Body image and body composition: comparisons of young male elite soccer players and controls

[EN] The purpose of this study was to evaluate body composition and body image (perception and satisfaction) in a group of young elite soccer players and to compare the data with those of a control group (age and BMI matched). Participants were 56 volunteer males whose mean age and BMI were 19.6 (SD 1.3) years and 23.3 (SD 1.1) kg/m2, respectively. Results showed that soccer players have a higher lean mass and lower fat mass than controls. Moreover, body perception (difference between current and actual image) was more accurate in controls than in soccer players, and the results suggest a tendency for soccer players to aspire to have more muscle mass and body fat. Soccer players perceived an ideal image with significantly higher body-fat percentage than their current and actual images. There were no body-dissatisfaction differences between groups, however. Although the results are necessarily limited by the small sample size, the findings should be of interest to coaches of young elite soccer teams.

Optical intrinsically fuzzy mathematical morphology for gray-scale image processing

Intrinsically fuzzy morphological erosion and dilation are extended to a total of eight operations that have been formulated in terms of a single morphological operation--biased dilation. Based on the spatial coding of a fuzzy variable, a bidirectional projection concept is proposed. Thus, fuzzy logic operations, arithmetic operations, gray-scale dilation, and erosion for the extended intrinsically fuzzy morphological operations can be included in a unified algorithm with only biased dilation and fuzzy logic operations. To execute this image algebra approach we present a cellular two-layer processing architecture that consists of a biased dilation processor and a fuzzy logic processor. (C) 1996 Optical Society of America