Asymptotic Recovery for Discrete-Time Systems

An asymptotic recovery design procedure is proposed for square, discrete-time, linear, time-invariant multivariable systems, which allows a state-feedback design to be approximately recovered by a dynamic output feedback scheme. Both the case of negligible processing time (compared to the sampling interval) and of significant processing time are discussed. In the former case, it is possible to obtain perfect. © 1985 IEEE.

Face recognition from video

In spite of over two decades of intense research, illumination and pose invariance remain prohibitively challenging aspects of face recognition for most practical applications. The objective of this work is to recognize faces using video sequences both for training and recognition input, in a realistic, unconstrained setup in which lighting, pose and user motion pattern have a wide variability and face images are of low resolution. In particular there are three areas of novelty: (i) we show how a photometric model of image formation can be combined with a statistical model of generic face appearance variation, learnt offline, to generalize in the presence of extreme illumination changes; (ii) we use the smoothness of geodesically local appearance manifold structure and a robust same-identity likelihood to achieve invariance to unseen head poses; and (iii) we introduce an accurate video sequence "reillumination" algorithm to achieve robustness to face motion patterns in video. We describe a fully automatic recognition system based on the proposed method and an extensive evaluation on 171 individuals and over 1300 video sequences with extreme illumination, pose and head motion variation. On this challenging data set our system consistently demonstrated a nearly perfect recognition rate (over 99.7%), significantly outperforming state-of-the-art commercial software and methods from the literature. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.

A novel design of Thermally Actuated Magnetization Flux pump for high temperature superconducting bulks

High temperature superconductors, such as melt-processed YBCO bulks, have great advantages on trapping strong magnetic fields in liquid nitrogen. To enable them to function well, there are some traditional ways of magnetizing them, in which the YBCO bulks are magnetized instantly under a very strong source of magnetic field. These ways would consume great amounts of power to make the superconductors trap as much field as possible. Thermally Actuated Magnetization (TAM) Flux pump has been proved a perfect substitution for these expensive methods by using a relatively small magnet as the source. In this way, the field is developed gradually over many pulses. Unlike conventional flux pumping ways, the TAM does not drive the superconductor normal during the process of magnetization. In former experiments for the flux pump, some fundamental tests were done. In this paper, the experiment system is advanced to a new level with better temperature control to the thermal waves moving in the Gadolinium and with less air gap for the flux lines sweeping through the superconductor. This experiment system F leads to a stronger accumulation of the magnetic field trapped in the YBCO bulk. We also tried different ways of sending the thermal waves and found out that the pumping effect is closely related to the power of the heaters and the on and off time. © 2010 IEEE.

Ultrafast switching liquid crystals for electro-optic transmissive and reflective displays and microscopic lasers

We have used novel liquid crystals with extremely large flexoelectric coefficients in a range of ultra-fast photonic/display modes, namely 1) the uniform lying helix, that leads to in-plain switching, birefringence based displays with 100 μs switching times at low fields, i.e.2-5 V/μm, wide viewing angle and analogue or grey scale capability, 2) the uniform standing helix, using planar surface alignment and in-plane fields, with sub ms response times and optical contrasts in excess of 5000:1 with a perfect black "off state", 3) the wide temperature range blue phase that leads to field controlled reflective color and 4) high slope efficiency, wide wavelength range tunable narrow linewidth microscopic liquid crystal lasers.

Fabrication and testing of a high resolution extensometer based on resonant MEMS strain sensors

A novel type of linear extensometer with exceptionally high resolution of 4 nm based on MEMS resonant strain sensors bonded on steel and operating in a vacuum package is presented. The tool is implemented by means of a steel thin bar that can be pre-stressed in tension within two fixing anchors. The extension of the bar is detected by using two vacuum-packaged resonant MEMS double- ended tuning fork (DETF) sensors bonded on the bar with epoxy glue, one of which is utilized for temperature compensation. Both sensors are driven by a closed loop self-oscillating transresistance amplifier feedback scheme implemented on a PCB (Printed Circuit Board). On the same board, a microcontroller-based frequency measurement circuit is also implemented, which is able to count the square wave fronts of the MEMS oscillator output with a resolution of 20 nsec. The system provides a frequency noise of 0.2 Hz corresponding to an extension resolution of 4 nm for the extensometer. Nearly perfect temperature compensation of the frequency output is achieved in the temperature range 20-35 C using the reference sensor. © 2011 IEEE.

