Scale-adaptive spatial appearance feature density approximation for object tracking

Object tracking is an essential task in visual traffic surveillance. Ideally, a tracker should be able to accurately capture an object's natural motion such as translation, rotation, and scaling. However, it is well known that object appearance varies due to changes in viewing angle, scale, and illumination. They introduce ambiguity to the image cue on which a visual tracker usually relies and which affects the tracking performance. Thus, a robust image appearance cue is required. This paper proposes scale-adaptive spatial appearance feature density approximation to represent objects and construct the image cue. It is found that the appearance representation improves the sensitivity on both the object's rotation and scale. The image cue is then constructed by both the appearance representation of the object and its surrounding background such that distinguishable parts of an object can be tracked under poor imaging conditions. Moreover, tracking dynamics is integrated with the image cue so that objects are efficiently localized in a gradient-based process. Comparative experiments show that the proposed method is effective in capturing the natural motion of objects and generating better tracking accuracy under different image conditions. © 2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

The environmental impact of wind turbine blades

The first generation of wind turbine (WT) blades are now reaching their end of life, signalling the beginning of a large problem for the future. Currently most waste is sent to landfill, which is not an environmentally desirable solution. Awareness of this issue is rising, but no studies have fully assessed the eco impact of WT blades. The present study aims to provide a macroscopic quantitative assessment of the lifetime environmental impact of WT blades. The first stage has been to analyse global data to calculate the amount of WT blade materials consumed in the past. The life cycle environmental impact of a single WT blade has then been estimated using eco data for raw materials, manufacturing processes, transportation, and operation and maintenance processes. For a typical 45.2 meter 1.5 MW blade this is 795 GJ (CO2 footprint 42.1 tonnes), dominated by manufacturing processes and raw materials (96% of the total. Based on the 2014 installed capacity, the total mass of WTB is 78 kt, their energy consumption is 82 TJ and the carbon dioxide footprint is 4.35 Mt. These figures will provide a basis for suggesting possible solutions to reduce WTB environmental impact.China Scholarship CouncilThis is the final version of the article. It first appeared from the Institute of Physics via http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1757-899X/139/1/01203

A Wireless Implantable System for Facilitating Gastrointestinal Motility.

Gastrointestinal (GI) electrical stimulation has been shown in several studies to be a potential treatment option for GI motility disorders. Despite the promising preliminary research progress, however, its clinical applicability and usability are still unknown and limited due to the lack of a miniaturized versatile implantable stimulator supporting the investigation of effective stimulation patterns for facilitating GI dysmotility. In this paper, we present a wireless implantable GI modulation system to fill this technology gap. The system consists of a wireless extraluminal gastrointestinal modulation device (EGMD) performing GI electrical stimulation, and a rendezvous device (RD) and a custom-made graphical user interface (GUI) outside the body to wirelessly power and configure the EGMD to provide the desired stimuli for modulating GI smooth muscle activities. The system prototype was validated in bench-top and in vivo tests. The GI modulation system demonstrated its potential for facilitating intestinal transit in the preliminary in vivo chronic study using porcine models

Energy bands and Landau levels of ultracold fermions in the bilayer honeycomb optical lattice

We investigate the spectrum and eigenstates of ultracold fermionic atoms in the bilayer honeycomb optical lattice. In the low energy approximation, the dispersion relation has parabolic form and the quasiparticles are chiral. In the presence of the effective magnetic field, which is created for the system with optical means, the energy spectrum shows an unconventional Landau level structure. Furthermore, the experimental detection of the spectrum is proposed with the Bragg scattering techniques.Comment: To appear in Journal of Modern Optic

A soft coarse-grained reconfigurable array based high-level synthesis methodology: Promoting design productivity and exploring extreme FPGA frequency

Compared to the use of a typical software development flow, the productivity of developing FPGA-based compute applications remains much lower. Although the use of high-level synthesis (HLS) tools may partly alleviate this shortcoming, the lengthy low-level FPGA implementation process remains a major obstacle to high productivity computing, limiting the number of compile-debug-edit cycles per day. Furthermore, high-level application developers often lack the intimate hardware engineering experience that is needed to achieve high performance on FPGAs, therefore undermining their usefulness as accelerators. To address the productivity and performance problems, a HLS methodology that utilizes soft coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (SCGRAs) as an intermediate compilation step is presented. Instead of compiling high-level applications directly to circuits, the compilation process is reduced to an operation scheduling task targeting the SCGRA. © 2013 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Mixed truck delivery systems with both hub-and-spoke and direct shipment

Department of Shipping and Transport Logistics2003-2004 > Academic research: refereed > Publication in refereed journalAccepted ManuscriptPublishe

Effects of qigong training on physical and psychosocial well-being of breast cancer survivors: a systematic review

published_or_final_versio

Wind turbine blade end-of-life options: an eco-audit comparison

Wind energy has developed rapidly over the last two decades to become one of the most promising economical and green sources of renewable energy, responding to concerns about use of fossil fuels and increasing demand for energy. However, attention is now turning to what happens to end-of-life wind turbine waste, and there is scrutiny of its environmental impact. In this study, we focus on one aspect of this, the blades. We analyse and compare end-of-life options for wind turbine blade materials (mainly glass fibre reinforced plastic and carbon fibre reinforced plastic) in terms of environmental impact (focusing on energy consumption), using our own data together with results gathered from the literature. The environmental impacts of each end-of-life option are discussed, looking at processing energy consumption, the recycling benefits and the effect of blade technology development trends. There is considerable variability in the results, and lack of consensus on predictions for the future. We therefore analyse the results using a range of different scenarios to show how the ‘optimal’ solutions are influenced by trends in blade composition and end-of-life process development. The most environmentally favourable process is dependent on whether the materials used for the blades are glass fibre composite or carbon fibre composite. The extent to which process improvement might affect the viability of different end-of-life processes has been assessed by looking at ‘crossover’ points for when the environmental impact becomes favourable. This analysis gives new insight into areas where research into process technologies could be targeted to enable significant end-of-life environmental benefits.China Scholarship Council Jesus College Cambridg

Analytical technology aided optimization and scale-up of impinging jet mixer for reactive crystallization process

Reactive crystallization is widely used in the manufacture of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs). Since APIs often have low solubility, traditional stirred tank reactors and the route of process operation and control using metastable zone width are not effective. The current work investigated the integration of an impinging jet mixer and a stirred tank crystallizer that can take advantage of both the reaction and crystallization characteristics, the focus being on design optimization and scale-up using process analytical techniques based on the Fourier transform Infrared spectroscopy and Focused Beam Reflectance Measurement, as well as X-ray diffraction and particle imaging Morphologi G3. The parameters for process operation and design of the impinging jet mixer were optimized. The research was carried out with reference to the manufacture of an antibiotic, sodium cefuroxime, firstly in a 1L reactor, then a 10L reactor. The crystals produced showed higher crystallinity, narrower size distribution, higher stability and purity