London, A new technique for matching faces before and after plastic surgery could now help police uncover criminals who go under the knife to disguise themselves. A team, including an Indian origin computer scientist at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana, is behind the new facial-recognition software. “If someone has plastic surgery, they’re trying to change the appearance of one or more parts of their face,” New scientist quoted Kevin Bowyer, a computer scientist at the University, as saying. As a result, existing software can hardly match before and after photos gathered from plastic surgery websites. Gaurav Aggarwal of the team realised that matching individual facial features rather than whole faces could be more successful. Aggarwal was inspired by a facial-recognition technique called sparse representation, which matches an image of a face by comparing it with combinations of individual features from faces already recorded in a database. If the closest matching combination turns out to be made up of features mostly drawn from one person in the database, it is a good bet to say the target image is also of that person. But if the best match combines features pulled from images of many different people, then the system has failed to identify the new face. However, to function properly sparse representation requires multiple images of each person in the database, so it does not work with pairs of before and after surgery pictures alone. The new system does. It uses two databases: a general one full of random faces, and another containing all of the “before” pictures -- akin to police mugshots.When a target “after” picture is analysed, a composite picture as similar as possible is created from the features of people in the general database. All of the “before” pictures go through the same process. If the composite picture created using the “after” picture matches closely with any of the composite pictures derived from the “before” pictures, the two are declared a match. The team found that while surgery changes the appearance of a face, many individual features stay the same, and matching based on the nose or eyes alone was actually more accurate than some existing whole-face techniques. Combining the matches of all facial features gave the team a 78 per cent success rate when comparing pre- and post-surgical photos. Their work was presented this week at the Workshop on the Applications of Computer Vision in Breckenridge, Colorado. Source: Indian Express
New software could expose face-changing criminals
New Windows Phone 8 features: screenshots, pinch-to-zoom camera, more
Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Phone 8 mobile OS will include the ability to capture screenshots and several new camera functions like panorama setting, the company said on stage at today’s big Nokia event. Microsoft corporate VP Joe Belfiore (pictured) talked about new features for the Windows Phone 8, which will be included on the just-announced Nokia Lumia 920. One of the big features the Lumia 920 includes is a PureView camera that claims to be one of the best smartphone cameras ever made. In tandem, Belfiore decided to show off new camera features for WP8. Here’s what he introduced on stage: Screenshots — Windows Phone 8 will make it much easier to take screenshots, something developers (and phone reviewers) have wanted for a long while. Pressing the home button and power button will take a screenshot of what’s on your screen. Pinch-to-zoom camera support — Inside the native Windows Phone 8 camera app, there is no more zoom bar. Instead, you can pinch-to-zoom like you do on other smartphone OSes. Blink Lens app — This one’s pretty cool. The Blink Lens app, which was written by Microsoft’s research team, lets you get a great picture of someone’s face by snapping a ton of photos at once. It automatically picks the best photo, or you can go back later to modify it and pick one you like more. Deep SkyDrive integration — Full resolution photos will automatically be uploaded to one’s SkyDrive account. Belfiore took a photo and it automatically showed up in the native SkyDrive app on a Windows 8 laptop, showing the connected state of SkyDrive to all devices. (Just Source: VentureBeatNASA's GRAIL Creates Most Accurate Moon Gravity Map
This image depicting the porosity of the lunar highland crust was derived using bulk density data from NASA's GRAIL mission and independent grain density measurements from NASA's Apollo moon mission samples as well as orbital remote-sensing data. Image credit: SA/JPL-Caltech/ IPGP.
