Depth sensor

We present a new thermomechanical method and a platform to measure the phase transition temperature at microscale. A thin film metal sensor on a membrane simultaneously measures both temperature and mechanical strain of the sample during heating and cooling cycles. This thermomechanical principle of operation is described in detail. Physical hydrogel samples are prepared as a disc-shaped gels (200 μm thick and 1 mm diameter) and placed between an on-chip heater and sensor devices. The sol-gel transition temperature of gelatin solution at various concentrations, used as a model physical hydrogel, shows less than 3% deviation from in-depth rheological results...

The use of RGB-Depth (RGB-D) sensors for assisting visually impaired people (VIP) has been widely reported as they offer portability, function-diversity and cost-effectiveness. However, polarization cues to assist traversability awareness without precautions against stepping into water areas are weak. In this paper, a polarized RGB-Depth (pRGB-D) framework is proposed to detect traversable area and water hazards simultaneously with polarization-color-depth-attitude information to enhance safety during navigation...

Some unilateral lower-limb amputees load the intact limb more than the prosthetic limb. This can cause chronic pains, fatigue, lumbago, and joint diseases, including knee osteoarthritis. To avoid and counteract these symptoms it is necessary to improve their asymmetric gait. Increasing the function of the hip abductor muscle is important to maintaining symmetrical weight distribution. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop a training assist system, which estimates and visualizes an abductor muscle by using a color-depth sensor...

Sensing and characterization of water-soluble peptides is of critical importance in a wide variety of bioapplications. Single molecule nanopore spectrometry (SMNS) is based on the idea that one can use biological protein nanopores to resolve different sized molecules down to limits set by the blockade duration and noise. Previous work has shown that this enables discrimination between polyethylene glycol (PEG) molecules that differ by a single monomer unit. This paper describes efforts to extend SMNS to a variety of biologically relevant, water-soluble peptides...

Mechanical stress from blood flow has a significant effect on endothelial physiology, with a key role in initiating vasoregulatory signals. Disturbances in blood flow, such as in regions of disease-associated stenosis, arterial branch points, and sharp turns, can induce proatherogenic phenotypes in endothelial cells. The disruption of vascular homeostasis as a result of endothelial dysfunction may contribute to early and late stages of atherosclerosis, the underlying cause of coronary artery disease. In-depth knowledge of the mechanobiology of endothelial cells is essential to identifying mechanosensory complexes involved in the pathogenesis of atherosclerosis...

With the increasing popularity of RGB-depth (RGB-D) sensor, research on the use of RGB-D sensors to reconstruct three-dimensional (3D) indoor scenes has gained more and more attention. In this paper, an automatic point cloud registration algorithm is proposed to efficiently handle the task of 3D indoor scene reconstruction using pan-tilt platforms on a fixed position. The proposed algorithm aims to align multiple point clouds using extrinsic parameters of the RGB-D camera obtained from every preset pan-tilt control point...

Augmented Reality offers many applications today, especially on mobile devices. Due to the lack of mobile hardware for illumination measurements, photorealistic rendering with consistent appearance of virtual objects is still an area of active research. In this paper, we present a full two-stage pipeline for environment acquisition and augmentation of live camera images using a mobile device with a depth sensor. We show how to directly work on a recorded 3D point cloud of the real environment containing high dynamic range color values...

Cracks in oil and gas pipelines cause leakage which results in property damage, environmental pollution, and even personal injury or loss of lives. In this paper, an active-sensing approach was conducted to identify the crack damage in pipeline structure using a stress wave propagation approach with piezoceramic transducers. A pipeline segment instrumented with five distributed piezoceramic transducers was used as the testing specimen in this research. Four cracks were artificially cut on the specimen, and each crack had six damage cases corresponding to different crack depths...

Optical sensing technologies provide opportunities for in situ oxygen sensing capable of capturing the whole range of spatial and temporal variability. We developed a miniaturized Distributed Oxygen Sensor ('mDOS') specifically for long-term in situ application in soil and sediment. The mDOS sensor system enables the unattended, repeated acquisition of time series of in situ oxygen profiles at a sub-cm resolution covering a depth of up to one meter. Compared to existing approaches, this provides the possibility to reveal highly variable and heterogenous oxygen dynamics at a high, quasi-continuous resolution across both scales...

