General-purpose Microcomputer Research Articles

A System for Collecting and Evaluating Load Information about Bioelectric Signals of the Muscular Apparatus of the Foot of a Person with Cerebral Palsy

The purpose of the research is to develop a system of biomechanical investigation of the volume of movement in the foot and ankle joint for the diagnosis of patients with cerebral palsy in assessing the quality of rehabilitation measures. The process of creating a computer diagnostic system for patients with impaired motor functions of the lower extremities, which is equipped with special bio-measuring devices provided with specialized algorithms for processing the information obtained, is investigated due to the need for scientific research aimed at developing methods and tools for a comprehensive assessment of the results of physical rehabilitation using biomedical indicators.Methods of kinematic analysis of movements in the ankle joint were used, dynamic and static analyses of the forces of the supporting reactions of the foot of the lower extremities were carried out.Results. A motion detection system based on an electronic goniometer implemented on the basis of a B10K resistive potentiometer has been developed. The determination of the absolute rotation angles of the links of the diagnostic system was carried out using the MMA7361 acceleration sensor, which contains three micromachine capacitors mounted on one silicon plate. In the course of research, changing the capacitances of micromachine capacitors makes it possible to fix the recorded value in each direction. Signals passing through low-frequency filters and temperature compensation cascades are sent to the corresponding outputs X, Y and Z. The obtained angulograms allow us to evaluate the gait of the studied patient in two classes ‒ normal and in the presence of pathology.Conclusion. A system for the formation and evaluation of bioelectric signals obtained using the muscular apparatus of the foot of patients with cerebral palsy, assembled on the platform of the Arduino UNO control board and a generalpurpose personal computer, has been developed. The developed system makes it possible to register bioelectric signals with their subsequent processing using a personal computer and making diagnostic decisions.

Digital Signal Processing in RadioSolariz Project Using SSE2

This paper aims at elaborating on the digital signal processing techniques used in data manipulation in the radioSolariz solar radio-telescope project. Focus is drawn on the implementation of different digital signal processing algorithms through the use of streaming single instruction – multiple data extensions 2. This complementary instruction set to general purpose personal computer microprocessors offers increased computational power by realizing parallel processing. The benefit is a higher data throughput while lowering the electrical power consumption of the digital signal processing computer. Optimized code fragments are shown along with original code snippets and these are discussed and analyzed. Future work and implementation of other modern parallel processing technologies are envisaged.

Real-time Automated Detection and Recognition of Nigerian License Plates via Deep Learning Single Shot Detection and Optical Character Recognition

License plate detection and recognition are critical components of the development of a connected Intelligent transportation system, but are underused in developing countries because to the associated costs. Existing license plate detection and recognition systems with high accuracy require the usage of Graphical Processing Units (GPU), which may be difficult to come by in developing nations. Single stage detectors and commercial optical character recognition engines, on the other hand, are less computationally expensive and can achieve acceptable detection and recognition accuracy without the use of a GPU. In this work, a pretrained SSD model and a tesseract tessdata-fast traineddata were fine-tuned on a dataset of more than 2,000 images of vehicles with license plate. These models were combined with a unique image preprocessing algorithm for character segmentation and tested using a general-purpose personal computer on a new collection of 200 automobiles with license plate photos. On this testing set, the plate detection system achieved a detection accuracy of 99.5 % at an IOU threshold of 0.45 while the OCR engine successfully recognized all characters on 150 license plates, one character incorrectly on 24 license plates, and two or more incorrect characters on 26 license plates. The detection procedure took an average of 80 milliseconds, while the character segmentation and identification stages took an average of 95 milliseconds, resulting in an average processing time of 175 milliseconds per image, or 6 photos per second. The obtained results are suitable for real-time traffic applications.