Twin NASA probes orbiting Earth's moon have generated the highest resolution gravity field map of any celestial body. The new map, created by the Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission, is allowing scientists to learn about the moon's internal structure and composition in unprecedented detail. Data from the two washing machine-sized spacecraft also will provide a better understanding of how Earth and other rocky planets in the solar system formed and evolved. The gravity field map reveals an abundance of features never before seen in detail, such as tectonic structures, volcanic landforms, basin rings, crater central peaks and numerous simple, bowl-shaped craters. Data also show the moon's gravity field is unlike that of any terrestrial planet in our solar system. These are the first scientific results from
GRAIL's Gravity Tour of the Moon: This movie shows the variations in the lunar gravity field as measured by NASA's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) during the primary mapping mission from March to May 2012. Very precise microwave measurements between two spacecraft, named Ebb and Flow, were used to map gravity with high precision and high spatial resolution. Video credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MIT/GSFC.
the prime phase of the mission, and they are published in three papers in the journal Science. "What this map tells us is that more than any other celestial body we know of, the moon wears its gravity field on its sleeve," said GRAIL Principal Investigator Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. "When we see a notable change in the gravity field, we can sync up this change with surface topography features such as craters, rilles or mountains." According to Zuber, the moon's gravity field preserves the record of impact bombardment that characterized all terrestrial planetary bodies and reveals evidence for fracturing of the interior extending to the deep crust and possibly the mantle. This impact record is preserved, and now precisely measured, on the moon. The probes revealed the bulk density of the moon's highland crust is substantially lower than generally assumed. This low-bulk crustal density agrees well with data obtained during the final Apollo lunar missions in the early 1970s, indicating that
This map shows the gravity field of the moon as measured by NASA's GRAIL mission. Image credit: NASA/ARC/MIT.
local samples returned by astronauts are indicative of global processes. "With our new crustal bulk density determination, we find that the average thickness of the moon's crust is between 21 and 27 miles (34 and 43 kilometers), which is about 6 to 12 miles (10 to 20 kilometers) thinner than previously thought," said Mark Wieczorek, GRAIL co-investigator at the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. "With this crustal thickness, the bulk composition of the moon is similar to that of Earth. This supports models where the moon is derived from Earth materials that were ejected during a giant impact event early in solar system history." The map was created by the spacecraft transmitting radio signals to define precisely the distance between them as they orbit the moon in formation. As they fly over areas of greater and lesser gravity caused by visible features, such as mountains and craters, and masses hidden beneath the lunar surface, the distance between the two spacecraft will change slightly. "We used gradients of the gravity field in order to highlight smaller and narrower structures than could be seen in previous datasets," said Jeff Andrews-Hanna, a GRAIL guest scientist with the Colorado School of Mines in Golden. "This data revealed a population of long, linear gravity anomalies, with lengths of hundreds of kilometers, crisscrossing the surface. These linear gravity anomalies indicate the presence of dikes, or long, thin, vertical bodies of solidified magma in the subsurface. The dikes are among the oldest features
Gravity Recovery And Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) spacecrafts. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
on the moon, and understanding them will tell us about its early history."While results from the primary science mission are just beginning to be released, the collection of gravity science by the lunar twins continues. GRAIL's extended mission science phase began Aug. 30 and will conclude Dec. 17. As the end of mission nears, the spacecraft will operate at lower orbital altitudes above the moon. When launched in September 2011, the probes were named GRAIL A and B. They were renamed Ebb and Flow in January by elementary students in Bozeman, Mont., in a nationwide contest. Ebb and Flow were placed in a near-polar, near-circular orbit at an altitude of approximately 34 miles (55 kilometers) on Dec. 31, 2011, and Jan. 1, 2012, respectively. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., manages the mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington. GRAIL is part of the Discovery Program managed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. Lockheed Martin Space Systems of Denver built the spacecraft. To view the lunar gravity map, visit http://bit.ly/grailtour . For more information about the mission, visit:http://www.nasa.gov/grail . JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Images (mentioned), Video (mentioned), Text, Credits: NASA / Dwayne Brown / JPL / DC Agle / Massachusetts Institute of Technology / Sarah McDonnell. Greetings, Orbiter.ch Source: Orbiter.ch Space News
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