Two stage electrostatic separator for the recycling of plastics from waste electrical and electronic equipment

The aim of study was to evaluate the effectiveness of a new facility for recycling of plastics from granular waste electrical and electronic equipment. The installation consists of two sections, the products of a first tribo-aero-electrostatic separator being subsequently treated in two free-fall electrostatic separators. The tests were performed on a mixture of polycarbonate (PC) and polyamide (PA). Analysis of the purity of the products obtained was performed using a program of image processing in MATLAB. Products of very high purity (roughly 95% for both PC and PA) were obtained at a recovery rate higher than 70%.     

蒸发器支撑板板孔精密测量系统

建立了蒸发器支撑板板孔精密测量系统,并提出了基于边缘约束条件的轮廓参量测量方法.首先采用图像处理技术将待测目标转化为二维离散坐标点,计算其最小外接矩形并对轮廓进行预定位;然后将轮廓分割成相互重合的"扩展邻域轮廓",建立以曲率角为原则的边缘约束算法对各轮廓段精确定界,实现对轮廓参量的精密测量.实验和误差分析表明,该系统测量准确度优于0.02mm,对具有复杂轮廓的零件参量测量有参考价值.     

Scanning schemes in white light Photoelasticity – Part I: Critical assessment of existing schemes

The use of white light based Three Fringe Photoelasticity (TFP)/RGB Photoelasticity has gained importance in the recent years. With recent advances in TFP, it is possible to resolve fringe orders upto twelve. The main advantage of this technique is that it requires only a single image for isochromatic demodulation, which makes it suitable especially for problems where recording multiple images is difficult. The accuracy of isochromatic data obtained using TFP/RGB Photoelasticity is dependent on the scanning scheme used to refine the data, which is necessary to incorporate fringe order continuity. In this paper, the existing scanning schemes are critically evaluated for their ability to scan the entire model domain, influence of seed point selection and noise propagation. The scanning schemes are assessed using four problems of increasing level of geometric complexity – Circular disc under compression (simply connected), bi-axially loaded cruciform specimen with an inclined crack, a thick ring subjected to internal pressure and a finite plate with a hole (multiply connected).     

Multi-scale retinex improvement for nighttime image enhancement

We propose a retinex improvement for nighttime image enhancement. Retinex is often used on images under non-uniform illumination in terms of either color or lightness and has satisfactory results to achieve color constancy and dynamic range compression. Few studies focus retinex on nighttime images, especially those under extreme conditions (i.e., images with over-lighted or extremely under-lighted areas or with noise speckles), on which retinex operation can perform badly. Original multi-scale retinex (MSR) is extremely sensitive to noise speckles that cameras produce in low light areas, and it has unsatisfactory effect on areas with normal or intensive illumination. Moreover, original MSR uses a gain-offset method for prior-to-display treatment and can lead to apparent data loss on nighttime images. This paper replaces the logarithm function in MSR with a customized sigmoid function to minimize data loss, and adapts MSR to nighttime images by merging results from sigmoid-MSR with original images. Experiments show our framework, when applied to nighttime images, can preserve areas with normal or intensive lighting and suppress noise speckles in extreme low light areas.     

吸波材料与微波暗室问题的数学模型

为分析尖劈形材料的吸波性能,建立了半圆镜像模型将辐射波在尖劈空间的传播等效为射线对等分半圆的切割,确定了反射波线和吸波材料几何参数之间的解析关系.对于微波暗室问题,假设在余弦辐射体上随机选取一个方向的能量波束集中了其所有能量,分别建立了加权能量分布模型和Monte Carlo模型,仿真验证了两模型结论的一致性.     

Distributing points uniformly on the unit sphere under a mirror reflection symmetry constraint

Uniformly distributed point sets on the unit sphere with and without symmetry constraints have been found useful in many scientific and engineering applications. Here, a novel variant of the Thomson problem is proposed and formulated as an unconstrained optimization problem. While the goal of the Thomson problem is to find the minimum energy configuration of N electrons constrained on the surface of the unit sphere, this novel variant imposes a new symmetry constraint – mirror reflection symmetry with the x–y plane as the plane of symmetry. Qualitative features of the two-dimensional projection of the optimal configurations are briefly mentioned and compared to the ground-state configurations of the two dimensional system of charged particles laterally confined by a parabolic potential well.     

Edge linking and image segmentation by combining optical and digital methods

We present a hybrid method for segmentation of intensity images, which combines an optical contouring technique and digital algorithms for linking edge points or image segmentation. In a first stage, the digital image to be processed is displayed in a twisted-nematic liquid-crystal display (LCD), which is placed between a polarizer–analyzer pair at 45 deg (instead of 90 deg as occurs in standard LCDs). It is not difficult to demonstrate that the proposed setup produces a resultant image with very pronounced dark contours at middle intensity. After the optical preprocessing, two different digital algorithms are applied: an edge linking algorithm (modified chain code) and a simple thresholding technique for image segmentation. The proposed procedure works well with monochromatic and color images. The method could be useful as a robust technique for segmentation of large images in real-time, which presents potential applications in medical and biological imaging.     

Finest image sharpening by use of the modified mask filter dealing with highest spatial frequencies

We demonstrate a new finding that the filtering-mask with merely four coefficients in the vertical and horizontal directions could be the best choice to achieve finest image sharpening. The mask's merit to better magnify highest spatial frequencies is unveiled by employing the nonlinear transfer function, which has been proved liable to reduce the overshooting effect. By use of this chosen mask, the enhanced image is capable of manifesting extreme sharpness.     

A novel chaotic image encryption scheme using DNA sequence operations

In this paper, we propose a novel image encryption scheme based on DNA (Deoxyribonucleic acid) sequence operations and chaotic system. Firstly, we perform bitwise exclusive OR operation on the pixels of the plain image using the pseudorandom sequences produced by the spatiotemporal chaos system, i.e., CML (coupled map lattice). Secondly, a DNA matrix is obtained by encoding the confused image using a kind of DNA encoding rule. Then we generate the new initial conditions of the CML according to this DNA matrix and the previous initial conditions, which can make the encryption result closely depend on every pixel of the plain image. Thirdly, the rows and columns of the DNA matrix are permuted. Then, the permuted DNA matrix is confused once again. At last, after decoding the confused DNA matrix using a kind of DNA decoding rule, we obtain the ciphered image. Experimental results and theoretical analysis show that the scheme is able to resist various attacks, so it has extraordinarily high security.     

Two-scale image fusion of visible and infrared images using saliency detection

Military, navigation and concealed weapon detection need different imaging modalities such as visible and infrared to monitor a targeted scene. These modalities provide complementary information. For better situation awareness, complementary information of these images has to be integrated into a single image. Image fusion is the process of integrating complementary source information into a composite image. In this paper, we propose a new image fusion method based on saliency detection and two-scale image decomposition. This method is beneficial because the visual saliency extraction process introduced in this paper can highlight the saliency information of source images very well. A new weight map construction process based on visual saliency is proposed. This process is able to integrate the visually significant information of source images into the fused image. In contrast to most of the multi-scale image fusion techniques, proposed technique uses only two-scale image decomposition. So it is fast and efficient. Our method is tested on several image pairs and is evaluated qualitatively by visual inspection and quantitatively using objective fusion metrics. Outcomes of the proposed method are compared with the state-of-art multi-scale fusion techniques. Results reveal that the proposed method performance is comparable or superior to the existing methods.