Update on the antitrust ghost in the standard-setting machine [patents]

This article presents Richard Stern's Micro Law paper in the May-June 2005 issue of IEEE Micro, by two lawyers involved in presenting Hewlett-Packard's RAND proposal to the IEEE PatCom recently. The paper captured the essence of a long-running obstacle to addressing the anticompetitive patent "hold-up" that undermines the open-standards objectives of standards developing organizations (SDOs). That obstacle is the misconceived fear of antitrust liability if an SDO allows any consideration of license intentions beyond vague or vacuous commitments to reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) licensing during the course of a standard-setting process.     

The antitrust ghost in the standard-setting machine [IEEE standards and RAND licensing]

It is the policy of the IEEE and many other standard-setting organizations to request that any patented technology incorporated into a technical standard be made available to all users of the standard on reasonable and nondiscriminatory (RAND) terms. By the same token, such organizations typically require that participants engaged in formulating a standard disclose whether the proposed standard's use would infringe patents that their companies own. They must also disclose whether such patents will be subject to RAND licensing.     

Unmasking Your Software's Ethical Risks

Software engineers need to anticipate unintended consequences, including negative impacts on society, individuals, and the environment. Even developers with the best of intentions can walk into ethical traps. This article includes four suggestions for software engineers during system development to help recognize these traps: (1) Look for humans values in technical decisions. (2) Identify stakeholders—groups and individuals likely to be affected by the system. (3) Examine how the system will affect the stakeholders' rights and obligations. (4) Review relevant professional standards.     

The physics of ghost imaging

Ghost images are obtained by correlating the output of a single-pixel (bucket) photodetector??which collects light that has been transmitted through or reflected from an object??with the output from a high spatial-resolution scanning photodetector or photodetector array whose illumination has not interacted with that object. The term ??ghost image?? is apt because neither detector??s output alone can yield an image: the bucket detector has no spatial resolution, while the high spatial-resolution detector has not viewed the object. The first ghost imaging experiment relied on the entangled signal and idler outputs from a spontaneous parametric downconverter, and hence the image was interpreted as a quantum phenomenon. Subsequent theory and experiments showed, however, that classical correlations can be used to form ghost images. For example, ghost images can be formed with pseudothermal light, for which quantum mechanics is not required to characterize its photodetection statistics. This paper presents an overview of the physics of ghost imaging. It clarifies and unites two disparate interpretations of pseudothermal ghost imaging??two-photon interference and classical intensity-fluctuation correlations??that had previously been thought to be conflicting. It also reviews recent work on ghost imaging in reflection, ghost imaging through atmospheric turbulence, computational ghost imaging, and two-color ghost imaging.     

应用于热光鬼成像的自适应形态学滤波器

鬼成像是一种新的成像机制,但研究人员主要注重研究鬼成像的理论价值。传统的鬼成像从工程上讲质量通常较差,为了提高成像质量,提出一种新的自适应形态学滤波算法。该算法自动估计斑点的大小,作为形态学滤波中的结构体的大小。对该算法进行了仿真,实验结果表明,应用于热光鬼成像的形态学滤波器可以很好滤除噪声。并对几种典型的鬼成像处理方法进行对比,对比结果显示了该算法的有效性。     

Natural neighbor extrapolation using ghost points

Among locally supported scattered data schemes, natural neighbor interpolation has some unique features that makes it interesting for a range of applications. However, its restriction to the convex hull of the data sites is a limitation that has not yet been satisfyingly overcome. We use this setting to discuss some aspects of scattered data extrapolation in general, compare existing methods, and propose a framework for the extrapolation of natural neighbor interpolants on the basis of dynamic ghost points.     

A ghost in a snowstorm [computer graphics]

There is a storm cloud growing on the horizon of the digital convergence between computer graphics and television/graphic arts. Computer graphics and image processing assume that pixel values are linearly related to light intensity. A typical video or paint image, however, encodes intensity nonlinearly. Most image manipulation software does not take this into account and just does arithmetic on the pixel values as though they were linearly related to light intensity. This is obviously wrong. The question is, how wrong, and for what pixel values is the problem worst and best? The author presents a review of the basic concepts     

深入探讨“GHOST版”系统的安全性

针对目前越来越多的计算机用户使用"GHOST版"系统,本文就GHOST版系统的安全性进行深入的探讨。     

Simulating human cognition: A ghost story

The intentions to simulate human cognition are permanently increasing. Nonetheless, our knowledge about human cognition is based on fragments of different points of view. Hence, it is necessary to examine which demands these points of view make on technologies aiming at simulating human cognition. In this paper it is argued that no technology can function beyond the cognitive abilities of its constructor. It seems that the cognitive limits and constrains of the constructor will also be implanted in the technologies. It is perhaps the right time to think about what kind of future we are going to create by means of an artificial cognition built upon fragmentary, and many times confusing, premises.     

