A phenomenological study of a gifted personality based upon the death theme in the works of Emily Dickinson

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit

Dense non-rigid visual tracking with a robust similarity function

International audienceThis paper deals with dense non-rigid visual tracking robust towards global illumination perturbations of the observed scene. The similarity function is based on the sum of condi- tional variance (SCV). With respect to most approaches that minimize the sum of squared differences, which is poorly robust towards illumination variations in the scene, the choice of SCV as our registration function allows the approach to be naturally robust towards global perturbations. Moreover, a thin-plate spline warping function is considered in order to take into account deformations of the observed template. The proposed approach, after being detailed, is tested in nominal conditions and on scenes where light perturbations occur in order to assess the robustness of the approach

Visual Servoing using the Sum of Conditional Variance

International audienceIn this paper we propose a new way to achieve direct visual servoing. The novelty is the use of the sum of conditional variance to realize the optimization process of a positioning task. This measure, which has previously been used successfully in the case of visual tracking, has been shown to be invariant to non-linear illumination variations and inexpensive to compute. Compared to other direct approaches of visual servoing, it is a good compromise between techniques using the illumination of pixels which are computationally inexpensive but non robust to illumination variations and other approaches using the mutual information which are more complicated to compute but offer more robustness towards the variations of the scene. This method results in a direct visual servoing task easy and fast to compute and robust towards non-linear illumination variations. This paper describes a visual servoing task based on the sum of conditional variance performed using a Levenberg-Marquardt optimization process. The results are then demonstrated through experimental validations and compared to both photometric-based and entropy-based techniques

NSF and p97/VCP: similar at first, different at last

AbstractN-Ethylmaleimide sensitive factor (NSF) and p97/valosin-containing protein (VCP) are distantly related members of the ATPases associated with a variety of cellular activities (AAA) family of proteins. While both proteins have been implied in cellular morphology changes involving membrane compartments or vesicles, more recent evidence seems to imply that NSF is primarily involved in the soluble NSF attachment receptor (SNARE)-mediated vesicle fusion by disassembling the SNARE complex whereas p97/VCP is primarily involved in the extraction of membrane proteins. These functional differences are now corroborated by major structural differences based on recent crystallographic and cryo-electron microscopy studies. This review discusses these recent findings