Calculation and Development of the Device for Determining the Beginning, End and Extremum of Peak at the Output of the Adsorption Unit

It is known that the solution of such fundamental problems as the direct conversion of thermal and solar energy into electrical energy, the creation of superconducting materials, thermally stable materials and the development of the nanotechnology industry is directly dependent on the solution to the problem of obtaining highly pure substances. In practice, purification systems such as distillation columns, centrifuge-based devices, surface tension-based devices and adsorption-based devices are used to purify substances from impurities. The development of technology currently predisposes to the use of adsorption separation of the method in the analysis of multicomponent mixtures in many industries and the national economy and is gradually taking the place of traditional chemical and physico-chemical methods. The production of highly pure substances with a percentage of microimpurities less than 10-6% is possible only when using an adsorption unit with a large number of columns used. In industrial production, the number of columns in this installation is from 5000 to 10000 pieces. In this case, the signals coming from the adsorption unit in the form of a peak described by the Gauss function characterize the percentage of the test substance and to automate this process, the necessary condition is the use of devices for processing this signal. The efficiency of adsorption methods is significantly increased due to the automation of data processing at the output of the adsorption installation, which develops mainly in three directions: the use of universal general purpose personal computers for processing, the use of specialized computing devices. In general, the automation process involves pairing the adsorption unit with a personal computer, and to achieve this, it is necessary to use such devices for processing signals at the output of the adsorption unit as amplifiers, analog-to-digital converters, and a device for determining the beginning and end of the peak. This article is devoted to the calculation and development of a device for determining the beginning and end of a peak at the output of an adsorption tube. The developed device can be used in the production of high-purity silicon. Having available silicon of high degree of purification there is a possibility of production of such electronic devices as-the diode, the transistor, chips and other various semiconductor devices which essentially differ on the qualitative indicators. Along with this, the use of materials with a high degree of purification gives ample opportunities to improve the quality of manufacturing solar cells and LEDs of increased power.

Development of Android Version Active Textbook System

The authors have proposed the Active Textbook System (A-txt) as the next generation learning material system. A-txt is a system to enhance the textbook by adding digital content to the figures and formulas in a general book by using AR technology. Production of content and registration to the server can be done relatively easily using a general-purpose personal computer, and the content added to the book can be browed using the users’ own smart terminal. Therefore, the introduction cost can be reduced without the need for a dedicated machine. Also, once content is downloaded, it can be used offline. This point is the other advantage that other systems do not have. So far, A-txt was limited to iOS devices that hardware are standardized, but this time the system for Android devices, that have more users, have been developed. Although challenges remain for AR and 3D display, an application that meets practical requirements has been completed. Also, since the Android OS is free, there are a wide variety of terminals adopted. Therefore, recommended hardware specifications have been formulated by benchmark evaluation. Moreover, in order to solve some problems that became apparent in the development process, it was decided to change to an OS-independent system by using Unity.

1P1-A06 小型移動体のための汎用マイコンボードを用いた三相同期モータの回転制御に関する研究

This paper describes Research of Control the Permanent-Magnet-Synchronous-Motor (PMSM). We using the mbed LPC1768 that is General Purpose Microcomputer Board. The reason for simplified the development of control programs. Moreover, we need to incorporate the Vector-control-method for exert the highest efficiency of Permanent-Magnet-Synchronous-Motor. The research target is mounting this system for small mobile. The present conditions is available rectangular-wave-control-method.

Design on Light Geodesic Instrument Semi-Physical Simulation Training System Based on Virtual Scene

This paper takes the light geodesic instrument as the research object, puts forward a design idea of the semi-physical simulation training system based on the virtual scene and realizes three-dimensional modeling, real-time scene drawing and real-time data driving display through Virtools and Visual C++. ARM7 and the general-purpose single-chip microcomputer are adopted to realize the function simulation of the equipment. This simulation training system has the characteristics of low cost, low power consumption and high simulation degree.

Fast, multi-channel real-time processing of signals with microsecond latency using graphics processing units.

