No Arabic abstract
We study the association between physical appearance and family income using a novel data which has 3-dimensional body scans to mitigate the issue of reporting errors and measurement errors observed in most previous studies. We apply machine learning to obtain intrinsic features consisting of human body and take into account a possible issue of endogenous body shapes. The estimation results show that there is a significant relationship between physical appearance and family income and the associations are different across the gender. This supports the hypothesis on the physical attractiveness premium and its heterogeneity across the gender.
Neural machine translation has achieved remarkable empirical performance over standard benchmark datasets, yet recent evidence suggests that the models can still fail easily dealing with substandard inputs such as misspelled words, To overcome this issue, we introduce a new encoding heuristic of the input symbols for character-level NLP models: it encodes the shape of each character through the images depicting the letters when printed. We name this new strategy visual embedding and it is expected to improve the robustness of NLP models because humans also process the corpus visually through printed letters, instead of machinery one-hot vectors. Empirically, our method improves models robustness against substandard inputs, even in the test scenario where the models are tested with the noises that are beyond what is available during the training phase.
3D content creation is referred to as one of the most fundamental tasks of computer graphics. And many 3D modeling algorithms from 2D images or curves have been developed over the past several decades. Designers are allowed to align some conceptual images or sketch some suggestive curves, from front, side, and top views, and then use them as references in constructing a 3D model automatically or manually. However, to the best of our knowledge, no studies have investigated on 3D human body reconstruction in a similar manner. In this paper, we propose a deep learning based reconstruction of 3D human body shape from 2D orthographic views. A novel CNN-based regression network, with two branches corresponding to frontal and lateral views respectively, is designed for estimating 3D human body shape from 2D mask images. We train our networks separately to decouple the feature descriptors which encode the body parameters from different views, and fuse them to estimate an accurate human body shape. In addition, to overcome the shortage of training data required for this purpose, we propose some significantly data augmentation schemes for 3D human body shapes, which can be used to promote further research on this topic. Extensive experimen- tal results demonstrate that visually realistic and accurate reconstructions can be achieved effectively using our algorithm. Requiring only binary mask images, our method can help users create their own digital avatars quickly, and also make it easy to create digital human body for 3D game, virtual reality, online fashion shopping.
In this paper, we consider the problem to automatically reconstruct garment and body shapes from a single near-front view RGB image. To this end, we propose a layered garment representation on top of SMPL and novelly make the skinning weight of garment independent of the body mesh, which significantly improves the expression ability of our garment model. Compared with existing methods, our method can support more garment categories and recover more accurate geometry. To train our model, we construct two large scale datasets with ground truth body and garment geometries as well as paired color images. Compared with single mesh or non-parametric representation, our method can achieve more flexible control with separate meshes, makes applications like re-pose, garment transfer, and garment texture mapping possible. Code and some data is available at https://github.com/jby1993/BCNet.
In recent years there has been significant debate on whether the edge type of graphene nanoflakes (GNF) or graphene quantum dots (GQD) are relevant for their electronic structure, thermal stability and optical properties. Using computer simulations, we have proven that there is a fundamental difference in the calculated absorption spectra between samples of the same shape, similar size but different edge type, namely, armchair or zigzag edges. These can be explained by the presence of electronic structures near the Fermi level which are localized on the edges. These features are also evident from the dependence of band gap on the GNF size, which shows three very distinct trends for different shapes and edge geometries.
This paper makes the following original contributions. First, we develop a unifying framework for testing shape restrictions based on the Wald principle. The test has asymptotic uniform size control and is uniformly consistent. Second, we examine the applicability and usefulness of some prominent shape enforcing operators in implementing our framework. In particular, in stark contrast to its use in point and interval estimation, the rearrangement operator is inapplicable due to a lack of convexity. The greatest convex minorization and the least concave majorization are shown to enjoy the analytic properties required to employ our framework. Third, we show that, despite that the projection operator may not be well-defined/behaved in general parameter spaces such as those defined by uniform norms, one may nonetheless employ a powerful distance-based test by applying our framework. Monte Carlo simulations confirm that our test works well. We further showcase the empirical relevance by investigating the relationship between weekly working hours and the annual wage growth in the high-end labor market.