Hardware Implementation of a High Speed Deblocking Filter for the H.264 Video Codec

H.264/MPEG-4 part 10 or Advanced Video Coding (AVC) is a standard for video compression. MPEG-4 is currently one of the most widely used formats for recording, compression and distribution of high definition video. One feature of the AVC codec is the inclusion of an in-loop deblocking filter. The goal of the deblocking filter is to remove blocking artifacts that exist at macroblock boundaries. However, due to the complexity of the deblocking algorithm, the filter can easily account for one-third of the computational complexity of a decoder. In this thesis, a modification to the deblocking algorithm given in the AVC standard is presented. This modification allows the algorithm to finish the filtering of a macroblock to finish twenty clock cycles faster than previous single filter designs. This thesis also presents a hardware architecture of the H.264 deblocking filter to be used in the H.264 decoder. The developed architecture allows the filtering of videos streams using 4:2:2 chroma subsampling and 10-bit pixel precision in real-time. The filter was described in VHDL and synthesized for a Spartan-6 FPGA device. Timing analysis showed that is was capable of filtering a macroblock using 4:2:0 chroma subsampling in 124 clock cycles and 4:2:2 chroma subsampling streams in 162 clock cycles. The filter can also provide real-time deblocking of HDTV video (1920x1080) of up to 988 frames per second

Charity in New South Wales, 1850-1914 : a study in public, private and state provisions for the poor

In 185O charity in N.S.W. was a matter of caring for the destitute aged, the sick poor, fallen and friendless females, deserted wives and neglected or orphaned children. Most assistance was administered by public societies supported both by donations from the well-to-do in the community and by government subsidies. Charity’s role was a conserving one, with minimal goals and limited vision. The motives were mixed but largely Christian. The techniques were condescending and based on assessments of moral worth. Three main types of need attracted attention: the sick poor, neglected children and those who were simply called ’the p o o r ’. The colony’s hospitals were its charitable institutions par excellence. They were, however, little more than places of last resort in the 1850s . By the 187Os there were signs of change, largely the product of advances in medical knowledge. By 19OO, and even more so by 1914, the facilities provided in them had ceased to be limited to the mid nineteenth century objects of charity. Hospitals provided services manifestly desirable to sober middle class people. The charitable quality of the hospitals was largely disappearing. The second group which has been discussed were the destitute and neglected children of the colony. Care for them in 185O was custodial and institutional. The state was more deeply involved in the care of children than with the hospitals. As well as subsidies it provided legal sanctions, and after 1866, its own reformatory and industrial schools. But in the 1870s there was a sustained barrage of criticisms against the ’barracks’, which showed that attitudes towards these children were changing. The creation of the State Children's Relief Board in 1881 symbolised this increased emphasis on the needs of such children for the individual care which they could best be given in a family. It also revealed the extended involvement of the government in this field of charitable effort. With the succession of C.K. Mackellar as President of the Board in 1902, another stage was reached. Mackellar sought to expand the Board's work beyond the simply charitable, through legal and administrative effort. By 1914 a wide and complex range of services under the control of the State Children’s Relief Department, as well as the efforts of the older and more conservative societies was available for these children. The poor were the subject of much more generalised attention. An important process in the story of caring for them was that by which first one group then another was recognised as requiring special attention. Thus the aged destitute came under the care of a government board in 1862. The Benevolent Society accepted lying-in cases from the mid 1850s. In 1902 it opened the Royal Hospital for Women at Paddington for their care. Poor families and destitute people who could not appropriately be admitted to the asylums usually received outdoor relief in kind. After 19OO many of them received an old age pension. After 1908 the permanently invalid received similar aid. Deserted wives and widows with families came under the care of the State Children’s Relief Department in 1896. By 1914 the state government’s expenditure on assistance to hospitals and charitable societies was nearly £600,000. It had been perhaps £20,000 in 1855» The government had taken its place alongside the public’ societies as the supplier of some services; it had replaced them in others; it had made much more active efforts to reform the conditions in the environment which produced the needs which the charitable societies had sought to deal with. The societies too had accepted important re-definitions of the people to be helped, of the aid appropriate to their needs, and of their place in the community. Charity in 191^ was still an operative concept, but no longer separate from much of the rest of the life of the community. By 191^ it had very largely ceased to be a chancy, condescending affair at the Benevolent Asylum, and had become the provision of widely available, efficiently administered social services

