Showing papers on "Naturalness published in 1996"

Naturalness and image quality : saturation and lightness variation in color images of natural scenes

Abstract: The relation between perceived image quality and naturalness was investigated by varying the colorfulness of natural images at various lightness levels. At each lightness level, subjects assessed perceived colorfulness, naturalness, and quality as a function of average saturation by means of direct category scaling. Colorfulness was found to increase monotonically with average saturation. The relation between the quality/naturalness judgments and average saturation could always be described by an inverted V-shaped function. A systematic difference was found between quality and naturalness judgments. This difference, reflecting the subjects' preference for more colorful, but, at the same time, somewhat unnatural images, was most noticeable at the original lightness level and diminished with decreasing lightness, in particular being least at the lowest lightness level investigated.

Naturalness bounds on gauge mediated soft terms

Abstract: After a general discussion about the quantitative meaning of the naturalness upper bounds on the masses of supersymmetric particles, we compute these bounds in models with gauge-mediated soft terms. We find interesting upper limits on the right-handed slepton masses that, unless the messenger fields are very light, disfavor minimal models with large messenger content. Deep unphysical minima, that however turn out to be not dangerous, are usually present in such models. The mu-problem can be solved by adding a light singlet only at the price of a large amount of fine tuning that gives also rise to heavy sparticles and large tan\beta.

Vacuum Nucleon Loops and Naturalness.

Abstract: Phenomenological studies support the applicability of naturalness and naive dimensional analysis to hadronic effective lagrangians for nuclei. However, one-baryon-loop vacuum contributions in renormalizable models give rise to unnatural coefficients, which indicates that the quantum vacuum is not described adequately. The effective lagrangian framework accommodates a more general characterization of vacuum contributions without reference to a Dirac sea of nucleons.

A new Chinese text-to-speech system with high naturalness

Abstract: Introduces a new Chinese text-to-speech system that produces far more natural and intelligible synthesized speech than existing systems. There are two distinguishing features in this system. One is the perfect prosodic rules that are made up from the linguistic knowledge and statistical results from a standard Chinese database. These rules are successfully used to modify the elemental synthesis units to get high naturalness while concatenating them into a sentence. The other feature is that the log-magnitude approximate (LMA) filter is used as the synthesis filter in the system. With the LMA filter, the prosody of the synthesized speech can be modified in a wide range while maintaining high intelligence and naturalness. In this paper, the formulated prosodic rules are presented and the LMA filter-based speech synthesis is described in detail.

Retrospective and Outlook

Abstract: The virtues of the algebraic approach are 1) Naturalness of the conceptual structure; directness and unambiguity of the physical interpretation. 2) The sometimes amazing harmony between physical questions and mathematical structures. The theory of von Neumann algebras and C*-algebras offers an adequate language for the concise formulation of the principle of locality in special relativistic quantum physics and tools for further development of the physical theory. But more striking are cases where the discussion of physical questions and the development of a mathematical structure proceed parallel, ignorant of each other and motivated by completely disjoint objectives, till at some time the close ties between them are noticed and a mutually fruitful interaction between physicists and mathematicians sets in. One example in our context is the formulation of equilibrium quantum statistical mechanics in the algebraic setting and the inception of the Tomita-Takesaki theory of modular automorphisms. Another one is the correspondence between the statistics parameter and the Jones index. 3) The fact that a few principles stake out a vast territory in a qualitatively correct manner. The essential principles are locality in the sense of special relativity, stability (positivity of the energy), nuclearity. The consequences range from the emergence of the particle picture with all its ramifications (statistics, charge structure, collision theory) to a natural characterization of equilibrium states and the second law of thermodynamics. 4) A rather detailed understanding of the anatomy of the theory with the recognition of those points where further structural elements are needed and where modifications are demanded if one aspires to a synthesis with the principles of general relativity.

Vacuum Nucleon Loops and Naturalness

Abstract: Phenomenological studies support the applicability of naturalness and naive dimensional analysis to hadronic effective lagrangians for nuclei. However, one-baryon-loop vacuum contributions in renormalizable models give rise to unnatural coefficients, which indicates that the quantum vacuum is not described adequately. The effective lagrangian framework accommodates a more general characterization of vacuum contributions without reference to a Dirac sea of nucleons.

Phenomenological Aspects of Isospin Violation in the Nuclear Force

Abstract: Phenomenological Lagrangians and dimensional power counting are used to assess isospin violation in the nucleon-nucleon force. The $\pi NN$ coupling constants (including the Goldberger-Treiman discrepancy), charge-symmetry breaking, and meson-mixing models are examined. A one-loop analysis of the isospin-violating $\pi NN$ coupling constants is performed using chiral perturbation theory. Meson-mixing models and the $^3$He - $^3$H mass difference are also discussed in the context of naturalness.

Consequences of Low Energy Dynamical Supersymmetry Breaking

Abstract: Relatively simple models can be constructed in which supersymmetry is dynamically broken at energies of $10^5-10^7$ GeV. Models of this kind do not suffer from the naturalness and cosmological difficulties of conventional supergravity models, and make definite predictions for the spectrum of supersymmetric particle masses. Thus ``Renormalizable Visible Sector Models'' are a viable alternative to more conventional approaches. This talk mostly summarizes the results of a recent paper written with Michael Dine and Yuri Shirman.

The semantics of image quality

Abstract: In this contribution we will discuss image quality in the context of the visuo-cognitive system as an information-processing system. To this end, we subdivide the information-processing as performed by the visuo-cognitive system into three distinct processes: (1) the construction of a visual representation of the image, (2) the interpretation of this representation by means of a confrontation with memory, and (3) further processing of the interpreted scene in order to formulate a proper response. A successful completion of these processes can only be en sured when two main requirements are satisfied: (1) the visual representation of the image should be sufficiently precise, and (2) the degree of correspondence between the visual representation and ‘knowledge of reality’ as stored in memory should be high. We then relate these requirements to the attributes ‘usefulness’ and ‘naturalness’ of the image, and give a functional description of image quality in terms of naturalness and usefulness. To conclude, experimental results supporting this description of image quality will be discussed.