Analytic Tangent Irradiance Environment Maps for Anisotropic Surfaces

Environment‐mapped rendering of Lambertian isotropic surfaces is common, and a popular technique is to use a quadratic spherical harmonic expansion. This compact irradiance map representation is widely adopted in interactive applications like video games. However, many materials are anisotropic, and shading is determined by the local tangent direction, rather than the surface normal. Even for visualization and illustration, it is increasingly common to define a tangent vector field, and use anisotropic shading. In this paper, we extend spherical harmonic irradiance maps to anisotropic surfaces, replacing Lambertian reflectance with the diffuse term of the popular Kajiya‐Kay model. We show that there is a direct analogy, with the surface normal replaced by the tangent. Our main contribution is an analytic formula for the diffuse Kajiya‐Kay BRDF in terms of spherical harmonics; this derivation is more complicated than for the standard diffuse lobe. We show that the terms decay even more rapidly than for Lambertian reflectance, going as l^–3, where l is the spherical harmonic order, and with only 6 terms (l = 0 and l = 2) capturing 99.8% of the energy. Existing code for irradiance environment maps can be trivially adapted for real‐time rendering with tangent irradiance maps. We also demonstrate an application to offline rendering of the diffuse component of fibers, using our formula as a control variate for Monte Carlo sampling.     

Composite indicator for railway infrastructure management

Railway Engineering Science - The assessment and analysis of railway infrastructure capacity is an essential task in railway infrastructure management carried out to meet the required quality and...     

Results demonstrating techniques for enhancing electrochemical reactions involving iron oxide in slags and C in liquid iron

Two techniques are described for the enhancement of the kinetics of reduction of iron oxide from slags by carbon in molten iron. Laboratory experiments have shown that the rate of iron oxide reduction by carbon-saturated iron can be increased by 5 to 10 times when the reaction is carried out under a reduced-pressure atmosphere. This effect is thought to be the result of the increased volumetric gas evolution through the slag layer and the associated increase in slag stirring. A model is presented, which relates the mass-transfer coefficient for ferrous ions in the slag to its stirring that is controlled by varying the ambient pressure. Additional laboratory experiments examined the electrochemical nature of iron oxide reduction from slag by carbon in liquid iron. Results indicate that the reduction of iron oxide from slag is increased in the presence of an applied electric field. The external circuit allows for the separation of the half-cell reactions associated with iron oxide reduction and decarburization and increases the reaction area available for the individual reactions. These results have significant implications for several important slag metal reactions, which occur during ironmaking and steelmaking operations.     

Optical and electrical properties of ZrSe3 single crystals grown by chemical vapour transport technique

Single crystals of the lamellar compound, ZrSe₃, were grown by chemical vapour transport technique using iodine as a transporting agent. The grown crystals were characterized with the help of energy dispersive analysis by X-ray (EDAX), which gave confirmation about the stoichiometry. The optical band gap measurement of as grown crystals was carried out with the help of optical absorption spectra in the range 700–1450 nm. The indirect as well as direct band gap of ZrSe₃ were found to be 1.1 eV and 1.47 eV, respectively. The resistivity of the as grown crystals was measured using van der Pauw method. The Hall parameters of the grown crystals were determined at room temperature from Hall effect measurements. Electrical resistivity measurements were performed on this crystal in the temperature range 303–423 K. The crystals were found to exhibit semiconducting nature in this range. The activation energy and anisotropy measurements were carried out for this crystal. Pressure dependence of electrical resistance was studied using Bridgman opposed anvils set up up to 8 GPa. The semiconducting nature of ZrSe₃ single crystal was inferred from the graph of resistance vs pressure. The results obtained are discussed in detail.     

Discontinuity-Preserving Surface Reconstruction Using Stochastic Differential Equations

We address the problem of reconstructing a surface from irregularly spaced sparse and noisy range data while concurrently identifying and preserving the significant discontinuities in depth. It is well known that, starting from either the probabilistic Markov random field model or the mechanical membrane or thin plate model for the surface, the solution of the reconstruction problem can be eventually reduced to the global minimization of a certain “energy” function. Requiring the preservation of depth discontinuities makes the energy function nonconvex and replete with multiple local minima. We present a new method for obtaining discontinuity-preserving reconstruction based on the numerical solution of an appropriate Ito vector stochastic differential equation (SDE). The reconstructed surface is found by following the sample path of the (stochastic) diffusion process that solves the SDE in question. Our central contribution is the demonstration of the efficacy of the stochastic differential equation technique for solving a vision problem. Through comparisions of the results of our method to those of the two well-known existingglobalminimization based reconstruction techniques, we show a significant improvement in the final reconstructions obtained.     

