The book explores various aspects of existing and emerging fiber and waveguide optics sensing and imaging technologies including recent advances in nanobiophotonics. The focus is both on fundamental and applied research as well as on applications in civil engineering, biomedical sciences, environment, security and defence. The main goal of the multi-disciplinary team of Editors was to provide a useful reference of state-of-the-art overviews covering a variety of complementary topics on the interface of engineering and biomedical sciences.

A careful review of the literature covering various aspects of applications of lasers in science and technology reveals that lasers are being applied very widely throughout the entire gamut of physical medicine. After surveying the current developments taking place in the field of medical applications of lasers, it was considered appropriate to bring together these efforts of international research scientists and experts into one volume. It is with this aim that the editors have prepared this volume which brings current research and recent developments to the attention of a wide spectrum of readership associated with hospitals, medical institutions and universities world wide, including also the medical instrument industry. Both teachers and students in the medical faculties will especially find this compendium quite useful. This book is comprised of eleven chapters. All of the important medical applications of lasers are featured. The editors have made every effort that individual chapters are self-contained and written by experts. Emphasis has been placed on straight and simple presentation of the subject matter so that even the new entrants into the field will find the book of value.

Laser ablation describes the interaction of intense optical fields with matter, in which atoms are selectively driven off by thermal or nonthermal mechanisms. This is the first book that combines the most recent results in this rapidly advancing field with authoritative treatment of laser ablation and its applications, including the physics of high-power laser-matter interaction.

There is a consistent trend towards miniaturization of deviees and systems in many fields of engineering, in order to achieve significant reductions in size, weight, power consumption and cost. This trend is especially evident in optics and optoelectronics, where recent years have seen rapid growth in such new or renewed areas as rnicrooptics, integrated optics, integrated optoelectronics, and diffractive optics. In November 1996, an international group of scientists convened in Eriee, Sicily, for a meeting on the subject of "Diffractive Opties and Optieal Mierosystems." This Conference was the 20th Course of the International School of Quantum Electronies, under the auspices of the "Ettore Majorana Center for Scientific Culture" and was directed by Prof. Franeo Gori of the Third University of Rome, Italy, and Prof. Giancarlo Righini of the "Nello Carrara" Institute of Research on Electromagnetic Waves (IROE-CNR) in Florence, Italy. This book presents the Proceedings of this Conference, providing a fundamental introduction to the topie as weIlas reports on recent research results.

The free electron laser (FEL) will be an outstanding tool for research and industrial application. This book describes the physical fundamentals on the basis of classical mechanics, electrodynamics, and the kinetic theory of charged particle beams, and will be suitable for graduate students and scientists alike.After a short introduction, the book discusses the theory of the FEL amplifier and oscillator and diffraction effects in the amplifier. Waveguide FEL and shot noise are also treated.

This book is designed as an introductory course for undergraduate students, in Electrical and Electronic, Mechanical, Mechatronics, Chemical and Petroleum engineering, who need fundamental knowledge of electrical circuits. Worked out examples have been presented after discussing each theory. Practice problems have also been included to enrich the learning experience of the students and professionals. PSpice and Multisim software packages have been included for simulation of different electrical circuit parameters. A number of exercise problems have been included in the book to aid faculty members.

The contributions in this volume were presented at a NATO Advanced Study Institute held in Erice, Italy, 4-19 July 2013. Many aspects of important research into nanophotonics, plasmonics, semiconductor materials and devices, instrumentation for bio sensing to name just a few, are covered in depth in this volume. The growing connection between optics and electronics, due to the increasing important role plaid by semiconductor materials and devices, find their expression in the term photonics, which also reflects the importance of the photon aspect of light in the description of the performance of several optical systems. Nano-structures have unique capabilities that allow the enhanced performance of processes of interest in optical and photonic devices. In particular these structures permit the nanoscale manipulation of photons, electrons and atoms; they represent a very hot topic of research and are relevant to many devices and applications.
The various subjects bridge over the disciplines of physics, biology and chemistry, making this volume of interest to people working in these fields. The emphasis is on the principles behind each technique and on examining the full potential of each technique."

This book initiates a new digital multimedia standards series. The purpose of the series is to make information about digital multimedia standards readilyavailable. Both tutorial and advanced topics will be covered in the series, often in one book. Our hope is that users will find the series helpful in deciding what standards to support and use while implementors will d- cover a wealth of technical details that help them implement those standards correctly. In today's global economy standards are increasingly important. Yet until a standard is widely used, most of the benefits of standardization are not realized. We hope that standards committee chairpeople will organize and encourage a book in this series devoted to their new standard. This can be a forum to share and preserve some ofthe "why" and "how" that went into the development of the standard and, in the process, assist in the rapid adoption of the standard. Already in production for this series are books titled Digital Video: - troduction to MPEG-2 and Data Compression in Digital Systems.

