Holistic gaze strategy to categorize facial expression of varying intensities

Using faces representing exaggerated emotional expressions, recent behaviour and eye-tracking studies have suggested a dominant role of individual facial features in transmitting diagnostic cues for decoding facial expressions. Considering that in everyday life we frequently view low-intensity expressive faces in which local facial cues are more ambiguous, we probably need to combine expressive cues from more than one facial feature to reliably decode naturalistic facial affects. In this study we applied a morphing technique to systematically vary intensities of six basic facial expressions of emotion, and employed a self-paced expression categorization task to measure participants’ categorization performance and associated gaze patterns. The analysis of pooled data from all expressions showed that increasing expression intensity would improve categorization accuracy, shorten reaction time and reduce number of fixations directed at faces. The proportion of fixations and viewing time directed at internal facial features (eyes, nose and mouth region), however, was not affected by varying levels of intensity. Further comparison between individual facial expressions revealed that although proportional gaze allocation at individual facial features was quantitatively modulated by the viewed expressions, the overall gaze distribution in face viewing was qualitatively similar across different facial expressions and different intensities. It seems that we adopt a holistic viewing strategy to extract expressive cues from all internal facial features in processing of naturalistic facial expressions

Robust Non-Rigid Registration with Reweighted Position and Transformation Sparsity

Non-rigid registration is challenging because it is ill-posed with high degrees of freedom and is thus sensitive to noise and outliers. We propose a robust non-rigid registration method using reweighted sparsities on position and transformation to estimate the deformations between 3-D shapes. We formulate the energy function with position and transformation sparsity on both the data term and the smoothness term, and define the smoothness constraint using local rigidity. The double sparsity based non-rigid registration model is enhanced with a reweighting scheme, and solved by transferring the model into four alternately-optimized subproblems which have exact solutions and guaranteed convergence. Experimental results on both public datasets and real scanned datasets show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods and is more robust to noise and outliers than conventional non-rigid registration methods.Comment: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphic

Novel insights into the γγ∗→π0\gamma\gamma^*\to \pi^0 transition form factor

BaBar's observation of significant deviations of the pion transition form factor (TFF) from the asymptotic expectation with $Q^2>9$ GeV$^2$ has brought a serious crisis to a fundamental picture established for such a simplest $q\bar{q}$ system by perturbative QCD, i.e. the dominance of collinear factorization at high momentum transfers for the pion TFF. We show that non-factorizable contributions due to open flavors in $\gamma\gamma^*\to\pi^0$ could be an important source that contaminates the pQCD asymptotic limit and causes such deviations with $Q^2>9$ GeV$^2$. Within an effective Lagrangian approach, the non-factorizable amplitudes can be related to intermediate hadron loops, i.e. $K^{(*)}$ and $D^{(*)}$ etc, and their corrections to the $\pi^0$ and $\eta$ TFFs can be estimated.Comment: Revtex, 6 pages and 4 eps figures; Extended version accepted by Eur. Phys. J.

Automatic landmark annotation and dense correspondence registration for 3D human facial images

Dense surface registration of three-dimensional (3D) human facial images holds great potential for studies of human trait diversity, disease genetics, and forensics. Non-rigid registration is particularly useful for establishing dense anatomical correspondences between faces. Here we describe a novel non-rigid registration method for fully automatic 3D facial image mapping. This method comprises two steps: first, seventeen facial landmarks are automatically annotated, mainly via PCA-based feature recognition following 3D-to-2D data transformation. Second, an efficient thin-plate spline (TPS) protocol is used to establish the dense anatomical correspondence between facial images, under the guidance of the predefined landmarks. We demonstrate that this method is robust and highly accurate, even for different ethnicities. The average face is calculated for individuals of Han Chinese and Uyghur origins. While fully automatic and computationally efficient, this method enables high-throughput analysis of human facial feature variation.Comment: 33 pages, 6 figures, 1 tabl

Baryon electric dipole moments from strong CP violation

The electric dipole form factors and moments of the ground state baryons are calculated in chiral perturbation theory at next-to-leading order. We show that the baryon electric dipole form factors at this order depend only on two combinations of low-energy constants. We also derive various relations that are free of unknown low-energy constants. We use recent lattice QCD data to calculate all baryon EDMs. In particular, we find d_n = -2.9\pm 0.9 and d_p = 1.1\pm 1.1 in units of 10^{-16} e \theta_0 cm. Finite volume corrections to the moments are also worked out. We show that for a precision extraction from lattice QCD data, the next-to-leading order terms have to be accounted for.Comment: 30 pages, 8 figures, to appear in JHE

Triangular singularity and a possible ϕp\phi p resonance in the Λc+→π0ϕp\Lambda^+_c \to \pi^0 \phi p decay

We study the $\Lambda^+_c \to \pi^0 \phi p$ decay by considering a triangle singularity mechanism. In this mechanism, the $\Lambda^+_c$ decays into the $K^* \Sigma^*(1385)$, the $\Sigma^*(1385)$ decays into the $\pi^0 \Sigma$ (or $\Lambda$), and then the $K^* \Sigma$ (or $\Lambda$) interact to produce the $\phi p$ in the final state. This mechanism produces a peak structure around $2020$ MeV. In addition, the possibility that there is a hidden-strange pentaquark-like state is also considered by taking into account the final state interactions of $K^* \Lambda$, $K^* \Sigma$, and $\phi p$. We conclude that it is difficult to search for the hidden-strange analogue of the $P_c$ states in this decay. However, we do expect nontrivial behavior in the $\phi p$ invariant mass distribution. The predictions can be tested by experiments such as BESIII, LHCb and Belle-II.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure

Human spontaneous gaze patterns in viewing of faces of different species

Human studies have reported clear differences in perceptual and neural processing of faces of different species, implying the contribution of visual experience to face perception. Can these differences be manifested in our eye scanning patterns while extracting salient facial information? Here we systematically compared non-pet owners’ gaze patterns while exploring human, monkey, dog and cat faces in a passive viewing task. Our analysis revealed that the faces of different species induced similar patterns of fixation distribution between left and right hemi-face, and among key local facial features with the eyes attracting the highest proportion of fixations and viewing times, followed by the nose and then the mouth. Only the proportion of fixation directed at the mouth region was species-dependent and could be differentiated at the earliest stage of face viewing. It seems that our spontaneous eye scanning patterns associated with face exploration were mainly constrained by general facial configurations; the species affiliation of the inspected faces had limited impact on gaze allocation, at least under free viewing conditions