Facial reshaping operator for controllable face beautification

Posting attractive facial photos is part of everyday life in the social media era. Motivated by the demand, we propose a lightweight method to automatically and efficiently beautify the shapes of both portrait and non-portrait faces in photos, while allowing users to customize the beautification of individual facial features. Previous methods focus on the beautification of mostly frontal and neutral faces, without incorporating user controllability in the beautification process. To address these restrictions, we propose the Facial Reshaping Operator representation, which is affine-invariant, captures the pairwise geometric configuration of facial landmarks, and allows for efficient face beautification with the user-specified weights of individual facial parts. We also propose an unsupervised beautification method in the operator space of faces, where an input face is iteratively pulled towards a local nearby density mode with improved attractiveness. Our method distinguishes itself from the commercial beautification tools in that it mildly enhances facial shapes without altering makeups or complexions, which complements these tools that lack fine-grained control on the attractiveness of facial shapes for users. The experimental results show that our method improves facial shape attractiveness for a large range of poses and expressions, demonstrating the potential of applicability to photos seen on the social media such as Facebook and Instagram everyday

Fluctuations in the Cosmic Microwave Background I: Form Factors and their Calculation in Synchronous Gauge

It is shown that the fluctuation in the temperature of the cosmic microwave background in any direction may be evaluated as an integral involving scalar and dipole form factors, which incorporate all relevant information about acoustic oscillations before the time of last scattering. A companion paper gives asymptotic expressions for the multipole coefficient $C_\ell$ in terms of these form factors. Explicit expressions are given here for the form factors in a simplified hydrodynamic model for the evolution of perturbations.Comment: 35 pages, no figures. Improved treatment of damping, including both Landau and Silk damping; inclusion of late-time effects; several references added; minor changes and corrections made. Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. D1

How to Test Stringy Dark Energy?

It is suggested, by using a covariant lagrangian formalism to estimate the equation of state $w = p/\rho$, that stringy dark energy predicts $w < -1$, a negative pressure larger in magnitude than that for a cosmological constant or quintessence. This would lead to a later transition from decelerating to accelerating cosmological expansion; $w = - 4/3$ is briefly considered as one illustrative example.Comment: 4 pages LaTeX. v2. Typos correcte

Singularites at a Dense Set of Temperature in Husimi Tree

We investigate complex temperature singularities of the three-site interacting Ising model on the Husimi tree in the presentce of magnetic field. We show that at certain magnetic field these singularities lie at a dense set and as a consequence the phase transition condensation take place.Comment: ps file, 10 page

A Delayed Black and Scholes Formula I

In this article we develop an explicit formula for pricing European options when the underlying stock price follows a non-linear stochastic differential delay equation (sdde). We believe that the proposed model is sufficiently flexible to fit real market data, and is yet simple enough to allow for a closed-form representation of the option price. Furthermore, the model maintains the no-arbitrage property and the completeness of the market. The derivation of the option-pricing formula is based on an equivalent martingale measure

A Pose-based Feature Fusion and Classification Framework for the Early Prediction of Cerebral Palsy in Infants

The early diagnosis of cerebral palsy is an area which has recently seen significant multi-disciplinary research. Diagnostic tools such as the General Movements Assessment (GMA), have produced some very promising results. However, the prospect of automating these processes may improve accessibility of the assessment and also enhance the understanding of movement development of infants. Previous works have established the viability of using pose-based features extracted from RGB video sequences to undertake classification of infant body movements based upon the GMA. In this paper, we propose a series of new and improved features, and a feature fusion pipeline for this classification task. We also introduce the RVI-38 dataset, a series of videos captured as part of routine clinical care. By utilising this challenging dataset we establish the robustness of several motion features for classification, subsequently informing the design of our proposed feature fusion framework based upon the GMA. We evaluate our proposed framework’s classification performance using both the RVI-38 dataset and the publicly available MINI-RGBD dataset. We also implement several other methods from the literature for direct comparison using these two independent datasets. Our experimental results and feature analysis show that our proposed pose-based method performs well across both datasets. The proposed features afford us the opportunity to include finer detail than previous methods, and further model GMA specific body movements. These new features also allow us to take advantage of additional body-part specific information as a means of improving the overall classification performance, whilst retaining GMA relevant, interpretable, and shareable features

Improved perturbation theory in the vortex liquids state of type II superconductors

We develop an optimized perturbation theory for the Ginzburg - Landau description of thermal fluctuations effects in the vortex liquids. Unlike the high temperature expansion which is asymptotic, the optimized expansion is convergent. Radius of convergence on the lowest Landau level is $a_{T}=-3$ in 2D and $a_{T}=-5$ in 3D. It allows a systematic calculation of magnetization and specific heat contributions due to thermal fluctuations of vortices in strongly type II superconductors to a very high precision. The results are in good agreement with existing Monte Carlo simulations and experiments. Limitations of various nonperturbative and phenomenological approaches are noted. In particular we show that there is no exact intersection point of the magnetization curves both in 2D and 3D.Comment: 24 pages, 9 figure

PERFLUOROOCTANE SULFONATE (PFOS) AND PERFLUOROOCTANOATE (PFOA) CONTAMINATION OF WATER ENVIRONMENT IN ASIAN COUNTRIES

Joint Research on Environmental Science and Technology for the Eart

Ideal scales for weighing the Universe

We investigate the performance of a large class of cosmic microwave background experiments with respect to their ability to measure various cosmological parameters. We pay special attention to the measurement of the total cosmological density, $\Omega$. We consider interferometer experiments, all-sky single-dish experiments, and also single-dish experiments with a deep-patch technique. Power spectrum estimates for these experiments are studied, and their induced errors in cosmological parameter estimates evaluated. Given this motivation we find various promising corners in the experiment parameter space surveyed. Low noise all-sky satellite experiments are the expensive option, but they are best suited for dealing with large sets of cosmological parameters. At intermediate noises we find a useful corner in high-resolution deep patch single-dish experiments. Interferometers are limited by sample variance, but provide the best estimates based on the very small angular scales. For all these experiments we present conservative, but still promising estimates of the accuracy of the measurement of $\Omega$. In these estimates we consider a variety of possible signals not necessarily in the vicinity of standard cold dark matter

Anti-plane interfacial crack with functionally graded coating: static and dynamic

The anti-plane displacement discontinuity method is applied to establish the Fredholm integral equation of the first kind for the orthotropic Functionally Graded Material (FGM) coatings subjected to static/dynamic shears. The shear modulus and mass density are assumed to vary exponentially through the thickness. The static and dynamic fundamental solutions with anti-plane displacement discontinuity are derived for orthotropic FGM coating by using Fourier transform method and Laplace transform method. It has been shown that the transformed fundamental solution with orthotropic coatings has the same order of hyper-singularity as in the static case, i.e. O(1/r2), and the Chebyshev polynomials of the second kind are used to solve the integral equations numerically. The time dependent stress intensity factors are obtained directly from the coefficients of the Chebyshev polynomials with the aid of Durbin’s Laplace transform inversion method. A comparative study of FGM versus homogeneous coating is conducted, and the dependence of the stress intensity factors in the coating/substrate system on the material property (orthotropic) and thickness of coating is examined. Two examples including the static/dynamic loads are given as benchmarks for the numerical methods and application in composite engineering