Spherical Mosaic Research Articles

A Spherical Volume-Rendering Method of Ocean Scalar Data Based on Adaptive Ray Casting

There are some limitations in traditional ocean scalar field visualization methods, such as inaccurate expression and low efficiency in the three-dimensional digital Earth environment. This paper presents a spherical volume-rendering method based on adaptive ray casting to express ocean scalar field. Specifically, the minimum bounding volume based on spherical mosaic is constructed as the proxy geometry, and the depth texture of the seabed terrain is applied to determine the position of sampling points in the spatial interpolation process, which realizes the fusion of ocean scalar field and seabed terrain. Then, we propose an adaptive sampling step algorithm according to the heterogeneous depth distribution and data change rate of the ocean scalar field dataset to improve the efficiency of the ray-casting algorithm. In addition, this paper proposes a nonlinear color-mapping enhancement scheme based on the skewness characteristics of the datasets to optimize the expression effect of volume rendering, and the transparency transfer function is designed to realize volume rendering and local feature structure extraction of ocean scalar field data in the study area.

Mechanical design and energy absorption analysis of spherical honeycomb core for soft-landing device buffer shell

Soft-landing buffer systems with spherical curvature outer shells are widely used in the aerospace field, which not only requires its efficient and smooth buffer performance, but also that the shell of the landing buffer system is compact and lightweight. This paper presents a novel design method for the spherical honeycomb core structure for a soft-landing device buffer shell. The proposed method aims to realize the positive sphere characteristics of the honeycomb core by adopting the spherical mosaic of a truncated icosahedron and the triangle formation principle. Furthermore, according to the relationship of the deformation and the energy absorption performance, the optimum structural parameters are obtained by discussing the mechanical properties of the inner core, which determine the unit size and density of the whole model. At the same time, we estimate the distortion rate caused by projection that can be considered as an evaluation criterion to describe the performance of the proposed structure of the spherical honeycomb core. Simulation tests are carried out employing Abaqus/explicit to analyze the distortion impact and the energy-absorbtion properties of the proposed structures under different actual environments.

Drift-Free Real-Time Sequential Mosaicing

We present a sequential mosaicing algorithm for a calibrated rotating camera which can for the first time build drift-free, consistent spherical mosaics in real-time, automatically and seamlessly even when previously viewed parts of the scene are re-visited. Our mosaic is composed of elastic triangular tiles attached to a backbone map of feature directions over the unit sphere built using a sequential EKF SLAM (Extend Kalman Filter Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) approach. This method represents a significant advance on previous mosaicing techniques which either require off-line optimization or which work in real-time but use local alignment of nearby images and ultimately drift. We demonstrate the system's real-time performance with real-time mosaicing results from sequences with 360 degrees pan. The system shows good global mosaicing ability despite the challenging conditions: hand-held simple low-resolution webcam, varying natural outdoor illumination, and people moving in the scene.

Stereo with oblique cameras

Mosaics acquired by pushbroom cameras, stereo panoramas, omnivergent mosaics, and spherical mosaics can be viewed as images taken by non-central cameras, i.e. cameras that project along rays that do not all intersect at one point. It has been shown that in order to reduce the correspondence search in mosaics to a one-parametric search along curves, the rays of the non-central cameras have to lie in double ruled epipolar surfaces. In this work, we introduce the oblique stereo geometry, which has nonintersecting double ruled epipolar surfaces. We analyze the configurations of mutually oblique rays that see every point in space. We call such configurations oblique cameras. We argue that oblique cameras are important because they are the most non-central cameras among all cameras. We show that oblique cameras, and the corresponding oblique stereo geometry, exist and give an example of a physically realizable oblique stereo geometry.

Spherical Mosaics with Quaternions and Dense Correlation

We describe an algorithm for generating spherical mosaics from a collection of images acquired from a common optical center. The algorithm takes as input an arbitrary number of partially overlappin...

Extinction within the limit of validity of the Darwin transfer equations. I. General formalism for primary and secondary extinction and their applications to spherical crystals

A theory of extinction is derived which is valid within the limit of the Darwin intensity transfer equations. An expression describing the effect of n-fold rescattering within an ideal crystallite is derived, which differs from the equation given by Zachariasen because independent coordinates x1 and x2 based on an external coordinate system have been used, rather than the coordinates t1 and t2 which are only mutually independent if the crystal is a parallelepiped with faces parallel to the incident and diffracted beams. Furthermore, the derivation of the earlier expressions is based on a generally unjustifiable reversal of the direction of the diffracted ray (interchange of t2 and t'2). An exact expression is derived for the diffraction cross section σ(ε1) in the perfect crystallite, which contains a factor sin 2θ neglected in the earlier work. As a result, the previously used classification of crystals into type I and type II becomes less well defined because at very small Bragg angles particle size always becomes the dominant effect. It is shown that the extinction factor yp (p = primary), for a perfect spherical crystallite, calculated with the present theory, is in good agreement with calculations based on the dynamical theory. Furthermore, the limiting behavior of the expressions at 2θ = 0 and π justifies some of the mathematical approximations made. For a mosaic crystal the extinction coefficient y is written as yp . ys (s = secondary), yp is evaluated numerically from the expressions derived. An analytical expression for yp is obtained by least-squares fit to the numerical values. A similar procedure is followed for ys, in the case of a Gaussian, Lorentzian and Fresnellian distributions of the crystallites and a spherical mosaic crystal. Analysis of the results shows that the Zachariasen expression can be used for small extinction (y > 0.8), provided the θ dependent factor is properly introduced for particle-size-affected extinction. Allowance for polarization effects in the X-ray case is discussed. Absorption effects cannot be treated separately from extinction for all but small values of 1 -y. Coefficients of the analytical extinction expressions are given for absorbing spherical crystals with μR values ≤ 4. Application of the expressions and extension to non-spherical geometries will be treated in following publications.