57,543 research outputs found
State Estimation for Kite Power Systems with Delayed Sensor Measurements
We present a novel estimation approach for airborne wind energy systems with ground-based control and energy generation. The estimator fuses measurements from an inertial measurement unit attached to a tethered wing and position measurements from a camera as well as line angle sensors in an unscented Kalman filter. We have developed a novel kinematic description for tethered wings to specifically address tether dynamics. The presented approach simultaneously estimates feedback variables for a flight controller as well as model parameters, such as a time-varying delay. We demonstrate the performance of the estimator for experimental flight data and compare it to a state-of-the-art estimator based on inertial measurements
Gait recognition based on shape and motion analysis of silhouette contours
This paper presents a three-phase gait recognition method that analyses the spatio-temporal shape and dynamic motion (STS-DM) characteristics of a human subject’s silhouettes to identify the subject in the presence of most of the challenging factors that affect existing gait recognition systems. In phase 1, phase-weighted magnitude spectra of the Fourier descriptor of the silhouette contours at ten phases of a gait period are used to analyse the spatio-temporal changes of the subject’s shape. A component-based Fourier descriptor based on anatomical studies of human body is used to achieve robustness against shape variations caused by all common types of small carrying conditions with folded hands, at the subject’s back and in upright position. In phase 2, a full-body shape and motion analysis is performed by fitting ellipses to contour segments of ten phases of a gait period and using a histogram matching with Bhattacharyya distance of parameters of the ellipses as dissimilarity scores. In phase 3, dynamic time warping is used to analyse the angular rotation pattern of the subject’s leading knee with a consideration of arm-swing over a gait period to achieve identification that is invariant to walking speed, limited clothing variations, hair style changes and shadows under feet. The match scores generated in the three phases are fused using weight-based score-level fusion for robust identification in the presence of missing and distorted frames, and occlusion in the scene. Experimental analyses on various publicly available data sets show that STS-DM outperforms several state-of-the-art gait recognition methods
Capillary pinching in a pinched microchannel
We report a study of the capillary pinching of a gas bubble by a wetting liquid inside a pinched channel. The capillary pinching induces very reproducible bubbling, at a very well-defined frequency. There are two regimes associated with drip and jet bubbling. In the latter, we show that highly monodispersed bubbles are formed by our pinched channel. The dynamics of the bubble formation also shows two distinct regimes: a long-duration elongation of the air bubble and a rapid relaxation of the interface after interface breakup. The slow regime depends on the flux imposed and the channel geometry. The rapid deformation dynamic regime depends very weakly on the boundary conditions. Scaling arguments are proposed in the context of the lubrication approximation to describe the two regimes
Micro Fourier Transform Profilometry (FTP): 3D shape measurement at 10,000 frames per second
Recent advances in imaging sensors and digital light projection technology
have facilitated a rapid progress in 3D optical sensing, enabling 3D surfaces
of complex-shaped objects to be captured with improved resolution and accuracy.
However, due to the large number of projection patterns required for phase
recovery and disambiguation, the maximum fame rates of current 3D shape
measurement techniques are still limited to the range of hundreds of frames per
second (fps). Here, we demonstrate a new 3D dynamic imaging technique, Micro
Fourier Transform Profilometry (FTP), which can capture 3D surfaces of
transient events at up to 10,000 fps based on our newly developed high-speed
fringe projection system. Compared with existing techniques, FTP has the
prominent advantage of recovering an accurate, unambiguous, and dense 3D point
cloud with only two projected patterns. Furthermore, the phase information is
encoded within a single high-frequency fringe image, thereby allowing
motion-artifact-free reconstruction of transient events with temporal
resolution of 50 microseconds. To show FTP's broad utility, we use it to
reconstruct 3D videos of 4 transient scenes: vibrating cantilevers, rotating
fan blades, bullet fired from a toy gun, and balloon's explosion triggered by a
flying dart, which were previously difficult or even unable to be captured with
conventional approaches.Comment: This manuscript was originally submitted on 30th January 1
On the jets, kinks, and spheromaks formed by a planar magnetized coaxial gun
Measurements of the various plasma configurations produced by a planar
magnetized coaxial gun provide insight into the magnetic topology evolution
resulting from magnetic helicity injection. Important features of the
experiments are a very simple coaxial gun design so that all observed
geometrical complexity is due to the intrinsic physical dynamics rather than
the source shape and use of a fast multiple-frame digital camera which provides
direct imaging of topologically complex shapes and dynamics. Three key
experimental findings were obtained: (1) formation of an axial collimated jet
[Hsu and Bellan, Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc. 334, 257 (2002)] that is consistent
with a magnetohydrodynamic description of astrophysical jets, (2)
identification of the kink instability when this jet satisfies the
Kruskal-Shafranov limit, and (3) the nonlinear properties of the kink
instability providing a conversion of toroidal to poloidal flux as required for
spheromak formation by a coaxial magnetized source [Hsu and Bellan, Phys. Rev.
Lett. 90, 215002 (2003)]. A new interpretation is proposed for how the n=1
central column instability provides flux amplification during spheromak
formation and sustainment, and it is shown that jet collimation can occur
within one rotation of the background poloidal field.Comment: Physics of Plasmas (accepted
Silhouette-based gait recognition using Procrustes shape analysis and elliptic Fourier descriptors
This paper presents a gait recognition method which combines spatio-temporal motion characteristics, statistical and physical parameters (referred to as STM-SPP) of a human subject for its classification by analysing shape of the subject's silhouette contours using Procrustes shape analysis (PSA) and elliptic Fourier descriptors (EFDs). STM-SPP uses spatio-temporal gait characteristics and physical parameters of human body to resolve similar dissimilarity scores between probe and gallery sequences obtained by PSA. A part-based shape analysis using EFDs is also introduced to achieve robustness against carrying conditions. The classification results by PSA and EFDs are combined, resolving tie in ranking using contour matching based on Hu moments. Experimental results show STM-SPP outperforms several silhouette-based gait recognition methods
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