An Adaptive Skin Detection Approach of Face Images with Unequal Luminance, Color Excursion, and Background Interference

Face detection and recognition are affected greatly by unequal luminance, color excursion and background interference. For improving skin detection rates of color face images in the presence of unequal luminance, color excursion and background interference, this paper proposes an approach for automatic skin detection. This approach globally corrects the color excursion using the X, Y, Z color components. Then it establishes a self-adaptive nonlinear amendment function using the a', b'and L' components, and locally corrects the R, G, B color components of row-column transformed sub-block images to balance the global luminance and color. Finally, it constructs an L'a'b'three-dimensional semi-supervised dual-probability skin model, based on which automatic skin detection can be realized. The experimental results demonstrated that this approach has great adaptability, a high detection rate and speed

Autocorrelations of stellar light and mass at z~0 and ~1: From SDSS to DEEP2

We present measurements of projected autocorrelation functions w_p(r_p) for the stellar mass of galaxies and for their light in the U, B and V bands, using data from the third data release of the DEEP2 Galaxy Redshift Survey and the final data release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We investigate the clustering bias of stellar mass and light by comparing these to projected autocorrelations of dark matter estimated from the Millennium Simulations (MS) at z=1 and 0.07, the median redshifts of our galaxy samples. All of the autocorrelation and bias functions show systematic trends with spatial scale and waveband which are impressively similar at the two redshifts. This shows that the well-established environmental dependence of stellar populations in the local Universe is already in place at z=1. The recent MS-based galaxy formation simulation of Guo et al. (2011) reproduces the scale-dependent clustering of luminosity to an accuracy better than 30% in all bands and at both redshifts, but substantially overpredicts mass autocorrelations at separations below about 2 Mpc. Further comparison of the shapes of our stellar mass bias functions with those predicted by the model suggests that both the SDSS and DEEP2 data prefer a fluctuation amplitude of sigma_8 0.8 rather than the sigma_8=0.9 assumed by the MS.Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Monthly Notices, minor revisions in tex

Fish Oil Enhances Recovery of Intestinal Microbiota and Epithelial Integrity in Chronic Rejection of Intestinal Transplant

The intestinal chronic rejection (CR) is the major limitation to long-term survival of transplanted organs. This study aimed to investigate the interaction between intestinal microbiota and epithelial integrity in chronic rejection of intestinal transplantation, and to find out whether fish oil enhances recovery of intestinal microbiota and epithelial integrity.. In addition, CR rats showed pronounced alteration of tight junction, depicted by marked changes in epithelial cell ultrastructure and redistribution of occuldin and claudins as well as disruption in TJ barrier function. Fish oil administration ameliorated disruption of epithelial integrity in CR, which was associated with an improvement of the mucosal structure leading to improved tight junctions.Our study have presented novel evidence that fish oil is involved in the maintenance of epithelial TJ integrity and recovery of gut microbiota, which may have therapeutic potential against CR in intestinal transplantation

Phosphotungstic acid encapsulated in metal-organic framework as catalysts for carbohydrate dehydration to 5-hydroxymetrthylfurfural

MIL-101, a chromium-based metal–organic framework, is known for its very large pore size, large surface area and good stability. However, applications of this material in catalysis are still limited. 5-Hydroxymethylfurfural (HMF) has been considered a renewable chemical platform for the production of liquid fuels and fine chemicals. Phosphotungstic acid, H3PW12O40 (PTA), encapsulated in MIL-101 is evaluated as a potential catalyst for the selective dehydration of fructose and glucose to 5-hydroxymethylfurfural. The results demonstrate that PTA/MIL-101 is effective for HMF production from fructose in DMSO and can be reused. This is the first example of the application of a metal–organic framework in carbohydrate dehydration