A procedure to correct the images of astronomical objects for the distortions due to atmospheric turbulence

A method is proposed to obtain diffraction limited pictures of extended astonomical objects in spite of the wavefront distortions due to atmospheric turbulence. The method does not require any prior knowledge on the brightness distribution across the object. The presence of reference details is not necessary.     

Phase interpretation for polarization-dependent near-field images of high-density gratings

It has been described that the near-field images of a high-density grating at the half self-imaging distance could be different for TE and TM polarization states. We propose that the phases of the diffraction orders play an important role in such polarization dependence. The view is verified through the coincidence of the numerical result of finite-difference time-domain method and the reconstructed results from the rigorous coupled-wave analysis. Field distributions of TE and TM polarizations are given numerically for a grating with period d = 2.3λ, which are verified through experiments with the scanning near-field optical microscopy technique. The concept of phase interpretation not only explains the polarization dependence at the half self-imaging distance of gratings with a physical view, but also, it could be widely used to describe the near-field diffraction of a variety of periodic diffractive optical elements whose feature size comparable to the wavelength.     

General model to predict and correct errors in phase map interpretation and measurement for out-of-plane ESPI interferometers

Out-of-plane configurations used in electronic speckle pattern interferometry (ESPI), introduce phase error interpretation in extended target objects due to spatial variation of the sensitivity vector. In this paper, a general model to predict and correct the displacement measurement error and error phase map interpretation taking into account the target shape, illumination geometry, and in-plane displacement information, is presented. This model generalizes and extends previous analyses with respect to the sensitivity vector variations. The model is based on a relationship between variable sensitivity vector and the constant one. The importance of illumination geometry and in-plane displacement as factors that introduce the biggest error in the interpretation of the phase map are stressed. An analysis with practical parameters using divergent and collimated beams is presented. In order to predict and correct the error of phase interpretation, the finite element method should be used to obtain in-plane proportional factors to build up the correction function. The analysis shows that the error can be large for common configurations even when using collimated beam. To compute the measurement directly from the phase map, a general sensitivity function taking into account the shape and in-plane displacement information is naturally obtained from the presented analysis.     

An easy and efficient way to treat Green's function for nano-devices with arbitrary shapes and multi-terminal configurations

The efficiency of the calculation of Green's function (GF) for nano-devices is very important because the calculation is often needed to be repeated countlessly. We present a set of efficient algorithms for the numerical calculation of GF for devices with arbitrary shapes and multi-terminal configurations. These algorithms can be used to calculate the specified blocks related to the transmission, the diagonals needed by the local density of states calculation, and the full matrix of GF, to meet different calculation levels. In addition, the algorithms for the non-equilibrium occupation and current flow are also given. All these algorithms are described using the basic theory of GF, based on a new partition strategy of the computational area. We apply these algorithms to the tight-binding graphene lattice to manifest their stability and efficiency. We also discuss the physics of the calculation results.     

Triple-D network for efficient undersampled magnetic resonance images reconstruction

Compressed sensing (CS) theory can help accelerate magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) by sampling partial k-space measurements. However, conventional optimization-based CS-MRI methods are often time-consuming and are based on fixed transform or shallow image dictionaries, which limits modeling capabilities. Recently, deep learning models have been used to solve the CS-MRI problem. However, recent researches have focused on modeling in image domain, and the potential of k-space modeling capability has not been utilized seriously. In this paper, we propose a deep model called Dual Domain Dense network (Triple-D network), which consisted of some k-space and image domain sub-network. These sub-networks are connected with dense connections, which can utilize feature maps at different levels to enhance performance. To further promote model capabilities, we use two strategies: multi-supervision strategies, which can avoid loss of supervision information; channel-wise attention layer (CA layer), which can adaptively adjust the weight of the feature map. Experimental results show that the proposed Triple-D network provides promising performance in CS-MRI, and it can effectively work on different sampling trajectories and noisy settings.     

