Objective: To demonstrate optical coherence tomography for high-resolution, noninvasive imaging of the human retina. Optical coherence tomography is a new imaging technique analogous to ultrasound B scan that can provide cross-sectional images of the retina with micrometer-scale resolution. Design: Survey optical coherence tomographic examination of the retina, including the macula and optic nerve head in normal human subjects. Settings Research laboratory. Participants: Convenience sample of normal human subjects. Main Outcome Measures: Correlation of optical coherence retinal tomographs with known normal retinal anatomy. Results: Optical coherence tomographs can discriminate the cross-sectional morphologic features of the fovea and optic disc, the layered structure of the retina, and normal anatomic variations in retinal and retinal nerve fiber layer thicknesses with 10- μm depth resolution. Conclusion: Optical coherence tomography is a potentially useful technique for high depth resolution, cross-sectional examination of the fundus.

Optical Coherence Tomography of the Human Retina

Intelligent vehicles have increased their capabilities for highly and, even fully, automated driving under controlled environments. Scene information is received using onboard sensors and communication network systems, i.e., infrastructure and other vehicles. Considering the available information, different motion planning and control techniques have been implemented to autonomously driving on complex environments. The main goal is focused on executing strategies to improve safety, comfort, and energy optimization. However, research challenges such as navigation in urban dynamic environments with obstacle avoidance capabilities, i.e., vulnerable road users (VRU) and vehicles, and cooperative maneuvers among automated and semi-automated vehicles still need further efforts for a real environment implementation. This paper presents a review of motion planning techniques implemented in the intelligent vehicles literature. A description of the technique used by research teams, their contributions in motion planning, and a comparison among these techniques is also presented. Relevant works in the overtaking and obstacle avoidance maneuvers are presented, allowing the understanding of the gaps and challenges to be addressed in the next years. Finally, an overview of future research direction and applications is given.

A Review of Motion Planning Techniques for Automated Vehicles

Motion planning is a fundamental research area in robotics. Sampling-based methods offer an efficient solution for what is otherwise a rather challenging dilemma of path planning. Consequently, these methods have been extended further away from basic robot planning into further difficult scenarios and diverse applications. A comprehensive survey of the growing body of work in sampling-based planning is given here. Simulations are executed to evaluate some of the proposed planners and highlight some of the implementation details that are often left unspecified. An emphasis is placed on contemporary research directions in this field. We address planners that tackle current issues in robotics. For instance, real-life kinodynamic planning, optimal planning, replanning in dynamic environments, and planning under uncertainty are discussed. The aim of this paper is to survey the state of the art in motion planning and to assess selected planners, examine implementation details and above all shed a light on the current challenges in motion planning and the promising approaches that will potentially overcome those problems.

Sampling-Based Robot Motion Planning: A Review

Raindrops adhered to a glass window or camera lens can severely hamper the visibility of a background scene and degrade an image considerably. In this paper, we address the problem by visually removing raindrops, and thus transforming a raindrop degraded image into a clean one. The problem is intractable, since first the regions occluded by raindrops are not given. Second, the information about the background scene of the occluded regions is completely lost for most part. To resolve the problem, we apply an attentive generative network using adversarial training. Our main idea is to inject visual attention into both the generative and discriminative networks. During the training, our visual attention learns about raindrop regions and their surroundings. Hence, by injecting this information, the generative network will pay more attention to the raindrop regions and the surrounding structures, and the discriminative network will be able to assess the local consistency of the restored regions. This injection of visual attention to both generative and discriminative networks is the main contribution of this paper. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our approach, which outperforms the state of the art methods quantitatively and qualitatively.

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Attentive Generative Adversarial Network for Raindrop Removal from A Single Image

Confluent Hypergeometric Functions By Dr L J Slater Pp ix + 247 (Cambridge: At the University Press, 1960) 65s net

Confluent Hypergeometric Functions

In this paper, we propose a shape reconstruction and image restoration method for paper documents with curved surfaces or fold lines by using a stereo vision system. Characters in images of thick book's pages acquired with an image scanner are difficult to recognize because they are deformed under the influence of curved surface. Therefore, 3-D shape reconstruction of the book's surface is executed from the result of the stereoscopic measurement by putting the book upward, and an image of a flat surface is recovered from the curved or folded surface. The validity of the proposed method is shown through experiments.

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Shape reconstruction and image restoration for non-flat surfaces of documents with a stereo vision system

The curve is the most basic design element to determine shapes and silhouettes of industrial products and works for shape designers and it is inevitable for them to make it aesthetic and attractive to improve the total quality of the shape design. If we can find an equation of aesthetic curves, it is expected that the quality of the curve design improves drastically because we can use it as a standard to generate, evaluate, and deform the curves. In this paper, we derive a general equation of aesthetic curves that describes the relationship between its radius of curvature and length inclusively expressing these two curves. Furthermore we show the self-affinity possessed by the curves satisfying the general equation of aesthetic curves.

A General Equation of Aesthetic Curves and its Self-Affinity

We propose an algorithm to approximate the clothoid curve defined in the interval [0, π/2] and its offset curves with Bezier curves and the approximation errors converge to zero as the degree of the Bezier curves is increased. Secondly, we discuss how to approximate the clothoid curve by B-spline curves of low degrees. By employing our method, the clothoid curve and its offset can be efficiently incorporated into CAD/CAM systems, which are important for the development of 3D civil engineering CAD systems, especially for 3D highway road design systems. The proposed method has been implemented on AutoCAD R14.

An approximation approach of the clothoid curve defined in the interval [0, π/2] and its offset by free-form curves

The main characteristic of visually pleasing curves used for product design is a monotonic curvature profile. Recently, a planar curve called Generalized Log Aesthetic Curve (GLAC) has been extended from the Log Aesthetic Curve (LAC), and it has an additional shape parameter, ν. This curve preserves the monotonicity of curvature and is said to produce visually pleasing curves. This paper delves on the drawable region of the GLAC segment which indicates the probable solutions of shape parameters from given interpolating points and the direction of travel at those points. The first section reviews the formulation of GLAC and its related bounds. The section describes the algorithm for identifying the drawable region. It is followed by the section describing how small changes of ν widen the drawable boundaries. The final section discusses the superiority of GLAC compared to LAC for use in industrial product design.

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Kenjiro T. Miura

Papers

Shape reconstruction and image restoration for non-flat surfaces of documents with a stereo vision system

A General Equation of Aesthetic Curves and its Self-Affinity

An approximation approach of the clothoid curve defined in the interval [0, π/2] and its offset by free-form curves

Drawable Region of the Generalized Log Aesthetic Curves

Unit quaternion integral curve: a new type of fair free-form curves