Performance and evaluation of the Viking lander camera performance prediction program

A computer program is described for predicting the performance of the Viking lander cameras. The predictions are primarily concerned with two objectives: (1) the picture quality of a reference test chart (of which there are three on each lander) to aid in diagnosing camera performance; and (2) the picture quality of cones with surface properties of a natural terrain to aid in predicting favorable illumination and viewing geometries and operational camera commands. Predictions made with this program are verified by experimental data obtained with a Viking-like laboratory facsimile camera

Utilization of Document Imaging Technology By the 1996 Canadian Census of Agriculture

Processing of the Canadian Census of Agriculture relies heavily upon access to its questionnaires. The documents are required within many stages of collection and processing to ensure delivery of quality products to agricultural clients. Historically, access to the physical documents has proven problematic in terms of timely delivery, concurrent access, management, tracking, storage and cost. As early as 1984, Census management recognized the potential of document imaging technology to improve data quality and timeliness. However, in the 80s it took little effort to recognize that the technology of the day was not sufficiently mature or affordable for the Census. In 1996, document imaging became a successful reality for the Canadian Census of Agriculture. This paper describes the experiences, the issues and the expectations of the many different players involved in the implementation.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

CAD-CAM workflow for the fabrication of bioscaffolds and porous auricular constructs with polycaprolactone using Ultimaker 2+

In recent years, the application of three-dimensional fabrication to fabricate customized porous scaffolds for cell culture has received much attention from the field of tissue engineering and plastic surgery. In this study, we applied a more publicly accessible 3D printer, Ultimaker 2+ with biodegradable polymer-polycaprolactone (PCL) to fabricate both three-dimensional bioscaffolds and auricular constructs (both solid and porous) prepared to fill the gap as potential solutions for both cartilage defects and microtia respectively by managing of the CAD-CAM workflow. As an overview, the modified CAD-CAM workflow was regarded as the uniform preparation fabricating types of scaffolds to identify the general printability of PCL with Ultimaker 2+. For bioscaffolds, limit test was performed on original scaffold, the resolution for printing scaffolds by PCL was identified as 600 microns by applying method of uniform scaling and limit approaching. For customized auricular constructs, we extract the model from MRI/CT scan and use its mirror image for the general shape of model building in a relatively customized way to fabricate solid auricular constructs. Boolean operation was then applied for fabricating the inner porous microstructure to fabricate porous auricular constructs. As there were no significant differences among three groups of filaments regarding the respective dimensions for both bioscaffolds (n=9 for each group: PCL, PLA and ABS) and customized auricular constructs(n=5 for both solid auricular constructs and porous auricular constructs) indicated by the P value(P>0.05) from ANOVA, The printing compatibility of PCL regarding each specific domain of scaffolds were identified. In Conclusion, our study had indicated a consistent CAD-CAM workflow for Ultimaker 2+ with PCL to fabricate three-dimensional bioscaffolds, solid auricular constructs and porous auricular constructs which could be potentially applied to fill the gap of cartilage engineering and microtia reconstruction through in-vitro cell culture, surgical simulation and in-situ cell culture respectively

Identify and Rectify the Distorted Fingerprints

Elastic distortion of fingerprints is the major causes for false non-match. While this cause disturbs all fingerprint recognition applications, it is especiallyrisk in negative recognition applications, such as watch list and deduplication applications. In such applications, malicious persons may consciously distort their fingerprints to hide identification. In this paper, we suggested novel algorithms to detect and rectify skin distortion based on a single fingerprint image. Distortion detection is displayed as a two-class categorization problem, for which the registered ridge orientation map and period map of a fingerprint are beneficial as the feature vector and a SVM classifier is trained to act the classification task. Distortion rectification (or equivalently distortion field estimation) is viewed as a regression complication, where the input is a distorted fingerprint and the output is the distortion field. To clarify this problem, a database (called reference database) of various distorted reference fingerprints and corresponding distortion fields is built in the offline stage, and then in the online stage, the closest neighbor of the input fingerprint is organized in the reference database and the corresponding distortion field is used to transform (Convert) the input fingerprint into a normal fingerprints. Promising results have been obtained on three databases having many distorted fingerprints, namely FVC2004 DB1, Tsinghua Distorted Fingerprint database, and the NIST SD27 latent fingerprint database