We have discovered and developed a method that can directly pattern polymer microstructures of arbitrary shapes without using a resist, exposure, chemical development, and etching. A mask with protruded patterns is placed a distance above an initially flat polymer film cast on a substrate. During a heating cycle that raises the temperature above the polymer’s glass transition temperature and th...

A method for contrast enhancement is proposed. The algorithm is based on a local and image-dependent exponential correction. The technique aims to correct images that simultaneously present overexposed and underexposed regions. To prevent halo artifacts, the bilateral filter is used as the mask of the exponential correction. Depending on the characteristics of the image (piloted by histogram an...

In this study, an addition of Ag micro-particles (8–10 lm) with a content in the range between 0 and 1.5 wt.% to Sn–9Zn eutectic solder, were examined in order to understand the effect of Ag additions as the particulate reinforcement on the microstructural and mechanical properties as well as the thermal behavior of the newly developed composite solders. Here, an approach to prepare a micro-com...

Visual enhancement of speech intelligibility, although clearly established, still resists a clear description. We attempt to contribute to solving that problem by proposing a simple account based on phonetically motivated visual cues. This work extends a previous study quantifying the visual advantage in sentence intelligibility across three conditions with varying degrees of visual information...

Wavelet decompositions are based on basis functions satisfying refinement equations. The stability, linear independence and orthogonality of the integer translates of basis functions play an essential role in the study of wavelets. In this paper we characterize these properties in terms of the mask sequence in the refinement equation satisfied by the basis function. AMS Subject Classifications:...

A briefly presented target shape can be made invisible by the subsequent presentation of a mask that replaces the target. While varying the target–mask interval in order to investigate perception near the consciousness threshold, we discovered a novel visual illusion. At some intervals, the target is clearly visible, but its location is misperceived. By manipulating the mask’s size and target’s...

As critical dimensions shrink, line edge and width roughness (LER and LWR) become of increasing concern. Traditionally LER is viewed as a resist-limited effect; however, as critical dimensions shrink and LER requirements become proportionally more stringent, system-level effects begin to play an important role. Recent advanced EUV resist testing results have demonstrated lower bounds on achieva...

Abstract UV LIGA involves the exposure of SU-8 negative resist, using a UV mask aligner, to produce high aspect ratio pillars or microchannels as part of the manufacturing process for microsystems. This has been made possible by the widespread use of a UV sensitive resist SU-8. Many papers have been written on the Fresnel diffraction theory of exposure, some key properties of SU-8 and prototype...

In this paper, the influence of the estimated perceptual mask from the watermarked image is analyzed with the purpose of decreasing the probability of error in detection. We concentrate on a well known perceptual model that has been applied to 8x8 block-wise DCT coefficients. A new procedure based on extracting the mask of the original image from the watermarked image is developed. A closed for...

This paper presents a scheme to deal accurately and efficiently with complex angular masks, such as occur typically in galaxy surveys. An angular mask is taken to be an arbitrary union of arbitrarily weighted angular regions bounded by arbitrary numbers of edges. The restrictions on the mask are (i) that each edge must be part of some circle on the sphere (but not necessarily a great circle), a...