44,331 research outputs found
Perception of global facial geometry is modulated through experience
Identification of personally familiar faces is highly efficient across various viewing conditions. While the presence of robust facial representations stored in memory is considered to aid this process, the mechanisms underlying invariant identification remain unclear. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that facial representations stored in memory are associated with differential perceptual processing of the overall facial geometry. Subjects who were personally familiar or unfamiliar with the identities presented discriminated between stimuli whose overall facial geometry had been manipulated to maintain or alter the original facial configuration (see Barton, Zhao & Keenan, 2003). The results demonstrate that familiarity gives rise to more efficient processing of global facial geometry, and are interpreted in terms of increased holistic processing of facial information that is maintained across viewing distances
On the Equivalence of f-Divergence Balls and Density Bands in Robust Detection
The paper deals with minimax optimal statistical tests for two composite
hypotheses, where each hypothesis is defined by a non-parametric uncertainty
set of feasible distributions. It is shown that for every pair of uncertainty
sets of the f-divergence ball type, a pair of uncertainty sets of the density
band type can be constructed, which is equivalent in the sense that it admits
the same pair of least favorable distributions. This result implies that robust
tests under -divergence ball uncertainty, which are typically only minimax
optimal for the single sample case, are also fixed sample size minimax optimal
with respect to the equivalent density band uncertainty sets.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the
IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech, and Signal Processing
(ICASSP) 201
Detecting Baryon Acoustic Oscillations
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations are a feature imprinted in the galaxy
distribution by acoustic waves traveling in the plasma of the early universe.
Their detection at the expected scale in large-scale structures strongly
supports current cosmological models with a nearly linear evolution from
redshift approximately 1000, and the existence of dark energy. Besides, BAOs
provide a standard ruler for studying cosmic expansion. In this paper we focus
on methods for BAO detection using the correlation function measurement. For
each method, we want to understand the tested hypothesis (the hypothesis H0 to
be rejected) and the underlying assumptions. We first present wavelet methods
which are mildly model-dependent and mostly sensitive to the BAO feature. Then
we turn to fully model-dependent methods. We present the most often used method
based on the chi^2 statistic, but we find it has limitations. In general the
assumptions of the chi^2 method are not verified, and it only gives a rough
estimate of the significance. The estimate can become very wrong when
considering more realistic hypotheses, where the covariance matrix of the
measurement depends on cosmological parameters. Instead we propose to use a new
method based on two modifications: we modify the procedure for computing the
significance and make it rigorous, and we modify the statistic to obtain better
results in the case of varying covariance matrix. We verify with simulations
that correct significances are different from the ones obtained using the
classical chi^2 procedure. We also test a simple example of varying covariance
matrix. In this case we find that our modified statistic outperforms the
classical chi^2 statistic when both significances are correctly computed.
Finally we find that taking into account variations of the covariance matrix
can change both BAO detection levels and cosmological parameter constraints
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