Lip tracking has played a significant role in a lip reading system. In this paper, we present a local region based approach to lip tracking, which consists of two phases: (i) lip contour extraction for the first lip frame, and followed by (ii) lip tracking in the subsequent lip frames. Initially, we construct a localized color active color model provided that the foreground and background regio...

The results of photometric CCD monitoring and spectral observations of the black hole binary and microquasar V4641 Sgr in the quiet state are presented. The ellipsoidal light curve with large amplitude of 0.36 in R band suggests the influence of a massive object orbiting around a normal B9 star. In the spectra taken with the 6-m telescope one hour before black hole inferior conjunction, an abso...

Recently, reliable mass estimates for the central black holes in AGN became feasible due to emission-line reverberation techniques. Using this method as a calibrator, it is possible to determine black hole masses for a wide range of AGN, in particular NLS1s. Do NLS1s have smaller black holes than ordinary Seyfert 1 galaxies? Are their black holes smaller compared to the sizes of their host gala...

With most physicists and astrophysicists in agreement that black holes do indeed exist, the focus of astrophysical black hole research has shifted to the detailed properties of these systems. Nature has provided us with an extremely useful probe of the region very close to an accreting black hole — X-ray irradiation of relatively cold material in the vicinity of the black hole can imprint chara...

1047-3203/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.jvcir.2008.04.001 * Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (H. Li), k Ngan). In this paper, a novel face segmentation algorithm is proposed based on facial saliency map (FSM) for head-and-shoulder type video application. This method consists of three stages. The first stage is to generate the saliency map of in...

A time-variability study of the neutral iron line flux at 6.40 keV in the Sgr B2 region from data of Suzaku and Chandra is presented. The highly ionized iron line at 6.68 keV is due to Galactic Center Diffuse X-rays (GCDX), and is thus time invariable. By comparing the 6.68 keV and 6.40 keV line fluxes, we found that the 6.40 keV flux from the Sgr B2 complex region is time variable; particularl...

Motivated by the problem of protecting cryptographic hardware, we continue the investigation of private circuits initiated in [16]. In this work, our aim is to construct circuits that should protect the secrecy of their internal state against an adversary who may modify the values of an unbounded number of wires, anywhere in the circuit. In contrast, all previous works on protecting cryptograph...

The spectrum and variability of the Seyfert galaxy MCG–6-30-15 can be decomposed into two apparently disconnected components: a highly variable power law and an almost constant component which contains a broad and strong iron line. We explore a possible explanation of the puzzling lack of variability of the iron line, by assuming that the variations of the power law component are due to changes...

The authors studied whether the drawing variability in young children is best explicable by (a) demands on the explicit timing system, (b) an underdeveloped ability to control limb dynamics, or (c) both. The explicit timing demands were lower in continuous drawing in comparison with the discontinuous task. The authors manipulated limb dynamics by changing the number of joints involved, with lin...

We show that disc continuum fitting can be used to constrain black hole spin in a subclass of narrow-line Seyfert 1 (NLS1) active galactic nuclei as their low mass and high mass accretion rate means that the disc peaks at energies just below the soft X-ray bandpass. We apply the technique to the NLS1 PG1244+026, where the optical/UV/X-ray spectrum is consistent with being dominated by a standar...