Face recognition via incremental 2DPCA

Recently, the Two-Dimensional Principal Component Analysis (2DPCA) model is proposed and proved to be an efficient approach for face recognition. In this paper, we will investigate the incremental 2DPCA and develop a new constructive method for incrementally adding observation to the existing eigen-space model. An explicit formula for incremental learning is derived. In order to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we performed some typical experiments and show that we can only keep the eigen-space of previous images and discard the raw images in the face recognition process. Furthermore, this proposed incremental approach is faster when compared to the batch method (2DPCD) and the recognition rate and reconstruction accuracy are as good as those obtained by the batch method.

Face recognition via the overlapping energy histogram

In this paper we investigate the face recognition problem via the overlapping energy histogram of the DCT coefficients. Particularly, we investigate some important issues relating to the recognition performance, such as the issue of selecting threshold and the number of bins. These selection methods utilise information obtained from the training dataset. Experimentation is conducted on the Yale face database and results indicate that the proposed parameter selection methods perform well in selecting the threshold and number of bins. Furthermore, we show that the proposed overlapping energy histogram approach outperforms the Eigenfaces, 2DPCA and energy histogram significantly.

Ecophysiology of avian migration in the face of current global hazards

Long-distance migratory birds are often considered extreme athletes, possessing a range of traits that approach the physiological limits of vertebrate design. In addition, their movements must be carefully timed to ensure that they obtain resources of sufficient quantity and quality to satisfy their high-energy needs. Migratory birds may therefore be particularly vulnerable to global change processes that are projected to alter the quality and quantity of resource availability. Because long-distance flight requires high and sustained aerobic capacity, even minor decreases in vitality can have large negative consequences for migrants. In the light of this, we assess how current global change processes may affect the ability of birds to meet the physiological demands of migration, and suggest areas where avian physiologists may help to identify potential hazards. Predicting the consequences of global change scenarios on migrant species requires (i) reconciliation of empirical and theoretical studies of avian flight physiology; (ii) an understanding of the effects of food quality, toxicants and disease on migrant performance; and (iii) mechanistic models that integrate abiotic and biotic factors to predict migratory behaviour. Critically, a multi-dimensional concept of vitality would greatly facilitate evaluation of the impact of various global change processes on the population dynamics of migratory birds.

Non-face to face consultations and communications in primary care : the role and perspective of general practice managers in Scotland

Background Practice managers play an important role in the organisation and delivery of primary care, including uptake and implementation of technologies. Little is currently known about practice managers’ attitudes to the use of information and communication technologies, such as email or text messaging, to communicate or consult with patients.

Objectives To investigate practice managers’ attitudes to non-face-to-face consultation/communication technologies in the routine delivery of primary care and their role in the introduction and normalisation of these technologies.

Methods We carried out a mixed-methods study in Scotland, UK. We invited all practice managers in Scotland to take part in a postal questionnaire survey. A maximum variation sample of 20 survey respondents participated subsequently in in-depth qualitative interviews.

Results Practice managers supported the use of new technologies for routine tasks to manage workload and maximise convenience for patients, but a range of contextual factors such as practice list size, practice deprivation area and geographical location affected whether managers would pursue the introduction of these technologies in the immediate future. The most common objections were medico-legal concerns and lack of perceived patient demand.

Conclusion Practice managers are likely to play a central role in the introduction of new consultation/communication technologies within general practice. They hold varying views on the appropriateness of these technologies, influenced by a complex mix of contextual characteristics.Managers from areas in which the ethos of the practice prioritises personalised care in service delivery are less enthusiastic about the adoption of remote consultation/ communication technologies.

Seabird and marine mammal management options in the face of climate change

Climate change is already impacting Australia’s oceans. Responses by marine life to both climate variability and change have been documented for low trophic levels, however, responses for Australia’s iconic higher trophic level marine taxa are poorly understood, including for many conservation-dependent seabirds and marine mammals. We report initial results from a national study evaluating impacts an adaptation options. Individual time series and combined analyses show consistent responses to historical climate signals, however, improved monitoring protocols are needed to maximize detection of any climate-related demographic signals. Despite difference in sampling , the development of regional multi-species-indices of environmental change provides robust climate indicators over large regions.

Flash-floods : genre subversion and the abject erotic in Dorothy Porter’s The monkey’s mask and El Dorado

When discussing her verse novels, Dorothy Porter explicitly stated that she loved to ‘write bad’. This paper will argue that it was Porter’s engagement with the verse novel form and genre subversion, most notably seen with her detective and crime thriller verse novels The monkey’s mask and El Dorado, that allows for a destabilisation of traditionally established genre conventions, which in turn provide a narrative foundation for Porter’s use of abject erotic imagery.

