The emergence of multimedia, the availability of large digital archives, as well as the rapid growth of the World-Wide Web, have recently attracted research efforts in providing tools for effective retrieval of image data based on their content (Content-Based Image Retrieval, CBIR). The relevance of CBIR for many applications, ranging from art galleries and museum archives, to picture/photograp...

Despite its well-known toxicity, carbon monoxide (CO) is now recognized as a potential therapeutic agent. Its inherent toxicity, however, has limited clinical applications because uncontrolled inhalation of the gas leads to severe systemic derangements in higher organisms. In order to obviate life-threatening effects and administer the gas by bypassing the respiratory system, CO releasing molec...

This thesis presents a novel approach to the problem of behaviour modelling within computer vision. This technique is not based upon statistical measures of typicality, but upon building an understanding of the way people navigate towards a goal. Representing movement through the scene in terms of the known goals and obstacles and interpreting people’s behaviour as representative of underlying ...

We demonstrate the fabrication of an all-dielectric omnidirectional mirror for visible frequencies. The dielectric reflector consists of a stack of 19 alternating layers of tin (IV) sulfide and silica. Using a combination of thermal evaporation (for tin sulfide) and thick electron-beam evaporation (for silica), we have achieved a refractive-index contrast of 2.6/1.46 , one of the highest refrac...

We demonstrate a tunable laser frequency comb operating near 420 nm with mode spacing of 20-50 GHz, usable bandwidth of 15 nm and output power per line of ~20 nW. Using the TRES spectrograph at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, we characterize this system to an accuracy below 1m/s, suitable for calibrating high-resolution astrophysical spectrographs used, e.g., in exoplanet studies.

The problem of trying to view and comprehend large amounts of data is a well-known one. A specialised version of this problem, that of visualising program code (often known as software visualisation) has suffered from the field refusing to embrace new ideas and technologies. This paper presents an application of virtual reality to this problem and highlights areas of importance from virtual rea...

We address the problem of reconstructing the visible surface in stereoscopic vision. We point out the need for viewpoint invariance in the reconstruction scheme and demonstrate the undesirable "wobble" effect that can occur when such invariance is lacking. The design of an invariant scheme is discussed.

During basic education in veterinary medicine, anatomy is the most extended topic, because the various species differ substantially concerning shape and topology of organs. The same is true for the blood supply and nervous systems. Unlike in human anatomy therefore different atlases are necessary for the respective species. In addition, a veterinarian needs thorough anatomical knowledge is nece...