Complex wavelets and shift invariance

Recently we have developed a new form of discrete wavelet transform, which generates complex coefficients by using a dual tree of wavelet filters to obtain their real and imaginary parts. This introduces limited redundancy (2 m:1 for m-dimensional signals) and allows the transform to provide approximate shift invariance and directionally selective filters (properties lacking in the traditional wavelet transform) while preserving the usual properties of perfect reconstruction and computational efficiency with good well-balanced frequency responses. In this paper we analyse why the new transform can be designed to be shift invariant, and describe how to estimate the accuracy of this approximation and design suitable filters to achieve this.

Ultrafast switching liquid crystals for electro-optic transmissive and reflective displays and microscopic lasers

We report on novel liquid crystals with extremely large flexoelectric coefficients in a range of ultra-fast photonic modes, namely 1) the uniform lying helix, that leads to in-plain switching, birefringence phase devices with 100 μs switching times at low fields, i.e.2-5 V/μm, and analogue or grey scale capability, 2) the uniform standing helix, using planar surface alignment and in-plane fields, with sub ms response times and optical contrasts in excess of 5000:1 with a perfect optically isotropic or black "off state", 3) the wide temperature range blue phase that leads to field controlled reflective color, 4) chiral nematic optical reflectors electric field tunable over a wide wavelength range and 5) high slope efficiency, wide wavelength range tunable narrow linewidth microscopic liquid crystal lasers. © 2011 Materials Research Society.

Outage exponents of block-fading channels with power allocation

Power allocation is studied for fixed-rate transmission over block-fading channels with arbitrary continuous fading distributions and perfect transmitter and receiver channel state information. Both short- and long-term power constraints for arbitrary input distributions are considered. Optimal power allocation schemes are shown to be direct applications of previous results in the literature. It is shown that the short- and long-term outage exponents for arbitrary input distributions are related through a simple formula. The formula is useful to predict when the delay-limited capacity is positive. Furthermore, this characterization is useful for the design of efficient coding schemes for this relevant channel model. © 2010 IEEE.

Outage probability of the gaussian MIMO free-space optical channel with PPM

Atmospheric effects can significantly degrade the reliability of free-space optical communications. One such effect is scintillation, caused by atmospheric turbulence, refers to random fluctuations in the irradiance and phase of the received laser beam. In this paper we inv stigate the use of multiple lasers and multiple apertures to mitigate scintillation. Since the scintillation process is slow, we adopt a block fading channel model and study the outage probability under the assumptions of orthogonal pulse-position modulation and non-ideal photodetection. Assuming perfect receiver channel state information (CSI), we derive the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) exponents for the cases when the scintillation is lognormal, exponential and gammagamma distributed, which cover a wide range of atmospheric turbulence conditions. Furthermore, when CSI is also available at the transmitter, we illustrate very large gains in SNR are possible (in some cases larger than 15 dB) by adapting the transmitted power. Under a long-term power constraint, we outline fundamental design criteria via a simple expression that relates the required number of lasers and apertures for a given code rate and number of codeword blocks to completely remove system outages. Copyright © 2009 IEEE.

Achieving robust face recognition from video by combining a weak photometric model and a learnt generic face invariant

In spite of over two decades of intense research, illumination and pose invariance remain prohibitively challenging aspects of face recognition for most practical applications. The objective of this work is to recognize faces using video sequences both for training and recognition input, in a realistic, unconstrained setup in which lighting, pose and user motion pattern have a wide variability and face images are of low resolution. The central contribution is an illumination invariant, which we show to be suitable for recognition from video of loosely constrained head motion. In particular there are three contributions: (i) we show how a photometric model of image formation can be combined with a statistical model of generic face appearance variation to exploit the proposed invariant and generalize in the presence of extreme illumination changes; (ii) we introduce a video sequence re-illumination algorithm to achieve fine alignment of two video sequences; and (iii) we use the smoothness of geodesically local appearance manifold structure and a robust same-identity likelihood to achieve robustness to unseen head poses. We describe a fully automatic recognition system based on the proposed method and an extensive evaluation on 323 individuals and 1474 video sequences with extreme illumination, pose and head motion variation. Our system consistently achieved a nearly perfect recognition rate (over 99.7% on all four databases). © 2012 Elsevier Ltd All rights reserved.

Impact of mode localization on the motional resistance of coupled MEMS resonators

This paper investigates the effect of mode-localization that arises from structural asymmetry induced by manufacturing tolerances in mechanically coupled, electrically transduced Si MEMS resonators. We demonstrate that in the case of such mechanically coupled resonators, the achievable series motional resistance (R x) is dependent not only on the quality factor (Q) but also on the variations in the eigenvector of the chosen mode of vibration induced by mode localization due to manufacturing tolerances during the fabrication process. We study this effect of mode-localization both theoretically and experimentally in two pairs of coupled double-ended tuning fork resonators with different levels of initial structural asymmetry. The measured series R x is minimal when the system is close to perfect symmetry and any deviation from structural symmetry induced by fabrication tolerances leads to a degradation in the effective R x. Mechanical tuning experiments of the stiffness of one of the coupled resonators was also conducted to study variations in R x as a function of structural asymmetry within the system, the results of which demonstrated consistent variations in motional resistance with predictions. © 2012 IEEE.

