arXiv subjects

Zhong Liu

Publications and source records attributed to Zhong Liu.

At least 73 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

PairDiagSph: Generalization of the Exact Pairing Diagonalization Program for Spherical Systems

We present an efficient program for the exact diagonalization solution of the pairing Hamiltonian in spherical systems with rotational invariance based on the SU(2) quasi-spin algebra. The basis vectors with quasi-spin symmetry considered are generated by using an iterative algorithm. Then the Hamiltonian matrix constructed on this basis is diagonalized with the Lanczos algorithm. All non-zero matrix elements of the Hamiltonian matrix are evaluated "on the fly" by the scattering operator and hash search acting on the basis vectors. The OpenMP parallel program thus developed, PairDiagSph, can efficiently calculate the ground-state eigenvalue and eigenvector of general spherical pairing Hamiltonians. Systems with dimension up to 10$^{8}$ can be calculated in few hours on standard desktop computers.

physics.comp-ph↗

arXiv2020

Non-Common Band SAR Interferometry via Compressive Sensing

To avoid decorrelation, conventional synthetic aperture radar interferometry (InSAR) requires that interferometric images should have a common spectral band and the same resolution after proper preprocessing. For a high-resolution (HR) image and a low-resolution (LR) one, the interferogram quality is limited by the LR one since the non-common band (NCB) between two images is usually discarded. In this article, we try to establish an InSAR method to improve interferogram quality by means of exploiting the NCB. To this end, we first define a new interferogram, which has the same resolution as the HR image. Then we formulate the interferometric relationship between the two images into a compressive sensing (CS) model, which contains the proposed HR interferogram. With the sparsity of interferogram in appropriate domains, we model the interferogram formation as a typical sparse recovery problem. Due to the speckle effect in coherent radar imaging, the sensing matrix of our CS model is inherently random. We theoretically prove that the sensing matrix satisfies restricted isometry property, and thus the interferogram recovery performance is guaranteed. Furthermore, we provide a fast interferogram formation algorithm by exploiting computationally efficient structures of the sensing matrix. Numerical experiments show that the proposed method provides better interferogram quality in the sense of reduced phase noise and obtain extrapolated interferogram spectra with respect to CB processing.

eess.SP↗

arXiv2019

Spectro-polarimetric Observations at the NVST: I. Instrumental Polarization Calibration and Primary Measurements

This paper is devoted to the primary spectro-polarimetric observation performed at the New Vacuum Solar Telescope of China since 2017, and our aim is to precisely evaluate the real polarimetric accuracy and sensitivity of this polarimetry by using full Stokes spectro-polarimetric observations of the photospheric line Fe I 532.4 nm. In the work, we briefly describe the salient characteristic of the NVST as a polarimeter in technology and then characterize its instrumental polarization based on the operation in 2017 and 2019. It is verified that the calibration method making use of the instrumental polarization calibration unit (ICU) is stable and credible. The calibration accuracy can reach up to 3$\times 10^{-3}$ . Based on the scientific observation of the NOAA 12645 on April 5th, 2017, we estimate that the residual cross-talk from Stokes $I$ to Stokes $Q$, $U$ and $V$, after the instrumental polarization calibration, is about 4$\times10^{-3}$ on average, which is consistent with the calibration accuracy and close to the photon noise. The polarimetric sensitivity (i.e., the detection limit) for polarized light is of the order of $10^{-3}$ with an integration time over 20 seconds. Slow modulation rate is indeed an issue for the present system. The present NVST polarimeter is expected to be integrated with an high-order adaptive optics system and a field scanner to realize 2D magnetic field vector measurements in the following instrumentation update.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2019

