Increasing Hardware Capabilities Research Articles

MAP GENERATION FOR RETRO GAMING ENGINES

Abstract. Current attempts to integrate gaming, geospatial and AEC technologies are driven by increased hardware capabilities and target virtual worlds as close to reality as possible. In this paper we pursue a converse destination and populate low-tech virtual worlds from geospatial data, building and city models, specifically for retro gaming engines in spatial chat tools. We consider an island, a building and a city district scenario and populate these scenarios from OSM, IFC, and CityGML data sources. The derived worlds are targeting use cases in business, educational and recreational settings. Based on a prototypical implementation, we study the feasibility and limitations of good quality retro gaming map generation with automatic means from existing data sets, but also the potential of such worlds for Green IT, accessibility and inspiration of new user groups. We describe the algorithms and processes to generate the maps and outline the concept for a user survey. Beyond that, by discussing map generation techniques from classical gaming in context of and comparison with geospatial and AEC practices, this paper contributes a retrospective of early gaming techniques that might be both entertaining and informative for current development practice.

A Fast Keypoint Based Hybrid Method for Copy Move Forgery Detection

Copy move forgery detection in digital images has become a very popular research topic in the area of image forensics. Due to the availability of sophisticated image editing tools and ever increasing hardware capabilities, it has become an easy task to manipulate the digital images. Passive forgery detection techniques are more relevant as they can be applied without the prior information about the image in question. Block based techniques are used to detect copy move forgery, but have limitations of large time complexity and sensitivity against affine operations like rotation and scaling. Keypoint based approaches are used to detect forgery in large images where the possibility of significant post processing operations like rotation and scaling is more. A hybrid approach is proposed using different methods for keypoint detection and description. Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) are used to detect the keypoints in the image and Binary Robust Invariant Scalable Keypoints (BRISK) features are used to describe features at these keypoints. The proposed method has performed better than the existing forgery detection method using SURF significantly in terms of detection speed and is invariant to post processing operations like rotation and scaling. The proposed method is also invariant to other commonly applied post processing operations like adding Gaussian noise and JPEG compression

Modular design of an open-source, networked embedded system

The ever increasing hardware capabilities typical of modern microcontrollers make it easier to add more and more functions to embedded systems, even for relatively low-end ones. In turn, this raises new requirements on their firmware, focusing on aspects like adherence to international and industrial standards, modularity, portability, fast time to market, and integration of diverse software components.This paper shows, by means of a case study, how to design a full-fledged networked embedded system using only open-source components, including a small-scale real-time operating system. In addition, it highlights how different components addressed key design issues, like inter-task synchronization and communication.

Discrete Event Systems Control of a Rapid Thermal Multiprocessor

The need for more flexible equipment for the production of integrated circuits has started the development of a new family of multiprocessing machines for semiconductor manufacturing. The increased hardware capabilities of these machines in performing a variety of different processes pose great challenges to the control software. It is shown in this paper how to use an approach based on theory from the field of Discrete Event Systems Control to design the control software of one of these multiprocessing machines: a Rapid Thermal Multiprocessor (RTM) at the Center for Integrated Systems of Stanford University.