Facial expression recognition in dynamic sequences: An integrated approach

Automatic facial expression analysis aims to analyse human facial expressions and classify them into discrete categories. Methods based on existing work are reliant on extracting information from video sequences and employ either some form of subjective thresholding of dynamic information or attempt to identify the particular individual frames in which the expected behaviour occurs. These methods are inefficient as they require either additional subjective information, tedious manual work or fail to take advantage of the information contained in the dynamic signature from facial movements for the task of expression recognition. In this paper, a novel framework is proposed for automatic facial expression analysis which extracts salient information from video sequences but does not rely on any subjective preprocessing or additional user-supplied information to select frames with peak expressions. The experimental framework demonstrates that the proposed method outperforms static expression recognition systems in terms of recognition rate. The approach does not rely on action units (AUs) and therefore, eliminates errors which are otherwise propagated to the final result due to incorrect initial identification of AUs. The proposed framework explores a parametric space of over 300 dimensions and is tested with six state-of-the-art machine learning techniques. Such robust and extensive experimentation provides an important foundation for the assessment of the performance for future work. A further contribution of the paper is offered in the form of a user study. This was conducted in order to investigate the correlation between human cognitive systems and the proposed framework for the understanding of human emotion classification and the reliability of public databases

Food access in remote rural places: consumer accounts of food shopping

<p>Food access in remote rural places: consumer accounts of food shopping. <i>Regional Studies</i>. In remote rural and island communities access to food involves adaption of living style and travel outside the local area as a normal and integral part of food shopping. Despite the poor retail assortment, consumers have a strong allegiance to local food stores centred on a desire to maintain a local retail presence and to support the community. Deeper understanding of consumer access to food and adaptations to constrained access have implications for food policy for these remote areas and public policy on remote regions more generally. Results are reported for remote island communities in Scotland.</p

Owen_et_al_mtDNA_nDNA

Nexus file that includes mtDNA and nDNA alignment with a partition block at the bottom of the file

Owen_et_al_nDNAonly

Nexus file that contains only the nDNA alignment. The file contains a partition block at the bottom of the file

Origin of miRNA precursors.

<p>The majority of miRNA precursors are transcribed from intergenic regions. miRNA precursors originating from coding regions locates mainly in introns.</p

Distribution of conserved miRNA family members in potato.

<p>Graphical representation of the different members of conserved miRNA families found in potato by sequencing and bioinformatics prediction.</p

Flowchart for the prediction of miRNAs and their target RNAs in potato.

<p>Flowchart for the prediction of miRNAs and their target RNAs in potato.</p

Reads length analysis of the predicted unique miRNA and star (miRNA*) sequences.

<p>Graph shows that most miRNAs and star sequences have 24 and 21 nt length. Star sequences show different distribution compared to miRNAs; there are less star sequences with 17, 20, 21 and 24 nt length but more in other length categories.</p

Size distribution of small RNA sequences.

<p>(A) Reads and unique sequence distribution in all the small RNA libraries. 24 and 21nt length reads are the most abundant reads among the small RNAs. (B) Size distribution of reads originating from leaf (dark grey) and stolon (light grey) tissues expressed as a percentage of total reads. 24 and 21nt length reads are dominant in both of the tissues; in stolon tissues there are more reads for 21, 23 and 24nt length.</p

Summary of reads and unique sequences in small RNA libraries.

<p>Summary of reads and unique sequences in small RNA libraries.</p