A stochastic evaluation of the contour strength

International audienceIf one considers only local neighborhoods for segmenting an image, one gets contours whose strength is often poorly estimated. A method for reevaluating the contour strength by taking into account non local features is presented: one generates a fixed number of random germs which serve as markers for the watershed segmentation. For each new population of markers, another set of contours is generated. "Important" contours are selected more often. The present paper shows that the probability that a contour is selected can be estimated without performing the effective simulations. Copyright Springer-Verlag 2010. The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com/content/y057x103475301r2

Automatic Selection of Stochastic Watershed Hierarchies

International audienceThe segmentation, seen as the association of a partition with an image, is a difficult task. It can be decomposed in two steps: at first, a family of contours associated with a series of nested partitions (or hierarchy) is created and organized, then pertinent contours are extracted. A coarser partition is obtained by merging adjacent regions of a finer partition. The strength of a contour is then measured by the level of the hierarchy for which its two adjacent regions merge. We present an automatic segmentation strategy using a wide range of stochastic watershed hierarchies. For a given set of homogeneous images, our approach selects automatically the best hierarchy and cut level to perform image simplification given an evaluation score. Experimental results illustrate the advantages of our approach on several real-life images datasets

Evaluation of Self-Intersecting Wilson Loop in the Stochastic Vacuum Model

A Wilson loop is evaluated within the stochastic vacuum model for the case when the respective contour is self-intersecting and its size does not exceed the correlation length of the vacuum. The result has the form of a certain functional of the tensor area. It is similar to that for the non-self-intersecting loop only when the contour is a plane one. Even for such a contour, the obtained expression depends on the ratio of two functions parametrizing the bilocal field strength correlator taken at the origin, which is not so for the case of non-self-intersecting contour.Comment: 7 pages, LaTeX2e, no figures, minor stylistic corrections of the tex

Analytical probabilistic approach to the ground state of lattice quantum systems: exact results in terms of a cumulant expansion

We present a large deviation analysis of a recently proposed probabilistic approach to the study of the ground-state properties of lattice quantum systems. The ground-state energy, as well as the correlation functions in the ground state, are exactly determined as a series expansion in the cumulants of the multiplicities of the potential and hopping energies assumed by the system during its long-time evolution. Once these cumulants are known, even at a finite order, our approach provides the ground state analytically as a function of the Hamiltonian parameters. A scenario of possible applications of this analyticity property is discussed.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figure

DNA-Protein Binding Rates: Bending Fluctuation and Hydrodynamic Coupling Effects

We investigate diffusion-limited reactions between a diffusing particle and a target site on a semiflexible polymer, a key factor determining the kinetics of DNA-protein binding and polymerization of cytoskeletal filaments. Our theory focuses on two competing effects: polymer shape fluctuations, which speed up association, and the hydrodynamic coupling between the diffusing particle and the chain, which slows down association. Polymer bending fluctuations are described using a mean field dynamical theory, while the hydrodynamic coupling between polymer and particle is incorporated through a simple heuristic approximation. Both of these we validate through comparison with Brownian dynamics simulations. Neither of the effects has been fully considered before in the biophysical context, and we show they are necessary to form accurate estimates of reaction processes. The association rate depends on the stiffness of the polymer and the particle size, exhibiting a maximum for intermediate persistence length and a minimum for intermediate particle radius. In the parameter range relevant to DNA-protein binding, the rate increase is up to 100% compared to the Smoluchowski result for simple center-of-mass motion. The quantitative predictions made by the theory can be tested experimentally.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figures, 1 tabl

An Iterative Procedure for the Estimation of Drift and Diffusion Coefficients of Langevin Processes

A general method is proposed which allows one to estimate drift and diffusion coefficients of a stochastic process governed by a Langevin equation. It extends a previously devised approach [R. Friedrich et al., Physics Letters A 271, 217 (2000)], which requires sufficiently high sampling rates. The analysis is based on an iterative procedure minimizing the Kullback-Leibler distance between measured and estimated two time joint probability distributions of the process.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure

Exact c-number Representation of Non-Markovian Quantum Dissipation

The reduced dynamics of a quantum system interacting with a linear heat bath finds an exact representation in terms of a stochastic Schr{\"o}dinger equation. All memory effects of the reservoir are transformed into noise correlations and mean-field friction. The classical limit of the resulting stochastic dynamics is shown to be a generalized Langevin equation, and conventional quantum state diffusion is recovered in the Born--Markov approximation. The non-Markovian exact dynamics, valid at arbitrary temperature and damping strength, is exemplified by an application to the dissipative two-state system.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures. To be published in Phys. Rev. Let

Testing Nonperturbative Ansaetze for the QCD Field Strength Correlator

A test for the Gaussian and exponential Ansaetze for the nonperturbative parts of the coefficient functions, D^{nonpert.} and D_1^{nonpert.}, which parametrize the gauge-invariant bilocal correlator of the field strength tensors in the stochastic vacuum model of QCD, is proposed. It is based on the evaluation of the heavy-quark condensate within this model by making use of the world-line formalism and equating the obtained result to the one following directly from the QCD Lagrangian. This yields a certain relation between D^{nonpert.}(0) and D_1^{nonpert.}(0), which is further compared with an analogous relation between these quantities known from the existing lattice data. Such a comparison leads to the conclusion that at the distances smaller than the correlation length of the vacuum, Gaussian Ansatz is more suitable than the exponential one.Comment: 10 pages, LaTeX2e, 1 table, no figure