Under Darkness

Into Darkness

Visual navigation of mobile robots has become a core capability that enables many interesting applications from planetary exploration to self-driving cars. While systems built on passive cameras have been shown to be robust in well-lit scenes, they cannot handle the range of conditions associated with a full diurnal cycle. Lidar, which is fairly invariant to ambient lighting conditions, offers ...

Darkness filling-in: a neural model of darkness induction

A model of darkness induction based on a neural filling-in mechanism is proposed. The model borrows principles from both Land's Retinex theory and BCS/FCS filling-in model of Grossberg and colleagues. The main novel assumption of the induction model is that darkness filling-in signals, which originate at luminance borders, are partially blocked when they try to cross other borders. The percenta...

Topology of light's darkness.

We numerically study the topology of optical vortex lines (nodal lines) in volumes of optical speckle, modeled as superpositions of random plane waves. It is known that the vortex lines may be infinitely long, or form closed loops. Loops are occasionally threaded by infinite lines, or linked with other loops. We find the probability of a loop not being threaded decays exponentially with the len...

Heart of Darkness

Significant literature has an impact on the reader. Reading the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad as a young boy rose emotions comparable to those I felt when losing a patient after percutaneous nephrolithotomy (PCNL) as a grown up. The case of a 37-year-old woman with bilateral staghorn and a fatal outcome after PCNL is presented and alternatives are discussed.

Out of darkness.