The effect of transparency on recognition of overlapping objects

Are overlapping objects easier to recognize when the objects are transparent or opaque? It is important to know whether the transparency of X-ray images of luggage contributes to the difficulty in searching those images for targets. Transparency provides extra information about objects that would normally be occluded but creates potentially ambiguous depth relations at the region of overlap. Two experiments investigated the threshold durations at which adult participants could accurately name pairs of overlapping objects that were opaque or transparent. In Experiment 1, the transparent displays included monocular cues to relative depth. Recognition of the back object was possible at shorter durations for transparent displays than for opaque displays. In Experiment 2, the transparent displays had no monocular depth cues. There was no difference in the duration at which the back object was recognized across transparent and opaque displays. The results of the two experiments suggest that transparent displays, even though less familiar than opaque displays, do not make object recognition more difficult, and possibly show a benefit. These findings call into question the importance of edge junctions in object recognitio

Volumetric visualization of 3D data

In recent years, there has been a rapid growth in the ability to obtain detailed data on large complex structures in three dimensions. This development occurred first in the medical field, with CAT (computer aided tomography) scans and now magnetic resonance imaging, and in seismological exploration. With the advances in supercomputing and computational fluid dynamics, and in experimental techniques in fluid dynamics, there is now the ability to produce similar large data fields representing 3D structures and phenomena in these disciplines. These developments have produced a situation in which currently there is access to data which is too complex to be understood using the tools available for data reduction and presentation. Researchers in these areas are becoming limited by their ability to visualize and comprehend the 3D systems they are measuring and simulating

The Profiling Potential of Computer Vision and the Challenge of Computational Empiricism

Computer vision and other biometrics data science applications have commenced a new project of profiling people. Rather than using 'transaction generated information', these systems measure the 'real world' and produce an assessment of the 'world state' - in this case an assessment of some individual trait. Instead of using proxies or scores to evaluate people, they increasingly deploy a logic of revealing the truth about reality and the people within it. While these profiling knowledge claims are sometimes tentative, they increasingly suggest that only through computation can these excesses of reality be captured and understood. This article explores the bases of those claims in the systems of measurement, representation, and classification deployed in computer vision. It asks if there is something new in this type of knowledge claim, sketches an account of a new form of computational empiricism being operationalised, and questions what kind of human subject is being constructed by these technological systems and practices. Finally, the article explores legal mechanisms for contesting the emergence of computational empiricism as the dominant knowledge platform for understanding the world and the people within it

"State capture" versus "administrative corruption". A comparative study for the public health service in Romania

The papers tackles, from an evolutive and comparative perspective, the general issue of the state capture and administrative corruption phenomena, with specific reference to the South Eastern European states, as well as to the assessment of the perception upon these phenomena in the public health service in Romania. In this regard, the paper mainly uses the theoretical framework developed by the World Bank and turns to account empirical studies from the field literature or developed by the authors, regarding the assessment of the mentioned corruption phenomenon, in a South Eastern European and Romanian context. The analysis and research demarche refers to the compatibility of the anticorruption strategies in Romania with the general framework of these strategies promoted by the World Bank. Unlike other existent empirical studies, the ones used by the authors propose a new method of assessment, based on statistical instruments and processing, of the state capture and/or administrative capture level.state capture, administrative corruption, influence, lobbying, anti-corruption strategies.

Serial dependence in a simulated clinical visual search task.

In everyday life, we continuously search for and classify objects in the environment around us. This kind of visual search is extremely important when performed by radiologists in cancer image interpretation and officers in airport security screening. During these tasks, observers often examine large numbers of uncorrelated images (tumor x-rays, checkpoint x-rays, etc.) one after another. An underlying assumption of such tasks is that search and recognition are independent of our past experience. Here, we simulated a visual search task reminiscent of medical image search and found that shape classification performance was strongly impaired by recent visual experience, biasing classification errors 7% more towards the previous image content. This perceptual attraction exhibited the three main tuning characteristics of Continuity Fields: serial dependence extended over 12 seconds back in time (temporal tuning), it occurred only between similar tumor-like shapes (feature tuning), and only within a limited spatial region (spatial tuning). Taken together, these results demonstrate that serial dependence influences shape perception and occurs in visual search tasks. They also raise the possibility of a detrimental impact of serial dependence in clinical and practically relevant settings, such as medical image perception