This monograph is intended for the designers and would-be designers of secure and efficient wireless communication systems under intentional interference. Along with the widespread of wireless devices, especially reconfigurable software defined radios, jamming has become a serious threat to civilian communications. In this book, going beyond traditional communication system design that mainly focuses on accurate information transmission under benign environments, we aim to enhance the physical layer security of communication systems by integrating modern cryptographic techniques into transceiver design, so as to achieve secure high-speed transmission under hostile interference with high reliability and efficiency. We revisit existing jamming patterns, and introduce new jamming patterns. We analyze the weaknesses of existing anti-jamming techniques. We present innovative and feasible anti-jamming techniques, which can strengthen the inherent security of the 3G, 4G and the upcoming 5G systems with minimal and inexpensive changes to the existing CDMA, frequency hopping and OFDM schemes. We also provide benchmarks for system performance evaluation under various jamming scenarios through capacity analysis. This book includes design principles, in-depth theoretical analysis and practical design examples, and will be of interest to academic researchers as well as professionals in industry.

Digital Functions and Data Reconstruction: Digital-Discrete Methods provides a solid foundation to the theory of digital functions and its applications to image data analysis, digital object deformation, and data reconstruction. This new method has a unique feature in that it is mainly built on discrete mathematics with connections to classical methods in mathematics and computer sciences. Digitally continuous functions and gradually varied functions were developed in the late 1980s. A. Rosenfeld (1986) proposed digitally continuous functions for digital image analysis, especially to describe the "continuous" component in a digital image, which usually indicates an object. L. Chen (1989) invented gradually varied functions to interpolate a digital surface when the boundary appears to be continuous. In theory, digitally continuous functions are very similar to gradually varied functions. Gradually varied functions are more general in terms of being functions of real numbers; digitally continuous functions are easily extended to the mapping from one digital space to another. This will be the first book about digital functions, which is an important modern research area for digital images and digitalized data processing, and provides an introduction and comprehensive coverage of digital function methods. Digital Functions and Data Reconstruction: Digital-Discrete Methods offers scientists and engineers who deal with digital data a highly accessible, practical, and mathematically sound introduction to the powerful theories of digital topology and functional analysis, while avoiding the more abstruse aspects of these topics.

This book guides readers through the design of hardware architectures using VHDL for digital communication and image processing applications that require performance computing. Further it includes the description of all the VHDL-related notions, such as language, levels of abstraction, combinational vs. sequential logic, structural and behavioral description, digital circuit design, and finite state machines. It also includes numerous examples to make the concepts presented in text more easily understandable.

This book provides a comprehensive view of the contemporary methods for quantum-light engineering. In particular, it addresses different technological branches and therefore allows the reader to quickly identify the best technology - application match. Non-classical light is a versatile tool, proven to be an intrinsic part of various quantum technologies. Its historical significance has made it the subject of many text books written both from theoretical and experimental point of view. This book takes another perspective by giving an insight to modern technologies used to generate and manipulate quantum light.

This book presents an in-depth discussion of the semiconductor-laser gain medium. The optical and electronic properties of semiconductors, particularly semiconductor quantum-well systems, are analzyed in detail, covering a wide variety of near-infrared systems with or without strain, as well as wide-gap materials such as the group-III nitride compounds or the II-VI materials. The important bandstructure modifications and Coulomb interaction effects are discussed, including the solution of the longstanding semiconductor laser lineshape problem. Quantitative comparisons between measured and predicted gain/absorption and refractive index spectra for a wide variety of semiconductor-laser materials enable the theoretical results to be used directly in the engineering of advanced laser and amplifier structures. A wealth of examples for many different material combinations bestow the book with quantitative and predictive value for a wide variety of applications.

This book highlights the latest advances and trends in advanced signal processing (such as wavelet theory, time-frequency analysis, empirical mode decomposition, compressive sensing and sparse representation, and stochastic resonance) for structural health monitoring (SHM). Its primary focus is on the utilization of advanced signal processing techniques to help monitor the health status of critical structures and machines encountered in our daily lives: wind turbines, gas turbines, machine tools, etc. As such, it offers a key reference guide for researchers, graduate students, and industry professionals who work in the field of SHM.

Recent state-of-the-art technologies in fabricating low-loss optical and mechanical components have significantly motivated the study of quantum-limited measurements with optomechanical devices. Such research is the main subject of this thesis. In the first part, the author considers various approaches for surpassing the standard quantum limit for force measurements. In the second part, the author proposes different experimental protocols for using optomechanical interactions to explore quantum behaviors of macroscopic mechanical objects. Even though this thesis mostly focuses on large-scale laser interferometer gravitational-wave detectors and related experiments, the general approaches apply equally well for studying small-scale optomechanical devices.

The author is the winner of the 2010 Thesis prize awarded by the Gravitational Wave International Committee.

This book offers a comprehensive introduction to advanced methods for image and video analysis and processing. It covers deraining, dehazing, inpainting, fusion, watermarking and stitching. It describes techniques for face and lip recognition, facial expression recognition, lip reading in videos, moving object tracking, dynamic scene classification, among others. The book combines the latest machine learning methods with computer vision applications, covering topics such as event recognition based on deep learning,dynamic scene classification based on topic model, person re-identification based on metric learning and behavior analysis. It also offers a systematic introduction to image evaluation criteria showing how to use them in different experimental contexts. The book offers an example-based practical guide to researchers, professionals and graduate students dealing with advanced problems in image analysis and computer vision.

