Automatic 3D facial expression recognition using geometric and textured feature fusion

3D facial expression recognition has gained more and more interests from affective computing society due to issues such as pose variations and illumination changes caused by 2D imaging having been eliminated. There are many applications that can benefit from this research, such as medical applications involving the detection of pain and psychological effects in patients, in human-computer interaction tasks that intelligent systems use in today's world. In this paper, we look into 3D Facial Expression Recognition, by investigating many feature extraction methods used on the 2D textured images and 3D geometric data, fusing the 2 domains to increase the overall performance. A One Vs All Multi-class SVM Classifier has been adopted to recognize the expressions Angry, Disgust, Fear, Happy, Neutral, Sad and Surprise from the BU-3DFE and Bosphorus databases. The proposed approach displays an increase in performance when the features are fused together

A smart tool for the diagnosis of Parkinsonian syndrome using wireless watches

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.Early detection and diagnosis of Parkinson disease will provide a good chance for patients to take early actions and prevent its further development. In this paper, a smart tool for the diagnosis of Parkinsonian syndromes is designed and developed using low-cost Texas Instruments eZ430-Chronos wireless watches. With this smart tool, Parkinson Bradykinesia is detected based on the cycle of a human gait, with the watch worn on the foot, and Parkinson Tremor shaking is detected and differed by frequency 0 to 8 Hz on the arm in real-time with a developed statistical diagnosis chart. It can be used in small clinics as well as home environment due to its low-cost and easy-use property

Automatic affective dimension recognition from naturalistic facial expressions based on wavelet filtering and PLS regression

Automatic affective dimension recognition from facial expression continuously in naturalistic contexts is a very challenging research topic but very important in human-computer interaction. In this paper, an automatic recognition system was proposed to predict the affective dimensions such as Arousal, Valence and Dominance continuously in naturalistic facial expression videos. Firstly, visual and vocal features are extracted from image frames and audio segments in facial expression videos. Secondly, a wavelet transform based digital filtering method is applied to remove the irrelevant noise information in the feature space. Thirdly, Partial Least Squares regression is used to predict the affective dimensions from both video and audio modalities. Finally, two modalities are combined to boost overall performance in the decision fusion process. The proposed method is tested in the fourth international Audio/Visual Emotion Recognition Challenge (AVEC2014) dataset and compared to other state-of-the-art methods in the affect recognition sub-challenge with a good performance

Matter loops corrected modified gravity in Palatini formulation

Recently, corrections to the standard Einstein-Hilbert action are proposed to explain the current cosmic acceleration in stead of introducing dark energy. In the Palatini formulation of those modified gravity models, there is an important observation due to Arkani-Hamed: matter loops will give rise to a correction to the modified gravity action proportional to the Ricci scalar of the metric. In the presence of such term, we show that the current forms of modified gravity models in Palatini formulation, specifically, the 1/R gravity and $\ln R$ gravity, will have phantoms. Then we study the possible instabilities due to the presence of phantom fields. We show that the strong instability in the metric formulation of 1/R gravity indicated by Dolgov and Kawasaki will not appear and the decay timescales for the phantom fields may be long enough for the theories to make sense as effective field theory . On the other hand, if we change the sign of the modification terms to eliminate the phantoms, some other inconsistencies will arise for the various versions of the modified gravity models. Finally, we comment on the universal property of the Palatini formulation of the matter loops corrected modified gravity models and its implications.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figures, References adde

The first 40 million years of circumstellar disk evolution: the signature of terrestrial planet formation

We characterize the first 40 Myr of evolution of circumstellar disks through a unified study of the infrared properties of members of young clusters and associations with ages from 2 Myr up to ~ 40 Myr: NGC 1333, NGC 1960, NGC 2232, NGC 2244, NGC 2362, NGC 2547, IC 348, IC 2395, IC 4665, Chamaeleon I, Orion OB1a and OB1b, Taurus, the \b{eta} Pictoris Moving Group, \r{ho} Ophiuchi, and the associations of Argus, Carina, Columba, Scorpius-Centaurus, and Tucana-Horologium. Our work features: 1.) a filtering technique to flag noisy backgrounds, 2.) a method based on the probability distribution of deflections, P(D), to obtain statistically valid photometry for faint sources, and 3.) use of the evolutionary trend of transitional disks to constrain the overall behavior of bright disks. We find that the fraction of disks three or more times brighter than the stellar photospheres at 24 {\mu}m decays relatively slowly initially and then much more rapidly by ~ 10 Myr. However, there is a continuing component until ~ 35 Myr, probably due primarily to massive clouds of debris generated in giant impacts during the oligarchic/chaotic growth phases of terrestrial planets. If the contribution from primordial disks is excluded, the evolution of the incidence of these oligarchic/chaotic debris disks can be described empirically by a log-normal function with the peak at 12 - 20 Myr, including ~ 13 % of the original population, and with a post-peak mean duration of 10 - 20 Myr.Comment: accepted for publication, the Astrophysical Journal (2017

