High Spatial Resolution Imaging of NGC 1068 in the Mid Infrared

Mid-infrared observations of the central source of NGC 1068 have been obtained with a spatial resolution in the deconvolved image of 0.1" (~ 7pc). The central source is extended by ~1" in the north-south direction but appears unresolved in the east-west direction over most of its length. About two-thirds of its flux can be ascribed to a core structure which is itself elongated north-south and does not show a distinct unresolved compact source. The source is strongly asymmetric, extending significantly further to the north than to the south. The morphology of the mid-infrared emission appears similar to that of the radio jet, and has features which correlate with the images in [O III]. Its 12.5-24.5 micron color temperature ranges from 215 to 260 K and does not decrease smoothly with distance from the core. Silicate absorption is strongest in the core and to the south and is small in the north. The core, apparently containing two-thirds of the bolometric luminosity of the inner 4" diameter area, may be explained by a thick, dusty torus near the central AGN viewed at an angle of ~65 deg to its plane. There are, however, detailed difficulties with existing models, especially the narrow east-west width of the thin extended mid-infrared "tongue" to the north of the core. We interpret the tongue as re-processed visual and ultraviolet radiation that is strongly beamed and that originates in the AGN.Comment: 42 pages, 2 tables, 9 figures; Accepted for publication in A

Lipreading with Long Short-Term Memory

Lipreading, i.e. speech recognition from visual-only recordings of a speaker's face, can be achieved with a processing pipeline based solely on neural networks, yielding significantly better accuracy than conventional methods. Feed-forward and recurrent neural network layers (namely Long Short-Term Memory; LSTM) are stacked to form a single structure which is trained by back-propagating error gradients through all the layers. The performance of such a stacked network was experimentally evaluated and compared to a standard Support Vector Machine classifier using conventional computer vision features (Eigenlips and Histograms of Oriented Gradients). The evaluation was performed on data from 19 speakers of the publicly available GRID corpus. With 51 different words to classify, we report a best word accuracy on held-out evaluation speakers of 79.6% using the end-to-end neural network-based solution (11.6% improvement over the best feature-based solution evaluated).Comment: Accepted for publication at ICASSP 201

Tongue Image Analysis for Diabetes Mellitus Diagnosis Based on SOM Kohonen

Tongue diagnosis is an important diagnostic method for evaluating the condition of internal organ by looking at the image of tongue . However, due to its qualitative, subjective and experience-based nature, traditional tongue diagnosis has a very limited application in clinical medicine. Moreover, traditional tongue diagnosis is always concerned with the identification of syndromes rather than with the connection between tongue abnormal appearances and diseases. This is not well understood in Western medicine, thus greatly obstruct its wider use in the world. In this paper, we present a novel computerized tongue inspection method aiming to address these problems. First, two kinds of quantitative features, chromatic and textural measures, are extracted from tongue images by using popular digital image processing techniques. Then, SOM Kohonen are employed to model the relationship between these quantitative features and diseases. The effectiveness of the method is tested on 35 patients affected by Diabetes Mellitus as well as other 30 healthy volunteers, and the diagnostic results predicted by the previously trained SOM Kohonen classifiers are compared with the HOMA-B

A Chandra Observation of Abell 13: Investigating the Origin of the Radio Relic

We present results from the Chandra X-ray observation of Abell 13, a galaxy cluster that contains an unusual noncentral radio source, also known as a radio relic. This is the first pointed X-ray observation of Abell 13, providing a more sensitive study of the properties of the X-ray gas. The X-ray emission from Abell 13 is extended to the northwest of the X-ray peak and shows substructure indicative of a recent merger event. The cluster X-ray emission is centered on the bright galaxy H of Slee et al. 2001. We find no evidence for a cooling flow in the cluster. A knot of excess X-ray emission is coincident with the other bright elliptical galaxy F. This knot of emission has properties similar to the enhanced emission associated with the large galaxies in the Coma cluster. With these Chandra data we are able to compare the properties of the hot X-ray gas with those of the radio relic from VLA data, to study the interaction of the X-ray gas with the radio emitting electrons. Our results suggest that the radio relic is associated with cooler gas in the cluster. We suggest two explanations for the coincidence of the cooler gas and radio source. First, the gas may have been uplifted by the radio relic from the cluster core. Alternatively, the relic and cool gas may have been displaced from the central galaxy during the cluster merger event.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figures, Accepted for Publication in the Astrophysical Journal, higher-resolution figures can be found at http://www.astro.virginia.edu/~amj3r/Abell13

First Science Observations with SOFIA/FORCAST: 6 TO 37 micron Imaging of Orion BN/KL

The BN/KL region of the Orion Nebula is the nearest region of high mass star formation in our galaxy. As such, it has been the subject of intense investigation at a variety of wavelengths, which have revealed it to be brightest in the infrared to sub-mm wavelength regime. Using the newly commissioned SOFIA airborne telescope and its 5-40 micron camera FORCAST, images of the entire BN/KL complex have been acquired. The 31.5 and 37.1 micron images represent the highest resolution observations (<=4") ever obtained of this region at these wavelengths. These observations reveal that the BN object is not the dominant brightness source in the complex at wavelengths >31.5 microns, and that this distinction goes instead to the source IRc4. It was determined from these images and derived dust color temperature maps that IRc4 is also likely to be self-luminous. A new source of emission has also been identified at wavelengths >31.5 microns that coincides with the northeastern outflow lobe from the protostellar disk associated with radio source I.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