4,965 research outputs found
The Regional Appropriateness of Monetary Policy: An Application of Taylor’s Rule to Australian States and Territories
In recent years Taylor’s rule has become a widely used tool for assessing the stance of monetary policy. Not only has it been used to evaluate the U.S. Federal Reserve’s monetary policy, but also, for example, to evaluate the appropriateness of the European Central Bank’s monetary policy for each individual member nation of the European Monetary Union. This paper builds on this work and uses Taylor’s rule to evaluate the degree of appropriateness of Australia’s national monetary policy to each of Australia’s states and territories. National monetary policy is represented by the overnight cash rate and this is compared to a notional cash rate calculated for each individual state and territory. The aim is to illustrate the extent to which national monetary policy historically may have deviated from what might have been most appropriate for the economic conditions of each state and territory. To this end, three different recent monetary policy episodes are analysed from a regional perspective. Moreover, an analysis of the disparities between the Australian states’ and territories’ notional cash rates with the actual national cash rate suggests – perhaps not too surprisingly - that the Reserve Bank of Australia implicitly sets national cash rates in close accordance with the economic conditions of Australia’s two most populous states.Taylor’s rule, monetary policy, Reserve Bank of Australia, regional
FaceQnet: Quality Assessment for Face Recognition based on Deep Learning
In this paper we develop a Quality Assessment approach for face recognition
based on deep learning. The method consists of a Convolutional Neural Network,
FaceQnet, that is used to predict the suitability of a specific input image for
face recognition purposes. The training of FaceQnet is done using the VGGFace2
database. We employ the BioLab-ICAO framework for labeling the VGGFace2 images
with quality information related to their ICAO compliance level. The
groundtruth quality labels are obtained using FaceNet to generate comparison
scores. We employ the groundtruth data to fine-tune a ResNet-based CNN, making
it capable of returning a numerical quality measure for each input image.
Finally, we verify if the FaceQnet scores are suitable to predict the expected
performance when employing a specific image for face recognition with a COTS
face recognition system. Several conclusions can be drawn from this work, most
notably: 1) we managed to employ an existing ICAO compliance framework and a
pretrained CNN to automatically label data with quality information, 2) we
trained FaceQnet for quality estimation by fine-tuning a pre-trained face
recognition network (ResNet-50), and 3) we have shown that the predictions from
FaceQnet are highly correlated with the face recognition accuracy of a
state-of-the-art commercial system not used during development. FaceQnet is
publicly available in GitHub.Comment: Preprint version of a paper accepted at ICB 201
Estimating Carotid Pulse and Breathing Rate from Near-infrared Video of the Neck
Objective: Non-contact physiological measurement is a growing research area
that allows capturing vital signs such as heart rate (HR) and breathing rate
(BR) comfortably and unobtrusively with remote devices. However, most of the
approaches work only in bright environments in which subtle
photoplethysmographic and ballistocardiographic signals can be easily analyzed
and/or require expensive and custom hardware to perform the measurements.
Approach: This work introduces a low-cost method to measure subtle motions
associated with the carotid pulse and breathing movement from the neck using
near-infrared (NIR) video imaging. A skin reflection model of the neck was
established to provide a theoretical foundation for the method. In particular,
the method relies on template matching for neck detection, Principal Component
Analysis for feature extraction, and Hidden Markov Models for data smoothing.
Main Results: We compared the estimated HR and BR measures with ones provided
by an FDA-cleared device in a 12-participant laboratory study: the estimates
achieved a mean absolute error of 0.36 beats per minute and 0.24 breaths per
minute under both bright and dark lighting.
Significance: This work advances the possibilities of non-contact
physiological measurement in real-life conditions in which environmental
illumination is limited and in which the face of the person is not readily
available or needs to be protected. Due to the increasing availability of NIR
imaging devices, the described methods are readily scalable.Comment: 21 pages, 15 figure
Recent developments in nuclear structure theory: an outlook on the muonic atom program
The discovery of the proton-radius puzzle and the subsequent deuteron-radius
puzzle is fueling an on-going debate on possible explanations for the
difference in the observed radii obtained from muonic atoms and from
electron-nucleus systems. Atomic nuclei have a complex internal structure that
must be taken into account when analyzing experimental spectroscopic results.
Ab initio nuclear structure theory provided the so far most precise estimates
of important corrections to the Lamb shift in muonic atoms and is well poised
to also investigate nuclear structure corrections to the hyperfine splitting in
muonic atoms. Independently on whether the puzzle is due to
beyond-the-standard-model physics or not, nuclear structure corrections are a
necessary theoretical input to any experimental extraction of electric and
magnetic radii from precise muonic atom measurements.
Here, we review the status of the calculations performed by the TRIUMF-Hebrew
University group, focusing on the deuteron, and discuss preliminary results on
magnetic sum rules calculated with two-body currents at next-to-leading order.
Two-body currents will be an important ingredient in future calculations of
nuclear structure corrections to the hyperfine splitting in muonic atoms.Comment: 10 pages, accepted proceedings of the "55th International Winter
Meeting on Nuclear Physics", 23-27 January 2017, to appear on Po
A Comparative Evaluation of Heart Rate Estimation Methods using Face Videos
This paper presents a comparative evaluation of methods for remote heart rate
estimation using face videos, i.e., given a video sequence of the face as
input, methods to process it to obtain a robust estimation of the subjects
heart rate at each moment. Four alternatives from the literature are tested,
three based in hand crafted approaches and one based on deep learning. The
methods are compared using RGB videos from the COHFACE database. Experiments
show that the learning-based method achieves much better accuracy than the hand
crafted ones. The low error rate achieved by the learning based model makes
possible its application in real scenarios, e.g. in medical or sports
environments.Comment: Accepted in "IEEE International Workshop on Medical Computing
(MediComp) 2020
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