This is the first of a series of books on Ultrafast Intense Laser Science, a newly emerging interdisciplinary research field that spans atomic and molecular physics, molecular science, and optical science. It covers intense VUV laser-cluster interaction, resonance and chaos-assisted tunneling, and the effects of the carrier-envelope phase on high-order harmonic generation.

The domains of Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning have experienced exceptional interest and growth, however the overwhelming number of methods and applications can make the fields seem bewildering. This text offers an accessible and conceptually rich introduction, a solid mathematical development emphasizing simplicity and intuition. Students beginning to explore pattern recognition do not need a suite of mathematically advanced methods or complicated computational libraries to understand and appreciate pattern recognition; rather the fundamental concepts and insights, eminently teachable at the undergraduate level, motivate this text. This book provides methods of analysis that the reader can realistically undertake on their own, supported by real-world examples, case-studies, and worked numerical / computational studies.

Automatic speech recognition suffers from a lack of robustness with respect to noise, reverberation and interfering speech. The growing field of speech recognition in the presence of missing or uncertain input data seeks to ameliorate those problems by using not only a preprocessed speech signal but also an estimate of its reliability to selectively focus on those segments and features that are most reliable for recognition. This book presents the state of the art in recognition in the presence of uncertainty, offering examples that utilize uncertainty information for noise robustness, reverberation robustness, simultaneous recognition of multiple speech signals, and audiovisual speech recognition. The book is appropriate for scientists and researchers in the field of speech recognition who will find an overview of the state of the art in robust speech recognition, professionals working in speech recognition who will find strategies for improving recognition results in various conditions of mismatch, and lecturers of advanced courses on speech processing or speech recognition who will find a reference and a comprehensive introduction to the field. The book assumes an understanding of the fundamentals of speech recognition using Hidden Markov Models.

Gradient-Index (GRIN) optics provides a comprehensive and thorough treatment on fundamentals and applications of light propagation through inhomogeneous media. The book can be used both as a classroom text for students in physics and engineering and as a reference for specialists. A description of the phenomena, components and technology used in GRIN Optics are presented. The relationship to lenses, waveguides, optical connections, spatial solitons and vision is demonstrated. Applications of GRIN components and hybrid structures for optical connections, optical sensing and Talbot effect are analyzed.

The textbook presents basic concepts of signals and systems in a clear manner, based on the author's 15+ years of teaching the undergraduate course for engineering students. To attain full benefit from the content, readers should have a strong knowledge of calculus and be familiar with integration, differentiation, and summation operations. The book starts with an introduction to signals and systems and continues with coverage of basic signal functions and their manipulations; energy, power, convolution, and systems; Fourier analysis of continuous time signals and digital signals; Laplace transform; and Z transforms. Practical applications are included throughout. The book is also packed with solved examples, self-study exercises, and end of chapter problems.

Learn how to overcome resolution limitations caused by atmospheric turbulence in Imaging Through Turbulence. This hands-on book thoroughly discusses the nature of turbulence effects on optical imaging systems, techniques used to overcome these effects, performance analysis methods, and representative examples of performance. Neatly pulling together widely scattered material, it covers Fourier and statistical optics, turbulence effects on imaging systems, simulation of turbulence effects and correction techniques, speckle imaging, adaptive optics, and hybrid imaging. Imaging Through Turbulence is written in tutorial style, logically guiding you through these essential topics. It helps you bring down to earth the complexities of coping with turbulence.

This book provides a wide scope of contributions related to optoelectronic device application in a variety of robotic systems for diverse purposes. The contributions are focused on optoelectronic sensors and analyzing systems, 3D and 2D machine vision technologies, robot navigation, pose estimations, robot operation in cyclic procedures, control schemes, motion controllers, and intelligent algorithms and vision systems. Applications of these technologies are outlined for unmanned aerial vehicles, autonomous and mobile robots, industrial inspection applications, cultural heritage documentation, and structural health monitoring. Also discussed are recent advanced research in measurement and others areas where 3D and 2D machine vision and machine control play an important role. Surveys and reviews about optoelectronic and vision-based applications are also included. These topics are of interest to readers from a diverse group including those working in optoelectronics, and electrical, electronic and computer engineering.

