2,205 research outputs found
Announcement: Open Access Week 2016 Events: Join Us!
This October, for the sixth year running, BU is pleased to participate in the international Open Access Week. We have organized several events leading up to, and during, the week of October 24th. Weād love for you to join us; please register for as many as you like. All events are open to the public (registration helps us plan refreshments), and will take place in the Mugar Library Estin Room, 771 Commonwealth Avenue, Rm 302, Boston MA 02215. [Originally announced on the BU Libraries website: http://www.bu.edu/library/news/2016/10/03/oaweek2016/
The Right (Angled) Perspective: Improving the Understanding of Road Scenes Using Boosted Inverse Perspective Mapping
Many tasks performed by autonomous vehicles such as road marking detection,
object tracking, and path planning are simpler in bird's-eye view. Hence,
Inverse Perspective Mapping (IPM) is often applied to remove the perspective
effect from a vehicle's front-facing camera and to remap its images into a 2D
domain, resulting in a top-down view. Unfortunately, however, this leads to
unnatural blurring and stretching of objects at further distance, due to the
resolution of the camera, limiting applicability. In this paper, we present an
adversarial learning approach for generating a significantly improved IPM from
a single camera image in real time. The generated bird's-eye-view images
contain sharper features (e.g. road markings) and a more homogeneous
illumination, while (dynamic) objects are automatically removed from the scene,
thus revealing the underlying road layout in an improved fashion. We
demonstrate our framework using real-world data from the Oxford RobotCar
Dataset and show that scene understanding tasks directly benefit from our
boosted IPM approach.Comment: equal contribution of first two authors, 8 full pages, 6 figures,
accepted at IV 201
High efficiency InGaAs solar cells on Si by InP layer transfer
InP/Si substrates were fabricated through wafer bonding and helium-induced exfoliation of InP, and InGaAs solar cells lattice matched to bulk InP were grown on these substrates using metal-organic chemical-vapor deposition. The photovoltaic characteristics of the InGaAs cells fabricated on the wafer-bonded InP/Si substrates were comparable to those synthesized on commercially available epiready InP substrates, thus providing a demonstration of wafer-bonded InP/Si substrates as an alternative to bulk InP substrates for solar cell applications
Differences In Piping System Design for Reciprocating and Centrifugal Pumps
Short CourseReciprocating pump installations require particular design considerations which are much different from centrifugal pump systems. An incomplete design basis for reciprocating pump installations can lead to costly remedial actions after commissioning, significant downtime or more serious problems which, if undetected, can lead to failures of pump components.
The goal of this course is to provide insight into the design considerations and industry best practices for centrifugal and reciprocating pump installations. The focus of the course will be on reciprocating pumps due to their higher risk of fatigue failures
Ethical perspectives on advances in biogerontology
Worldwide populations are aging with economic development as a result of public health initiatives and advances in therapeutic discoveries. Since 1850, life expectancy has advanced by 1 year for every four. Accompanying this change is the rapid development of antiāaging science. There are three schools of thought in the field of aging science. One perspective is the life course approach, which considers that aging is a good and natural process to be embraced as a necessary and positive aspect of life, where the aim is to improve the quality of existing lifespan and ācompressā morbidity. Another view is that aging is undesirable, and that rejuvenation and indeed immortality are possible since the biological basis of aging is understood, and therefore, strategies are possible for engineering negligible senescence. Finally, a hybrid approach is that life span can be extended by antiāaging medicines but with uncertain effects on health. While these advances offer much promise, the ethical perspectives are seldom discussed in crossādisciplinary settings. This article discusses some of the key ethical issues arising from recent advances in biogerontology
Generating All the Roads to Rome: Road Layout Randomization for Improved Road Marking Segmentation
Road markings provide guidance to traffic participants and enforce safe
driving behaviour, understanding their semantic meaning is therefore paramount
in (automated) driving. However, producing the vast quantities of road marking
labels required for training state-of-the-art deep networks is costly,
time-consuming, and simply infeasible for every domain and condition. In
addition, training data retrieved from virtual worlds often lack the richness
and complexity of the real world and consequently cannot be used directly. In
this paper, we provide an alternative approach in which new road marking
training pairs are automatically generated. To this end, we apply principles of
domain randomization to the road layout and synthesize new images from altered
semantic labels. We demonstrate that training on these synthetic pairs improves
mIoU of the segmentation of rare road marking classes during real-world
deployment in complex urban environments by more than 12 percentage points,
while performance for other classes is retained. This framework can easily be
scaled to all domains and conditions to generate large-scale road marking
datasets, while avoiding manual labelling effort.Comment: presented at ITSC 201
- ā¦