In both The monkey’s mask and El Dorado there are several types of ‘bodies’ to be examined: the body of the verse narrative, the bodies of the characters subjected to crime, the body of poetry that is referred to as evidence, and the abject eroticised body. Extending upon the studies of Rose Lucas (1997) and Fleur Diamond (1999), this paper contends that it is Porter’s engagement with the abject erotic, as informed by Julia Kristeva’s (1982) theory of the abject and Johanna Blakley’s (1995) discussion of the abject in relation to eroticism, that allows Porter to subvert the phallocentric limitations upheld through the crime fiction genre and offer an alternative representation for lesbian sexuality and desire.

Learning Boltzmann distance metric for face recognition

We introduce a new method for face recognition using a versatile probabilistic model known as Restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM). In particular, we propose to regularise the standard data likelihood learning with an information-theoretic distance metric defined on intra-personal images. This results in an effective face representation which captures the regularities in the face space and minimises the intra-personal variations. In addition, our method allows easy incorporation of multiple feature sets with controllable level of sparsity. Our experiments on a high variation dataset show that the proposed method is competitive against other metric learning rivals. We also investigated the RBM method under a variety of settings, including fusing facial parts and utilising localised feature detectors under varying resolutions. In particular, the accuracy is boosted from 71.8% with the standard whole-face pixels to 99.2% with combination of facial parts, localised feature extractors and appropriate resolutions.

Optimal metric selection for improved multi-pose face recognition with group information

We address the limitation of sparse representation based classification with group information for multi-pose face recognition. First, we observe that the key issue of such classification problem lies in the choice of the metric norm of the residual vectors, which represent the fitness of each class. Then we point out that limitation of the current sparse representation classification algorithms is the wrong choice of the ℓ2 norm, which does not match with data statistics as these residual values may be considerably non-Gaussian. We propose an explicit but effective solution using ℓp norm and explain theoretically and numerically why such metric norm would be able to suppress outliers and thus can significantly improve classification performance comparable to the state-of-arts algorithms on some challenging datasets

Committed, face‐value, hybrid or mutual adaptation? The experiences of international students in Australian higher education

This paper explores the adaptation patterns of international Chinese and Vietnamese students in relation to academic writing practices in a higher education context. The study utilises a trans‐disciplinary framework for interpreting students’ and lecturers’ practices within institutional structures. This framework has been developed by infusing a modified version of Lillis’ heuristic for exploring students’ meaning making with positioning theory.

A prominent finding of the study indicates the emergence of three main forms of adaptation, committed adaptation, face‐value adaptation and hybrid adaptation, that the students employed to gain access to their disciplinary practices. The findings of the study give insights into ways that a dialogical pedagogic model for mutual adaptation can be developed between international students and academics. The aim is to enhance the education of international students in this increasingly internationalised environment.

The AFL’s indigenous round and the innocent face of racism

The opening of the AFL’s Indigenous Round, the chance for the contribution of Indigenous footballers to the game – both past and present – to be recognised and celebrated was marred by a racial taunt from a young supporter at Sydney’s Indigenous star Adam Goodes.

Making the most of the self-quotient image in face recognition

The self-quotient image is a biologically inspired representation which has been proposed as an illumination invariant feature for automatic face recognition. Owing to the lack of strong domain specific assumptions underlying this representation, it can be readily extracted from raw images irrespective of the persons's pose, facial expression etc. What makes the self-quotient image additionally attractive is that it can be computed quickly and in a closed form using simple low-level image operations. However, it is generally accepted that the self-quotient is insufficiently robust to large illumination changes which is why it is mainly used in applications in which low precision is an acceptable compromise for high recall (e.g. retrieval systems). Yet, in this paper we demonstrate that the performance of this representation in challenging illuminations has been greatly underestimated. We show that its error rate can be reduced by over an order of magnitude, without any changes to the representation itself. Rather, we focus on the manner in which the dissimilarity between two self-quotient images is computed. By modelling the dominant sources of noise affecting the representation, we propose and evaluate a series of different dissimilarity measures, the best of which reduces the initial error rate of 63.0% down to only 5.7% on the notoriously challenging YaleB data set.

Infrared face recognition: a literature review

Automatic face recognition (AFR) is an area with immense practical potential which includes a wide range of commercial and law enforcement applications, and it continues to be one of the most active research areas of computer vision. Even after over three decades of intense research, the state-of-the-art in AFR continues to improve, benefiting from advances in a range of different fields including image processing, pattern recognition, computer graphics and physiology. However, systems based on visible spectrum images continue to face challenges in the presence of illumination, pose and expression changes, as well as facial disguises, all of which can significantly decrease their accuracy. Amongst various approaches which have been proposed in an attempt to overcome these limitations, the use of infrared (IR) imaging has emerged as a particularly promising research direction. This paper presents a comprehensive and timely review of the literature on this subject.