Starting out with a review of the principles of nanophotonics, this book covers a wide range of novel nanofabrication technologies. The internationally recognized editor pioneered this field of research and here he has gathered together a team of authors to highlight the technical details and procedures for both discrete particle as well as surface structure generation. They also illustrate the application potential of different materials, including biological, inorganic and artificial ones.
An invaluable monograph for materials scientists, chemists, physicists, telecommunications engineers, surface and physical chemists.

Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), such as GPS, have become an efficient, reliable and standard tool for a wide range of applications. However, when processing GNSS data, the stochastic model characterising the precision of observations and the correlations between them is usually simplified and incomplete, leading to overly optimistic accuracy estimates. This work extends the stochastic model using signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) measurements and time series analysis of observation residuals. The proposed SNR-based observation weighting model significantly improves the results of GPS data analysis, while the temporal correlation of GPS observation noise can be efficiently described by means of autoregressive moving average (ARMA) processes. Furthermore, this work includes an up-to-date overview of the GNSS error effects and a comprehensive description of various mathematical methods.

YUNMIN ZHU In the past two decades, multi sensor or multi-source information fusion tech niques have attracted more and more attention in practice, where observations are processed in a distributed manner and decisions or estimates are made at the individual processors, and processed data (or compressed observations) are then transmitted to a fusion center where the final global decision or estimate is made. A system with multiple distributed sensors has many advantages over one with a single sensor. These include an increase in the capability, reliability, robustness and survivability of the system. Distributed decision or estimation fusion prob lems for cases with statistically independent observations or observation noises have received significant attention (see Varshney's book Distributed Detec tion and Data Fusion, New York: Springer-Verlag, 1997, Bar-Shalom's book Multitarget-Multisensor Tracking: Advanced Applications, vol. 1-3, Artech House, 1990, 1992,2000). Problems with statistically dependent observations or observation noises are more difficult and have received much less study. In practice, however, one often sees decision or estimation fusion problems with statistically dependent observations or observation noises. For instance, when several sensors are used to detect a random signal in the presence of observation noise, the sensor observations could not be statistically independent when the signal is present. This book provides a more complete treatment of the fundamentals of multi sensor decision and estimation fusion in order to deal with general random ob servations or observation noises that are correlated across the sensors."

In a computational tour-de-force, this volume wipes away a host of problems related to location discovery in wireless ad-hoc sensor networks. WASNs have recognized potential in many applications that are location-dependent, yet are heavily constrained by factors such as cost and energy consumption. Their "ad-hoc" nature, with direct rather than mediated connections between a network of wireless devices, adds another layer of difficulty. Basing this work entirely on data-driven, coordinated algorithms, the author's aim is to present location discovery techniques that are highly accurate-and which fit user criteria. The research deploys nonparametric statistical methods and relies on the concept of joint probability to construct error (including location error) models and environmental field models. It also addresses system issues such as the broadcast and scheduling of the beacon. Reporting an impressive accuracy gain of almost 17 percent, and organized in a clear, sequential manner, this book represents a stride forward in wireless localization.

For more than a century, microscopy has been a centerpiece of extraordinary discoveries in biology. Along the way, remarkable imaging tools have been developed allowing scientists to dissect the complexity of cellular processes at the nano length molecular scales. Nanoimaging: Methods and Protocols presents a diverse collection of microscopy techniques and methodologies that provides guidance to successfully image cellular molecular complexes at nanometer spatial resolution. The book's four parts cover: (1) light microscopy techniques with a special emphasis on methods that go beyond the classic diffraction-limited imaging; (2) electron microscopy techniques for high-resolution imaging of molecules, cells and tissues, in both two and three dimensions; (3) scanning probe microscopy techniques for imaging and probing macromolecular complexes and membrane surface topography; and (4) complementary techniques on correlative microscopy, soft x-ray tomography and secondary ion mass spectrometry imaging. Written in the successful format of the Methods in Molecular Biology (TM) series, chapters include introductions to their respective topics, lists of the necessary materials and reagents, step-by-step protocols, and notes on troubleshooting and avoiding known pitfalls. Authoritative and accessible, Nanoimaging: Methods and Protocols highlights many of the most exciting possibilities in microscopy for the investigation of biological structures at the nano length molecular scales.

Nonlinear Photonics and Novel Optical Phenomena contains contributed chapters from leading experts in nonlinear optics and photonics, and provides a comprehensive survey of fundamental concepts as well as hot topics in current research on nonlinear optical waves and related novel phenomena. The book covers self-accelerating airy beams, integrated photonics based on high index doped-silica glass, linear and nonlinear spatial beam dynamics in photonic lattices and waveguide arrays, the theory of polariton solitons in semiconductor microcavities, and Terahertz waves.

This book provides a comprehensive review of China's Internet development in the past 23 years since the country's first access to the Internet, especially since the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. It offers a systematic account of China's experience in Internet development and governance, and establishes and presents China's Internet Development Index System, covering network infrastructure, information technology, digital economy, e-governance, cyber security, and international cyberspace governance.