State estimation over a communication network: Measurement or estimate communication?

In this paper we consider the problem of state estimation over a communication network. Using estimation quality as a metric, two communication schemes are studied and compared. In scheme one, each sensor node communicates its measurement data to the remote estimator, while in scheme two, each sensor node communicates its local state estimate to the remote estimator. We show that with perfect communication link, if the sensor has unlimited computation capability, the two schemes produce the same estimate at the estimator, and if the sensor has limited computation capability, scheme one is always better than scheme two. On the other hand, when data packet drops occur over the communication link, we show that if the sensor has unlimited computation capability, scheme two always outperforms scheme one, and if the sensor has limited computation capability, we show that in general there exists a critical packet arrival rate, above which scheme one outperforms scheme two. Simulations are provided to demonstrate the two schemes under various circumstances. © South China University of Technology and Academy of Mathematics and Systems Science, CAS and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.

Cylindrical Fresnel lenses based on carbon nanotube forests

The forests of carbon nanotubes have been termed as the darkest man-made materials. Such materials exhibit near-perfect optical absorption (reflectance∼0.045%) due to low reflectance and nanoscale surface roughness. We have demonstrated the utilization of these perfectly absorbing forests to produce binary amplitude cylindrical Fresnel lenses. The opaque Fresnel zones are defined by the dark nanotube forests and these lenses display efficient focusing performance at optical wavelengths. Lensing performance was analyzed both computationally and experimentally with good agreement. Such nanostructure based lenses have many potential applications in devices like photovoltaic solar cells. © 2012 American Institute of Physics.

UV durable colour pigment doped SmA liquid crystal composites for outdoor trans-reflective bi-stable displays

High brightness trans-reflective bi-stable displays based on smectic A (SmA) liquid crystals (LCs) can have nearly perfect transparency in the clear state and very high reflection in the scattered state. Because the LC material in use is stable under UV radiation, this kind of displays can stand for strong day-light and therefore be ideal for outdoor applications from e-books to public signage and advertisement. However, the colour application has been limited because the traditional colourants in use are conventional dyes which are lack of UV stability and that their colours are easily photo bleached. Here we present a colour SmA display demonstrator using pigments as colourant. Mixing pigments with SmA LCs and maintain the desirable optical switching performance is not straightforward. We show here how it can be done, including how to obtain fine sized pigment nano-particles, the effects of particle size and size distribution on the display performance. Our optimized pigments/SmA compositions can be driven by a low frequency waveform (∼101Hz) to a scattered state to exhibit colour while by a high frequency waveform (∼103Hz) to a cleared state showing no colour. Finally, we will present its excellent UV life-time (at least >7.2 years) in comparison with that of dye composition (∼2.4 years). The complex interaction of pigment nano-particles with LC molecules and the resulting effects on the LC electro-optical performances are still to be fully understood. We hope this work will not only demonstrate a new and practical approach for outdoor reflective colour displays but also provide a new material system for fundamental liquid crystal colloid research work. © 2012 SPIE.

Phase perfection in zinc Blende and Wurtzite III-V nanowires using basic growth parameters.

Controlling the crystallographic phase purity of III-V nanowires is notoriously difficult, yet this is essential for future nanowire devices. Reported methods for controlling nanowire phase require dopant addition, or a restricted choice of nanowire diameter, and only rarely yield a pure phase. Here we demonstrate that phase-perfect nanowires, of arbitrary diameter, can be achieved simply by tailoring basic growth parameters: temperature and V/III ratio. Phase purity is achieved without sacrificing important specifications of diameter and dopant levels. Pure zinc blende nanowires, free of twin defects, were achieved using a low growth temperature coupled with a high V/III ratio. Conversely, a high growth temperature coupled with a low V/III ratio produced pure wurtzite nanowires free of stacking faults. We present a comprehensive nucleation model to explain the formation of these markedly different crystal phases under these growth conditions. Critical to achieving phase purity are changes in surface energy of the nanowire side facets, which in turn are controlled by the basic growth parameters of temperature and V/III ratio. This ability to tune crystal structure between twin-free zinc blende and stacking-fault-free wurtzite not only will enhance the performance of nanowire devices but also opens new possibilities for engineering nanowire devices, without restrictions on nanowire diameters or doping.