Switchable polarization manipulation, optical logical gates and conveyor belt based on U-shaped \ce{VO2} nanoholes

Based on U-shaped plasmonic nanoholes in an \ce{Au-VO2-Au} film, we propose to achieve several switchable functions at the telecom wavelength by transition from the \ce{VO2} semiconductive state to the metallic state. The first is the polarization manipulation of four different polarization states ($x\&y$-polarization, LCP, and RCP). An array of U-shaped holes constitutes of the high efficiency SPP splitter, and thus the spin-encoded optical logical gates can be achieved. Furthurmore, we prove that a nano-optical conveyor belt can be build up with such U-shaped holes, making the transport of nanoparticles over the film efficiency by transforming between two spin states periodically, and the transport direction switchably along with the \ce{VO2} phase

Ecological model to predict potential habitats of Oncomelania hupensis, the intermediate host of Schistosoma japonicum in the mountainous regions, China

Schistosomiasis japonica is a parasitic disease that remains endemic in seven provinces in the People's Republic of China (P.R. China). One of the most important measures in the process of schistosomiasis elimination in P.R. China is control of Oncomelania hupensis, the unique intermediate host snail of Schistosoma japonicum. Compared with plains/swamp and lake regions, the hilly/mountainous regions of schistosomiasis endemic areas are more complicated, which makes the snail survey difficult to conduct precisely and efficiently. There is a pressing call to identify the snail habitats of mountainous regions in an efficient and cost-effective manner.; Twelve out of 56 administrative villages distributed with O. hupensis in Eryuan, Yunnan Province, were randomly selected to set up the ecological model. Thirty out of the rest of 78 villages (villages selected for building model were excluded from the villages for validation) in Eryuan and 30 out of 89 villages in Midu, Yunnan Province were selected via a chessboard method for model validation, respectively. Nine-year-average Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI) and Land Surface Temperature (LST) as well as Digital Elevation Model (DEM) covering Eryuan and Midu were extracted from MODIS and ASTER satellite images, respectively. Slope, elevation and the distance from every village to its nearest stream were derived from DEM. Suitable survival environment conditions for snails were defined by comparing historical snail presence data and remote sensing derived images. According to the suitable conditions for snails, environment factors, i.e. NDVI, LST, elevation, slope and the distance from every village to its nearest stream, were integrated into an ecological niche model to predict O. hupensis potential habitats in Eryuan and Midu. The evaluation of the model was assessed by comparing the model prediction and field investigation. Then, the consistency rate of model validation was calculated in Eryuan and Midu Counties, respectively. The final ecological niche model for potential O. hupensis habitats prediction comprised the following environmental factors, namely: NDVI (≥ 0.446), LST (≥ 22.70°C), elevation (≤ 2,300 m), slope (≤ 11°) and the distance to nearest stream (≤ 1,000 m). The potential O. hupensis habitats in Eryuan distributed in the Lancang River basin and O. hupensis in Midu shows a trend of clustering in the north and spotty distribution in the south. The consistency rates of the ecological niche model in Eryuan and Midu were 76.67% and 83.33%, respectively.; The ecological niche model integrated with NDVI, LST, elevation, slope and distance from every village to its nearest stream adequately predicted the snail habitats in the mountainous regions

Application of Wavelet Analysis in Detecting Runway Foreign Object Debris

Foreign Object Debris (FOD) is dangerous for aircraft safety. And it can be suggested to use image processing technology on the FOD’s detection. Depending on image processing system, a major sub-system in FOD detecting system on the runway, FOD image will be observed efficiently and rapidly with few economy costs and highly accuracy and reliability. The paper analyses the characteristics and principles of wavelet transformation algorithm and applies wavelet theory on FOD’s identification and detection. Identifying the FOD’s shape and marking characteristic point on the runway under poor visual background would be accomplished by programming in MATLAB using wavelet algorithm. The results show that the plan is applicable. Besides that, it brings about profound significance for realizing the real-time detecting on the FOD and testing with more feasibility and efficiency.

Domain Fingerprints for No-reference Image Quality Assessment

Human fingerprints are detailed and nearly unique markers of human identity. Such a unique and stable fingerprint is also left on each acquired image. It can reveal how an image was degraded during the image acquisition procedure and thus is closely related to the quality of an image. In this work, we propose a new no-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) approach called domain-aware IQA (DA-IQA), which for the first time introduces the concept of domain fingerprint to the NR-IQA field. The domain fingerprint of an image is learned from image collections of different degradations and then used as the unique characteristics to identify the degradation sources and assess the quality of the image. To this end, we design a new domain-aware architecture, which enables simultaneous determination of both the distortion sources and the quality of an image. With the distortion in an image better characterized, the image quality can be more accurately assessed, as verified by extensive experiments, which show that the proposed DA-IQA performs better than almost all the compared state-of-the-art NR-IQA methods.Comment: accepted by IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology (TCSVT