Shearing interference microscope for step-height measurements.

A shearing interference microscope using a Savart prism as the shear plate is proposed for inspecting step-heights. Where the light beam propagates through the Savart prism and microscopic system to illuminate the sample, it then turns back to re-pass through the Savart prism and microscopic system to generate a shearing interference pattern on the camera. Two measurement modes, phase-shifting and phase-scanning, can be utilized to determine the depths of the step-heights on the sample.

Neurosurgical robotic arm drilling navigation system.

Background: The aim of this work was to develop a neurosurgical robotic arm drilling navigation system that provides assistance throughout the complete bone drilling process.

Methods: The system comprised neurosurgical robotic arm navigation combining robotic and surgical navigation, 3D medical imaging based surgical planning that could identify lesion location and plan the surgical path on 3D images, and automatic bone drilling control that would stop drilling when the bone was to be drilled-through. Three kinds of experiment were designed.

Traffic and Environmental Cues and Slow-Down Behaviors in Virtual Driving.

This study used a driving simulator to investigate whether the presence of pedestrians and traffic engineering designs that reported to have reduction effects on overall traffic speed at intersections can facilitate drivers adopting lower impact speed behaviors at pedestrian crossings. Twenty-eight men (M age = 39.9 yr.

Bimodal Biometric Verification Using the Fusion of Palmprint and Infrared Palm-Dorsum Vein Images.

In this paper, we present a reliable and robust biometric verification method based on bimodal physiological characteristics of palms, including the palmprint and palm-dorsum vein patterns. The proposed method consists of five steps: (1) automatically aligning and cropping the same region of interest from different palm or palm-dorsum images; (2) applying the digital wavelet transform and inverse wavelet transform to fuse palmprint and vein pattern images; (3) extracting the line-like features (LLFs) from the fused image; (4) obtaining multiresolution representations of the LLFs by using a multiresolution filter; and (5) using a support vector machine to verify the multiresolution representations of the LLFs. The proposed method possesses four advantages: first, both modal images are captured in peg-free scenarios to improve the user-friendliness of the verification device.

3D Printing Bioceramic Porous Scaffolds with Good Mechanical Property and Cell Affinity.

Artificial bone grafting is widely used in current orthopedic surgery for bone defect problems. Unfortunately, surgeons remain unsatisfied with the current commercially available products. One of the major complaints is that these products cannot provide sufficient mechanical strength to support the human skeletal structure.

Applying different independent component analysis algorithms and support vector regression for IT chain store sales forecasting.

Sales forecasting is one of the most important issues in managing information technology (IT) chain store sales since an IT chain store has many branches. Integrating feature extraction method and prediction tool, such as support vector regression (SVR), is a useful method for constructing an effective sales forecasting scheme. Independent component analysis (ICA) is a novel feature extraction technique and has been widely applied to deal with various forecasting problems.

Self-compensated standing wave probe for characterization of radio-frequency plasmas.

A simple self-compensated Langmuir probe using the character of a standing wave is developed for characterization of radio-frequency (RF) discharge plasmas. This probe is based on a concept that the interference of RF field is eliminated at the node of a standing wave which exists ideally at one-fourth of the RF wavelength (λ/4) away from the probe tip in the plasma. The fluctuation of plasma space potential is suppressed as confirmed by comparison with a non-compensated probe and a self-compensated probe using an inductor-capacitor (LC) resonant circuit.

Electrical Characteristics of the Uniaxial-Strained nMOSFET with a Fluorinated HfO₂/SiON Gate Stack.

The channel fluorine implantation (CFI) process was integrated with the Si₃N₄ contact etch stop layer (SiN CESL) uniaxial-strained n-channel metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (nMOSFET) with the hafnium oxide/silicon oxynitride (HfO₂/SiON) gate stack. The SiN CESL process clearly improves basic electrical performance, due to induced uniaxial tensile strain within the channel. However, further integrating of the CFI process with the SiN CESL-strained nMOSFET exhibits nearly identical transconductance, subthreshold swing, drain current, gate leakage and breakdown voltage, which indicates that the strain effect is not affected by the fluorine incorporation.

Risk factors for child and adolescent occupants, bicyclists, and pedestrians in motorized vehicle collisions.

Objective: The aim was to use similar population data to examine the relative risk of collision injury among children of different ages and adolescents involved in various collision types and to elucidate the possible risk factors related to road collisions involving children and adolescents in a large, 2-wheeled vehicle environment.

Methods: We used data from a society with a large population of motorcyclists to examine the relative risk of injury among children and adolescents aged 0 to 6, 7 to 9, 10 to 12, 13 to 15, and 16 to 17 years old who were involved in single motorized vehicle, multiple motorized vehicle, bicycle-to-vehicle, and pedestrian-to-vehicle collisions. Police reports for 73,232 collision injuries between the years 2003 and 2009 were analyzed using multicategory logit models of the 4 collision types.

