42,893 research outputs found
Dispersion enhancement and damping by buoyancy driven flows in 2D networks of capillaries
The influence of a small relative density difference on the displacement of
two miscible liquids is studied experimentally in transparent 2D networks of
micro channels. Both stable displacements in which the denser fluid enters at
the bottom of the cell and displaces the lighter one and unstable displacements
in which the lighter fluid is injected at the bottom and displaces the denser
one are realized. Except at the lowest mean flow velocity U, the average
of the relative concentration satisfies a convection-dispersion
equation. The dispersion coefficient is studied as function of the relative
magnitude of fluid velocity and of the velocity of buoyancy driven fluid
motion. A model is suggested and its applicability to previous results obtained
in 3D media is discussed
Segmentation-Aware Convolutional Networks Using Local Attention Masks
We introduce an approach to integrate segmentation information within a
convolutional neural network (CNN). This counter-acts the tendency of CNNs to
smooth information across regions and increases their spatial precision. To
obtain segmentation information, we set up a CNN to provide an embedding space
where region co-membership can be estimated based on Euclidean distance. We use
these embeddings to compute a local attention mask relative to every neuron
position. We incorporate such masks in CNNs and replace the convolution
operation with a "segmentation-aware" variant that allows a neuron to
selectively attend to inputs coming from its own region. We call the resulting
network a segmentation-aware CNN because it adapts its filters at each image
point according to local segmentation cues. We demonstrate the merit of our
method on two widely different dense prediction tasks, that involve
classification (semantic segmentation) and regression (optical flow). Our
results show that in semantic segmentation we can match the performance of
DenseCRFs while being faster and simpler, and in optical flow we obtain clearly
sharper responses than networks that do not use local attention masks. In both
cases, segmentation-aware convolution yields systematic improvements over
strong baselines. Source code for this work is available online at
http://cs.cmu.edu/~aharley/segaware
Curved Gabor Filters for Fingerprint Image Enhancement
Gabor filters play an important role in many application areas for the
enhancement of various types of images and the extraction of Gabor features.
For the purpose of enhancing curved structures in noisy images, we introduce
curved Gabor filters which locally adapt their shape to the direction of flow.
These curved Gabor filters enable the choice of filter parameters which
increase the smoothing power without creating artifacts in the enhanced image.
In this paper, curved Gabor filters are applied to the curved ridge and valley
structure of low-quality fingerprint images. First, we combine two orientation
field estimation methods in order to obtain a more robust estimation for very
noisy images. Next, curved regions are constructed by following the respective
local orientation and they are used for estimating the local ridge frequency.
Lastly, curved Gabor filters are defined based on curved regions and they are
applied for the enhancement of low-quality fingerprint images. Experimental
results on the FVC2004 databases show improvements of this approach in
comparison to state-of-the-art enhancement methods
Efficient MRF Energy Propagation for Video Segmentation via Bilateral Filters
Segmentation of an object from a video is a challenging task in multimedia
applications. Depending on the application, automatic or interactive methods
are desired; however, regardless of the application type, efficient computation
of video object segmentation is crucial for time-critical applications;
specifically, mobile and interactive applications require near real-time
efficiencies. In this paper, we address the problem of video segmentation from
the perspective of efficiency. We initially redefine the problem of video
object segmentation as the propagation of MRF energies along the temporal
domain. For this purpose, a novel and efficient method is proposed to propagate
MRF energies throughout the frames via bilateral filters without using any
global texture, color or shape model. Recently presented bi-exponential filter
is utilized for efficiency, whereas a novel technique is also developed to
dynamically solve graph-cuts for varying, non-lattice graphs in general linear
filtering scenario. These improvements are experimented for both automatic and
interactive video segmentation scenarios. Moreover, in addition to the
efficiency, segmentation quality is also tested both quantitatively and
qualitatively. Indeed, for some challenging examples, significant time
efficiency is observed without loss of segmentation quality.Comment: Multimedia, IEEE Transactions on (Volume:16, Issue: 5, Aug. 2014
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An evaluation framework for stereo-based driver assistance
This is the post-print version of the Article - Copyright @ 2012 Springer VerlagThe accuracy of stereo algorithms or optical flow methods is commonly assessed by comparing the results against the Middlebury
database. However, equivalent data for automotive or robotics applications
rarely exist as they are difficult to obtain. As our main contribution, we introduce an evaluation framework tailored for stereo-based driver assistance able to deliver excellent performance measures while
circumventing manual label effort. Within this framework one can combine several ways of ground-truthing, different comparison metrics, and use large image databases.
Using our framework we show examples on several types of ground truthing techniques: implicit ground truthing (e.g. sequence recorded without a crash occurred), robotic vehicles with high precision sensors, and to a small extent, manual labeling. To show the effectiveness of our evaluation framework we compare three different stereo algorithms on
pixel and object level. In more detail we evaluate an intermediate representation
called the Stixel World. Besides evaluating the accuracy of the Stixels, we investigate the completeness (equivalent to the detection rate) of the StixelWorld vs. the number of phantom Stixels. Among many findings, using this framework enables us to reduce the number of phantom Stixels by a factor of three compared to the base parametrization. This base parametrization has already been optimized by test driving vehicles for distances exceeding 10000 km
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