Research progress based on observations of the New Vacuum Solar Telescope

The purpose of this paper is to introduce the main scientific results made by the one-meter New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST), which was put into commission on 2010. NVST is one of the large aperture solar telescopes in the world, located on the shore of Fuxian lake of Yunnan province in China, aiming at serving solar physicists by providing them with high resolution photospheric and chromospheric observational data. Based on the data from NVST and complementary observations from space (e.g., Hinode, SDO and IRIS, etc), dozens of scientific papers have been published with a wide range of topics concentrating mainly on dynamics and activities of fine-scale magnetic structures and their roles in the eruptions of active-region filaments and flares. The achievements include dynamic characteristics of photospheric bright points, umbral dots, penumbral waves, and sunspot/light bridge oscillation, observational evidence of small-scale magnetic reconnection, and fine-scale dynamic structure of prominences. All these new results will shed light on the better understanding of solar eruptive activities. Data release, observation proposals, and future research subjects are introduced and discussed.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2019

Extended Local Binary Patterns for Efficient and Robust Spontaneous Facial Micro-Expression Recognition

Facial Micro-Expressions (MEs) are spontaneous, involuntary facial movements when a person experiences an emotion but deliberately or unconsciously attempts to conceal his or her genuine emotions. Recently, ME recognition has attracted increasing attention due to its potential applications such as clinical diagnosis, business negotiation, interrogations, and security. However, it is expensive to build large scale ME datasets, mainly due to the difficulty of inducing spontaneous MEs. This limits the application of deep learning techniques which require lots of training data. In this paper, we propose a simple, efficient yet robust descriptor called Extended Local Binary Patterns on Three Orthogonal Planes (ELBPTOP) for ME recognition. ELBPTOP consists of three complementary binary descriptors: LBPTOP and two novel ones Radial Difference LBPTOP (RDLBPTOP) and Angular Difference LBPTOP (ADLBPTOP), which explore the local second order information along the radial and angular directions contained in ME video sequences. ELBPTOP is a novel ME descriptor inspired by unique and subtle facial movements. It is computationally efficient and only marginally increases the cost of computing LBPTOP, yet is extremely effective for ME recognition. In addition, by firstly introducing Whitened Principal Component Analysis (WPCA) to ME recognition, we can further obtain more compact and discriminative feature representations, then achieve significantly computational savings. Extensive experimental evaluation on three popular spontaneous ME datasets SMIC, CASME II and SAMM show that our proposed ELBPTOP approach significantly outperforms the previous state-of-the-art on all three single evaluated datasets and achieves promising results on cross-database recognition.Our code will be made available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Learning to Identify High Betweenness Centrality Nodes from Scratch: A Novel Graph Neural Network Approach

Betweenness centrality (BC) is one of the most used centrality measures for network analysis, which seeks to describe the importance of nodes in a network in terms of the fraction of shortest paths that pass through them. It is key to many valuable applications, including community detection and network dismantling. Computing BC scores on large networks is computationally challenging due to high time complexity. Many approximation algorithms have been proposed to speed up the estimation of BC, which are mainly sampling-based. However, these methods are still prone to considerable execution time on large-scale networks, and their results are often exacerbated when small changes happen to the network structures. In this paper, we focus on identifying nodes with high BC in a graph, since many application scenarios are built upon retrieving nodes with top-k BC. Different from previous heuristic methods, we turn this task into a learning problem and design an encoder-decoder based framework to resolve the problem. More specifcally, the encoder leverages the network structure to encode each node into an embedding vector, which captures the important structural information of the node. The decoder transforms the embedding vector for each node into a scalar, which captures the relative rank of this node in terms of BC. We use the pairwise ranking loss to train the model to identify the orders of nodes regarding their BC. By training on small-scale networks, the learned model is capable of assigning relative BC scores to nodes for any unseen networks, and thus identifying the highly-ranked nodes. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world networks demonstrate that, compared to representative baselines, our model drastically speeds up the prediction without noticeable sacrifce in accuracy, and outperforms the state-of-the-art by accuracy on several large real-world networks.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2019

