54,138 research outputs found
Fast approximation of visibility dominance using topographic features as targets and the associated uncertainty
An approach to reduce visibility index computation time andmeasure the associated uncertainty in terrain visibility analysesis presented. It is demonstrated that the visibility indexcomputation time in mountainous terrain can be reduced substantially,without any significant information loss, if the lineof sight from each observer on the terrain is drawn only to thefundamental topographic features, i.e., peaks, pits, passes,ridges, and channels. However, the selected sampling of targetsresults in an underestimation of the visibility index ofeach observer. Two simple methods based on iterative comparisonsbetween the real visibility indices and the estimatedvisibility indices have been proposed for a preliminary assessmentof this uncertainty. The method has been demonstratedfor gridded digital elevation models
Smart Traction Control Systems for Electric Vehicles Using Acoustic Road-type Estimation
The application of traction control systems (TCS) for electric vehicles (EV)
has great potential due to easy implementation of torque control with
direct-drive motors. However, the control system usually requires road-tire
friction and slip-ratio values, which must be estimated. While it is not
possible to obtain the first one directly, the estimation of latter value
requires accurate measurements of chassis and wheel velocity. In addition,
existing TCS structures are often designed without considering the robustness
and energy efficiency of torque control. In this work, both problems are
addressed with a smart TCS design having an integrated acoustic road-type
estimation (ARTE) unit. This unit enables the road-type recognition and this
information is used to retrieve the correct look-up table between friction
coefficient and slip-ratio. The estimation of the friction coefficient helps
the system to update the necessary input torque. The ARTE unit utilizes machine
learning, mapping the acoustic feature inputs to road-type as output. In this
study, three existing TCS for EVs are examined with and without the integrated
ARTE unit. The results show significant performance improvement with ARTE,
reducing the slip ratio by 75% while saving energy via reduction of applied
torque and increasing the robustness of the TCS.Comment: Accepted to be published by IEEE Trans. on Intelligent Vehicles, 22
Jan 201
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Letter processing and font information during reading: beyond distinctiveness, where vision meets design
Letter identification is a critical front end of the
reading process. In general, conceptualizations of the identification process have emphasized arbitrary sets of distinctive features. However, a richer view of letter processing incorporates principles from the field of type design, including an emphasis on uniformities across letters within a font. The importance of uniformities is supported by a small body of research indicating that consistency of font increases letter identification efficiency. We review design concepts and the relevant literature, with the goal of stimulating further thinking about letter processing during reading
Focusing on out-of-focus : assessing defocus estimation algorithms for the benefit of automated image masking
Acquiring photographs as input for an image-based modelling pipeline is less trivial than often assumed. Photographs should be correctly exposed, cover the subject sufficiently from all possible angles, have the required spatial resolution, be devoid of any motion blur, exhibit accurate focus and feature an adequate depth of field. The last four characteristics all determine the " sharpness " of an image and the photogrammetric, computer vision and hybrid photogrammetric computer vision communities all assume that the object to be modelled is depicted " acceptably " sharp throughout the whole image collection. Although none of these three fields has ever properly quantified " acceptably sharp " , it is more or less standard practice to mask those image portions that appear to be unsharp due to the limited depth of field around the plane of focus (whether this means blurry object parts or completely out-of-focus backgrounds). This paper will assess how well-or ill-suited defocus estimating algorithms are for automatically masking a series of photographs, since this could speed up modelling pipelines with many hundreds or thousands of photographs. To that end, the paper uses five different real-world datasets and compares the output of three state-of-the-art edge-based defocus estimators. Afterwards, critical comments and plans for the future finalise this paper
Toward Entity-Aware Search
As the Web has evolved into a data-rich repository, with the standard "page view," current search engines are becoming increasingly inadequate for a wide range of query tasks. While we often search for various data "entities" (e.g., phone number, paper PDF, date), today's engines only take us indirectly to pages. In my Ph.D. study, we focus on a novel type of Web search that is aware of data entities inside pages, a significant departure from traditional document retrieval. We study the various essential aspects of supporting entity-aware Web search. To begin with, we tackle the core challenge of ranking entities, by distilling its underlying conceptual model Impression Model and developing a probabilistic ranking framework, EntityRank, that is able to seamlessly integrate both local and global information in ranking. We also report a prototype system built to show the initial promise of the proposal. Then, we aim at distilling and abstracting the essential computation requirements of entity search. From the dual views of reasoning--entity as input and entity as output, we propose a dual-inversion framework, with two indexing and partition schemes, towards efficient and scalable query processing. Further, to recognize more entity instances, we study the problem of entity synonym discovery through mining query log data. The results we obtained so far have shown clear promise of entity-aware search, in its usefulness, effectiveness, efficiency and scalability
Expected Behavior of Quantum Thermodynamic Machines with Prior Information
We estimate the expected behavior of a quantum model of heat engine when we
have incomplete information about external macroscopic parameters, like
magnetic field controlling the intrinsic energy scales of the working medium.
We explicitly derive the prior probability distribution for these unknown
parameters, . Based on a few simple assumptions, the prior is
found to be of the form . By calculating the expected
values of various physical quantities related to this engine, we find that the
expected behavior of the quantum model exhibits thermodynamic-like features.
This leads us to a surprising proposal that incomplete information quantified
as appropriate prior distribution can lead us to expect classical thermodynamic
behavior in quantum models.Comment: Revtex, 13 pages, 3 figures, revised version, new results added,
accepted for Phys. Rev.
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