Passive Tracking System and Method

System and methods are disclosed for passively determining the location of a moveable transmitter utilizing a pair of phase shifts at a receiver for extracting a direction vector from a receiver to the transmitter. In a preferred embodiment, a phase difference between the transmitter and receiver is extracted utilizing a noncoherent demodulator in the receiver. The receiver includes antenna array with three antenna elements, which preferably are patch antenna elements placed apart by one-half wavelength. Three receiver channels are preferably utilized for simultaneously processing the received signal from each of the three antenna elements. Multipath transmission paths for each of the three receiver channels are indexed so that comparisons of the same multipath component are made for each of the three receiver channels. The phase difference for each received signal is determined by comparing only the magnitudes of received and stored modulation signals to determine a winning modulation symbol

The 21-SPONGE HI Absorption Survey I: Techniques and Initial Results

We present methods and results from "21-cm Spectral Line Observations of Neutral Gas with the EVLA" (21-SPONGE), a large survey for Galactic neutral hydrogen (HI) absorption with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA). With the upgraded capabilities of the VLA, we reach median root-mean-square (RMS) noise in optical depth of $\sigma_{\tau}=9\times 10^{-4}$ per $0.42\rm\,km\,s^{-1}$ channel for the 31 sources presented here. Upon completion, 21-SPONGE will be the largest HI absorption survey with this high sensitivity. We discuss the observations and data reduction strategies, as well as line fitting techniques. We prove that the VLA bandpass is stable enough to detect broad, shallow lines associated with warm HI, and show that bandpass observations can be combined in time to reduce spectral noise. In combination with matching HI emission profiles from the Arecibo Observatory ($\sim3.5'$ angular resolution), we estimate excitation (or spin) temperatures ($\rm T_s$) and column densities for Gaussian components fitted to sightlines along which we detect HI absorption (30/31). We measure temperatures up to $\rm T_s\sim1500\rm\,K$ for individual lines, showing that we can probe the thermally unstable interstellar medium (ISM) directly. However, we detect fewer of these thermally unstable components than expected from previous observational studies. We probe a wide range in column density between $\sim10^{16}$ and $>10^{21}\rm\,cm^{-2}$ for individual HI clouds. In addition, we reproduce the trend between cold gas fraction and average $\rm T_s$ found by synthetic observations of a hydrodynamic ISM simulation by Kim et al. (2014). Finally, we investigate methods for estimating HI $\rm T_s$ and discuss their biases.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ; 24 pages, 14 figure

First Detection of HCO+^+ Absorption in the Magellanic System

We present the first detection of HCO$^+$ absorption in the Magellanic System. Using the Australia Telescope Compact Array (ATCA), we observed 9 extragalactic radio continuum sources behind the Magellanic System and detected HCO$^+$ absorption towards one source located behind the leading edge of the Magellanic Bridge. The detection is located at LSR velocity of $v=214.0 \pm 0.4\rm\,km\,s^{-1}$, with a full width at half maximum of $\Delta v=4.5\pm 1.0\rm\,km\,s^{-1}$ and optical depth of $\tau(\rm HCO^+)=0.10\pm 0.02$. Although there is abundant neutral hydrogen (HI) surrounding the sightline in position-velocity space, at the exact location of the absorber the HI column density is low, $<10^{20}\rm\,cm^{-2}$, and there is little evidence for dust or CO emission from Planck observations. While the origin and survival of molecules in such a diffuse environment remains unclear, dynamical events such as HI flows and cloud collisions in this interacting system likely play an important role.Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ. 6 pages, 2 figures, 2 table

Tidal Limits to Planetary Habitability

The habitable zones of main sequence stars have traditionally been defined as the range of orbits that intercept the appropriate amount of stellar flux to permit surface water on a planet. Terrestrial exoplanets discovered to orbit M stars in these zones, which are close-in due to decreased stellar luminosity, may also undergo significant tidal heating. Tidal heating may span a wide range for terrestrial exoplanets and may significantly affect conditions near the surface. For example, if heating rates on an exoplanet are near or greater than that on Io (where tides drive volcanism that resurface the planet at least every 1 Myr) and produce similar surface conditions, then the development of life seems unlikely. On the other hand, if the tidal heating rate is less than the minimum to initiate plate tectonics, then CO_2 may not be recycled through subduction, leading to a runaway greenhouse that sterilizes the planet. These two cases represent potential boundaries to habitability and are presented along with the range of the traditional habitable zone for main sequence, low-mass stars. We propose a revised habitable zone that incorporates both stellar insolation and tidal heating. We apply these criteria to GJ 581 d and find that it is in the traditional habitable zone, but its tidal heating alone may be insufficient for plate tectonics.Comment: 13 pages, 2 figures, accepted to ApJ Letters. A version with full resolution images is available at http://www.astro.washington.edu/users/rory/publications/bjgr09.pd