Creating invariance to "nuisance parameters" in face recognition

A major goal for face recognition is to identify faces where the pose of the probe is different from the stored face. Typical feature vectors vary more with pose than with identity, leading to very poor recognition performance. We propose a non-linear many-to-one mapping from a conventional feature space to a new space constructed so that each individual has a unique feature vector regardless of pose. Training data is used to implicitly parameterize the position of the multi-dimensional face manifold by pose. We introduce a co-ordinate transform, which depends on the position on the manifold. This transform is chosen so that different poses of the same face are mapped to the same feature vector. The same approach is applied to illumination changes. We investigate different methods for creating features, which are invariant to both pose and illumination. We provide a metric to assess the discriminability of the resulting features. Our technique increases the discriminability of faces under unknown pose and lighting compared to contemporary methods

The DWPF: Results of full scale qualification runs leading to radioactive operations

The Defense Waste Processing Facility (DWPF) at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, SC will immobilize high-level radioactive liquid waste, currently stored in underground carbon steel tanks, in borosilicate glass. The radioactive waste is transferred to the DWPF in two forms: precipitate slurry and sludge slurry. The radioactive waste is pretreated and then combined with a borosilicate glass frit in the DWPF. This homogeneous slurry is fed to a Joule-heated melter which operates at approximately 1150 degrees C. The glass is poured into stainless steel canisters for eventual disposal in a geologic repository. The DWPF product (i.e. the canistered waste form) must comply with the Waste Acceptance Product Specifications (WAPS) in order to be acceptable for disposal. The DWPF has completed Waste Qualification Runs which demonstrate the facility`s ability to comply with the waste acceptance specifications. During the Waste Qualification Runs seventy-one canisters of simulated waste glass were produced in preparation for Radioactive Operations. These canisters of simulated waste glass were produced during five production campaigns which also exercised the facility prior to beginning Radioactive Operations. The results of the Waste Qualification Runs are presented

Surface reconstruction of wear in carpets by using a wavelet edge detector

Carpet manufacturers have wear labels assigned to their products by human experts who evaluate carpet samples subjected to accelerated wear in a test device. There is considerable industrial and academic interest in going from human to automated evaluation, which should be less cumbersome and more objective. In this paper, we present image analysis research on videos of carpet surfaces scanned with a 3D laser. The purpose is obtaining good depth Images for an automated system that should have a high percentage of correct assessments for a wide variety of carpets. The innovation is the use of a wavelet edge detector to obtain a more continuously defined surface shape. The evaluation is based on how well the algorithms allow a good linear ranking and a good discriminance of consecutive wear labels. The results show an improved linear ranking for most carpet types, for two carpet types the results are quite significant

Free-Shape Polygonal Object Localization

Polygonal objects are prevalent in man-made scenes. Early approaches to detecting them relied mainly on geometry while subsequent ones also incorporated appearance-based cues. It has recently been shown that this could be done fast by searching for cycles in graphs of line-fragments, provided that the cycle scoring function can be expressed as additive terms attached to individual fragments. In this paper, we propose an approach that eliminates this restriction. Given a weighted line-fragment graph, we use its cyclomatic number to partition the graph into managebly-sized sub-graphs that preserve nodes and edges with a high weight and are most likely to contain object contours. Object contours are then detected as maximally scoring elementary circuits enumerated in each sub-graph. Our approach can be used with any cycle scoring function and multiple candidates that share line fragments can be found. This is unlike in other approaches that rely on a greedy approach to finding candidates. We demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art for the detection of building rooftops in aerial images and polygonal object categories from ImageNet

Developmental pathways to autism: a review of prospective studies of infants at risk

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are neurodevelopmental disorders characterized by impairments in social interaction and communication, and the presence of restrictive and repetitive behaviors. Symptoms of ASD likely emerge from a complex interaction between pre-existing neurodevelopmental vulnerabilities and the child's environment, modified by compensatory skills and protective factors. Prospective studies of infants at high familial risk for ASD (who have an older sibling with a diagnosis) are beginning to characterize these developmental pathways to the emergence of clinical symptoms. Here, we review the range of behavioral and neurocognitive markers for later ASD that have been identified in high-risk infants in the first years of life. We discuss theoretical implications of emerging patterns, and identify key directions for future work, including potential resolutions to several methodological challenges for the field. Mapping how ASD unfolds from birth is critical to our understanding of the developmental mechanisms underlying this disorder. A more nuanced understanding of developmental pathways to ASD will help us not only to identify children who need early intervention, but also to improve the range of interventions available to them