The importance of emotions experienced by learners during their interaction with multimedia learning systems, such as serious games, underscores the need to identify sources of information that allow the recognition of learners' emotional experience without interrupting the learning process. Bodily expression is gaining in attention as one of these sources of information. However, to date, the question of how bodily expression can convey different emotions has largely been addressed in research relying on acted emotion displays...

Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are prevalent in the US and many forms of CVDs primarily affect the mechanical aspects of heart function. Wearable technologies for monitoring the mechanical health of the heart and vasculature could enable proactive management of CVDs through titration of care based on physiological status, as well as preventative wellness monitoring to help promote lifestyle choices that reduce the overall risk of developing CVDs. Additionally, such wearable technologies could be used to optimize human performance in austere environments...

In this paper, we address the generation of semantic labels describing the headgear accessories carried out by people in a scene under surveillance, only using depth information obtained from a Time-of-Flight (ToF) camera placed in an overhead position. We propose a new method for headgear accessories classification based on the design of a robust processing strategy that includes the estimation of a meaningful feature vector that provides the relevant information about the people's head and shoulder areas...

In manufacturing processes involving diffusion (of C, N, S, etc.), the evolution of the layer depth is of the utmost importance: the success of the entire process depends on this parameter. Currently, nitriding is typically either calibrated using a "post process" method or controlled via indirect measurements (H2, O2, H2O + CO2). In the absence of "in situ" monitoring, any variation in the process parameters (gas concentration, temperature, steel composition, distance between sensors and furnace chamber) can cause expensive process inefficiency or failure...

Short-term bed-level dynamics has been identified as one of the main factors affecting biota establishment or retreat on tidal flats. However, due to a lack of proper instruments and intensive labour involved, the pattern and drivers of daily bed-level dynamics are largely unexplored in a spatiotemporal context. In this study, 12 newly-developed automatic bed-level sensors were deployed for nearly 15 months on two tidal flats with contrasting wave exposure, proving an unique dataset of daily bed-level changes and hydrodynamic forcing...

Aquatic exercises can be used in clinical and sporting disciplines for both rehabilitation and sports training. However, there is limited knowledge on the influence of water immersion on the kinematics of exercises commonly used in rehabilitation and fitness programs. The aim of this study was to use inertial sensors to quantify differences in kinematics and movement variability of bodyweight squats, split squats, and single-leg squats performed on dry land and whilst immersed to the level of the greater trochanter...

PURPOSE: To develop and evaluate an approach to estimate the respiratory-induced motion of lesions in the chest and abdomen. MATERIALS AND METHODS: The proposed approach uses the motion of an initial reference needle inserted into a moving organ to estimate the lesion (target) displacement that is caused by respiration. The needles position is measured using an inertial measurement unit (IMU) sensor externally attached to the hub of an initially placed reference needle...

This paper is intended to serve as an overview of, and mostly a tutorial to illustrate, the optimization techniques used in several different key design aspects that have been considered in the literature of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). It targets the researchers who are new to the mathematical optimization tool, and wish to apply it to WSN design problems. We hence divide the paper into two main parts. One part is dedicated to introduce optimization theory and an overview on some of its techniques that could be helpful in design problem in WSNs...

Commercially available depth sensing devices are primarily designed for domains that are either macroscopic, or static. We develop a solution for fast microscale 3D reconstruction, using off-the-shelf components. By the addition of lenses, precise calibration of camera internals and positioning, and development of bespoke software, we turn an infrared depth sensor designed for human-scale motion and object detection into a device with mm-level accuracy capable of recording at up to 30Hz.

BACKGROUND: Sensor technology that dynamically identifies hospitalized patients' fall risk and detects and alerts nurses of high-risk patients' early exits out of bed has potential for reducing fall rates and preventing patient harm. During Phase 1 (August 2014-January 2015) of a previously reported performance improvement project, an innovative depth sensor was evaluated on two inpatient medical units to study fall characteristics. In Phase 2 (April 2015-January 2016), a combined depth and bed sensor system designed to assign patient fall probability, detect patient bed exits, and subsequently prevent falls was evaluated...

In this paper, a novel 3D reconstruction framework is proposed to recover the 3D structural model of a space object from its multi-view images captured by a visible sensor. Given an image sequence, this framework first estimates the relative camera poses and recovers the depths of the surface points by the structure from motion (SFM) method, then the patch-based multi-view stereo (PMVS) algorithm is utilized to generate a dense 3D point cloud. To resolve the wrong matches arising from the symmetric structure and repeated textures of space objects, a new strategy is introduced, in which images are added to SFM in imaging order...