The use of mouse and one- and two-finger input methods for searching a large, horizontal display.

A horizontal, table-sized computer display was used to examine one- and two-finger search performances. 31 college students participated in a basic computer operation and target landmark search task. The mean completion times of the target landmark search task were analyzed by a repeated-measures analysis of variance with the following factors: input device, environmental familiarity, and cue.

Microwave dielectric properties of (Mg(1-x)Cox)2SnO4 ceramics for application in dual-band inverted-E-shaped monopole antenna.

The microwave dielectric properties of (Mg((1-x))Co(x))(2)SnO(4) ceramics were examined with a view to their exploitation for mobile communication. The (Mg((1-x))Co(x))(2)SnO(4) ceramics were prepared by the conventional solid-state method with various sintering temperatures. The X-ray diffraction patterns of the (Mg((1-x))Co(x))(2)SnO(4) ceramics revealed no significant variation of phase with sintering temperatures.

Measurement of auditory cues in drivers' distraction.

A driving simulator was used to examine the effects on driving performance of auditory cues in an in-vehicle information search task. Drivers' distraction by the search tasks was measured on a peripheral detection task. The difficulty of the search task was systematically varied to test the distraction caused by a quantified visual load.

Replacers of barcodes for small application areas by using grating dots to diffractively form bright points.

Although barcodes can be used to manage data conveniently, they cannot be applied to small areas. Therefore, pointcodes are used to overcome the issue in this article. A pointcode uses a pointcode pattern to encode data and uses a pointcode image to decode data.

Standalone CMAC control system with online learning ability.

A cerebellar model articulation controller (CMAC) control system, which contains only one single-input controller implemented by a differentiable CMAC, is proposed in this paper. In the proposed scheme, the CMAC controller is solely used to control the plant, and no conventional controller is needed. Without a preliminary offline learning, the single-input CMAC controller can provide the control effort to the plant at each online learning step.

Precise displacement measurement for a local surface.

An optical measurement method to get the in-plane and out-of-plane displacements of a local surface using a laser is proposed. The proposed method simultaneously derives the in-plane and out-of-plane displacements by measuring the shift of interference fringes formed by scattered beams. The average errors of the in-plane and out-of-plane displacement measurements are significantly smaller than 10 nm.

Diffractive barcode using grating-dot lines.

Bar arrangements used by conventional diffractive barcodes are usually similar to those used by diffusive barcodes. We, however, propose a modified diffractive barcode with bar arrangements different from those used by diffusive barcodes. A modified diffractive barcode pattern is composed of many parallel grating-dot lines.

Pattern composed of two-dimensional diffusion dots for showing dynamic images.

A new type of diffusion pattern is proposed. The proposed patterns are composed of 2D diffusion dots. The diffusion dots are created on a photoresist plate by recording the image of a local area of a piece of ground glass dot by dot.

A self-organizing CMAC network with gray credit assignment.

This paper attempts to incorporate the structure of the cerebellar-model-articulation-controller (CMAC) network into the Kohonen layer of the self-organizing map (SOM) to construct a self-organizing CMAC (SOCMAC) network. The proposed SOCMAC network can perform the function of an SOM and can distribute the learning error into the memory contents of all addressed hypercubes as a CMAC. The learning of the SOCMAC is in an unsupervised manner.

Using random features of dot-matrix holograms for anticounterfeiting.

The images on a dot-matrix hologram contain many two-dimensional (2D) dots with different grating orientations and different grating pitches. Because the zeroth-order light nondiffracted by different grating structures has the same progress direction, the nondiffracted light can be diffracted to a 2D spot spectrum by the 2D dot structure. The 2D spot spectrum depends on grating depths and dot sizes.

Look-up tables for protein solvent accessibility prediction and nearest neighbor effect analysis.

We developed dictionaries of two-, three-, and five-residue patterns in proteins and computed the average solvent accessibility of the central residues in their native proteins. These dictionaries serve as a look-up table for making subsequent predictions of solvent accessibility of amino acid residues. We find that predictions made in this way are very close to those made using more sophisticated methods of solvent accessibility prediction.

Optical implementation of the hopfield neural network with matrix gratings.

We propose a new method for the optical implementation of the Hopfield neural network with a universal tool. The tool is a matrix grating constituted with a group of element gratings. The algorithms for designing a matrix grating are proposed, and a matrix grating is created to execute recognition experiments by use of the Hopfield neural network.

Target locations in visual field and character recognition by students of Chinese.

The potential influence of target location in a visual field on search should be considered in layouts of control panels and advertisements. This investigation was done to verify the assumption that the upper-left portion of a page or its equivalent naturally attracts the attention of the viewer. Exp.