Lean implementation to improve scheduling for a multi-cell manufacturing facility

Includes bibliographical references

Interactive exploration of historic information via gesture recognition

Developers of interactive exhibits often struggle to �nd appropriate input devices that enable intuitive control, permitting the visitors to engage e�ectively with the content. Recently motion sensing input devices like the Microsoft Kinect or Panasonic D-Imager have become available enabling gesture based control of computer systems. These devices present an attractive input device for exhibits since the user can interact with their hands and they are not required to physically touch any part of the system. In this thesis we investigate techniques to enable the raw data coming from these types of devices to be used to control an interactive exhibit. Object recognition and tracking techniques are used to analyse the user's hand where movement and clicks are processed. To show the e�ectiveness of the techniques the gesture system is used to control an interactive system designed to inform the public about iconic buildings in the centre of Norwich, UK. We evaluate two methods of making selections in the test environment. At the time of experimentation the technologies were relatively new to the image processing environment. As a result of the research presented in this thesis, the techniques and methods used have been detailed and published [3] at the VSMM (Virtual Systems and Multimedia 2012) conference with the intention of further forwarding the area

Real-Time Global Illumination for VR Applications

Real-time global illumination in VR systems enhances scene realism by incorporating soft shadows, reflections of objects in the scene, and color bleeding. The Virtual Light Field (VLF) method enables real-time global illumination rendering in VR. The VLF has been integrated with the Extreme VR system for realtime GPU-based rendering in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment

Explosion of Comet 17P/Holmes as revealed by the Spitzer Space Telescope

An explosion on comet 17P/Holmes occurred on 2007 Oct 23, projecting particulate debris of a wide range of sizes into the interplanetary medium. We observed the comet using the Spitzer spectrograph on 2007 Nov 10 and 2008 Feb 27, and the photometer, on 2008 Mar 13. The fresh ejecta have detailed mineralogical features from small crystalline silicate grains. The 2008 Feb 27 spectra, and the central core of the 2007 Nov 10 spectral map, reveal nearly featureless spectra, due to much larger grains that were ejected from the nucleus more slowly. We break the infrared image into three components (size, speed) that also explain the temporal evolution of the mm-wave flux. Optical images were obtained on multiple dates spanning 2007 Oct 27 to 2008 Mar 10 at the Holloway Comet Observatory and 1.5-m telescope at Palomar Observatory. The orientation of the leading edge of the ejecta shell and the ejecta blob, relative to the nucleus, do not change as the orientation of the Sun changes; instead, the configuration was imprinted by the orientation of the initial explosion. The kinetic energy of the ejecta >1e21 erg is greater than the gravitational binding energy of the nucleus. We model the explosion as being due to crystallization and release of volatiles from interior amorphous ice within a subsurface cavity; once the pressure in the cavity exceeded the surface strength, the material above the cavity was propelled from the comet. The size of the cavity and the tensile strength of the upper layer of the nucleus are constrained by the observed properties of the ejecta; tensile strengths on >10 m scale must be greater than 10 kPa. The appearance of the 2007 outburst is similar to that witnessed in 1892, but the 1892 explosion was less energetic by a factor of about 20.Comment: 51 pages. Some figures compressed (see real journal for full quality). accepted by Icaru

Surface Reconstruction and Evolution from Multiple Views

Applications like 3D Telepresence necessitate faithful 3D surface reconstruction of the object and 3D data compression in both spatial and temporal domains. This makes us feel immersed in virtual environments there by making 3D Telepresence a powerful tool in many applications. Hence 3D surface reconstruction and 3D compression are two challenging problems which are addressed in this thesis