Industrial TiO2 based nacreous pigments as functional building materials: Photocatalytic removal of NO

In this paper, the photocatalytic activity of industrial titanium dioxide (TiO₂) based nacreous pigments was researched as functional building materials for photocatalytic NO remove. Three industrial TiO₂ based nacreous pigments were selected to estimate the photocatalytic activity for NO remove. This study is a good proof that pearlescent pigments can eliminate NO, and its performance is positively correlated with its titanium dioxide content. And this research will widen the application of nacreous pigments in functional building materials, and provide a new way to eliminate in door nitric oxide pollution.     

Morphologies and microstructures of tree-like carbon produced at different reaction conditions in a CVD process

Centimeter-size multi-branched tree-like carbon structures have been generated by the catalytic chemical vapor deposition of toluene using ferrocene as the catalyst precursor and investigated by means of SEM, TEM, and EDX. It is found that a temperature of 1000-1200 °C and a carrier gas flow rate of 1000-2500 ml/min are necessary for the generation of the carbon trees. Their morphologies and microstructures change greatly with the changing reaction conditions. The fractal dimensions of the trees are calculated to quantitatively investigate the influence of different reaction temperatures on the morphologies.     

Detecting changes of the Yellow River Estuary via SAR images based on a local fit-search model and kernel-induced graph cuts

The Yellow River Estuary area of China is under great pressure from both human intervention and natural processes. For analysis of the changes in this area, this article presents a novel change-detection method based on a local fit-search model and kernel-induced graph cuts in multitemporal synthetic aperture radar images. Change detection involves assigning a label to every pixel. This task is naturally formulated in terms of energy minimization, which can be effectively solved by graph cuts. The difference image is transformed implicitly by a kernel function so that an alternative to complex modelling of the original data makes the piecewise constant model become applicable for graph cuts formulation. An issue is that graph cuts are sensitive to the initial estimate. The local fit-search model is proposed to approximate to the local histogram while selecting an optimal threshold for the initial labelling, which leads to an effective constraint for graph cuts and computational benefits as well. Visual and quantitative analyses obtained on the Yellow River Estuary data set confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method and that it outperforms the other state-of-the-art methods of change detection.     

Synthesis and characterization of copolythiophene

Copolythiophenes (Co‐PTs), poly(3‐hexylthiophene‐co‐3‐thiophene carboxylic acid) (P3HT‐TCa), poly(3‐hexyloxylthiophene‐co‐3‐thiophene carboxylic acid) (P3HOT‐TCa), and poly(3‐phenylthiophene‐co‐3‐thiophene carboxylic acid) (P3PhT‐TCa), were synthesized by chemical oxidized polymerization to investigate the effect of copolymerization on the properties of polythiophenes (PTs). Gel permeation chromatography showed that the molecular weight (MW) of Co‐PT was lower than that of homopolythiophene. Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectra indicated that the copolymerization was successful between the monomers. The λ_max of Co‐PTs gave a “blue shift” in ultraviolet‐visible (UV‐VIS) spectra. Photoluminescence (PL) spectra showed that the PL intensity of Co‐PT became weaker than that of homopolythiophene and the disappearance of PL had been observed in P3HOT‐TCa. The thermal stability of Co‐PT was influenced by the carboxyl for its low decomposition temperature. Furthermore, the copolymerization between multi‐wall carbon nanotube containing thiophene ring (MWNT‐Th) and 3‐hexyloxylthiphene could also take place successfully. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 2007     

Dynamic deviation reduction‐based concurrent dual‐band digital predistortion

This article introduces the concurrent dual‐band digital predistortion (DPD) architecture with only one upconvertion unit, which is suitable for the linearization of wideband power amplifiers (PAs) excited by concurrent dual‐band signals. By extending the conventional dynamic deviation reduction (DDR) model to the concurrent dual‐band mode, we propose two DDR‐based concurrent dual‐band models, the dual‐band DDR (DB‐DDR) model and the simplified dual‐band DDR (SDB‐DDR) model. The performance of these two models is experimentally assessed with two types of wideband PAs (a GaN Class F PA and a GaN Doherty PA) driven by the concurrent dual‐band signal, and compared with the prior two‐dimensional digital predistortion (2D‐DPD) model and the two‐dimensional modified memory polynomial (2D‐MMP) model. The results prove the good DPD performance and low computational complexity of the proposed models. © 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J RF and Microwave CAE 24:401–411, 2014.     

Logo detection with extendibility and discrimination

Logos are specially designed marks that identify goods, services, and organizations using distinguished characters, graphs, signals, and colors. Identifying logos can facilitate scene understanding, intelligent navigation, and object recognition. Although numerous logo recognition methods have been proposed for printed logos, a few methods have been specifically designed for logos in photos. Furthermore, most recognition methods use codebook-based approaches for the logos in photos. A codebook-based method is concerned with the generation of visual words for all the logo models. When new logos are added, the codebook reconstruction is required if effectiveness is a crucial factor. Moreover, logo detection in natural scenes is difficult because of perspective tilt and non-rigid deformation. Therefore, this study develops an extendable, but discriminating, model-based logo detection method. The proposed logo detection method is based on a support vector machine (SVM) using edge-based histograms of oriented gradient (HOGE) as features through multi-scale sliding window scanning. Thereafter, anti-distortion affine scale invariant feature transform (ASIFT) is used for logo verification with constraints on the ASIFT matching pairs and neighbors. The experimental results using the public Flickr-Logo database confirm that the proposed method has a higher retrieval and precision accuracy compared to existing model-based methods.

     

Precise localization of eye centers with multiple cues

Automatic detection and precise localization of human eye centers are the essential processes in photo related multimedia applications. Since eye center points are used as reference base points for further intelligent processing, precise eye center localization is very important. In face recognition the accuracy of localization of eye centers directly influences the identification accuracy. A multiple stage approach with multiple cues for detection and precise localization of eye centers is presented in this paper. Multiple scopes searching strategy is used for correctly extracting eye patch images from the background. Dedicated gradient based features and curvelet based features are constructed and used for comprehensively revealing the intensity distribution characteristics and the edge based texture around eye centers. A rebuilt score calculation mechanism is proposed and the rebuilt scores are used as a specific measurement index reflecting the matching accuracy. The final localizations of eye centers are determined with integrating the gradient based scores and curvelet based scores. The experiment results testing on public face datasets show that the localization accuracy of proposed approach outperforms the accuracy with other state of the art methods.     

关于图像反走样的理论及应用

图像反走样是用于提升图像质量的一个重要环节。导致图像失真的主要原因是由于采样频率过低及重建过滤器的质量低下。在实时渲染的应用中,随着硬件的发展及渲染架构的改变,主流反走样技术逐渐从硬件加速模式发展到后处理模式。纯后处理算法由于缺失子像素信息,无法生成高质量的反走样图像。针对这一问题,混合反走样在保留了后处理反走样效率的同时,通过结合多重采样能提供更精确的边缘处理,并保证图像在时序上的稳定性。