Accurate Light Field Depth Estimation with Superpixel Regularization over Partially Occluded Regions

Depth estimation is a fundamental problem for light field photography applications. Numerous methods have been proposed in recent years, which either focus on crafting cost terms for more robust matching, or on analyzing the geometry of scene structures embedded in the epipolar-plane images. Significant improvements have been made in terms of overall depth estimation error; however, current state-of-the-art methods still show limitations in handling intricate occluding structures and complex scenes with multiple occlusions. To address these challenging issues, we propose a very effective depth estimation framework which focuses on regularizing the initial label confidence map and edge strength weights. Specifically, we first detect partially occluded boundary regions (POBR) via superpixel based regularization. Series of shrinkage/reinforcement operations are then applied on the label confidence map and edge strength weights over the POBR. We show that after weight manipulations, even a low-complexity weighted least squares model can produce much better depth estimation than state-of-the-art methods in terms of average disparity error rate, occlusion boundary precision-recall rate, and the preservation of intricate visual features

The chinesenization of American zoning in the 1980s

The most instrumental reform in Chinese urban planning system during the market reform in the 1980s is the introduction of so-called “regulatory detailed planning” (in Chinese pinyin, kong gui), an adaptive form of American zoning in Chinese cities. However, this episode of the reform hasn’t been closely examined from a historic and critical perspective so far. Based on archival research, mapping and interviews, this article traces the planning and development process of Shanghai Hongqiao New District and Wenzhou old town, and explores the original process of transplantation and localization of American zoning in Chinese cities. By comparing the planning and construction explorations of the two cities, we will argue that although it learned much from zoning techniques, especially the control indexes, the regulatory detailed planning is more to be a plat form for local government to negotiate with the foreign businessmen and other private sectors, rather than representing public intervention and regulation in the US, and served as a technical tool to materialize the development goals of Chinese cities

Rigid formation construction from non-rigid components

This paper discusses the construction of rigid formation from arbitrary non-rigid components in two-dimensional space. Specifically, we focus on developing strategies for the construction sequences under the premise of building minimum number of links between the non-rigid components. Three operations, namely spindle splitting, rigid component shrink and edge floating, are proposed. The scenarios of acquiring a rigid formation from different kinds of non-rigid components are discussed respectively. It is proved that our strategy will guarantee the rigidity of the obtained formation with minimum number of inserted links, and will cover all the possible solutions during the construction process

Quantum Impurity in Luttinger Liquid: Universal Conductance with Entanglement Renormalization

We study numerically the universal conductance of Luttinger liquids wire with a single impurity via the Muti-scale Entanglement Renormalization Ansatz (MERA). The scale invariant MERA provides an efficient way to extract scaling operators and scaling dimensions for both the bulk and the boundary conformal field theories. By utilizing the key relationship between the conductance tensor and ground-state correlation function, the universal conductance can be evaluated within the framework of the boundary MERA. We construct the boundary MERA to compute the correlation functions and scaling dimensions for the Kane-Fisher fixed points by modeling the single impurity as a junction (weak link) of two interacting wires. We show that the universal behavior of the junction can be easily identified within the MERA and argue that the boundary MERA framework has tremendous potential to classify the fixed points in general multi-wire junctions.Comment: 14 pages, 18 figure