'Shu-Fei-Shu' : a digital strategy for modernising Chinese calligraphy

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences.Chinese calligraphy has undergone a revolution over the last decade. The traditional brush and ink have been replaced by various materials and tools, and artists have been transforming calligraphy both technically and conceptually. Through the use of various graphics programs and pressure-sensitive stylus tablets, the aesthetics of calligraphy have shifted into the postmodern era. Two important questions are addressed in this research: firstly, in the journey from paper to new media how has calligraphy changed? And secondly, what kinds of new values are propagated in the art of calligraphy today? I undertook a thorough overview of the field then in response I produced a creative project titled Shu-Fei-Shu. The primary aims of Shu-Fei-Shu are to theoretically articulate and practically present artistic approaches to modernising Chinese calligraphy in the media age. The first section of this project is a theoretical and critical analysis of the historical developments, relative literature and key art works of modem calligraphy. In the end of this section, I concluded that the concept of 'digital-generation' is a strategy for modernising Chinese calligraphy. Also I argued that three main genres can be identified as, namely: 'illegibility', 'digital mosaics' and 'interaction', within this new digital calligraphic form. In the second section, I present my artistic experiments, whish I have done through out the process of research, and lastly, my final multimedia work, Shu-Fei-Shu. It is an interactive web site that offers users a platform to browse, learn and create their own digital calligraphy on line

The permeability of hot mix asphalt concrete with petroleum contaminated soils

It is estimated by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) that there are 2 to 3.5 million underground storage tanks (USTs) throughout the nation and about 25% of these tanks are leaking. The leakage of petroleum or other organic material presents serious environmental problem due to the uncontrolled release of petroleum products to ground water. Many new techniques have developed to reuse these petroleum contaminated soils generated from sites containing leaking USTs. One such soil reuse method available since 1985 is the use of petroleum contaminated soils in the production of hot mix asphalt. The stability, durability, and hydraulic conductivity are three important engineering parameters that need to be considered when using petroleum contaminated soils (PCSs) in hot mix asphalt (HMA). In three separate theses, the stability, durability of asphalt concrete mixed with PCSs and the environmental impacts of the process were investigated. In this thesis, the variation in hydraulic conductivity due to the addition of PCSs in to HMA is investigated. The hydraulic conductivity of Hot Mix Asphalt pavement affects its performance. However, there are no publications that document the hydraulic conductivity of hot mix asphalt concrete made with or without petroleum contaminated soils. In this thesis, six different hot mix asphalt concrete mixes with petroleum contaminated soils and a control mix were designed and the hydraulic conductivity were measured. The measured hydraulic conductivity values are then correlated to the properties of the matrix in the HMA concrete

Inkjet Printing of Ag Nanoparticles using Dimatix Inkjet Printer, No 2

This report describes the rheological analysisof the present Ag nanoparticle ink, and confirms that it is suitable for the piezoelectric drop-on-demand printing for both of 1 pL and 10 pL cartridges. The satellite drops and the splashing on the substrate are also discussed for optimization of the nozzle temperature and the jetting voltage. The minimum horizontal and vertical line widths are shown to be 30 and 40 µm, respectively, but the average minimum single line width is estimated to be ~50 µm. The non-uniform width lines are suggested to arise from the bulge instability. Furthermore, it is indicated that the surface roughness of the PI film causes the non-parallel contact line pinning. The resistivity of printed lines is also reported

Surface Roughness Dependence of Inkjet Printing of Ag Nanoparticles

This report describes dependence of the inkjet printing on the surface roughness of normal PI film, ultra-smooth PI film, and polished Si wafer. The printing line width and LER are discussed by the line spreading constraint due to the limited volume of the droplet, vaporization of the solvent by the substrate temperature, the contact angle of the ink, and the surface roughness of the substrate. It is also shown that the minimum line width of ~21um is achieved on the Si wafer. Furthermore, the optimization of the substrate temperature for sintering of Ag nanoparticle is discussed

Text Growing on Leaf

Irregular-shaped texts bring challenges to Scene Text Detection (STD). Although existing contour point sequence-based approaches achieve comparable performances, they fail to cover some highly curved ribbon-like text lines. It leads to limited text fitting ability and STD technique application. Considering the above problem, we combine text geometric characteristics and bionics to design a natural leaf vein-based text representation method (LVT). Concretely, it is found that leaf vein is a generally directed graph, which can easily cover various geometries. Inspired by it, we treat text contour as leaf margin and represent it through main, lateral, and thin veins. We further construct a detection framework based on LVT, namely LeafText. In the text reconstruction stage, LeafText simulates the leaf growth process to rebuild text contour. It grows main vein in Cartesian coordinates to locate text roughly at first. Then, lateral and thin veins are generated along the main vein growth direction in polar coordinates. They are responsible for generating coarse contour and refining it, respectively. Considering the deep dependency of lateral and thin veins on main vein, the Multi-Oriented Smoother (MOS) is proposed to enhance the robustness of main vein to ensure a reliable detection result. Additionally, we propose a global incentive loss to accelerate the predictions of lateral and thin veins. Ablation experiments demonstrate LVT is able to depict arbitrary-shaped texts precisely and verify the effectiveness of MOS and global incentive loss. Comparisons show that LeafText is superior to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods on MSRA-TD500, CTW1500, Total-Text, and ICDAR2015 datasets

