Kinematic frames and "active longitudes": does the Sun have a face?

It has recently been claimed that analysis of Greenwich sunspot data over 120 years reveals that sunspot activity clusters around two longitudes separated by 180 degrees (``active longitudes'') with clearly defined differential rotation during activity cycles.In the present work we extend this critical examination of methodology to the actual Greenwich sunspot data and also consider newly proposed methods of analysis claiming to confirm the original identification of active longitudes. Our analysis revealed that values obtained for the parameters of differential rotation are not stable across different methods of analysis proposed to track persistent active longitudes. Also, despite a very thorough search in parameter space, we were unable to reproduce results claiming to reveal the century-persistent active longitudes. We can therefore say that strong and well substantiated evidence for an essential and century-scale persistent nonaxisymmetry in the sunspot distribution does not exist.Comment: 14 pages, 1 table, 21 figures, accepted in A&

Note: An object detection method for active camera

To solve the problems caused by a changing background during object detection in active camera, this paper proposes a new method based on SURF (speeded up robust features) and data clustering. The SURF feature points of each image are extracted, and each cluster center is calculated by processing the data clustering of k adjacent frames. Templates for each class are obtained by calculating the histograms within the regions around the center points of the clustering classes. The window of the moving object can be located by finding the region that satisfies the histogram matching result between adjacent frames. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the effectiveness of object detection.Yong Chen, Ronghua Zhang, Lei Shang, and Eric H

Long-Term Image Boundary Prediction

Boundary estimation in images and videos has been a very active topic of research, and organizing visual information into boundaries and segments is believed to be a corner stone of visual perception. While prior work has focused on estimating boundaries for observed frames, our work aims at predicting boundaries of future unobserved frames. This requires our model to learn about the fate of boundaries and corresponding motion patterns -- including a notion of "intuitive physics". We experiment on natural video sequences along with synthetic sequences with deterministic physics-based and agent-based motions. While not being our primary goal, we also show that fusion of RGB and boundary prediction leads to improved RGB predictions.Comment: Accepted in the AAAI Conference for Artificial Intelligence, 201

Construction of equiangular signatures for synchronous CDMA systems

Welch bound equality (WBE) signature sequences maximize the uplink sum capacity in direct-spread synchronous code division multiple access (CDMA) systems. WBE sequences have a nice interference invariance property that typically holds only when the system is fully loaded, and, to maintain this property, the signature set must be redesigned and reassigned as the number of active users changes. An additional equiangular constraint on the signature set, however, maintains interference invariance. Finding such signatures requires equiangular side constraints to be imposed on an inverse eigenvalue problem. The paper presents an alternating projection algorithm that can design WBE sequences that satisfy equiangular side constraints. The proposed algorithm can be used to find Grassmannian frames as well as equiangular tight frames. Though one projection is onto a closed, but non-convex, set, it is shown that this algorithm converges to a fixed point, and these fixed points are partially characterized

Spatio-Temporal Image Boundary Extrapolation

Boundary prediction in images as well as video has been a very active topic of research and organizing visual information into boundaries and segments is believed to be a corner stone of visual perception. While prior work has focused on predicting boundaries for observed frames, our work aims at predicting boundaries of future unobserved frames. This requires our model to learn about the fate of boundaries and extrapolate motion patterns. We experiment on established real-world video segmentation dataset, which provides a testbed for this new task. We show for the first time spatio-temporal boundary extrapolation in this challenging scenario. Furthermore, we show long-term prediction of boundaries in situations where the motion is governed by the laws of physics. We successfully predict boundaries in a billiard scenario without any assumptions of a strong parametric model or any object notion. We argue that our model has with minimalistic model assumptions derived a notion of 'intuitive physics' that can be applied to novel scenes