Recent advances in theory and observations using passive microwave remote sensing have hightlighted the potential of spaceborne sensors for contributing to the required land surface measurements of soils, vegetation, snow cover and precipitation. Furthermore, the spatial resolution of passive microwave observations matches the special scales of large-scale models of land-atmosphere interactions both for data assimilation and validation. In order to stimulate and focus this research a workshop, sponsored by ESA and NASA, was organized to review the state-of-the-art in microwave radiometry related to land applications and to exchange ideas leading into new directions for future research. This volume contains the refereed papers from the aforementioned ESA/NASA workshop, which are arranged by topic, as well as the (edited) working group reports.

"Nanoscale Applications for Information and Energy Systems "presents nanotechnology fundamentals and applications in the key research areas of information technology (electronics and photonics) and alternative (solar) energy: plasmonics, photovoltaics, transparent conducting electrodes, silicon electroplating, and resistive switching. The three major technology areas electronics, photonics, and solar energy are linked on the basis of similar applications of nanostructured materials in research and development. By bridging the materials physics and chemistry at the atomic scale with device and system design, integration, and performance requirements, tutorial chapters from worldwide leaders in the field provide a coherent picture of theoretical and experimental research efforts and technology development in these highly interdisciplinary areas."

This book highlights the capabilities and limitations of radar and air navigation. It discusses issues related to the physical principles of an electromagnetic field, the structure of radar information, and ways to transmit it. Attention is paid to the classification of radio waves used for transmitting radar information, as well as to the physical description of their propagation media. The third part of the book addresses issues related to the current state of navigation systems used in civil aviation and the prospects for their development in the future, as well as the history of satellite radio navigation systems. The book may be useful for schoolchildren, interested in the problems of radar and air navigation.

This book presents the history of the development of fibre optic technology, explaining the scientific challenges that needed to be overcome, the range of applications and future potential for this fundamental communications technology. The author has followed and reported the development closely for the past 20 years, and is better placed than anyone to write the definitive history of the field.

In this thesis, a new lidar (light detection and ranging) ceilometer capable of monitoring cloud base and sensitive to boundary layer aerosols is introduced. The key to this novelty lies in its divided-lens design that addresses a classical lidar problem of balancing transmitter-receiver overlap and signal-to-noise ratio, along with a method for characterizing overlap in the laboratory. Enhanced sensitivity in the near-range of the instrument is achieved without compromising signal-to-noise in a design that is straightforward to manufacture for broad deployment. The instrument, its optical characterization, and its performance in the field are described. The prototype instrument described here has since formed the basis of a commercial sensor for monitoring clouds and aerosols. High-resolution, continuous observations of clouds and aerosols are needed to reduce the large uncertainties in our current understanding of their influence on climate that have been highlighted by the International Panel on Climate Change. And as international health organizations indicate growing public health threats over the coming decades resulting from poor air quality, extensive aerosol monitoring is required to assess personal exposure to and the health impacts of anthropogenic particulates. Ground-based optical remote sensing measurements made by well-characterized instruments, such as that described in these pages, are critical to this.

Intelligent Machine Vision: Techniques, Implementations & Applications brings together the central issues involved in this exciting and topical subject.Drawing on half a century of combined experience, the authors describe state of the art and the latest developments in the field, including:- fundamentals of 'intelligent' image processing, specifically intended for Machine Vision systems;- algorithm optimization;- implementation in high-speed electronic digital hardware;- implementation in an integrated high-level software environment;- applications for industrial product quality and process control.There are hundreds of illustrations in the book, most of them created using the author's 'PIP' software - a sophisticated intelligent image processing package.A demonstration version of this software, as well as numerous examples from the book, are available at the authors' Web site: http://bruce.cs.cf.ac.uk/bruce/index.html