靶场光测多站图像多目标判读技术

靶场光测图像处理的一个突出难题是如何分辨图像上出现的大量小目标。利用单站序列图像上目标的运动关联、目标在多站图像上像点之间的对极几何约束关系,提出了靶场多站图像多目标判读的新技术,采用单站序列图像目标卡尔曼运动轨迹预测及跟踪识别技术,以及多站图像对极几何约束同名目标匹配技术,突破了传统方法仅进行单站图像判读的局限。仿真结果证明其能有效解决多站、多目标的判读问题,已成功应用于我们研制的多套靶场图像判读系统中。     

Degradative encryption: An efficient way to protect SPIHT compressed images

Degradative encryption, a new selective image encryption paradigm, is proposed to encrypt only a small part of image data to make the detail blurred but keep the skeleton discernible. The efficiency is further optimized by combining compression and encryption. A format-compliant degradative encryption algorithm based on set partitioning in hierarchical trees (SPIHT) is then proposed, and the scheme is designed to work in progressive mode for gaining a tradeoff between efficiency and security. Extensive experiments are conducted to evaluate the strength and efficiency of the scheme, and it is found that less than 10% data need to be encrypted for a secure degradation. In security analysis, the scheme is verified to be immune to cryptographic attacks as well as those adversaries utilizing image processing techniques. The scheme can find its wide applications in online try-and-buy service on mobile devices, searchable multimedia encryption in cloud computing, etc.     

Some alternative methods for hydrodynamic closures to dissipative kinetic models

Two different strategies for deriving hydrodynamic equations for dissipative kinetic models are presented and discussed. The homogeneity scaling approach, not very well-known in the physical literature, is expanded and applied to different show-cases in several applications. Then, we show that this strategy may fail, as it occurs for a thermalized granular gas in a host medium, in which case the problem can be dealt with by resorting to classical moment closure methods.     

Enhanced visualization methods for interpretation of wind tunnel data

Journal of Visualization -     

A quantitative comparison of two methods to correct eddy current-induced distortions in DT-MRI

Eddy current-induced geometric distortions of single-shot, diffusion-weighted, echo-planar (DW-EP) images are a major confounding factor to the accurate determination of water diffusion parameters in diffusion tensor MRI (DT-MRI). Previously, it has been suggested that these geometric distortions can be removed from brain DW-EP images using affine transformations determined from phantom calibration experiments using iterative cross-correlation (ICC). Since this approach was first described, a number of image-based registration methods have become available that can also correct eddy current-induced distortions in DW-EP images. However, as yet no study has investigated whether separate eddy current calibration or image-based registration provides the most accurate way of removing these artefacts from DT-MRI data. Here we compare how ICC phantom calibration and affine FLIRT (http://www.fmrib.ox.ac.uk), a popular image-based multi-modal registration method that can correct both eddy current-induced distortions and bulk subject motion, perform when registering DW-EP images acquired with different slice thicknesses (2.8 and 5 mm) and b-values (1000 and 3000 s/mm(2)). With the use of consistency testing, it was found that ICC was a more robust algorithm for correcting eddy current-induced distortions than affine FLIRT, especially at high b-value and small slice thickness. In addition, principal component analysis demonstrated that the combination of ICC phantom calibration (to remove eddy current-induced distortions) with rigid body FLIRT (to remove bulk subject motion) provided a more accurate registration of DT-MRI data than that achieved by affine FLIRT.     

A method for operative quantitative interpretation of multispectral images of biological tissues

A method for operative retrieval of spatial distributions of biophysical parameters of a biological tissue by using a multispectral image of it has been developed. The method is based on multiple regressions between linearly independent components of the diffuse reflection spectrum of the tissue and unknown parameters. Possibilities of the method are illustrated by an example of determining biophysical parameters of the skin (concentrations of melanin, hemoglobin and bilirubin, blood oxygenation, and scattering coefficient of the tissue). Examples of quantitative interpretation of the experimental data are presented.     

