Covariate conscious approach for Gait recognition based upon Zernike moment invariants

Gait recognition i.e. identification of an individual from his/her walking pattern is an emerging field. While existing gait recognition techniques perform satisfactorily in normal walking conditions, there performance tend to suffer drastically with variations in clothing and carrying conditions. In this work, we propose a novel covariate cognizant framework to deal with the presence of such covariates. We describe gait motion by forming a single 2D spatio-temporal template from video sequence, called Average Energy Silhouette image (AESI). Zernike moment invariants (ZMIs) are then computed to screen the parts of AESI infected with covariates. Following this, features are extracted from Spatial Distribution of Oriented Gradients (SDOGs) and novel Mean of Directional Pixels (MDPs) methods. The obtained features are fused together to form the final well-endowed feature set. Experimental evaluation of the proposed framework on three publicly available datasets i.e. CASIA dataset B, OU-ISIR Treadmill dataset B and USF Human-ID challenge dataset with recently published gait recognition approaches, prove its superior performance.Comment: 11 page

Scaling of particle production with number of participants in high-energy A+A collisions in the parton-cascade model

In view of the recent WA98 data of pi0 spectra from central Pb+Pb collisions at the CERN SPS, we analyze the production of neutral pions for A+$collisions across the periodic table at sqrt(s)=17 AGeV and 200 AGeV within the framework of the parton-cascade model for relativistic heavy ion collisions. The multiplicity of the pions (having pT > 0.5 GeV/c) in the central rapidity region, is seen to scale as \sim (N_part)^alpha, where N_part$ is the number of participating nucleons, which we have approximated as 2A for central collisions of identical nuclei. We argue that the deviation of \alpha (\simeq 1.2) from unity may have its origin in the multiple scattering suffered by the partons. We also find that the constant of proportionality in the above scaling relation increases substantially in going from SPS to RHIC energies. This would imply that the (semi)hard partonic activity becomes a much cleaner signal above the soft particle production at the higher energy of RHIC, and thus much less dependent on the (lack of) understanding of the underlying soft physics background.Comment: 4 pages including 2 postscript figure

The use of steroids and thalidomide in the management of Erythema Nodosumn Leprosum; 17 years at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases, London

Objectives: Prednisolone and thalidomide are commonly used in the management of erythema nodosum leprosum (ENL) and bring relief to patients with this condition worldwide. However, both ENL and its treatments can cause significant morbidity. This study describes the spectrum of ENL seen at The Hospital for Tropical Diseases, London (HTD), the use of steroids and thalidomide in its management and the complications of their use. Study Design: We conducted a retrospective audit of patients diagnosed with ENL between 1996 and 2013. Data were obtained from hospital records including severity and length of disease, together with treatments received and adverse effects. Results: Between 1996 and 2013, 30 patients were diagnosed with ENL. The median bacillary index (BI) at diagnosis was 4·65, higher than in previous studies. Most patients developed ENL during leprosy treatment (67%) and had chronic ENL (57%). The median length of ENL was 60 months (range 9 – 192); patients with BI . 4·5 had significantly longer duration of disease. 87% patients received prednisolone for median nine months; 35% developed adverse effects including diabetes and hypertension. 87% patients received thalidomide for median 16 months; 65% complained of side effects. There were no pregnancies or venous thromboembolisms. 77% patients stopped prednisolone within two months of starting thalidomide. There were no deaths in our cohort. Conclusion: We describe the clinical course of ENL in a non-endemic country with access to thalidomide and prednisolone. ENL may last far longer than previously described and has significant impact on a patient’s health. In the UK, thalidomide is essential as a steroid-sparing agent, to prevent the adverse effects and mortality of long-term steroids which have been documented elsewhere.</p

A Reanalysis of Single Photon Data at CERN SPS

We reanalyze the WA98 single photon data at CERN SPS by incorporating several recent developments in the study of prompt and thermal photon production from relativistic heavy ion collisions. Isospin and shadowing corrected NLO pQCD, along with an optimized scale for factorization, fragmentation and renormalization are considered for prompt photon production. Photons from thermal medium are estimated by considering a boost invariant azimuthally anisotropic hydrodynamic expansion of the plasma along with a well tested equation of state and initial conditions. A quantitative explanation of the data is obtained by combining $\kappa \times$ prompt with thermal photons, where $\kappa$ is an overall scaling factor. We show that, elliptic flow of thermal photons can play a crucial role to distinguish between the `with' and `without' phase transition scenarios at SPS energy.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures - To appear in the conference proceedings for Quark Matter 2009, March 30 - April 4, Knoxville, Tennessee, v2: minor correction

