Illumination invariant single face image recognition under heterogeneous lighting condition

Illumination problem is still a bottleneck of robust face recognition system, which demands extracting illumination invariant features. In this field, existing works only consider the variations caused by lighting direction or magnitude (denoted as homogeneous lighting), but the effect of spectral wavelength is always ignored and thus existing illumination invariant descriptors have its limitation on processing face images under different spectral wavelengths (denoted as heterogeneous lighting). We propose a novel gradient based descriptor, namely Logarithm Gradient Histogram (LGH), which takes the illumination direction, magnitude and the spectral wavelength together into consideration, so that it can handle both homogeneous and heterogeneous lightings. Our proposal contributes in three-folds: (1) we incorporate LMSN-LoG filter to eliminate the lighting effect of each image and extract two illumination invariant components, namely logarithm gradient orientation (LGO) and logarithm gradient magnitude (LGM); (2) we propose an effective post-processing strategy to make our model tolerant to noise and generate a histogram representation to integrate both LGO and LGM; (3) we present solid theoretical analysis on the illumination invariant properties of our proposed descriptors. Extensive experimental results on CMU-PIE, Extended YaleB, FRGC and HFB databases are reported to verify the effectiveness of our proposed model.

The influence of advancing speed of powered mining stope with single face on earth’s surface displacing in Kuzbass

The researches in the area of undermined rock massifs estimate the influence of advancing speed of mining stopes on earth’s surface shift-ing ambiguously. It reflects the lack of maturity of this trend. The aim of this paper is to establish the relationship between subsidence of individual points on the surface profile line along strike and the speed of stope’s advancing, taking into account other influencing factors. Dependencies of displacement of certain points of the earth’s surface undermined during mining operations can be identified by frequency instrumental observations on the profile lines. Further analysis is made by mathematical methods, in-cluding the random number theory. In the formation of the dynamic downfold of displacement the relationship between advancing speed and subsiding of individual points in the “behind the face” half-downfold can-not be traced. In the “front face” half-downfold the increase of mining stope advancing speed reduces dynamic subsidence. In the paper empirical relationships between subsidence of individual points on the surface and the position of the working face were shown.