Emergency and perioperative management of adrenal insufficiency in children and young people: British Society for Paediatric Endocrinology and Diabetes consensus guidance

Adrenal insufficiency (AI) is characterised by lack of cortisol production from the adrenal glands. This can be a primary adrenal disorder or secondary to adrenocorticotropic hormone deficiency or suppression from exogenous glucocorticoids. Symptoms of AI in children may initially be non-specific and include growth faltering, lethargy, poor feeding, weight loss, abdominal pain, vomiting and lingering illnesses. AI is treated with replacement doses of hydrocortisone. At times of physiological stress such as illness, trauma or surgery, there is an increased requirement for exogenous glucocorticoids, which if untreated can lead to an adrenal crisis and death. There are no unified guidelines for those <18 years old in the UK, leading to substantial variation in the management of AI. This paper sets out guidance for intercurrent illness, medical, dental and surgical procedures to allow timely and appropriate recognition and treatment of AI and adrenal crisis for children and young people

The economic and accounting content of fixed assets

This book presents a mathematical methodology for image analysis tasks at the edge of current research, including anisotropic diffusion filtering of tensor fields. Instead of specific applications, it explores methodological structures on which they are built.DIPLECS, GARNICS, NACI

An Integrated TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource to Drive High-Quality Survival Outcome Analytics

For a decade, The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA) program collected clinicopathologic annotation data along with multi-platform molecular profiles of more than 11,000 human tumors across 33 different cancer types. TCGA clinical data contain key features representing the democratized nature of the data collection process. To ensure proper use of this large clinical dataset associated with genomic features, we developed a standardized dataset named the TCGA Pan-Cancer Clinical Data Resource (TCGA-CDR), which includes four major clinical outcome endpoints. In addition to detailing major challenges and statistical limitations encountered during the effort of integrating the acquired clinical data, we present a summary that includes endpoint usage recommendations for each cancer type. These TCGA-CDR findings appear to be consistent with cancer genomics studies independent of the TCGA effort and provide opportunities for investigating cancer biology using clinical correlates at an unprecedented scale. Analysis of clinicopathologic annotations for over 11,000 cancer patients in the TCGA program leads to the generation of TCGA Clinical Data Resource, which provides recommendations of clinical outcome endpoint usage for 33 cancer types

The effect on melanoma risk of genes previously associated with telomere length.

Telomere length has been associated with risk of many cancers, but results are inconsistent. Seven single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) previously associated with mean leukocyte telomere length were either genotyped or well-imputed in 11108 case patients and 13933 control patients from Europe, Israel, the United States and Australia, four of the seven SNPs reached a P value under .05 (two-sided). A genetic score that predicts telomere length, derived from these seven SNPs, is strongly associated (P = 8.92x10(-9), two-sided) with melanoma risk. This demonstrates that the previously observed association between longer telomere length and increased melanoma risk is not attributable to confounding via shared environmental effects (such as ultraviolet exposure) or reverse causality. We provide the first proof that multiple germline genetic determinants of telomere length influence cancer risk.This is the final version of the article. It first appeared from Oxford University Press via http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jnci/dju26

Spinodal decomposition in multicomponent fluid mixtures: A molecular dynamics study

We have investigated the effect of the number p of components on the dynamics of phase separation in two-dimensional symmetric multicomponent fluids. In contrast to concentrated two-dimensional binary fluids, where the growth dynamics is controlled by the coupling of the velocity held to the order parameter, leading to large growth-exponent values, the dynamics in multicomponent fluids (p = 3, 4) is found to follow a t(1/3) growth law, where t is time, which we relate to a long-wavelength evaporation-condensation process. These findings, which are proposed to be consequences of the compact domain structure persisting in multicomponent fluids, imply that hydrodynamic modes do not affect the dynamics of the phase separation in these systems