Chromospheric cannonballs on the Sun

In the highly dynamic chromosphere, there exist many kinds of small-scale activities, such as spicules, surges, and Ellerman bombs. Here, we report the discovery of a new phenomenon in the chromosphere observed with the New Vacuum Solar Telescope at the Fuxian Solar Observatory. In the high tempo-spatial resolution H$α$ images, some dark or bright structures are found to fly along the curved trajectory, looking like cannonballs. Their average size, mass, and velocity are about 1.5 $\times$ 10$^{9}$ km$^{3}$, 1.5 $\times$ 10$^{8}$ kg, and 56 km s$^{-1}$, respectively. In the simultaneous (extreme-)ultraviolet images obtained by the Solar Dynamics Observatory, these cannonballs appear as brighter features compared to the surrounding area, implying that there exists some kind of heating during this process. The photospheric magnetograms show the magnetic flux emergence and interaction with the pre-existing fields. These observations reveal that the cannonballs are chromospheric material blobs launched due to the magnetic reconnection between emerging magnetic flux and the pre-existing loops.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2019

Lijiang 2.4-meter Telescope and its Instruments

Lijiang 2.4-meter Telescope(LJT), the largest common-purpose optical telescope in China, has been applied to the world-wide astronomers since 2008. It is located at Gaomeigu site, Lijiang Observatory(LJO), the southwest of China. The site has very good observational conditions. Since 10-year operation, several instruments have been equipped on the LJT. Astronomers can perform both photometric and spectral observations. The main scientific goals of LJT include photometric and spectral evolution of supernova, reverberation mapping of active galactic nucleus, physical properties of binary star and near-earth object(comet and asteroid), identification of exoplanet, and all kinds of transients. Until now, the masses of 41 high accretion rate black holes have been measured, and more than 168 supernova have been identified by the LJT. More than 190 papers related to the LJT have been published. In this paper, the general observation condition of the Gaomeigu site is introduced at first. Then, the LJT structure is described in detail, including the optical, mechanical, motion and control system. The specification of all the instruments, and some detailed parameters of the YFOSC is also presented. Finally, some important scientific results and future expectations are summarized.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2018

VMAV-C: A Deep Attention-based Reinforcement Learning Algorithm for Model-based Control

Recent breakthroughs in Go play and strategic games have witnessed the great potential of reinforcement learning in intelligently scheduling in uncertain environment, but some bottlenecks are also encountered when we generalize this paradigm to universal complex tasks. Among them, the low efficiency of data utilization in model-free reinforcement algorithms is of great concern. In contrast, the model-based reinforcement learning algorithms can reveal underlying dynamics in learning environments and seldom suffer the data utilization problem. To address the problem, a model-based reinforcement learning algorithm with attention mechanism embedded is proposed as an extension of World Models in this paper. We learn the environment model through Mixture Density Network Recurrent Network(MDN-RNN) for agents to interact, with combinations of variational auto-encoder(VAE) and attention incorporated in state value estimates during the process of learning policy. In this way, agent can learn optimal policies through less interactions with actual environment, and final experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in control problem.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2018

Radar Interferometry using Two Images with Different Resolutions

Radar interferometry usually exploits two complex-valued radar images with the same resolution to extract terrain elevation information. This paper considers the interferometry using two radar images with different resolutions, which we refer to as dual-resolution radar interferometry. We find that it is feasible to recover a high-resolution interferogram from a high-resolution image and a low-resolution one. We formulate the dual-resolution interferometry into a compressive sensing problem, and exploit the wavelet-domain sparsity of the interferogram to solve it. Due to the speckle effect in coherent radar imaging, the sensing matrix of our model is expected to have small mutual coherence, which guarantees the performance of our method. In comparison with the conventional radar interferometry methods, the proposed method reduces the resolution requirement of radar image acquisition. It therefore can promote wide coverage, low sampling/data rate and storage cost. Numerical experiments on Sentinel-1 data are made to validate our method.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2018