Efficient ghost removal in motion detection with patch-corrected background differentiation

An efficient ghost removal technique is proposed as an extension to adaptive background differentiation for motion detection. The pixels of the first frame in the sequence representing moving objects are replaced with the values taken for the same pixels from the memory bank where those pixels are identified as non-moving ones. The memory bank is built of the frames immediately following or, alternatively preceding, the initial frame of the analyzed sequence. This allows creating the initial background model with no moving pixels. Parameters optimization is conducted for specific case of traffic control system application. Experiments demonstrate that threshold reduction is beneficial to achieve completeness of the ghost removal. Additionally, a second improvement is introduced to reduce for the noise by non-stationary cameras which are shown to be efficiently compensated by a second derivative in the temporal differentiation when working with videos at a sufficiently high frame rate.     

目标相似性度量的鬼影抑制方法

针对背景差分法中的鬼影扰乱运动目标检测与跟踪问题, 提出目标相似性度量的鬼影抑制方法。首先分析间隔帧中目标的直方图分布和像素变化率, 依此判断目标相似度并检测鬼影; 然后提出面向鬼影对象的背景模型更新方法, 快速校正鬼影背景, 抑制鬼影再出现。实验结果表明, 该方法克服了自适应背景方法的检测灵敏度低和运动属性方法消耗高的缺点, 能够快速准确地抑制鬼影。     

Robust image metamorphosis immune from ghost and blur

In this paper, we propose a novel method for the metamorphosis between two different images. By the approach, the transition sequence is generated by stitching two forward and backward warped sequences in a three-dimensional space along transition surface. In contrast to the traditional methods by blending two warped images at each intermediate frame, we continuously warp images on opposite direction without blending until the two warped images match in a three-dimensional space leading to a better transition in quality. Furthermore, for each pixel, we make decision of choosing a given input image best suitable so as to produce plausible in-between images to prevent from ghost and blur. By our scheme, the transition surface is computed by minimizing an energy function in terms of graph-cut optimization. Depending on the transition surface, a warp function is proposed to create a smooth and clear transformation. We demonstrate the advantage of our framework by performing transformation test to various kinds of image couples.     

The use of ghost variables and virtual programming in the documentation and verification of programs

Using ghost variables and virtual programming, a method for documenting programs which exhibit some common characteristics is presented. The annotations required are expressed in a powerful high level assertion language. The usefulness of these annotations is illustrated by the generation of verification conditions for some small example programs written in a dialect of Pascal. Demonstrations of the correctness of these programs are also given.     

Unmasking forest borderlines by an automatic delineation based on airborne laser scanner data

This study presents an automatic methodology based on airborne laser scanner (ALS) data, which allows the mapping of forests, using quantitative criteria typical of forest definitions, i.e. minimum threshold for the height of trees, canopy cover, forest area size, and width. Interactions between forest and other land uses are explored by the methodology for the definition of forest borderlines using an additional criterion; this criterion is the distance-discontinuity (DD), which establishes a minimum width (MW) for portions of territory categorized by land uses different from the forest. The proposed forest mapping approach introduces also a fuzzy algorithm to assess the canopy cover, thereby enhancing the positional accuracy in the delineation of the forest borderline. This methodology has a very flexible mapping approach with the potential to address the many forest definitions existing worldwide. The evaluation and the improvement of the methodology are particularly encouraged by its release as an open source tool.     

基于Qt的电脑横机上位机的设计

通过研究电脑横机主控系统的工作流程、分析电脑横机工作时的数据流向．针对电脑横机的需求,提出一种以开源的Linux为操作系统、ARM处理器为硬件平台的电脑横机上位机软件的设计方法,并且使用Qt对电脑横机的图形用户界面进行设计。给出了图形用户界面的设计步骤及界面之间相互转换的方法。     

From machine learning to machine reasoning

A plausible definition of “reasoning” could be “algebraically manipulating previously acquired knowledge in order to answer a new question”. This definition covers first-order logical inference or probabilistic inference. It also includes much simpler manipulations commonly used to build large learning systems. For instance, we can build an optical character recognition system by first training a character segmenter, an isolated character recognizer, and a language model, using appropriate labelled training sets. Adequately concatenating these modules and fine tuning the resulting system can be viewed as an algebraic operation in a space of models. The resulting model answers a new question, that is, converting the image of a text page into a computer readable text. This observation suggests a conceptual continuity between algebraically rich inference systems, such as logical or probabilistic inference, and simple manipulations, such as the mere concatenation of trainable learning systems. Therefore, instead of trying to bridge the gap between machine learning systems and sophisticated “all-purpose” inference mechanisms, we can instead algebraically enrich the set of manipulations applicable to training systems, and build reasoning capabilities from the ground up.