The rise in Climate-Smart Agriculture strategies, policies, partnerships and investments across the globe

Since the term ‘climate-smart agriculture’ (CSA) was coined in 2010, a growth in strategies, policies, partnerships and investments in the area has been observed. Here we have summarised key CSA efforts globally and in South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Africa, West Africa, and Latin America. We have interpreted CSA in the broad sense, including efforts which may not mention CSA but implicitly contribute to CSA pillars. We note that many international and regional organisations, and countries, are implementing policies and programmes promoting and upscaling CSA. While the growth in strategies, policies, partnerships and investments is positive and creates a favourable enabling environment for CSA, these need to be complemented with targeted implementation on the ground, sustainable financing, institutional coordination and metrics to measure the efficacy of interventions

(R1508) Stability and Zero Velocity Curves in the Perturbed Restricted Problem of 2 + 2 Bodies

The present study investigates the existence and linear stability of the equilibrium points in the restricted problem of 2+2 bodies including the effect of small perturbations epsilon-1 and espilon-2 in the Coriolis and centrifugal forces respectively. The less massive primary is considered as a straight segment and the more massive primary a point mass. The equations of motion of the infinitesimal bodies are derived.We obtain fourteen equilibrium points of the model, out of which six are collinear and rest non-collinear with the centers of the primaries. The position of the equilibrium points are affected by the small perturbation in centrifugal force, length and mass parameters, but there is no impact of small perturbation in Coriolis force on them. In addition, the obtained results are applied to Earth-22 Kalliope-dual satellite system. For this system, we calculate collinear and non-collinear equilibrium points and observed that the number of non-collinear equilibrium points depends on epsilon-2. Furthermore, for a set of values of the parameters epsilon-1 and epsilon-2, we have checked the stability of all the equilibrium points and concluded that all the equilibrium points are found to be unstable. The permissible regions of motion for the Earth-22 Kalliope-dual satellite system are also studied

Production of intermediate-mass dileptons in relativistic heavy ion collisions

The production of intermediate mass dileptons in ultrarelativistic nuclear collisions at SPS energies is studied. The acceptance and detector resolution inherent to measurements by the NA50 experimental collaboration are accurately modeled. The measured centrality dependence of the intermediate mass lepton pair excess is also addressed.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, ReVTe

Scaling of hadronic transverse momenta in a hydrodynamic treatment of relativistic heavy ion collisions

The transverse momenta of hadrons in central nucleus-nucleus collisions are evaluated in a boost invariant hydrodynamics with transverse expansion. Quark gluon plasma is assumed to be formed in the initial state which expands and cools via a first order phase transition to a rich hadronic matter and ultimately undergoes a freeze-out. The average transverse momentum of pions, kaons, and protons is estimated for a wide range of multiplicity densities and transverse sizes of the system. For a given system it is found to scale with the square-root of the particle rapidity density per unit transverse area, and consistent with the corresponding values seen in $p\overline{p}$ experiments at 1800 GeV, suggesting a universal behaviour. The average transverse momentum shows only an approximate scaling with multiplicity density per nucleon which is at variance with the $p\overline{p}$ data.Comment: 6 pages including 9 figure

Modelling Visual Semantics via Image Captioning to extract Enhanced Multi-Level Cross-Modal Semantic Incongruity Representation with Attention for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection

Sarcasm is a type of irony, characterized by an inherent mismatch between the literal interpretation and the intended connotation. Though sarcasm detection in text has been extensively studied, there are situations in which textual input alone might be insufficient to perceive sarcasm. The inclusion of additional contextual cues, such as images, is essential to recognize sarcasm in social media data effectively. This study presents a novel framework for multimodal sarcasm detection that can process input triplets. Two components of these triplets comprise the input text and its associated image, as provided in the datasets. Additionally, a supplementary modality is introduced in the form of descriptive image captions. The motivation behind incorporating this visual semantic representation is to more accurately capture the discrepancies between the textual and visual content, which are fundamental to the sarcasm detection task. The primary contributions of this study are: (1) a robust textual feature extraction branch that utilizes a cross-lingual language model; (2) a visual feature extraction branch that incorporates a self-regulated residual ConvNet integrated with a lightweight spatially aware attention module; (3) an additional modality in the form of image captions generated using an encoder-decoder architecture capable of reading text embedded in images; (4) distinct attention modules to effectively identify the incongruities between the text and two levels of image representations; (5) multi-level cross-domain semantic incongruity representation achieved through feature fusion. Compared with cutting-edge baselines, the proposed model achieves the best accuracy of 92.89% and 64.48%, respectively, on the Twitter multimodal sarcasm and MultiBully datasets