13,967 research outputs found

    Facial Asymmetry Analysis Based on 3-D Dynamic Scans

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    Facial dysfunction is a fundamental symptom which often relates to many neurological illnesses, such as stroke, Bell’s palsy, Parkinson’s disease, etc. The current methods for detecting and assessing facial dysfunctions mainly rely on the trained practitioners which have significant limitations as they are often subjective. This paper presents a computer-based methodology of facial asymmetry analysis which aims for automatically detecting facial dysfunctions. The method is based on dynamic 3-D scans of human faces. The preliminary evaluation results testing on facial sequences from Hi4D-ADSIP database suggest that the proposed method is able to assist in the quantification and diagnosis of facial dysfunctions for neurological patients

    BUILDING SYNTHETIC INDICATORS FOR ASPECTS OF TERRITORIAL CAPITAL TOWARDS THEIR IMPACT ON REGIONAL PERFORMANCE

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    Empirical analyses highlight local structural features (territorial capital) as constraints on regional growth and interregional convergence processes, but scant attention is devoted to traditional localised resources and specifically the natural and cultural heritage. However, only the application of know-how embodied in human capital to resources provides value. Specifically, heritage becomes economically relevant through human capital acting via tourist, recreational and cultural activities. Although, because of its service exporting nature, tourism contributes to economic growth and job creation similarly to manufacturing, the literature concerned manufacturing and rarely studied tourism or extended results to it. Besides, in Europe tourism is the market activity most favouring policentricity, territorial cohesion and equity. On the other hand, heritage valorisation responding to tourist service demand has adverse effects on development (congestion) and environmental quality / resource consumption (heritage dissipation); these partly offset strictly economic benefits and over time weaken the destination’s pull, hence its value and its population’s welfare. Our goal is to analyse the role of territorial capital, and specifically of intangibles such as natural and cultural capital, in regional growth processes and in local response processes to exogenous crises, by building a national database of territorial capital in Italian provinces, containing synthetic endowment indicators for natural and cultural heritage, human capital, and structure and distribution of tourism and leisure industries. Our methodology includes the application of multivariate analyses, with state-of-the-art techniques. We use available European and national databases, augmented by ad hoc integrations if and when needed. The study area is Italy; the optimal tier is NUTS3, i.e. provinces, in Italy. The time reference is 1990-2010, to ensure a structural long-term approach. The paper is organised in the following way: - an initial section outlines the original data on 103 provinces, providing 33 proxy indicators of which major univariate statistics and correlations are explored; - a first main section reduces indicators into 5 synthetic indicators, by means of factor analysis; - a second main section reduces provinces into 11 ideal types, by means of cluster analysis; - a final section compares and interprets results, also with reference to 2007-2009 economic dynamics.

    The attractiveness of central eastern European countries for venture capital and private equity investors

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    We address the attractiveness of Central Eastern European countries for VC/PE investors by the construction of a composite index. For the index composition we refer to the results of numerous prior research papers that investigate relevant parameters determining entrepreneurial activity and/or the engagements of institutional investors. We aggregate the index via five different methods and receive country rankings that vary only slightly, signaling a robust index calculation. We clearly identify six tier groups of attractiveness for all of our sample countries. We compare our index with the actual fundraising activities in the particular countries and reveal a reasonable correlation of both figures. The results highlight the strengths and weaknesses of the particular economies and provide guidelines for political improvements and institutional investors' country allocations.Venture capital; Private equity; Central Eastern Europe; Economic transition;

    Subjectivity and complexity of facial attractiveness

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    The origin and meaning of facial beauty represent a longstanding puzzle. Despite the profuse literature devoted to facial attractiveness, its very nature, its determinants and the nature of inter-person differences remain controversial issues. Here we tackle such questions proposing a novel experimental approach in which human subjects, instead of rating natural faces, are allowed to efficiently explore the face-space and 'sculpt' their favorite variation of a reference facial image. The results reveal that different subjects prefer distinguishable regions of the face-space, highlighting the essential subjectivity of the phenomenon.The different sculpted facial vectors exhibit strong correlations among pairs of facial distances, characterising the underlying universality and complexity of the cognitive processes, and the relative relevance and robustness of the different facial distances.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures. Supplementary information: 26 pages, 13 figure

    Personalized video summarization by highest quality frames

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    In this work, a user-centered approach has been the basis for generation of the personalized video summaries. Primarily, the video experts score and annotate the video frames during the enrichment phase. Afterwards, the frames scores for different video segments will be updated based on the captured end-users (different with video experts) priorities towards existing video scenes. Eventually, based on the pre-defined skimming time, the highest scored video frames will be extracted to be included into the personalized video summaries. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of our proposed model, we have compared the video summaries generated by our system against the results from 4 other summarization tools using different modalities
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