23,696 research outputs found
Variational Uncalibrated Photometric Stereo under General Lighting
Photometric stereo (PS) techniques nowadays remain constrained to an ideal
laboratory setup where modeling and calibration of lighting is amenable. To
eliminate such restrictions, we propose an efficient principled variational
approach to uncalibrated PS under general illumination. To this end, the
Lambertian reflectance model is approximated through a spherical harmonic
expansion, which preserves the spatial invariance of the lighting. The joint
recovery of shape, reflectance and illumination is then formulated as a single
variational problem. There the shape estimation is carried out directly in
terms of the underlying perspective depth map, thus implicitly ensuring
integrability and bypassing the need for a subsequent normal integration. To
tackle the resulting nonconvex problem numerically, we undertake a two-phase
procedure to initialize a balloon-like perspective depth map, followed by a
"lagged" block coordinate descent scheme. The experiments validate efficiency
and robustness of this approach. Across a variety of evaluations, we are able
to reduce the mean angular error consistently by a factor of 2-3 compared to
the state-of-the-art.Comment: Haefner and Ye contributed equall
Genetic Risk for Alzheimer\u27s Disease Alters the Five-Year Trajectory of Semantic Memory Activation in Cognitively Intact Elders
Healthy aging is associated with cognitive declines typically accompanied by increased task-related brain activity in comparison to younger counterparts. The Scaffolding Theory of Aging and Cognition (STAC) (Park and Reuter-Lorenz, 2009; Reuter-Lorenz and Park, 2014) posits that compensatory brain processes are responsible for maintaining normal cognitive performance in older adults, despite accumulation of aging-related neural damage. Cross-sectional studies indicate that cognitively intact elders at genetic risk for Alzheimer\u27s disease (AD) demonstrate patterns of increased brain activity compared to low risk elders, suggesting that compensation represents an early response to AD-associated pathology. Whether this compensatory response persists or declines with the onset of cognitive impairment can only be addressed using a longitudinal design. The current prospective, 5-year longitudinal study examined brain activation in APOE ε4 carriers (N = 24) and non-carriers (N = 21). All participants, ages 65–85 and cognitively intact at study entry, underwent task-activated fMRI, structural MRI, and neuropsychological assessments at baseline, 18, and 57 months. fMRI activation was measured in response to a semantic memory task requiring participants to discriminate famous from non-famous names. Results indicated that the trajectory of change in brain activation while performing this semantic memory task differed between APOE ε4 carriers and non-carriers. The APOE ε4 group exhibited greater activation than the Low Risk group at baseline, but they subsequently showed a progressive decline in activation during the follow-up periods with corresponding emergence of episodic memory loss and hippocampal atrophy. In contrast, the non-carriers demonstrated a gradual increase in activation over the 5-year period. Our results are consistent with the STAC model by demonstrating that compensation varies with the severity of underlying neural damage and can be exhausted with the onset of cognitive symptoms and increased structural brain pathology. Our fMRI results could not be attributed to changes in task performance, group differences in cerebral perfusion, or regional cortical atrophy
Fragments of a larger whole: Retrieval cues constrain observed neural correlates of memory encoding
Laying down a new memory involves activity in a number of brain regions. Here, it is shown that the particular regions associated with successful encoding depend on the way in which memory is probed. Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging signals were acquired while subjects performed an incidental encoding task on a series of visually presented words denoting objects. A recognition memory test using the Remember/Know procedure to separate responses based on recollection and familiarity followed 1 day later. Critically, half of the studied objects were cued with a corresponding spoken word, and half with a corresponding picture. Regardless of cue, activity in prefrontal and hippocampal regions predicted subsequent recollection of a word. Type of retrieval cue modulated activity in prefrontal, temporal, and parietal cortices. Words subsequently recognized on the basis of a sense of familiarity were at study also associated with differential activity in a number of brain regions, some of which were probe dependent. Thus, observed neural correlates of successful encoding are constrained by type of retrieval cue, and are only fragments of all encoding-related neural activity. Regions exhibiting cue-specific effects may be sites that support memory through the degree of overlap between the processes engaged during encoding and those engaged during retrieval
HARPO: a TPC as a gamma-ray telescope and polarimeter
A gas Time Projection Chamber can be used for gamma-ray astronomy with
excellent angular-precision and sensitivity to faint sources, and for
polarimetry, through the measurement of photon conversion to pairs. We
present the expected performance in simulations and the recent development of a
demonstrator for tests in a polarized photon beam.Comment: SPIE Astronomical Telescopes + Instrumentation, Ultraviolet to gamma
ray, Montr\'eal, Canada 2014. v2: note added in proof. Copyright 2014 SPIE.
One print or electronic copy may be made for personal use only. Systematic
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Trifocal Relative Pose from Lines at Points and its Efficient Solution
We present a new minimal problem for relative pose estimation mixing point
features with lines incident at points observed in three views and its
efficient homotopy continuation solver. We demonstrate the generality of the
approach by analyzing and solving an additional problem with mixed point and
line correspondences in three views. The minimal problems include
correspondences of (i) three points and one line and (ii) three points and two
lines through two of the points which is reported and analyzed here for the
first time. These are difficult to solve, as they have 216 and - as shown here
- 312 solutions, but cover important practical situations when line and point
features appear together, e.g., in urban scenes or when observing curves. We
demonstrate that even such difficult problems can be solved robustly using a
suitable homotopy continuation technique and we provide an implementation
optimized for minimal problems that can be integrated into engineering
applications. Our simulated and real experiments demonstrate our solvers in the
camera geometry computation task in structure from motion. We show that new
solvers allow for reconstructing challenging scenes where the standard two-view
initialization of structure from motion fails.Comment: This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No. DMS-1439786 while most authors were in residence
at Brown University's Institute for Computational and Experimental Research
in Mathematics -- ICERM, in Providence, R
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