Fast, digital signal processing (DSP) has many applications. Typical hardware options for performing DSP are field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), application-specific integrated DSP chips, or general purpose personal computer systems. This paper presents a novel DSP platform that has been developed for feedback control on the HBT-EP tokamak device. The system runs all signal processing exclusively on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to achieve real-time performance with latencies below 8 μs. Signals are transferred into and out of the GPU using PCI Express peer-to-peer direct-memory-access transfers without involvement of the central processing unit or host memory. Tests were performed on the feedback control system of the HBT-EP tokamak using forty 16-bit floating point inputs and outputs each and a sampling rate of up to 250 kHz. Signals were digitized by a D-TACQ ACQ196 module, processing done on an NVIDIA GTX 580 GPU programmed in CUDA, and analog output was generated by D-TACQ AO32CPCI modules.

Fully 3D iterative CT reconstruction using polar coordinates

This paper demonstrates the feasibility of fully 3D iterative computed tomography reconstruction of highly resolved fields of view using polar coordinates. System matrix is computed using a ray-tracing approach in cylindrical or spherical coordinates. By using polar symmetries inherent to the acquisition geometry, the system matrix size can be reduced by a factor corresponding to the number of acquired projections. Such an important decrease in size allows the system matrix to be precomputed, and loaded all at once into memory prior to reconstruction. By carefully ordering the field of view voxels and the sinogram data, reconstruction speed is also enhanced by a cache-oblivious computer implementation. The reconstruction algorithm is also compatible with the ordered-subsets acceleration method. A final polar-to-Cartesian transformation is applied to the reconstructed image in order to allow proper visualization. The ray-tracing and reconstruction algorithms were implemented in polar representation. Large 3D system matrices were calculated in cylindrical and spherical coordinates, and the performance assessed against Cartesian ray-tracers in terms of speed and memory requirements. Images of analytical phantoms were successfully reconstructed in both cylindrical and spherical coordinates. Fully 3D images of phantoms and small animals were acquired with a Gamma Medica Triumph X-O small animal CT scanner and reconstructed using the manufacturer's software and the proposed polar approach to demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the later. The noise was found to be reduced while preserving the same level of spatial resolution, without noticeable polar artifacts. Under a reasonable set of assumptions, the memory size of the system matrix can be reduced by a factor corresponding to the number of projections. Using this strategy, iterative reconstruction from high resolution clinical and preclinical systems can be more easily performed using general-purpose personal computers.

Architecture Plan of the Real-Time Diagnostic Signals Acquisition System Toward JT-60SA Project

For a steady state operation of JT-60SA, a plasma feedback control using various diagnostic sensor signals plays an essential role. To realize this, Real-Time Diagnostic Signals acquisition System, RTDS, which utilizes PC-based real-time OS “INtime”, has been under consideration toward JT-60SA project.Real-Time Processor, RTP in JT-60 data processing system, which utilized a WS-based computer with real-time UNIX, was becoming increasingly difficult to maintain, manage, and improve due to the aging of the system and the limited capability of the CPU.To solve these problems and assess the feasibility of introducing clustered architecture, a prototype had been developed with the existing RTP and a VxWorks computer at hand. Its effectiveness as the architecture of the next RTDS was verified on JT-60U experiments, but the actual RTDS will employ PC-based “INtime” system, which consist of a general-purpose personal computer and a real-time operating system “INtime”.Moreover, long-pulse experiments of more than 400s will be planned in JT-60SA project. Therefore, real time monitoring will be required as an essential function that displays acquired diagnostic signals in real-time during long-pulse experiment. This function will also be realized by utilizing the RTDS.

Height Measurement using Sphere Matching Method in the Stereo Vision System

This paper describes the system to measure height of persons by triangulation using stereo vision which installs two cameras on the ceiling in a stably lighted room. We propose the sphere matching method which assumes a human head as a sphere. The feature of this measurement system is as follows:- Since a sphere template is used for head matching in the edge images of a left camera and a right camera, the proposed method is hard to be influenced of each camera's field angle.- Since the head edge in the images is used, even when there is no feature in top of the head, the human height can be measured.As the result of experiment by this system, average error 1.36 [cm] and maximum error 3.85 [cm] were gained, which means high precision on the height measurement. And height measurement process, including input of a pair of stereo images, was attained in approx. 0.8 [s] (Pentium III,1.0GHz). Note that this system is a simple setup consisting of stereo camera and a general-purpose personal computer with one video capture board installed.

