Spatiotemporal sampling of dynamic environment sequences

Environment sampling is a popular technique for rendering scenes with distant environment illumination. However, the temporal consistency of animations synthesized under dynamic environment sequences has not been fully studied. This paper addresses this problem and proposes a novel method, namely spatiotemporal sampling, to fully exploit both the temporal and spatial coherence of environment sequences. Our method treats an environment sequence as a spatiotemporal volume and samples the sequence by stratifying the volume adaptively. For this purpose, we first present a new metric to measure the importance of each stratified volume. A stratification algorithm is then proposed to adaptively suppress the abrupt temporal and spatial changes in the generated sampling patterns. The proposed method is able to automatically adjust the number of samples for each environment frame and produce temporally coherent sampling patterns. Comparative experiments demonstrate the capability of our method to produce smooth and consistent animations under dynamic environment sequences.     

Transflective ferroelectric liquid‐crystal display with a single‐cell gap

Abstract— A ferroelectric liquid‐crystal (FLC) display was optimized as a transflective liquid‐crystal display (LCD). In this configuration, the single‐cell‐gap approach was considered. The optimized configuration exhibits a high contrast ratio, wide viewing angles, and achromatic (black/white) switching in both the transmissive and reflective modes. Because no double‐cell‐gap structure, no subpixel separation, and no patterning polarizers and retarders are included in the configuration, the configuration is easy to fabricate and also possess a perfect dark state. This configuration is also suitable for bistable applications.     

A lamellar ceria structure with encapsulated platinum nanoparticles

A novel lamellar feather-like CeO₂ structure has been fabricated by using a triblock copolymer as the structure-directing agent. This material was characterized in detail by X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy, and BET surface area measurements. Compared with conventional spherical shaped ceria prepared by ammonia gelation, the ceria feathers have superior ability to support nanosized platinum particles due to their special structure. The “skeletons” of ceria feathers can serve as an ideal host matrix to anchor the platinum particles. Furthermore, the inter-crossing pattern of the “skeletons” also acts as a partition to separate platinum particles, allowing the Pt nanoparticles (average diameter ∼6 nm) to be highly dispersed in the structure. The Pt/feather-like CeO₂ catalyst exhibits high activity in the water gas shift reaction.      

The bile canalicular network in vitro

In 7 PHA--and PPD stimulated lymphocyte cultures from healthy human donors the maintained immunosuppressive effect of Rifampicin was investigated. Concentrations of 5-200 mug RMP/ml culture medium were used. A significant decrease in the transformation rate was found at 20 mug/ml and higher concentrations. A vitality examination (trypan blue staining) on lymphocytes after 72 hours cultivation in a RMP-containing medium with the same concentrations showed no increase of stained cells as compared with the controls. It is suggested that the observed inhibition of lymphocyte reactivity is to be attributed to an immunosuppressive effect of RMP and not to a toxic influence.     

LC-VCOs using spiral inductors with single- and dual-layer patterned floating shields: a comparative study

This letter studies and compares class-B VCOs using spiral inductors with the proposed dual-layer patterned floating shield (DL-PFS) and conventional single-layer patterned floating shield (SL-PFS). The proposed DL-PFS technique utilizes two lowest metal layers to effectively reduce the capacitive induced current to the substrate in an on-chip spiral inductor, thereby boosts its Q-factor by 40% when compared with the conventional SL-PFS approach. We fabricated, as a proof of concept, the class-B LC-VCOs using the DL-PFS and SL-PFS in 0.13 µm CMOS. Operating at 10 GHz, the VCO with the DL-PFS inductor measures a 3.6 dB phase noise (PN) improvement at the same power consumption of 2.12 mW. Specifically, the VCO with DL-PFS inductor is tunable from 9.3-to-10.1 GHz and measured PN at 10 GHz is ?132.5 dBc/Hz at 10 MHz offset while consuming 2.12 mW at the lowest 0.6 V supply. The achieved figure-of-merit (187.4 dBc/Hz@1 MHz offset) compares favorably with the recent state-of-the-art.     

Real-time video object segmentation in H.264 compressed domain

In this study the authors proposed a real-time video object segmentation algorithm that works in the H.264 compressed domain. The algorithm utilises the motion information from the H.264 compressed bit stream to identify background motion model and moving objects. In order to preserve spatial and temporal continuity of objects, Markov random field (MRF) is used to model the foreground field. Quantised transform coefficients of the residual frame are also used to improve segmentation result. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can effectively extract moving objects from different kinds of sequences. The computation time of the segmentation process is merely about 16 ms per frame for CIF size frame, allowing the algorithm to be applied in real-time applications.     

Cationic Covalent‐Organic Framework as Efficient Redox Motor for High‐Performance Lithium–Sulfur Batteries

The shuttle effect of soluble lithium polysulfides (LiPSs) leads to the rapid decay of sulfur cathode, severely hindering the practical applications of lithium‐sulfur (Li‐S) batteries. To this point, a covalent‐organic framework (COF) with proper cationic sites, which can be utilized as the cathode host of high‐performance Li–S batteries, is reported. The chemical sulfur anchoring within micropores effectively suppresses the dissolution of LiPSs into the electrolyte. During the discharge step, the cationic sites can accept electrons from anode and deliver them to polysulfides to facilitate the polysulfides' disintegration. Meanwhile, the cationic sites can receive electrons from polysulfides and then send them to the anode during the charge process, which promotes the polysulfides oxidation. Thus, both experiments and computational modeling show that the cationic COF can effectively inhibit the shuttle effect of LiPSs and improve the batteries' performances. Compared with electrically neutral COFs, the cationic COF‐based batteries show much better cycling stability even at high current density, for instance, a high specific capacity of 468 mA h g^?1 is retained after 300 cycles at a current density of 4.0 C.