In this thesis, Matthias Heydt applies digital in-line holography to achieve for the first time a complete three dimensional and real time motion analysis of Ulva zoospores, both in solution and in the vicinity of different surfaces. These results provide previously unknown information about the behavior and mechanism spores use to select a suitable site for settlement. This work gives deeper insight into biofouling algae and stimulates new design strategies for antifouling coatings. Furthermore, the tracking system developed during this research could be used as a new system for assessing the antifouling performance on different surfaces at very early points in time, allowing disentanglement of surface conditioning and interaction of spores with pristine chemistries.

Dead-Reckoning aided with Doppler velocity measurement has been the most common method for underwater navigation for small vehicles. Unfortunately DR requires frequent position recalibrations and underwater vehicle navigation systems are limited to periodic position update when they surface. Finally standard Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers are unable to provide the rate or precision required when used on a small vessel. To overcome this, a low cost high rate motion measurement system for an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) with underwater and oceanographic purposes is proposed. The proposed onboard system for the USV consists of an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) with accelerometers and rate gyros, a GPS receiver, a flux-gate compass, a roll and tilt sensor and an ADCP. Interfacing all the sensors proved rather challenging because of their different characteristics. The proposed data fusion technique integrates the sensors and develops an embeddable software package, using real time data fusion methods, for a USV to aid in navigation and control as well as controlling an onboard Acoustic Doppler Current Profiler (ADCP). While ADCPs non-intrusively measure water flow, the vessel motion needs to be removed to analyze the data and the system developed provides the motion measurements and processing to accomplish this task.

Session 1 Elementary Excitations and Excitation Transport.- Picosecond Resolved Optically Driven Phonon Dynamics.- Relaxation and Propagation of High Frequency Phonons in Thin Crystalline Plates After Intense Laser Pumping.- Evolution in Real Time and Space of Short Polariton Pulses in Crystals.- Quasielastic Electronic Light Scattering in Semiconductors at Low Concentrations of Current Carriers.- Condensed Matter Science With Far Infra Red Free Electron Lasers (Abstract).- Nonequilibrium Terahertz Range Acoustic Phonons and Luminescence of Excitons in Semiconductors.- Session II Optical Properties of Surfaces and Interfaces.- Nonlinear Optical Studies of Molecular Adsorbates.- Enhancement of Exciton Transition Probabilities in Ultrathin Films of Cadmium Telluride.- Studies of Semiconductor Surfaces and Interfaces by Three Wave Mixing Spectroscopy (Abstract).- Time-Resolved Resonant Reflection of Light.- Femtosecond Photoemission Studies of Image Potential and Electron Dynamics in Metals.- High Intensity, Ultrashort Pulse Laser Heated Solids.- Session III Optical Studies of Growth, Instabilities and Pattern Formation.- Control of Transversal Interactions in Nonlinear Optics: New Spatio-Temporal Effects in Nonlinear Wave Dynamics (Abstract).- Synchronization of Atomic Quantum Transitions by Light Pulses.- Chaos in Nonlinear Optics.- Self-Organizaiton and Spatio-Temporal Chaos in Phase-Locked Semiconductor Laser Arrays (Abstract).- Competitive and Cooperative Dynamics in Optical Neural Networks (Abstract).- Transitions Between Ordered and Disordered Solid-Melt Patterns Formed on Silicon by Continuous Laser Beams: Competition Between Electrodynamics and Thermodynamics.- Session IV Elementary Excitations and Excitation Transport.- Light Scattering in Oxide Superconductors.- Raman Scattering in High-Tc Superconductors YBa2Cu3Ox With Different Oxygen Contents.- Raman Scattering from High Temperature Superconductors.- Decay of Exciton Gratings in Anthracene: Anisotropy of Lowest Exciton Bands and Coexistence of Longpath and Shortpath Waveguide Modes.- Excitation Transport in Polymeric Solids.- Vibron Lifetimes in Molecular Crystals.- Session V Optical Properties of Critical Phenomena Random Systems, and Coherent Phenomena.- Anomalies of the Elastic Light Scattering at Phase Transitions in Crystals with Point Defects.- Dynamical Fluctuations in a Dipolar Glass.- Localization of Light in Random Media (Abstract).- Quantum Optic and Transient Effects of Excitonic Polaritons, and Properties of Phonoritons.- Nonclassical Field Correlations in Quantum Optics (Abstract).- Phase-Conjugated Wave Enhanced by Weak Localization of Exciton-Polaritons.- Session VI Nonlinear Optical Properties of Semiconductors Organics and Fibers.- The Historical Relationship Between Nonlinear Optics and Condensed Matter (Abstract).- Optical Nonlinearities Enhanced by Carrier Transport.- Organic Nonlinear Optical Materials and Devices for Optoelectronics (Abstract).- Nonlinear Optical Susceptibilities of Surface Layers of Metals and Super- and Semiconductors Related to Electronic Structure and Crystal Symmetry.- Second Harmonic Generation in Optical Fibers.- Nonlinear Optical Probes of Glassy Polymers.- Session VII Quantum Wells.- Photoluminescence of Hot Electrons and Scattering Processes in Quantum-Well Structures.- High Resolution Nonlinear Laser Spectroscopy Measurements of Exciton Dynamics in GaAs Quantum Well Structures.- Optical Spectroscopy in the Regime of the Fractional Quantum Hall Effect.- Geminate Recombination in MQW Structures in a Magnetic Field.- Investigation of Two-Electron-Hole Pair Resonances in Semiconductor Quantum Dots.- Many Body Effects in Homogeneous Quasi 2D Electron-Hole Plasma in Undoped and Modulation Doped InGaAs Single Quantum Wells.- Session VIII Recent Significant Developments.- Pulsed Diffusing-Wave Spectroscopy in Dense Colloids.- Waves on Corrugated Surfaces: K-Gaps and Enhanced Backscattering.- Black Hole Radiation: Can Vir...