1P1-A14 汎用マイコンを用いた超音波モータの筋電制御システム

This paper describes an EMG (electromyogram) control system using general-purpose microcomputer for ultrasonic motor, as a basis on development of elbow disarticulation prostheses combined by ultrasonic motor and magneto-rheological (MR) fluid. Ultrasonic motors have some special unique features, such as high-torque under low-speed operation, compact size, and no electromagnetic noise. In this study, we developed an EMG control system for ultrasonic motor using general-purpose microcomputer (NEC 78K microcomputer), and it was proved effective in fundamental experiments.

Overcoming Current Limitations of Personal Computers in Replacing Traditional Video Production Equipment

Personal computer (PC)-based systems have made some inroads into the professional video production arena in recent years, serving primarily as nonlinear editing and graphics workstations. However, PCs have thus far failed to replace single-function legacy equipment, instead they function with existing products such as video switchers, digital video effects systems, character generators, and audio mixers. The true benefits of the PC in video production will not he realized until the entire production process is integrated into one system. This step will use the economics of the general purpose PC to dramatically decrease the cost of video production, while making the entire process easier to learn and practice. Integration will also further expand the toolset available to producers by providing a myriad of tools from hundreds of developers, all for one platform. This paper examines the reasons why PC-based systems have failed thus far to make this step and examines some solutions to these problems.

An Accelerometry-Based System for the Assessment of Balance and Postural Sway

The aim of this investigation was to develop an inexpensive, efficient system for the clinical assessment of static and dynamic balance and postural sway using accelerometry-based measurements. Subjects consisted of 10 young (range 18–32 years) and 10 older (range 69–86 years) individuals screened for polypharmacy and history of cardiovascular, neurological or orthopedic health conditions. A lightweight uniaxial accelerometer and general-purpose microcomputer were used to obtain measurements of postural sway. Customized software was written to acquire the data and provide a real-time display consisting of amplitude and frequency characteristics of the sway profile. Intraclass reliability coefficients greater than R = 0.75 were obtained in both eyes-open and challenging-standing balance tasks. Preliminary results demonstrate that the instrumentation can be used to discriminate among balance tasks and to differentiate healthy older adults from those with a tendency toward frequent falls. Moreover, the technique described yields a simple-to-administer, inexpensive procedure that can be conducted in the home or another natural environment. Accelerometry also allows for balance training and re-learning, using tasks that might ordinarily pose a balance challenge for the older or frail adult.

The Movie-2 Digital Audio/Video Expansion Bus

The use of economical, general-purpose personal computers (PCs) in demanding professional video applications like nonlinear editing, graphics creation, animation recording, three-dimensional (3-D) rendering, video-on-demand, and commercial insertion continues to grow. In these applications, specialized PC adapters are typically used to handle the massive processing requirements for transporting natural data types in real time. Commonly used subsystems include video input/output (I/O), video processing (digital video effects [DVE-mixing]), video compression/decompression (codec), audio I/O, audio processing (equalization [EQ]-mixing), mass storage interface, network interface, and video-in-a-window console display. Although it is possible to accomplish some of these tasks with host central processing unit (CPU) software and a single highly integrated adapter, most professional systems require more than one adapter. How to connect these multiple video adapters together inside a PC is a question that system integrators have been wrestling with for many years. This paper examines the limitations of commercially available buses in these demanding broadcast video applications, proposes the Movie-2 bus as a high-performance open-architecture standard that overcomes these limitations, discusses the Movie-2 bus in detail, and finally, presents a model of a typical nonlinear editing platform as an example of system-level Movie-2 bus implementation.

Real-Time Software Synthesis on Superscalar Architectures

Advances in processor technology are making it possible to use general-purpose personal computers as real-time signal processors. This enables highly integrated all-software systems for real-time music processing. Much has been speculated about the behavior of software synthesizers, but there has been relatively little actual experimentation and measurement to verify or refute the folklore that has appeared. In the hopes of better understanding this important future technology, we have performed extensive measurements on several types of processors. We report our findings here and discuss the implications for software-synthesis systems.