Formation of an active region filament driven by a series of jets

We present a formation process of a filament in active region NOAA 12574 during the period from 2016 August 11 to 12. Combining the observations of GONG H$α$, Hida spectrum and SDO/AIA 304 A, the formation process of the filament is studied. It is found that cool material ($T\sim10^4$ K) is ejected by a series of jets originating from the western foot-point of the filament. Simultaneously, the magnetic flux emerged from the photosphere in the vicinity of the western foot-point of the filament. These observations suggest that cool material in the low atmosphere can be directly injected into the upper atmosphere and the jets are triggered by the magnetic reconnection between pre-existing magnetic fields and new emerging magnetic fields. Detailed study of a jet at 18:02 UT on August 11 with GST/BBSO TiO observations reveals that some dark threads appeared in the vicinity of the western foot-point after the jet and the projection velocity of plasma along the filament axis was about 162.6$\pm$5.4 km/s. Using with DST/Hida observations, we find that the injected plasma by a jet at 00:42 UT on August 12 was rotating. Therefore, we conclude that the jets not only supplied the material for the filament, but also injected the helicity into the filament simultaneously. Comparing the quantity of mass injection by the jets with the mass of the filament, we conclude that the estimated mass loading by the jets is sufficient to account for the mass in the filament.

astro-ph.SR↗

arXiv2018

Towards the full realization of the RIBLL2 beam line at the HIRFL-CSR complex

The RIBLL2 in-flight separator at IMP, the secondary beam line between two storage rings at the \blue{\uwave{Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL-CSR)}}, has been commissioned to study the rare-isotope beam (RIB) physics at around 300 MeV/nucleon for the first time, in combination of the external target facility (ETF). The unambiguous particle identification in mass and charge states for $^{18}$O and $^{40}$Ar fragments has been achieved in recent experiments. A full realization of RIBLL2 will open many potentials to address important RIB physics problems at around 300 MeV/nucleon.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2018

Quadrature compressive sampling SAR imaging

This paper presents a quadrature compressive sampling (QuadCS) and associated fast imaging scheme for synthetic aperture radar (SAR). Different from other analog-to-information conversions (AIC), QuadCS AICs using independent spreading signals sample the SAR echoes due to different transmitted pulses. Then the resulting sensing matrix has lower correlation between any two columns than that by a fixed spreading signal, and better SAR image can be reconstructed. With proper setting of the spreading signals in QuadCS, the sensing matrix has the structures suitable for fast computation of matrix-vector multiplication operations, which leads to the fast image reconstruction. The performance of the proposed scheme is assessed using real SAR image. The reconstructed SAR images with only one-fourth of the Nyquist data achieve the image quality similar to that of the classical SAR images with Nyquist samples.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

A General and Yet Efficient Scheme for Sub-Nyquist Radar Processing

We study the target parameter estimation for sub-Nyquist pulse-Doppler radar. Several past works have addressed this problem but either have low estimation accuracy for off-grid targets, take large computation load, or lack versatility for analog-to-information conversion (AIC) systems. To overcome these difficulties, we present a general and efficient estimation scheme. The scheme first formulates a general model in the sense that it is applicable to all AICs regardless of whether the targets are on or off the grids. The estimation of Doppler shifts and delays is performed sequentially, in which the Doppler estimation is formulated into a spatial spectrum estimation problem and the delay estimation is decomposed into a series of compressive parameter estimation problems with each corresponding to an estimated Doppler shift. By the sequential and decomposed processing, the computational complexity is substantially reduced, and by the parametric estimation techniques, the high accurate estimation is obtained. Theoretical analyses and numerical experiments show the effectiveness and the correctness of the proposed scheme.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

Objective Image Quality Assessment for High Resolution Photospheric Images by Median Filter Gradient Similarity

