融合深度与肤色特征的自适应手部跟踪算法

手部跟踪技术是实现自然人机交互的关键。针对现有跟踪方法易受光照、环境等影响及鲁棒性差的不足,提出一种融合深度与肤色特征的自适应手部跟踪算法。考虑手部运动过程的形变,该算法首先利用深度平滑连续性选取深度阈值以实现跟踪区域的自适应尺度变化,获得手部候选区域。在此基础上建立YCbCr空间肤色归一化直方图,在粒子滤波框架下将跟踪问题转换为贝叶斯估计问题,基于最大后验准则确定手部位置,并通过监测粒子重要性权值的方差解决跟踪失效问题,实现复杂观测环境下的鲁棒跟踪。实验结果表明,该跟踪算法可适应不同复杂环境,鲁棒性良好。     

Two types of El Niño and extratropical sea-level pressure variations

This study applies the nonlinear canonical correlation analysis (NLCCA) to explore the nonlinear relationship between the sea-level pressure (SLP) anomalies over the extratropical North Pacific and sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies in the tropical Pacific during 1985–2009. Our results suggest that the asymmetry between the warm eastern Pacific (EP) El Niño–Aleutian Low mode and the cool EP La Niña–anti-phase of the Aleutian Low mode is exhibited in the first NLCCA mode. Nonlinearity of the first NLCCA SST field is enhanced after 1998, and vice versa for the SLP field. The second NLCCA SST mode reveals weak nonlinearity representing the nonlinear central tropical Pacific (CP) El Niño–CP La Niña modes, while the second SLP field depicts the North Pacific Oscillation and anti-phase with the Aleutian Low phases. The nonlinearity of the second SST and SLP NLCCA modes is found to decrease gradually with time. During 1985–1997, the SST field exhibits linearity, while the SLP field shows weak nonlinearity. During 1997–2009, the SST and SLP fields both display weak linearity. Nonlinearity between the extratropical SLP and SST fields is further weakened from the first period. The Aleutian Low pattern could be excited by both EP and CP El Niños. Moreover, the CP El Niños have more connections with the North Pacific Oscillation state rather than the EP El Niños. Conclusively, this study reveals the asymmetric modes between the SLP and SST by the nonlinear method, and contributes to the understanding of the extratropical SLP variability response to two types El Niño events.     

On-chip whole blood plasma separator based on microfiltration,sedimentation and wetting contrast

Miniaturized on-chip blood separators have a great value for point-of-care diagnosis. In our work, a combined design strategy—microfiltration, sedimentation in a retarded flow, and wetting contrast—was taken to overcome the known limitations of on-chip blood separators. Our microfluidic chip consists of a polydimethylsiloxane micropillar array and an etched glass with microchannel branches. The red blood cells are significantly slowed and gradually settled down due to micropillars and enlarged dimension of a chamber. An etched glass microchannel allows the extraction of blood plasma exclusively due to the capillary effect. The fabricated microfluidic device can separate blood plasma from a whole blood sample without any external driving force or dilution. The measured plasma separation efficiency was close to 100 % from human whole blood. Autonomous on-chip separation and collection of blood plasma was demonstrated.     

A heuristic approach to discovering user correlations from organized social stream data

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Recently, with the widespread popularity of SNS (Social Network Service), such as Twitter, Facebook, people are increasingly accustomed to sharing feeling,...     

Social recommendation based on trust and influence in SNS environments

The development of social media provides convenience to people’s lives. People’s social relationship and influence on each other is an important factor in a variety of social activities. It is obviously important for the recommendation, while social relationship and user influence are rarely taken into account in traditional recommendation algorithms. In this paper, we propose a new approach to personalized recommendation on social media in order to make use of such a kind of information, and introduce and define a set of new measures to evaluate trust and influence based on users’ social relationship and rating information. We develop a social recommendation algorithm based on modeling of users’ social trust and influence combined with collaborative filtering. The optimal linear relation between them will be reached by the proposed method, because the importance of users’ social trust and influence varies with the data. Our experimental results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms traditional recommendation in terms of recommendation accuracy and stability.

     

A content-adaptive video quality assessment method for online media service

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Video quality assessment is an important issue for Internet Content Providers (ICPs) to improve their service. Some research has been done on objective video...     

An auto-encoder-based summarization algorithm for unstructured videos

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Video summarization is an effective way to quick view videos and relieve the pressure of videos storage. However the traditional algorithms are hardly adapted to...