We investigate the fractional Schrödinger equation with a periodic PT-symmetric potential. In the inverse space, the problem transfers into a first-order nonlocal frequency-delay partial differential equation. We show that at a critical point, the band structure becomes linear and symmetric in the one-dimensional case, which results in a nondiffracting propagation and conical diffraction of input beams. If only one channel in the periodic potential is excited, adjacent channels become uniformly excited along the propagation direction, which can be used to generate laser beams of high power and narrow width. In the two-dimensional case, there appears conical diffraction that depends on the competition between the fractional Laplacian operator and the PT-symmetric potential. This investigation may find applications in novel on-chip optical devices.

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Personal videos often contain visual distractors, which are objects that are accidentally captured that can distract viewers from focusing on the main subjects. We propose a method to automatically detect and localize these distractors through learning from a manually labeled dataset. To achieve spatially and temporally coherent detection, we propose extracting features at the Temporal-Superpixel (TSP) level using a traditional SVM-based learning framework. We also experiment with end-to-end learning using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), which achieves slightly higher performance than other methods. The classification result is further refined in a post-processing step based on graph-cut optimization. Experimental results show that our method achieves an accuracy of 81% and a recall of 86%. We demonstrate several ways of removing the detected distractors to improve the video quality, including video hole filling; video frame replacement; and camera path re-planning. The user study results show that our method can significantly improve the aesthetic quality of videos.

The SOC-monotone function (respectively, SOC-convex function) is a scalar valued function that induces a map to preserve the monotone order (respectively, the convex order), when imposed on the spectral factorization of vectors associated with second-order cones (SOCs) in general Hilbert spaces. In this paper, we provide the sufficient and necessary characterizations for the two classes of functions, and particularly establish that the set of continuous SOC-monotone (respectively, SOC-convex) functions coincides with that of continuous matrix monotone (respectively, matrix convex) functions of order 2.

We introduce and study a geometric heat flow to find Killing vector fields on closed Riemannian manifolds with positive sectional curvature. We study its various properties, prove the global existence of the solution to this flow, discuss its convergence and possible applications, and its relation to the Navier-Stokes equations on manifolds and Kazdan-Warner-Bourguignon-Ezin identity for conformal Killing vector fields. We also provide two new criterions on the existence of Killing vector fields. A similar flow to finding holomorphic vector fields on Khler manifolds will be studied by Li and Liu (2014).