Thin Solid Electrolyte Layers Enabled by Nanoscopic Polymer Binding

To achieve high-energy all-solid-state batteries (ASSBs), solid-state electrolytes (SE) must be thin, mechanically robust, and possess the ability to form low resistance interfaces with electrode materials. Embedding an inorganic SE into an organic polymer combines the merits of high conductivity and flexibility. However, the performance of such an SE-in-polymer matrix (SEPM) is highly dependent on the microstructure and interactions between the organic and inorganic components. We report on the synthesis of a free-standing, ultrathin (60 μm) SEPM from a solution of lithium polysulfide, phosphorus sulfide, and ethylene sulfide (ES), where the polysulfide triggers the in situ polymerization of ES and the formation of Li3PS4. Reactant ratios were optimized to achieve a room-temperature conductivity of 2 × 10-5 S cm-1. Cryogenic electron microscopy confirmed a uniform nanoscopic distribution of β-Li3PS4 and PES (polyethylene sulfide). This work presents a facile route to the scalable fabrication of ASSBs with promising cycling performance and low electrolyte loading

A genome-wide association study suggests an association of Chr8p21.3 (GFRA2) with diabetic neuropathic pain

BACKGROUND: Neuropathic pain, caused by a lesion or a disease affecting the somatosensory system, is one of the most common complications in diabetic patients. The purpose of this study is to identify genetic factors contributing to this type of pain in a general diabetic population. METHOD: We accessed the Genetics of Diabetes Audit and Research Tayside (GoDARTS) datasets that contain prescription information and monofilament test results for 9439 diabetic patients, among which 6927 diabetic individuals were genotyped by Affymetrix SNP6.0 or Illumina OmniExpress chips. Cases of neuropathic pain were defined as diabetic patients with a prescription history of at least one of five drugs specifically indicated for the treatment of neuropathic pain and in whom monofilament test result was positive for sensory neuropathy in at least one foot. Controls were individuals who did not have a record of receiving any opioid analgesics. Imputation of non‐genotyped SNPs was performed by IMPUTE2, with reference files from 1000 Genomes Phase I datasets. RESULTS: After data cleaning and relevant exclusions, imputed genotypes of 572 diabetic neuropathic pain cases and 2491 diabetic controls were used in the Fisher's exact test. We identified a cluster in the Chr8p21.3, next to GFRA2 with a lowest p‐value of 1.77 × 10(−7) at rs17428041. The narrow‐sense heritability of this phenotype was 11.00%. CONCLUSION: This genome‐wide association study on diabetic neuropathic pain suggests new evidence for the involvement of variants near GFRA2 with the disorder, which needs to be verified in an independent cohort and at the molecular level

Covariant density functional theory for antimagnetic rotation

Following the previous letter on the first microscopic description of the antimagnetic rotation (AMR) in 105Cd, a systematic investigation and detailed analysis for the AMR band in the frame-work of tilted axis cranking (TAC) model based on covariant density functional theory are carried out. After performing the microscopic and self-consistentTAC calculations with an given density functional, the configuration for the observed AMR band in 105Cd is obtained from the single-particle Routhians. With the configuration thus obtained, the tilt angle for a given rotational frequency is determined self-consistently by minimizing the total Routhian with respect to the tilt angle. In such a way, the energy spectrum, total angular momenta, kinetic and dynamic moments of inertia, and the B(E2) values for the AMR band in 105Cd are calculated. Good agreement with the data is found. By investigating microscopically the contributions from neutrons and protons to the total angular momentum, the "two-shears-like" mechanism in the AMR band is clearly illus-trated. Finally, the currents leading to time-odd mean fields in the Dirac equation are presented and discussed in detail. It is found that they are essentially determined by the valence particles and/or holes. Their spatial distribution and size depend onthe specific single-particle orbitals and the rotational frequency.Comment: 35 pages, 17 figures, accepted by Phys. Rev.

Pioglitazone versus Rosiglitazone: Effects on Lipids, Lipoproteins, and Apolipoproteins in Head-to-Head Randomized Clinical Studies

Peroxisome proliferator-activated receptors (PPARs) play an important role in regulating both glucose and lipid metabolism. Agonists for both PPARγ and PPARγ have been used to treat dyslipidemia and hyperglycemia, respectively. In addition to affecting glucose metabolism, PPARγ agonists also regulate lipid metabolism. In this review, we will focus on the randomized clinical trials that directly compared the lipid effects of the thiazolidinedione class of PPARγ agonists, pioglitazone and rosiglitazone, head-to-head either as monotherapy or in combination with other lipid-altering or glucose-lowering agent

A systematic study of Zr and Sn isotopes in the Relativistic Mean Field theory

The ground-state properties of Zr and Sn isotopes are studied within the relativistic mean field theory. Zr and Sn isotopes have received tremendous attention due to various reasons, including the predicted giant halos in the neutron-rich Zr isotopes, the unique feature of being robustly spherical in the region of $^{100}$Sn $\sim$ $^{132}$Sn and the particular interest of Sn isotopes to nuclear astrophysics. Furthermore, four (semi-) magic neutron numbers, 40, 50, 82 and 126, make these two isotopic chains particularly important to test the pairing correlations and the deformations in a microscopic model. In the present work, we carry out a systematic study of Zr and Sn isotopes from the proton drip line to the neutron drip line with deformation effects, pairing correlations and blocking effects for nuclei with odd number of neutrons properly treated. A constrained calculation with quadrupole deformations is performed to find the absolute minimum for each nucleus on the deformation surface. All ground-state properties, including the separation energies, the odd-even staggerings, the nuclear radii, the deformations and the single-particle spectra are analyzed and discussed in detail.Comment: the final version to appear in Modern Physics Letters A. more figures, discussions, and references added. the data remain unchange