The Overseeing Mother: Revisiting the Frontal-Pose Lady in the Wu Family Shrines in Second Century China

Located in present-day Jiaxiang in Shandong province, the Wu family shrines built during the second century in the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220) were among the best-known works in Chinese art history. Although for centuries scholars have exhaustively studied the pictorial programs, the frontal-pose female image situated on the second floor of the central pavilion carved at the rear wall of the shrines has remained a question. Beginning with the woman’s eyes, this article demonstrates that the image is more than a generic portrait (“hard motif ”), but rather represents “feminine overseeing from above” (“soft motif ”). This synthetic motif combines three different earlier motifs – the frontal-pose hostess enjoying entertainment, the elevated spectator, and the Queen Mother of the West. By creatively fusing the three motifs into one unity, the Jiaxiang artists lent to the frontal-pose lady a unique power: she not only dominated the center of the composition, but also, like a divine being, commanded a unified view of the surroundings on the lofty building, hence echoing the political reality of the empress mother’s “overseeing the court” in the second century during Eastern Han dynasty

Quantum Computation-Based Image Representation, Processing Operations and Their Applications

A flexible representation of quantum images (FRQI) was proposed to facilitate the extension of classical (non-quantum)-like image processing applications to the quantum computing domain. The representation encodes a quantum image in the form of a normalized state, which captures information about colors and their corresponding positions in the images. Since its conception, a handful of processing transformations have been formulated, among which are the geometric transformations on quantum images (GTQI) and the CTQI that are focused on the color information of the images. In addition, extensions and applications of FRQI representation, such as multi-channel representation for quantum images (MCQI), quantum image data searching, watermarking strategies for quantum images, a framework to produce movies on quantum computers and a blueprint for quantum video encryption and decryption have also been suggested. These proposals extend classical-like image and video processing applications to the quantum computing domain and offer a significant speed-up with low computational resources in comparison to performing the same tasks on traditional computing devices. Each of the algorithms and the mathematical foundations for their execution were simulated using classical computing resources, and their results were analyzed alongside other classical computing equivalents. The work presented in this review is intended to serve as the epitome of advances made in FRQI quantum image processing over the past five years and to simulate further interest geared towards the realization of some secure and efficient image and video processing applications on quantum computers

Experimental Study of Particle Deposition on Surface at Different Mainstream Velocity and Temperature

The effect of mainstream velocity and mainstream temperature on the behavior of deposition on a flat plate surface has been investigated experimentally. Molten wax particles were injected to generate particle deposition in a two-phase flow wind tunnel. Tests indicated that deposition occurs mainly at the leading edge and the middle and backward portions of the windward side. The mass of deposition at the leading edge was far more than that on the windward and lee sides. For the windward and lee sides, deposition mass increased as the mainstream velocity was increased for a given particle concentration. Capture efficiency was found to increase initially until the mainstream velocity reaches a certain value, where it begins to drop with mainstream velocity increasing. For the leading edge, capture efficiency followed a similar trend due to deposition spallation and detachment induced by aerodynamic shear at high velocity. Deposition formation was also strongly affected by the mainstream temperature due to its control of particle phase (solid or liquid). Capture efficiency initially increased with increasing mainstream temperature until a certain threshold temperature (near the wax melting point). Subsequently, it began to decrease, for wax detaches from the model surface when subjected to the aerodynamic force at the surface temperature above the wax melting point

Logarithmic Fuzzy Entropy Function for Similarity Measurement in Multimodal Medical Images Registration

Multimodal medical images are useful for observing tissue structure clearly in clinical practice. To integrate multimodal information, multimodal registration is significant. The entropy-based registration applies a structure descriptor set to replace the original multimodal image and compute similarity to express the correlation of images. The accuracy and converging rate of the registration depend on this set. We propose a new method, logarithmic fuzzy entropy function, to compute the descriptor set. It is obvious that the proposed method can increase the upper bound value from log(r) to log(r) + ∆(r) so that a more representative structural descriptor set is formed. The experiment results show that our method has faster converging rate and wider quantified range in multimodal medical images registration