Noninvasive 3D vital imaging and characterization of notochordal cells of the intervertebral disc by femtosecond near-infrared two-photon laser scanning microscopy and spatial-volume rendering

The central region of the intervertebral disc (IVD) in infant humans is made and maintained by notochordal cells (NCs). These cells disappear during maturation to be replaced by mature chondrocyte-like cells. NCs are completely different morphologically from the mature chondrocyte-like IVD cells and have complex and essential functions but little is known about them. Recently, two-photon laser scanning microscopy (TPLSM) using near-infrared (NIR) femtosecond pulsed lasers has emerged as a promising noninvasive optical technique for observing unfixed living 3D biological specimens in situ and in vitro. Several lines of evidence suggest that compared with conventional laser scanning confocal microscopy (LSCM), femtosecond NIR laser-based TPLSM has any number of advantages including 3D resolution without a spatial filter (confocal pinhole), minimal photobleaching, and photodamage above and below the focal plane, and importantly, greater depth penetration. We have thus taken advantage of these unique features of femtosecond laser-based TPLSM for vital 3D imaging in conjunction with advanced spatial-volume rendering modalities to compare morphologies of NCs/clusters from pig caudal discs with chondrocyte-like IVD cells from bovine caudal discs, both in ex vivo tissue and when isolated and grown in vitro within 3D alginate scaffolds. Our results provide evidence that (a) ex vivo notochordal tissue consists of areas with NC clusters, and those dominated by tubular structures of low cell density (b) within 3D in vitro scaffolds the morphology of NC is heterogeneous and the cells contain distinct cytoplasmic vacuole-like structures occasionally including acidic subinclusions (c) a quantitative determination based on 3D spatial and volumetric-rendering reveals an average NC diameter of 22.05 microm (range 11.96-46.63 microm) and NC volume of 9701 microm(3) (2041-36427 microm(3)) whereas chondrocyte-like cells have a mean volume of 3279 microm(3) and diameter of 12.20 microm. Taken together, this study demonstrates that femtosecond TPLSM has unique advantages over other conventional histological and in particular LSCM for high resolution noninvasive vital characterization of notochordal and chondrocyte-like cells of IVD over extended depths beyond 300-500 microm.     

Software development for the 8052AH-basic microcontroller

Application software for Intel's 8052AH-basic microcontroller can be developed in MCS basic-52, an enhanced version of basic, using the onchip basic interpreter. The paper explores the 8052AH-basic device and its language in comparison with the standard Microsoft basic and presents some software routines and other guidelines for programmers. Control-oriented applications, as opposed to conventional number-crunching applications, are emphasized. The paper also discusses how the resources of the Intellec development system can be used to facilitate the development of application software.     

Robust one-time password authentication scheme using smart card for home network environment

Due to the exponential growth of the Internet users and wireless devices, interests on home networks have been enormously increased in recent days. In digital home networks, home services including remote access and control to home appliances as well as services offered by service providers are alluring. However, the remote control services cause digital home networks to have various security threats. Hence, for digital home networks, robust security services, especially remote user authentication, should be considered. This paper presents a robust and efficient authentication scheme based on strong-password approach to provide secure remote access in digital home network environments. The proposed scheme uses lightweight computation modules including hashed one-time password and hash-chaining technique along with low-cost smart card technology. It aims to satisfy several security requirements including stolen smart card attack and forward secrecy with lost smart card as well as functional requirements including no verification table and no time synchronization. Comparing with the existing representative schemes, it can be validated that the proposed scheme is more robust authentication mechanism having better security properties. We have conducted formal verification of the proposed scheme.     

Design and implementation of multicasting for multi-channel multi-interface wireless mesh networks

Multicasting is a useful communication method in wireless mesh networks (WMNs). Many applications in WMNs require efficient and reliable multicast communications, i.e., high delivery ratio with low overhead among a group of recipients. In spite of its significance, little work has been done on providing such multicast service in multi-channel WMNs. Traditional multicast protocols for wireless and multi-hop networks tend to assume that all nodes, each of which is equipped with a single interface, collaborate on the same channel. This single-channel assumption is not always true, as WMNs often provide nodes with multiple interfaces to enhance performance. In multi-channel and multi-interface (MCMI) WMNs, the same multicast data must be sent multiple times by a sender node if its neighboring nodes operate on different channels. In this paper, we try to tackle the challenging issue of how to design a multicast protocol more suitable for MCMI WMNs. Our multicast protocol builds multicast paths while inviting multicast members, and tries to allocate the same channel to neighboring members in a bottom-up manner. By unifying fixed channels of one-hop multicast neighbors, the proposed algorithm can improve the performance such as reducing multicast data transmission overhead and delay, while managing a successful delivery ratio. In order to prove such expectation on the performance, we have implemented and evaluated the proposed solution on the real testbed having the maximum 24 nodes, each of which is equipped with two IEEE 802.11a Atheros WLAN cards.