This book provides detailed and current information on using fullerenes (bucky-balls) in photodynamic therapy (PDT), one of the most actively studied applications of photonic science in healthcare. This will serve as a useful source for researchers working in photomedicine and nanomedicine, especially those who are investigating PDT for cancer treatment and infectious disease treatment. The book runs the gamut from an introduction to the history and chemistry of fullerenes and some basic photochemistry, to the application of fullerenes as photosensitizers for cancer and antimicrobial inactivation.

This book presents Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Networks (ICISN 2022), held at Hanoi in Vietnam. It includes peer reviewed high quality articles on Intelligent System and Networks. It brings together professionals and researchers in the area and presents a platform for exchange of ideas and to foster future collaboration. The topics covered in this book include- Foundations of Computer Science; Computational Intelligence Language and speech processing; Software Engineering Software development methods; Wireless Communications Signal Processing for Communications; Electronics track IoT and Sensor Systems Embedded Systems; etc.

This book presents lectures given at the 8th International Workshop on Spoken Dialog Systems. As agents evolve in terms of their ability to carry on a dialog with users, several qualities are emerging as essential components of a successful system. Users do not carry on long conversations on only one topic-they tend to switch between several topics. Thus the authors are observing the emergence of multi-domain systems that enable users to seamlessly hop from one domain to another. The systems have become active social partners. Accordingly, work on social dialog has become crucial to active and engaging human-robot/agent interaction. These new systems call for a coherent framework that guides their actions as chatbots and conversational agents. Human-Robot/Agent assessment mechanisms naturally lend themselves to this task. As these systems increasingly assist humans in a multitude of tasks, the ethics of their existence, their design and their interaction with users are becoming crucial issues. This book discusses the essential players and features involved, such as chat-based agents, multi-domain dialog systems, human-robot interaction, social dialog policy, and advanced dialog system architectures.

