Terrain is an ordered surface where locations relate to each other through their elevations. Preservation of this topographic orderliness by an interpolation method so that “if point A is higher than point B in the terrain, the interpolated elevation of A remains higher” is important to assure the practical value of the resultant DEM. Based on the concepts in group theory, this paper points out...

Assessing the impact of glaciation on Earth's surface requires understanding glacial erosion processes. Developing erosion theories is challenging because of the complex nature of the erosion processes and the difficulty of examining the ice/bedrock interface of contemporary glaciers. We demonstrate that the glacial erosion rate is proportional to the ice-sliding velocity squared, by quantifyin...

The successful development of scanning probe techniques to characterize corrosion in situ using multifunctional probes is intrinsically tied to surface topography signal decoupling from the measured electrochemical fluxes. One viable strategy is the shear force controlled scanning microcapillary method. Using this method, pulled quartz micropipettes with an aperture of 500 nm diameter were used...

This paper addresses face recognition under varying light via 3D reconstruction based on the techniques of shape from shading (SFS). First, we improve the geometric-based SFS by introducing the integrability constraint as one of the regular terms. This operation preserves the local curvedness of the recovered surface. Second, we propose a novel method to investigate human face recognition in th...

Micropatterned surfaces have been studied extensively as model systems to understand influences of topographic or chemical heterogeneities on wetting phenomena. Such surfaces yield specific wetting or hydrodynamic effects, for example, ultrahydrophobic surfaces, 'fakir' droplets, tunable electrowetting, slip in the presence of surface heterogeneities and so on. In addition, chemical patterns al...

The planetary topography has been the main focus of the in-orbital remote sensing. In spite of the recent development in active and passive sensing technologies to reconstruct three dimensional planetary topography, the resolution limit of range measurement is theoretically and practically obvious. Therefore, the extraction of inner topographical height variation within a measurement spot is ve...