Testing color difference evaluation methods for color digital images

A psychophysical experiment is carried out to evaluate the color difference between pairs of color digital images and their modulated versions, which are displayed on a professional liquid crystal display (LCD) monitor, using the category judgment method. The modulated images for six original images are generated with variations in five attributes, namely, lightness, chroma, hue, resolution, and sharpness, considering both their chromatic and spatial characteristics. Several color difference evaluation methods, namely, CIELAB, CIEDE2 000, CAM02-UCS, S-CIELAB, and iCAM, are compared based on the experimental data. The results demonstrate that the performance of iCAM is the best for predicting image color difference.     

Using a chemical concept for reactivity for the interpretation of STM images of physisorbed molecules

The electrostatic potential mapped on the electron density contour of gas phase molecules is used to identify several molecules physisorbed on transition metals imaged by scanning tunnelling microscopy within the molecular HOMO-LUMO gap. It is rationalized that the inverted of this potential, representing the potential energy felt by a negative test charge, is a good concept to interpret changes in the dielectricity constant through the influence of physisorbed molecules and thus to understand their submolecular resolution images. The validity of the concept is demonstrated on dichlorobenzene, chloronitrobenzene, and two azobenzene derivates on the surfaces of Au(111), Ag(111), and Cu(111).     

A fast,efficient and automated method to extract vessels from fundus images

Abstract  

We present a fast, efficient, and automatic method for extracting vessels from retinal images. The proposed method is based on the second local entropy and on the gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM). The algorithm is designed to have flexibility in the definition of the blood vessel contours. Using information from the GLCM, a statistic feature is calculated to act as a threshold value. The performance of the proposed approach was evaluated in terms of its sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy. The results obtained for these metrics were 0.9648, 0.9480, and 0.9759, respectively. These results show the high performance and accuracy that the proposed method offers. Another aspect evaluated in this method is the elapsed time to carry out the segmentation. The average time required by the proposed method is 3 s for images of size 565 × 584 pixels. To assess the ability and speed of the proposed method, the experimental results are compared with those obtained using other existing methods.     

物理实验教学改革一些基本作法

根据大学物理实验教学中存在的一些问题和实验室的实际条件，对大学物理实验的教学内容进行了更新改造，开发了新的实验项目；建立了三个不同层次的课程模块，以适应不同专业不同层次的学生需要，在成绩的考核和评定以及管理等方面也进行了较大力度的改革。     

Study on the methods of image enhancement for liver CT images

Image enhancement methods for liver CT images are studied in this paper. The liver region is first segmented from the whole CT image by simply using the characteristics of the gray distribution of the liver. The segmented liver CT image is processed by direct gray stretching, logarithmic transformation and linear stretching with histogram fitting. In addition, the method of selective histogram equalization is proposed to enhance the segmented liver CT image. It is proven from the experimental results that by this two-step method, the visual effect of the segmented image can be effectively improved and the focus is obviously highlighted.     

On the use of water phantom images to calibrate and correct eddy current induced artefacts in MR diffusion tensor imaging

The accurate determination of absolute measures of diffusion anisotropy in vivo using single-shot, echo-planar imaging techniques requires the acquisition of a set of high signal-to-noise ratio, diffusion-weighted images that are free from eddy current induced image distortions. Such geometric distortions can be characterized and corrected in brain imaging data using magnification (M), translation (T), and shear (S) distortion parameters derived from separate water phantom calibration experiments. Here we examine the practicalities of using separate phantom calibration data to correct high b-value diffusion tensor imaging data by investigating the stability of these distortion parameters, and hence the eddy currents, with time. It is found that M, T, and S vary only slowly with time (i.e., on the order of weeks), so that calibration scans need not be performed after every patient examination. This not only minimises the scan time required to collect the calibration data, but also the computational time needed to characterize these eddy current induced distortions. Examples of how measurements of diffusion anisotropy are improved using this post-processing scheme are also presented.