Nonlinearities and optics, optoelectronics and fiber communications are discussed systematically in this book. In a unified theoretical treatment, the book addresses the three categories of materials: fibers, semiconductors, and nonlinear crystals. In each case emphasis is placed on the nonlinear character of their refractive indices and optical absorption. The text also gives an in-depth analysis of the uses and limitations of phontonic nonlinearities with regard to wavelength division multiplexing and high-speed fiber communications. It will be of interest to graduate students as well as researchers and engineers in the fields of nonlinear optics and optical communications.

An image or video sequence is a series of two-dimensional (2-D) images sequen tially ordered in time. Image sequences can be acquired, for instance, by video, motion picture, X-ray, or acoustic cameras, or they can be synthetically gen erated by sequentially ordering 2-D still images as in computer graphics and animation. The use of image sequences in areas such as entertainment, visual communications, multimedia, education, medicine, surveillance, remote control, and scientific research is constantly growing as the use of television and video systems are becoming more and more common. The boosted interest in digital video for both consumer and professional products, along with the availability of fast processors and memory at reasonable costs, has been a major driving force behind this growth. Before we elaborate on the two major terms that appear in the title of this book, namely motion analysis and image sequence processing, we like to place them in their proper contexts within the range of possible operations that involve image sequences. In this book, we choose to classify these operations into three major categories, namely (i) image sequence processing, (ii) image sequence analysis, and (iii) visualization. The interrelationship among these three categories is pictorially described in Figure 1 below in the form of an "image sequence triangle.""

This book presents the design of modular architecture flight simulators. Safe transportation of people and goods is one of the main directions for the development of the world economy. At the same time, in conditions of constantly increasing intensity of air traffic, the actions of people, responsible for piloting aircraft and air traffic control are of particular importance. In this regard, special attention should be paid to the process of training such specialists. This book describes various flight simulators of an aircraft, as well as to assess the impact of various characteristics of aviation simulators on the quality of skills of aviation specialists. The book discusses the following issues: 1) method of setting dynamic parameters; 2) methods of correction of simulator parameters, according to expert opinions of operating organizations; 3) modules of simulators of operation of various aircraft units and flight conditions; 4) prospects for the development of aviation simulators; 5) collection and evaluation of information in the process of training on aviation simulators.

Covers principles, applications, and issues pertaining to all major elecro-optical displays presently in use, with discussion of display evaluation characteristics and human factor topics. Coverage includes: liquid crystal (LC) display properties, matrix addressing, and photoaddressing issues; time-

This book gives an overview of the latest progress in the domain of quantum imaging. It reflects three and a half years of research carried out by leading specialists in the area within the Quantum Imaging network, a research programme of the European Community.

Quantum Imaging is a newly born branch of quantum optics that investigates the ultimate performance limits of optical imaging allowed by the laws of quantum mechanics. Using the methods and techniques from quantum optics, quantum imaging addresses the questions of image formation, processing and detection with sensitivity and resolution exceeding the limits of classical imaging.

In the past few decades, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) has become an indispensable tool in modern medicine, with MRI systems now available at every major hospital in the developed world. But for all its utility and prevalence, it is much less commonly understood and less readily explained than other common medical imaging techniques. Unlike optical, ultrasonic, X-ray (including CT), and nuclear medicine-based imaging, MRI does not rely primarily on simple transmission and/or reflection of energy, and the highest achievable resolution in MRI is orders of magnitude smaller that the smallest wavelength involved. In this book, MRI will be explained with emphasis on the magnetic fields required, their generation, their concomitant electric fields, the various interactions of all these fields with the subject being imaged, and the implications of these interactions to image quality and patient safety. Classical electromagnetics will be used to describe aspects from the fundamental phenomenon of nuclear precession through signal detection and MRI safety. Simple explanations and Illustrations combined with pertinent equations are designed to help the reader rapidly gain a fundamental understanding and an appreciation of this technology as it is used today, as well as ongoing advances that will increase its value in the future. Numerous references are included to facilitate further study with an emphasis on areas most directly related to electromagnetics.