COrE (Cosmic Origins Explorer) A White Paper

COrE (Cosmic Origins Explorer) is a fourth-generation full-sky, microwave-band satellite recently proposed to ESA within Cosmic Vision 2015-2025. COrE will provide maps of the microwave sky in polarization and temperature in 15 frequency bands, ranging from 45 GHz to 795 GHz, with an angular resolution ranging from 23 arcmin (45 GHz) and 1.3 arcmin (795 GHz) and sensitivities roughly 10 to 30 times better than PLANCK (depending on the frequency channel). The COrE mission will lead to breakthrough science in a wide range of areas, ranging from primordial cosmology to galactic and extragalactic science. COrE is designed to detect the primordial gravitational waves generated during the epoch of cosmic inflation at more than $3\sigma$ for $r=(T/S)>=10^{-3}$. It will also measure the CMB gravitational lensing deflection power spectrum to the cosmic variance limit on all linear scales, allowing us to probe absolute neutrino masses better than laboratory experiments and down to plausible values suggested by the neutrino oscillation data. COrE will also search for primordial non-Gaussianity with significant improvements over Planck in its ability to constrain the shape (and amplitude) of non-Gaussianity. In the areas of galactic and extragalactic science, in its highest frequency channels COrE will provide maps of the galactic polarized dust emission allowing us to map the galactic magnetic field in areas of diffuse emission not otherwise accessible to probe the initial conditions for star formation. COrE will also map the galactic synchrotron emission thirty times better than PLANCK. This White Paper reviews the COrE science program, our simulations on foreground subtraction, and the proposed instrumental configuration.Comment: 90 pages Latex 15 figures (revised 28 April 2011, references added, minor errors corrected

Roadmap on structured light

Structured light refers to the generation and application of custom light fields. As the tools and technology to create and detect structured light have evolved, steadily the applications have begun to emerge. This roadmap touches on the key fields within structured light from the perspective of experts in those areas, providing insight into the current state and the challenges their respective fields face. Collectively the roadmap outlines the venerable nature of structured light research and the exciting prospects for the future that are yet to be realized

Part decomposition of 3D surfaces

This dissertation describes a general algorithm that automatically decomposes realworld scenes and objects into visual parts. The input to the algorithm is a 3 D triangle mesh that approximates the surfaces of a scene or object. This geometric mesh completely specifies the shape of interest. The output of the algorithm is a set of boundary contours that dissect the mesh into parts where these parts agree with human perception. In this algorithm, shape alone defines the location of a bom1dary contour for a part. The algorithm leverages a human vision theory known as the minima rule that states that human visual perception tends to decompose shapes into parts along lines of negative curvature minima. Specifically, the minima rule governs the location of part boundaries, and as a result the algorithm is known as the Minima Rule Algorithm. Previous computer vision methods have attempted to implement this rule but have used pseudo measures of surface curvature. Thus, these prior methods are not true implementations of the rule. The Minima Rule Algorithm is a three step process that consists of curvature estimation, mesh segmentation, and quality evaluation. These steps have led to three novel algorithms known as Normal Vector Voting, Fast Marching Watersheds, and Part Saliency Metric, respectively. For each algorithm, this dissertation presents both the supporting theory and experimental results. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm using both synthetic and real data and include comparisons with previous methods from the research literature. Finally, the dissertation concludes with a summary of the contributions to the state of the art

On Triangular Splines:CAD and Quadrature

The standard representation of CAD (computer aided design) models is based on the boundary representation (B-reps) with trimmed and (topologically) stitched tensor-product NURBS patches. Due to trimming, this leads to gaps and overlaps in the models. While these can be made arbitrarily small for visualisation and manufacturing purposes, they still pose problems in downstream applications such as (isogeometric) analysis and 3D printing. It is therefore worthwhile to investigate conversion methods which (necessarily approximately) convert these models into water-tight or even smooth representations. After briefly surveying existing conversion methods, we will focus on techniques that convert CAD models into triangular spline surfaces of various levels of continuity. In the second part, we will investigate efficient quadrature rules for triangular spline space