Demosaicing algorithms for area- and line-scan cameras in print inspection

Most color image sensors use color filter arrays (CFA). With this sensor design the captured information at each sensor pixel position is restricted to a specific spectral portion (typically red, green and blue bands). To obtain the missing color responses at each pixel position, so-called CFA demosaicing algorithms are commonly used. We propose two new CFA demosaicing algorithms, which are well suited for industrial print inspection with respect to the requirements in accuracy and speed. As a main contribution, we introduce novel demosaicing algorithms for specific high-speed color digital time delay and integration (DTDI) CFA line-scan cameras. We compare the suggested CFA demosaicing algorithms to state-of-the art algorithms for area and line-scan camera operation modes. We show that the two new algorithms perform superior to conventional algorithms as indicated by reconstruction error.     

Fate of trace element haps when applying mercury control technologies

During the past several years, and particularly since the Clean Air Mercury Rule (CAMR) was promulgated in June of 2005, the electric utility industry, product vendors, and the research community have been working diligently to develop and test Hg control strategies for a variety of coal types and plant configurations. Some of these strategies include sorbent injection and chemical additives designed to increase mercury capture efficiency in particulate control devices. These strategies have the potential to impact the fate of other inorganic hazardous air pollutants (HAPs), which typically include As, Be, Cd, Cr, Co, Mn, Ni, Pb, Se, and Sb. To evaluate this impact, flue gas samples using EPA Method 29, along with representative coal and ash samples, were collected during recent pilot-scale and field test projects that were evaluating Hg control technologies. These test programs included a range of fuel types with varying trace element concentrations, along with different combustion systems and particulate control devices. The results show that the majority of the trace element HAPs are associated with the particulate matter in the flue gas, except for Se. However, for five of the six projects, Se partitioning was shifted to the particulate phase and total emissions reduced when Hg control technologies were applied.     

The Use of a Spreadsheet Program to Design Motors on a Personal Computer

The use of the personal computer and the wide availability of powerful spreadsheet programs has given the motor designer a very powerful but simple-to-use tool. The use of the Symphony spreadsheet program, presently used to design pancake-type and linear induction motors, is described. As the original design process involved the development of a Fortran program to obtain similar design capabilities, a direct comparison between the development time, using a high-level language, and a spreadsheet program is made. In addition, it is shown how the Fortran program results can be incorporated into the spreadsheet programs to use the graphics capability and documentation features. This topic will be of interest to motor designers and educators.     

All-solid-state tunable continuous-wave ultraviolet source with high spectral purity and frequency stability

We present a novel approach for the generation of higly frequency-stable, widely tunable, single-frequency cw UV light that is suitable for high-resolution spectroscopy. Sum-frequency generation (SFG) of two solid-state sources with a single cavity resonant for both fundamental waves is employed. Using a highly stable, narrow-linewidth frequency-doubled cw Nd:YAG laser as a master laser and slaving to it the SFG cavity and the other fundamental wave from a Ti:sapphire laser, we generate UV radiation of 33-mW output power around 313 nm. Alternatively, we use a diode laser instead of the Ti:sapphire laser and produce an output power of 2.1 mW at 313 nm. With both setups we obtain a continuous tunability of >15 GHz, short-term frequency fluctuations in the submegahertz range, a long-term frequency drift below 100 MHz/h, and stable operation for several hours. The theory of optimized doubly resonant SFG is also given.     

Protein identification by MALDI-TOF-MS peptide mapping: a new strategy

A new strategy for identifying proteins by MALDI-TOF-MS peptide mapping is reported. In contrast to current approaches, the strategy does not rely on a good relative or absolute mass accuracy as the criterion that discriminates false positive results. The protein sequence database is first searched for all proteins that match a minimum five of the submitted masses within the maximum expected relative errors when the default or externally determined calibration constants are used, for instance, +/-500 ppm. Typically, this search retrieves many thousand candidate sequences. Assuming initially that each of these is the correct protein, the relative errors of the matching peptide masses are calculated for each candidate sequence. Linear regression analysis is then performed of the calculated relative errors as a function of m/z for each candidate sequence, and the standard deviation to the regression is used to distinguish the correct sequence among the candidates. We show that this parameter is independent of whether the mass spectrometric data were internally or externally calibrated. The result is a search engine that renders internal spectrum calibration unnecessary and adapts to the quality of the raw data without user interference. This is made possible by a dynamic scoring algorithm, which takes into account the number of matching peptide masses, the percentage of the protein's sequence covered by these peptides and, as new parameter, the determined standard deviation. The lower the standard deviation, the less cleavage peptides are required for identification and vice versa. Performance of the new strategy is demonstrated and discussed. All necessary computing has been implemented in a computer program, free access to which is provided in the Internet.     

Comparison of analysis methods for package-induced stresses on moulded Hall sensors

Due to the piezoresistive and the piezo-Hall effect in semiconductor materials, Hall sensors show a strong temperature dependency and also a drift when subjected to temperature cycles Manic et al. (2000). Four factors mainly influence the mechanical stress in the sensitive layer. These are the geometry of the device, the differences of the coefficients of thermal expansion of the package materials, the temperature-dependent material properties and the time-dependent, viscous material properties. The objective of this investigation was to determine the mechanical stress in a moulded Hall sensor during the packaging process by finite-element simulation in comparison to experimental methods. It is shown that after each process-step the mechanical stress in the sensitive layer changes over time depending on the absolute value and the rate of the temperature change. Measurements of the inverse bending radius of glued and moulded chips show good agreement to the simulations.     

Semantics and Verification of Data Flow in UML 2.0 Activities

One of the major changes in going from UML 1.5 to UML 2.0 is the reengineering of activity diagrams. This paper examines activity diagramies as described in the current version of the UML 2.0 standard by defining a denotational semantics. It covers basic control flow and data flow, but excludes hierarchy, expansion nodes, and exception handling (see [Störrle, H., Semantics of Control-Flow in UML 2.0 Activities, in: P. Bottoni, C. Hundhausen, S. Levialdi and G. Tortora, editors, Proc. IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) (2004), pp. 235–242, Störrle, H., Semantics of Exceptions in UML 2.0 Activities (2004), submitted to Journal of Software and Systems Modeling, May, 9^th, available at www.pst.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/~stoerrle, Störrle, H., Semantics of Expansion Nodes in UML 2.0 Activities, in: I. Porres, editor, Proc. 2^nd Nordic Ws. on UML, Modeling, Methods and Tools (NWUML'04), 2004] for these issues). The paper shows, where the constructs proposed in the standard are not so easily formalized, and how the formalisation may be used for formal analysis.     

Semantic Based Prefetching in News-on-Demand Video Servers

In video databases, a video document has two abstractions. The high level abstraction corresponds to the view in which the contents of that video document are seen by end users, and the low level abstraction corresponds to the physical organization of that video document. Due to the huge size of continuous data, reducing I/O has become a key issue. The latter has been mostly addressed by developing appropriate buffering techniques. In addition, prefetching techniques play a major role to meet the video data requirements. In this paper, we propose a novel prefetching strategy based not only on run-time information (objects access frequencies for example) but also on knowledge about clips structures. The proposed technique merges the two views of a video document to trigger prefetching at the video server level. Simulation experiments for a News-on-Demand application performed on different request scenarios show an improvement of about 18% in the buffer hit-rate with respect, first to the available buffer size and second to the request arrival rate.