40,674 research outputs found
Connectivity-Enforcing Hough Transform for the Robust Extraction of Line Segments
Global voting schemes based on the Hough transform (HT) have been widely used
to robustly detect lines in images. However, since the votes do not take line
connectivity into account, these methods do not deal well with cluttered
images. In opposition, the so-called local methods enforce connectivity but
lack robustness to deal with challenging situations that occur in many
realistic scenarios, e.g., when line segments cross or when long segments are
corrupted. In this paper, we address the critical limitations of the HT as a
line segment extractor by incorporating connectivity in the voting process.
This is done by only accounting for the contributions of edge points lying in
increasingly larger neighborhoods and whose position and directional content
agree with potential line segments. As a result, our method, which we call
STRAIGHT (Segment exTRAction by connectivity-enforcInG HT), extracts the
longest connected segments in each location of the image, thus also integrating
into the HT voting process the usually separate step of individual segment
extraction. The usage of the Hough space mapping and a corresponding
hierarchical implementation make our approach computationally feasible. We
present experiments that illustrate, with synthetic and real images, how
STRAIGHT succeeds in extracting complete segments in several situations where
current methods fail.Comment: Submitted for publicatio
Video recording true single-photon double-slit interference
As normally used, no commercially available camera has a low-enough dark
noise to directly produce video recordings of double-slit interference at the
photon-by-photon level, because readout noise significantly contaminates or
overwhelms the signal. In this work, noise levels are significantly reduced by
turning on the camera only when the presence of a photon has been heralded by
the arrival, at an independent detector, of a time-correlated photon produced
via parametric down-conversion. This triggering scheme provides the improvement
required for direct video imaging of Young's double-slit experiment with single
photons, allowing clarified versions of this foundational demonstration.
Further, we introduce variations on this experiment aimed at promoting
discussion of the role spatial coherence plays in such a measurement. We also
emphasize complementary aspects of single-photon measurement, where imaging
yields (transverse) position information, while diffraction yields the
transverse momentum, and highlight the roles of transverse position and
momentum correlations between down-converted photons, including examples of
"ghost" imaging and diffraction. The videos can be accessed at
http://sun.iwu.edu/~gspaldin/SinglePhotonVideos.html online.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure
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