A study on electrodeposited of ZnO/ZnS heterostructures

ZnO/ZnS heterostructures were synthesized by a two steps electrochemical deposition method. Firstly, ZnS layer was deposited from an aqueous solution containing Na₂S₂O₃ and ZnSO₄ onto indium-doped tin oxide (ITO) coating glass substrate at two deposition potentials. Then, ZnO nanostructures were deposited from an aqueous solution of Zn(NO₃) onto ZnS surface. The as-obtained samples were characterized by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), atomic force microscopy (AFM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman and UV-visible analysis. The results indicate that the electrodeposition of ZnS layer at ?0.9 V give the best proprieties of ZnO/ZnS heterostructures. Homogeneous and uniform surface of ZnO/ZnS heterostructure was confirmed by AFM images. The XRD patterns indicates a high crystallinity of ZnO/ZnS. A high transmittance of 65% was also noted from UV-Visible spectra and band gap energy as large as 3.6?eV was found.     

Scale invariant amplitude modulated phase-only filtering

A new synthetic discriminant-function-based amplitude modulated phase-only filtering technique is proposed for scale invariant pattern recognition. This technique has been found to yield improved correlation output when compared with the alternate techniques. The proposed technique is inherently suitable for optical implementation using the currently available spatial light modulators. Simulation results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed technique.     

Refractive system for generation of high-power diffraction-free laser beams

A refractive system is designed to convert a high-power annular beam into a circular Bessel beam. The input and output surface of the proposed system is derived. We provide cubic polynomial approximation of the surface profiles. A ray tracing through the complete system is provided to verify the design. The design parameters can be selected to choose the desired beam power in the central lobe and length of the refractive system.     

Lesion edge preserved direct average strain estimation for ultrasound elasticity imaging

Elasticity imaging techniques with built-in or regularization-based smoothing feature for ensuring strain continuity are not intelligent enough to prevent distortion or lesion edge blurring while smoothing. This paper proposes a novel approach with built-in lesion edge preservation technique for high quality direct average strain imaging. An edge detection scheme, typically used in diffusion filtering is modified here for lesion edge detection. Based on the extracted edge information, lesion edges are preserved by modifying the strain determining cost function in the direct-average-strain-estimation (DASE) method. The proposed algorithm demonstrates approximately 3.42–4.25 dB improvement in terms of edge-mean-square-error (EMSE) than the other reported regularized or average strain estimation techniques in finite-element-modeling (FEM) simulation with almost no sacrifice in elastographic-signal-to-noise-ratio (SNRe) and elastographic-contrast-to-noise-ratio (CNRe) metrics. The efficacy of the proposed algorithm is also tested for the experimental phantom data and in vivo breast data. The results reveal that the proposed method can generate a high quality strain image delineating the lesion edge more clearly than the other reported strain estimation techniques that have been designed to ensure strain continuity. The computational cost, however, is little higher for the proposed method than the simpler DASE and considerably higher than that of the 2D analytic minimization (AM2D) method.     

Optoelectronic symbolic substitution based canonical modified signed-digit arithmetic

A single-step optoelectronics symbolic substitution scheme to handle parallel modified signed-digit (MSD) arithmetic operations is proposed. Conversion algorithms from MSD numbers into a canonical MSD representation are provided. The canonical MSD numbers have the property that no two consecutive digits are non-zero. The addition operation of two CMSD numbers is performed in one step. It will be shown that through the use of CMSD representation, the number of symbolic substitution rules in an optical content-addressable memory (CAM) based system is significantly reduced. The number of symbolic substitution rules can be further reduced to an optimum value through a proposed shared content-addressable memory optical set-up. Further, the proposed optical scheme doubles the storage efficiency of the shared content-addressable memory.     

Fast implementation of matched-filter-based automatic alignment image processing

Video images of laser beams imprinted with distinguishable features are used for alignment of 192 laser beams at the National Ignition Facility (NIF). Algorithms for determining the position of these beams enable control systems to perform the task of alignment. Real world beam images suffer from intensity fluctuation or other distortions, making algorithms susceptible to higher position measurement variability. Using matched filtering to identify beam positions results in greater stability of position measurement compared to centroiding techniques. However, this gain is achieved at the expense of extra processing time. This work explores the use of FPGAs to accelerate these computations. Results indicate a performance improvement of 20 times for an FPGA over a 3 GHz Pentium 4 processor.     

Finite element approximation of a prestressed shell model

This work deals with the finite element approximation of a prestressed shell model formulated in Cartesian coordinates system. The considered constrained variational problem is not necessarily positive. Moreover, because of the constraint, it cannot be discretized by conforming finite element methods. A penalized version of the model and its discretization are then proposed. We prove existence and uniqueness results of solutions for the continuous and discrete problems, and we derive optimal a priori error estimates. Numerical tests that validate and illustrate our approach are given.     

Discretized amplitudemodulated phase-only filter

The amplitude-modulated phase-only filter (AMPOF) effectively utilizes both amplitude and phase information to obtain a narrower and larger autocorrelation peak. To make it readily suitable for real-time target recognition applications, we consider discretizing both its amplitude and phase. Accordingly, both amplitude and phase of the AMPOF are ternerized to yield improved performance statistics of the correlator.     

Synthetic optical processor for generalized logic realization problems

A synthetic joint Fourier transform (SJFT) correlator is proposed for the realization of generalized logic problems. As a case study, a multi-channel SJFT correlator is employed to realize a multi-output logic unit. For a given correlator set-up, this particular scheme ensures the maximal utilization of space bandwidth product. This work establishes a pragmatic approach for implementing real-time programmable content addressable memory for information processing.