Clothing Co-Parsing by Joint Image Segmentation and Labeling

This paper aims at developing an integrated system of clothing co-parsing, in order to jointly parse a set of clothing images (unsegmented but annotated with tags) into semantic configurations. We propose a data-driven framework consisting of two phases of inference. The first phase, referred as "image co-segmentation", iterates to extract consistent regions on images and jointly refines the regions over all images by employing the exemplar-SVM (E-SVM) technique [23]. In the second phase (i.e. "region co-labeling"), we construct a multi-image graphical model by taking the segmented regions as vertices, and incorporate several contexts of clothing configuration (e.g., item location and mutual interactions). The joint label assignment can be solved using the efficient Graph Cuts algorithm. In addition to evaluate our framework on the Fashionista dataset [30], we construct a dataset called CCP consisting of 2098 high-resolution street fashion photos to demonstrate the performance of our system. We achieve 90.29% / 88.23% segmentation accuracy and 65.52% / 63.89% recognition rate on the Fashionista and the CCP datasets, respectively, which are superior compared with state-of-the-art methods.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, CVPR 201

Island Fantasia

This in-depth study of the Matsu islands between China and Taiwan charts their sudden transition from a forbidden outpost in the Qing period to a military frontline during the Cold War and the Communist-Nationalist conflict, and showcases the cultural vibrancy of the people as they imagine their future.

Exploring Antecedents of Cyberchondria During Pandemics: An integration of Stress and Coping and SOR

Online health information seeking (OHIS) has become the main approach to obtaining health information especially during Covid-19 pandemic. Being increasingly exposed to online health information, cyberchondria, one of the dark sides of excessive online information exposure, has attracted increasing attention. Prior research has concentrated primarily on how information overload can affect cyberchondria. As a pattern composed of cognition, emotion and behavior, cyberchondria may be affected by the subjective emotional and behavioral factors, such as fear of missing out (FoMO) as well as excessive communication online via social media. Based on the theory of stress and coping and stimulus-organism-response (SOR) framework, a research model was proposed to examine the mechanism underlying the impact of exposure to online health information on information overload and communication overload with FoMO as a moderator, which subsequently affects cyberchondria. Online survey will be conducted for data collection. Data analysis methods and the expected contribution is discussed

A Privileged Working Memory State and Potential Top-Down Modulation for Faces, Not Scenes

Top-down modulation is engaged during multiple stages of working memory (WM), including expectation, encoding, and maintenance. During WM maintenance period, an "incidental cue" can bring one of the two items into a privileged state and make the privileged item be recalled with higher precision, despite being irrelevant to which one to be probed as the target. With regard to the different representational states of WM, it's unclear whether there is top-down modulation on earth sensory cortical areas. Here, We used this behavioral paradigm of "incidental cue" and event-related fMRI to investigate whether there were a privileged WM state and top-down modulation for complex stimuli including faces and natural scenes. We found that faces, not scenes, could enter into the privileged state with improved accuracy and response time of WM task. Meanwhile, cue-driven baseline activity shifts in fusiform face area (FFA) were identified by univariate analysis in the recognition of privileged faces, compared to that of nonprivileged ones. In addition, the functional connectivity between FFA and right inferior frontal junction (IFJ), middle frontal gyrus (MFG), inferior frontal gyrus, right intraparietal sulcus (IPS), right precuneus and supplementary motor area was significantly enhanced, corresponding to the improved WM performance. Moreover, FFA connectivity with IFJ and IPS could predict WM improvements. These findings indicated that privileged WM state and potential top-down modulation existed for faces, but not scenes, during WM maintenance period.Peer reviewe