A novel active-vision system is presented in this paper for moving-object recognition. The proposed system is a natura! extension of the static-object recognition system developed earlier in our laboratory. Pre-marking, via circular markers placed on the objects, and active detection, via a camera mounted on a robot, comprise the two principles of the recognition technique. The primary steps of...

SpatialBoost extends AdaBoost to incorporate spatial reasoning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SpatialBoost on the problem of interactive image segmentation. Our application takes as input a trimap of the original image, trains SpatialBoost on the pixels of the object and the background and use the trained classifier to classify the unlabeled pixels. The spatial reasoning is introduced in ...

Implicit learning research has generally examined form-level regularities with little work being directed at learning abstract rules of the kind underlying language. We constructed an artificial analogue of French in which the verb agreed in gender with the object in object-extracted sentences but not in subject-extracted sentences. We tested whether English native speakers (n = 25) could learn...

It is a well known fact about German that animacy plays a role in determining the word order of verbal arguments. In children’s production, animacy not only affects the order of the direct and indirect object in non-canonical double object constructions, but it also has an influence on the overt dative case marking of the indirect object. Optimality Theory readily accounts for these data in usi...

Visual marking makes it possible to ignore old items during search. In a typical study, old items are previewed 1 s before adding an equal number of new items, one of which is the target. Previewing half of the items reduces by half the search slope relating RT to overall set size, the defining feature of marking. However, previewing half of the items does not always reduce the search slope but...

Using a language game to elicit short sentences in various information structural conditions, we found that Finnish 4- to 5-year-olds already exhibit a characteristic interaction between prosody and word order in marking information structure. Providing insights into the acquisition of this complex system of interactions, the production data showed interesting parallels to adult speakers of Fin...

BACKGROUND Colour-marking polymorphism is widely distributed among cryptic species. To account for the adaptive significance of such polymorphisms, several hypotheses have been proposed to date. Although these hypotheses argue over the degree of camouflage effects of marking morphs (and the interactions between morphs and their microhabitat backgrounds), as far as we know, most empirical eviden...