Zoom Text Detector

To pursue comprehensive performance, recent text detectors improve detection speed at the expense of accuracy. They adopt shrink-mask based text representation strategies, which leads to a high dependency of detection accuracy on shrink-masks. Unfortunately, three disadvantages cause unreliable shrink-masks. Specifically, these methods try to strengthen the discrimination of shrink-masks from the background by semantic information. However, the feature defocusing phenomenon that coarse layers are optimized by fine-grained objectives limits the extraction of semantic features. Meanwhile, since both shrink-masks and the margins belong to texts, the detail loss phenomenon that the margins are ignored hinders the distinguishment of shrink-masks from the margins, which causes ambiguous shrink-mask edges. Moreover, false-positive samples enjoy similar visual features with shrink-masks. They aggravate the decline of shrink-masks recognition. To avoid the above problems, we propose a Zoom Text Detector (ZTD) inspired by the zoom process of the camera. Specifically, Zoom Out Module (ZOM) is introduced to provide coarse-grained optimization objectives for coarse layers to avoid feature defocusing. Meanwhile, Zoom In Module (ZIM) is presented to enhance the margins recognition to prevent detail loss. Furthermore, Sequential-Visual Discriminator (SVD) is designed to suppress false-positive samples by sequential and visual features. Experiments verify the superior comprehensive performance of ZTD

Feasibility of a Hip Flexion Feedback System For Controlling Exercise Intensity and Tibia Axial Peak Accelerations During Treadmill Walking

The ability to meet high exercise intensities is limited by the increased risk of injury in some clinical populations. Previous studies have linked large tibia peak positive accelerations resulting from running to increased risk of developing lower-extremity injury. The purpose of this study is to determine the feasibility of using a hip flexion feedback system (HFFS) to meet and maintain different exercise intensities while maintaining low tibia axial accelerations. Ten healthy participants were tested on a HFFS test and an independent walking/running test to meet exercise intensities of 40% and 60% of heart rate reserve (HRR). During the HFFS test, the HFFS controlled in real time the exercise intensity by directing individuals to specific maximum hip flexion targets during walking and providing visual information that assists them in maintaining low tibia peak positive accelerations during the initial contact phase. Maximum hip flexion targets during walking are calculated based on real-time readings of the participant’s heart rate. During the independent test, exercise intensity was controlled independently by the participant using treadmill speed. Compared to the independent test, using the HFFS at 60% HRR resulted in similar heart-rate error but lower tibia peak positive accelerations. No differences were observed for the 40% HRR intensity. This paper describes a novel exercise approach that uses the individual’s heart rate to calculate maximal hip flexion targets that an individual should meet during treadmill walking. The HFFS also provides tibia peak positive peak acceleration cues. Therefore, the HFFS can increase and control exercise intensities while maintaining low tibia accelerations. In particular, the HFFS might be an alternative strategy to meet moderate to vigorous exercise intensities in populations at risk of developing lower-extremity injuries

Feasibility of a Hip Flexion Feedback System For Controlling Exercise Intensity and Tibia Axial Peak Accelerations During Treadmill Walking

The ability to meet high exercise intensities is limited by the increased risk of injury in some clinical populations. Previous studies have linked large tibia peak positive accelerations resulting from running to increased risk of developing lower-extremity injury. The purpose of this study is to determine the feasibility of using a hip flexion feedback system (HFFS) to meet and maintain different exercise intensities while maintaining low tibia axial accelerations. Ten healthy participants were tested on a HFFS test and an independent walking/running test to meet exercise intensities of 40% and 60% of heart rate reserve (HRR). During the HFFS test, the HFFS controlled in real time the exercise intensity by directing individuals to specific maximum hip flexion targets during walking and providing visual information that assists them in maintaining low tibia peak positive accelerations during the initial contact phase. Maximum hip flexion targets during walking are calculated based on real-time readings of the participant’s heart rate. During the independent test, exercise intensity was controlled independently by the participant using treadmill speed. Compared to the independent test, using the HFFS at 60% HRR resulted in similar heart-rate error but lower tibia peak positive accelerations. No differences were observed for the 40% HRR intensity. This paper describes a novel exercise approach that uses the individual’s heart rate to calculate maximal hip flexion targets that an individual should meet during treadmill walking. The HFFS also provides tibia peak positive peak acceleration cues. Therefore, the HFFS can increase and control exercise intensities while maintaining low tibia accelerations. In particular, the HFFS might be an alternative strategy to meet moderate to vigorous exercise intensities in populations at risk of developing lower-extremity injuries

Quantifying obesity from anthropometric measures and body volume data

Obesity has become a serious problem in several developed and developing countries. Three-dimensional photonic scanning (3DPS) is a useful tool to obtain accurate anthropometric measures and body volume data for body shape quantification. Some traditional models have been developed to estimate body fat percentages from anthropometric measures or body volume data for body composition classification and obesity quantification. However, these traditional models are very sensitive to the errors in anthropometric measures and body volume data. Small errors in anthropometric measures or body volume data reduces accuracy of body fat percentages estimated from 3DPS and may lead to misclassifications when quantifying levels of obesity. In this study, pattern recognition techniques, neural networks, were applied to develop a new model which can classify obesity levels from a combination of anthropometric measures and body volume data without estimating body fat percentages. The developed model and the traditional models were applied to determine 2209 male participants’ body composition classes for obesity quantification. The accuracy of the new and the traditional models was determined by comparing the estimated body composition classes with the real body composition classes obtained from dual energy X-ray absorptiometry scanning output. The results showed that the accuracy of the developed model was better than the traditional models. Therefore, the developed model provides more accurate results in body composition classification for obesity quantification