All next generation ground-based and space-based solar telescopes require a good quality assessment metric in order to evaluate their imaging performance. In this paper, a new image quality metric, the median filter gradient similarity (MFGS) is proposed for photospheric images. MFGS is a no-reference/blind objective image quality metric (IQM) by a measurement result between 0 and 1 and has been performed on short-exposure photospheric images captured by the New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST) of the Fuxian Solar Observatory and by the Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) onboard the Hinode satellite, respectively. The results show that: (1)the measured value of MFGS changes monotonically from 1 to 0 with degradation of image quality; (2)there exists a linear correlation between the measured values of MFGS and root-mean-square-contrast (RMS-contrast) of granulation; (3)MFGS is less affected by the image contents than the granular RMS-contrast. Overall, MFGS is a good alternative for the quality assessment of photospheric images.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2017

A General Sequential Delay-Doppler Estimation Scheme for Sub-Nyquist Pulse-Doppler Radar

Sequential estimation of the delay and Doppler parameters for sub-Nyquist radars by analog-to-information conversion (AIC) systems has received wide attention recently. However, the estimation methods reported are AIC-dependent and have poor performance for off-grid targets. This paper develops a general estimation scheme in the sense that it is applicable to all AICs regardless whether the targets are on or off the grids. The proposed scheme estimates the delay and Doppler parameters sequentially, in which the delay estimation is formulated into a beamspace direction-of- arrival problem and the Doppler estimation is translated into a line spectrum estimation problem. Then the well-known spatial and temporal spectrum estimation techniques are used to provide efficient and high-resolution estimates of the delay and Doppler parameters. In addition, sufficient conditions on the AIC to guarantee the successful estimation of off-grid targets are provided, while the existing conditions are mostly related to the on-grid targets. Theoretical analyses and numerical experiments show the effectiveness and the correctness of the proposed scheme.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2017

High Performance Parallel Image Reconstruction for New Vacuum Solar Telescope

Many technologies have been developed to help improve spatial resolution of observational images for ground-based solar telescopes, such as adaptive optics (AO) systems and post-processing reconstruction. As any AO system correction is only partial, it is indispensable to use post-processing reconstruction techniques. In the New Vacuum Solar Telescope (NVST), speckle masking method is used to achieve the diffraction limited resolution of the telescope. Although the method is very promising, the computation is quite intensive, and the amount of data is tremendous, requiring several months to reconstruct observational data of one day on a high-end computer. To accelerate image reconstruction, we parallelize the program package on a high performance cluster. We describe parallel implementation details for several reconstruction procedures. The code is written in C language using Message Passing Interface (MPI) and optimized for parallel processing in a multi-processor environment. We show the excellent performance of parallel implementation, and the whole data processing speed is about 71 times faster than before. Finally, we analyze the scalability of the code to find possible bottlenecks, and propose several ways to further improve the parallel performance. We conclude that the presented program is capable of executing in real-time reconstruction applications at NVST.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2016

Plastic scintillation detectors for precision time-of-flight measurements of relativistic heavy ions

Plastic scintillation detectors for Time-of-Flight (TOF) measurements are almost essential for event-by-event identification of relativistic rare isotopes. In this work, a pair of plastic scintillation detectors of 50 $\times$ 50 $\times$ 3$^{t}$ mm$^3$ and 80 $\times$ 100 $\times$ 3$^{t}$ mm$^3$ have been set up at the external target facility (ETF), Institute of Modern Physics. Their time, energy and position responses are measured with $^{18}$O primary beam at 400 MeV/nucleon. After the off-line walk-effect and position corrections, the time resolution of the two detectors are determined to be 27 ps ($σ$) and 36 ps ($σ$), respectively. Both detectors have nearly the same energy resolution of 3$\%$ ($σ$) and position resolution of 2 mm ($σ$). The detectors have been used successfully in nuclear reaction cross section measurements, and will be be employed for upgrading RIBLL2 beam line at IMP as well as for the high energy branch at HIAF.

physics.ins-det↗