A Causal And-Or Graph Model for Visibility Fluent Reasoning in Tracking Interacting Objects

Tracking humans that are interacting with the other subjects or environment remains unsolved in visual tracking, because the visibility of the human of interests in videos is unknown and might vary over time. In particular, it is still difficult for state-of-the-art human trackers to recover complete human trajectories in crowded scenes with frequent human interactions. In this work, we consider the visibility status of a subject as a fluent variable, whose change is mostly attributed to the subject's interaction with the surrounding, e.g., crossing behind another object, entering a building, or getting into a vehicle, etc. We introduce a Causal And-Or Graph (C-AOG) to represent the causal-effect relations between an object's visibility fluent and its activities, and develop a probabilistic graph model to jointly reason the visibility fluent change (e.g., from visible to invisible) and track humans in videos. We formulate this joint task as an iterative search of a feasible causal graph structure that enables fast search algorithm, e.g., dynamic programming method. We apply the proposed method on challenging video sequences to evaluate its capabilities of estimating visibility fluent changes of subjects and tracking subjects of interests over time. Results with comparisons demonstrate that our method outperforms the alternative trackers and can recover complete trajectories of humans in complicated scenarios with frequent human interactions.Comment: accepted by CVPR 201

Higher bottom and bottom-strange mesons

Motivated by the recent observation of the orbital excitation $B(5970)$ by CDF collaboration, we have performed a systematical study of the mass spectrum and strong decay patterns of the higher $B$ and $B_s$ mesons. Hopefully the present investigation may provide valuable clues to further experimental exploration of these intriguing excited heavy mesons.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, 10 tables. More discussions and references added. Accepted by Phys. Rev.

Linear Stability of Flows in a Squeeze Film

We study linear stability of viscous flows in a squeeze lubrication film, in which the flow varies slowly in space and time, between two parallel plates moving normal to each other with a slow constant speed, generalizing the inviscid results of Aristov and Gitman [J. Fluid Mech. 464 (2002) 209]. The temporal evolution of two-dimensional disturbances for this physical situation, including the asymptotic behaviour of a long term or the transient behaviour of some time interval, is obtained by the construction of a low-dimensional Galerkin method. It is found that the wall boundaries typically play dual roles of stabilizer and destabilizer. They constrain the development of disturbances and have stabilizing influences. However, they give rise to velocity shear, which is diffused by viscosity and thereby tends to destabilize the flow

Protecting Electrical Connectors From Corrosion

This publication describes techniques and apparatuses for protecting electrical connectors from corrosion. An electrical connector may include an electrolytic plating stack-up of layers configured to minimize electrolytic corrosion. The plating stack-ups described in this publication utilize various elements applied in multiple ways to create a cost-efficient and effective solution for minimizing electrolytic corrosion in electrical connectors, thereby improving efficiency and extending the life of electrical connectors

Riverine Floodplains of China: Threats and Restoration

Article信州大学山地水環境教育研究センター研究報告 6: 9-9(2010)departmental bulletin pape