Melanie II--a third-generation software package for analysis of two-dimensional electrophoresis images: I. Features and user interface.

Although two-dimensional electrophoresis (2-DE) computer analysis software packages have existed ever since 2-DE technology was developed, it is only now that the hardware and software technology allows large-scale studies to be performed on low-cost personal computers or workstations, and that setting up a 2-DE computer analysis system in a small laboratory is no longer considered a luxury. After a first attempt in the seventies and early eighties to develop 2-DE analysis software systems on hardware that had poor or even no graphical capabilities, followed in the late eighties by a wave of innovative software developments that were possible thanks to new graphical interface standards such as XWindows, a third generation of 2-DE analysis software packages has now come to maturity. It can be run on a variety of low-cost, general-purpose personal computers, thus making the purchase of a 2-DE analysis system easily attainable for even the smallest laboratory that is involved in proteome research. Melanie II 2-D PAGE, developed at the University Hospital of Geneva, is such a third-generation software system for 2-DE analysis. Based on unique image processing algorithms, this user-friendly object-oriented software package runs on multiple platforms, including Unix, MS-Windows 95 and NT, and Power Macintosh. It provides efficient spot detection and quantitation, state-of-the-art image comparison, statistical data analysis facilities, and is Internet-ready. Linked to proteome databases such as those available on the World Wide Web, it represents a valuable tool for the "Virtual Lab" of the post-genome area.

Continuous, on-line, real-time spectral analysis of systemic arterial pressure signals

We present in this communication an algorithm that offers continuous, on-line, real-time analysis of the power spectrum (CORAPS) of systemic arterial pressure (SAP) signals. Based on direct fast Fourier transform of raw SAP signals into power spectral density, it is suitable for the delineation of acute SAP spectral changes over time after physiological or pharmacological perturbations. Thus it is an improvement over most current methods, which only generate the spectra off-line or from intermittent data. Furthermore, all executions can be accomplished economically with a general-purpose personal computer. We demonstrated and quantified vivid sequential alterations in the low-frequency components (< 3 Hz) of the SAP spectrum, which purportedly reflect the influence of vasomotor, baroreceptor, and respiratory activity on SAP during pentobarbital administration or transient hypertension. Three window options incorporated into the algorithm further improved the frequency or temporal resolution and discrimination of the spectral changes during abrupt hypertension or hypotension. Thus our CORAPS algorithm may be useful as an on-line monitor for acute hemodynamic changes.

Time-optimized analysis of slit-scan chromosome profiles on a general-purpose personal computer.

Slit-scan flow cytometry provides a method to analyze large numbers of metaphase chromosomes in a relatively short time due to morphological features. The high detection rate requires fast computing for on-line analysis. Up to now, this has been achieved using special-purpose computers, parallel systems or other complex hardware. Here, we describe an algorithm that can be implemented on a general-purpose personal computer. Digitized chromosome profiles can be classified by several criteria especially for the detection of chromosome abnormalities in biological dosimetry. A data set of approximately 4600 profiles was used. Programming in assembler results in an average computing time of about 600 microseconds per profile. Thus on-line evaluation of slit-scanning data appears to become feasible for many flow cytometers running nowadays.

Simultaneous, continuous, on-line and real-time spectral analysis of multiple physiologic signals by a personal-computer-based algorithm.

We presented in this communication a computer algorithm that offers the advantage of simultaneous analysis of the power spectrum of multiple physiologic signals, including systemic arterial pressure, single-neuronal and electroencephalographic signals, on a continuous, on-line and real-time basis. It provided sensitive definition, discrimination and quantification (graphic and digital) of the various frequency components in the spectrum. There was also great flexibility in selecting the physiologic signal(s) to be analyzed, the choice of results of analysis to be displayed for each physiologic parameter and the alteration of sensitivity and baseline of each event channel. Furthermore, it included window options to improve the frequency or temporal resolution and discrimination of the spectral changes. Most importantly, all these desirable features can be accomplished economically with a general purpose personal computer.