Polymer electrolytes

Summary The room temperature conductivity of lithium salts dissolved in polyethylene oxide, proposed as polymer electrolytes, is shown to decrease drastically upon storage. The crystallization process, which is responsible for that ageing, can be blocked, if two further components are added : an elastomer copolymer butadiene-acrylonitrile and a macromer of polyoxyethylene. In addition, a crosslinking process must be carried out.     

View Compensated Compression of Volume Rendered Images for Remote Visualization

Remote visualization of volumetric images has gained importance over the past few years in medical and industrial applications. Volume visualization is a computationally intensive process, often requiring hardware acceleration to achieve a real time viewing experience. One remote visualization model that can accomplish this would transmit rendered images from a server, based on viewpoint requests from a client. For constrained server-client bandwidth, an efficient compression scheme is vital for transmitting high quality rendered images. In this paper, we present a new view compensation scheme that utilizes the geometric relationship between viewpoints to exploit the correlation between successive rendered images. The proposed method obviates motion estimation between rendered images, enabling significant reduction to the complexity of a compressor. Additionally, the view compensation scheme, in conjuction with JPEG2000 performs better than AVC, the state of the art video compression standard.     

A method for coordinating the distributed transmission of imagery.

Distributed imaging using sensor arrays is gaining popularity among various research and development communities. A common bottleneck within such an imaging sensor network is the large resulting data load. In applications for which transmission power and/or bandwidth are constrained, this can drastically decrease the sensor network lifetime. We present an algorithm that efficiently exploits inter- and intrasensor correlation for the purpose of power-constrained distributed transmission of sensor-network imagery. Gains in network lifetime up to 114% are obtained when using the suggested algorithm with lossless compression. Our results also demonstrate that when lossy compression is employed, much larger gains are achieved. For example, when a normalized root-mean-squared error of 0.78% can be tolerated in the received measurements, the network lifetime increases by a factor of 2.8, as compared to the (optimized) lossless case.     

Rate allocation for spotlight SAR phase history data compression

Complex phase history data in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) systems require extensive processing before useful images can be obtained. In spotlight mode SAR systems, useful images can be obtained by applying aperture weighting and inverse Fourier transform operations to SAR phase history data. In this paper, we are concerned with the compression of the complex phase history data obtained by a spotlight SAR system. We exploit knowledge of the aperture weighting function along with Fourier transform processing to attach a "gain" factor to each complex phase history data sample. This gain factor is then used to efficiently allocate bits to the phase history data during quantization. Performance evaluations are presented for this compression system relative to other existing SAR phase history data compression systems.     

Communication theoretic image restoration for binary-valued imagery

We present a new image-restoration algorithm for binary-valued imagery. A trellis-based search method is described that exploits the finite alphabet of the target imagery. This algorithm seeks the maximum-likelihood solution to the image-restoration problem and is motivated by the Viterbi algorithm for traditional binary data detection in the presence of intersymbol interference and noise. We describe a blockwise method to restore two-dimensional imagery on a row-by-row basis and in which a priori knowledge of image pixel correlation structure can be included through a modification to the trellis transition probabilities. The performance of the new Viterbi-based algorithm is shown to be superior to Wiener filtering in terms of both bit error rate and visual quality. Algorithmic choices related to trellis state configuration, complexity reduction, and transition probability selection are investigated, and various trade-offs are discussed.     

Trellis coded quantization of memoryless and Gauss-Markov sources

Trellis-coded quantization (TCQ) is developed and applied to the encoding of memoryless and Gauss-Markov sources. The theoretical justification for the approach is alphabet-constrained rate distortion theory, which is a dual to the channel capacity argument that motivates trellis-coded modulation (TCM). The authors adopt the notions of signal set expansion, set partitioning, and branch labeling of TCM, but modify the techniques to account for the source distribution, to design TCQ coders of low complexity with excellent mean-squared-error (MSE) performance. For a memoryless uniform source, TCQ provides an MSE within 0.21 dB of the distortion-rate bound at all positive (integral) rates. The performance is superior to that promised by the coefficient of quantization for all of the best lattices known in dimensions 24 or less. For a memoryless Gaussian source, the TCQ performance at rates of 0.5, 1, and 2 b/sample is superior to all previous results the authors found in the literature. The encoding complexity of TCQ is very modest. TCQ is incorporated into a predictive coding structure for the encoding of Gauss-Markov sources. Simulation results for first-, second-, and third-order Gauss-Markov sources are presented     

A vector quantizer for image restoration

This paper presents a novel technique for image restoration based on nonlinear interpolative vector quantization (NLIVQ). The algorithm performs nonlinear restoration of diffraction-limited images concurrently with quantization. It is trained on image pairs consisting of an original image and its diffraction-limited counterpart. The discrete cosine transform is used in the codebook design process to control complexity. Simulation results are presented that demonstrate improvements in visual quality and peak signal-to-noise ratio of the restored images.     

Dam,Environment and Regional Development: Case Study of the Logone Floodplain in Northern Cameroon

The purpose of this paper is a study of environmental change in the Logone floodplain in northern Cameroon following the construction in the 1970s of a dam for a rice irrigation project. This unique ecosystem, designated as a biosphere reserve for supporting an impressive wildlife population, depends on the annual overflowing of the lowland. Several communities living in the plain rely upon water and natural resources of the floodplain to support recession agriculture, the fisheries, wetland rice and livestock. But both persistently poor rainfalls in the Sahel and the adverse impacts of the dam have devastated the area, forcing a large number of people to leave. This paper gives the scope of this situation based on geospatial information and field investigation, and also early results of the floodplain rehabilitation programme conducted since 1994 under the supervision of the World Wildlife Fund. In addition to demonstrating the potential of geomatics technology in environmental hazard assessment, this case study highlights the complexity of water-related issues in areas of conflicting interests. Despite significant improvements achieved by the rehabilitation programme, there is still much work to complete for the area to recover its former biodiversity.     

Compression of hyperspectral imagery using the 3-D DCT and hybridDPCM/DCT

Two systems are presented for compression of hyperspectral imagery which utilize trellis coded quantization (TCQ). Specifically, the first system uses TCQ to encode transform coefficients resulting from the application of an 8×8×8 discrete cosine transform (DCT). The second systems uses DPCM to spectrally decorrelate the data, while a 2D DCT coding scheme is used for spatial decorrelation. Side information and rate allocation strategies are discussed. Entropy-constrained code-books are designed using a modified version of the generalized Lloyd algorithm. These entropy constrained systems achieve compression ratios of greater than 70:1 with average PSNRs of the coded hyperspectral sequences exceeding 40.0 dB     

Trellis-coded vector quantization

Trellis-coded quantization is generalized to allow a vector reproduction alphabet. Three encoding structures are described, several encoder design rules are presented, and two design algorithms are developed. It is shown that for a stationary ergodic vector source, if the optimized trellis-coded vector quantization reproduction process is jointly stationary and ergodic with the source, then the quantization noise is zero-mean and of a variance equal to the difference between the source variance and the variance of the reproduction sequence. Several examples illustrate the encoder design procedure and performance