Object representation and magnetic moments in thin alkali films

Unrestricted This thesis is broken into two parts a computer vision part and a solid state physics part. In the computer vision part of the thesis (chapters 1 through 5), the concept of an architecture is discussed with a review of what is known about the brain's visual architecture as it applies to object representation. With this in mind we review the two main types of architectures that are used in computer vision for object representation. A specific object representation is then implemented and optimized to solve a problem in object tracking. This representation is then used to derive the fiducial points of a face usinfg two distinct methods. One using evolutionary algorithms and another by a Bayesian analysis of the feature responses drawn from a gallery of faces. The evolved fiducial representation is tested as a facial detection system. It is shown that the Bayesian analysis of facial images gives an entropy measure that can be used to further improve detection results in the facial detection system. In addition, two similarity metrics are explored in the context of facial detection. It is found that a normalized vector dot product substantially outperforms the Euclidean distance measure.; The solid state part of the thesis is composed of two self contained chapters. An effort has been made to reduce the redundancies between the material but some will necessarily remain (i.e., short descriptions of the experimental setup). Both chapters deal with the phenomenon of magnetism of atomic impurities in and on thin metal host films. The important difference between the chapters, besides the the results, lies in the experimental technique used to measure the magnetism.; In chapter 6, thin films of Pb are covered in situ with sub monolayers of V, Mo and Co in the range between 0.01 and 1 monolayers. If the surface impurities are magnetic they will reduce the superconducting transition temperature of the Pb film. From the reduction of T_{c} the magnetic dephasing rate of the surface impurities 1/τ_{s} and their magnetic cross section σ_{s} are calculated. We find that single V surface impurities are magnetic while single Mo and Co impurities are non-magnetic. Co surface clusters are magnetic.; In chapter 7, thin films of Na, K, Rb and Cs are quench condensed, then covered with 1/100 of a mono-layer of Ti and finally covered with the original host. The magnetization of the films is measured by means of the anomalous Hall effect. An anomalous Hall resistance R^{AHE} is observed for Ti on the surface of K, Rb and Cs and for Ti inside of Cs. Essentially the R^{AHE} varies linearly with the magnetic field and is inversely proportional to the inverse temperature. A small non-linearity of R^{AHE} suggests a Ti moment of about 1μ_{B}.