Sharif Digital Repository

With the aid of nanotechnology and understanding of visual and retinal neuroscience, tremendous advances have been achieved in the treatment of people who have lost their vision. Among vision restoration techniques, stem cells or gene therapy remain in their early phases of development, while visual prosthesis (bionic eye) attains some approaches in vision restoration. There are several ongoing projects around the world on visual prosthesis, including Argus II (received FDA approval), Boston Retinal Implant Project, Epi-Ret 3, Intelligent Medical Implants and Alpha-IMS (Retina Implant AG). One of the most crucial traits of implants is vision resolution that theoretically correlates with... 

This paper presents a new method for eye detection in a sequence of video pictures. We first find the face region using the features of skin's color, then the location of eye is determined by applying three cues on the detected face region. The first cue is the eye intensity and color, because the intensity of each eye region is relatively low and its color differs from the color of surrounding skin. The second cue is based on the position and size of eyes. The third cue is based on the convolution of proposed-eye-variance-filter with the eye-window candidates. After finding the precise location of eye, it will be tracked in a finite search window. We have evaluated and tested the presented... 

In this paper, jitter due to both capacitive and inductive coupling is studied. Maximum frequency of driving signal on a wire is limited by its input rise time, fall time, pulse width, and the coupling effect from its neighbors. The analytical expressions to estimate the deterministic jitter time due to these effects are presented. The estimation is based on the fastest and slowest approximation of the signal waveform components. Also, we have extracted the eye opening parameters of the eye diagram. The inductance effects significance is shown on eye opening and jitter time. The 45nm technology is used for estimating the horizontal and vertical eye opening and jitter time. The presented... 

Airbags are safety devices in vehicles effectively suppressing passengers’ injuries during accidents. Although there are still many cases of eye injuries reported due to eye-airbag impacts in recent years. Biomechanical approaches are now feasible and can considerably help experts to investigate the issue without ethical concerns. The eye-airbag impact–induced stresses/strains in various components of the eye were found to investigate the risk of injury in different conditions (impact velocity and airbag pressure). Three-dimensional geometry of the eyeball, fat and bony socket as well as the airbag were developed and meshed to develop a finite element model. Nonlinear material properties of... 

The fish freshness was evaluated using machine vision technique through color changes of eyes and gills of farmed and wild gilthead sea bream (Sparus aurata), being employed lightness (L*), redness (a *), yellowness (b*), chroma (c *), and total color difference (ΔE) parameters during fish ice storage. A digital color imaging system, calibrated to provide accurate CIELAB color measurements, was employed to record the visual characteristics of eyes and gills. The region of interest was automatically selected using a computer program developed in MATLAB software. L*, b *, and ΔE of eyes increased with storage time, while c* decreased. The a* parameter of fish eyes did not show clear a trend... 

A simple and effective ratiometric fluorescence sensor for selective detection of dopamine (DA) in alkaline media has been developed by simply mixing thioglycolic acid (TGA) functionalized orange fluorescent cadmium telluride (CdTe) quantum dots (QDs) with amino-functionalized blue fluorescent carbon nanodots (CDs). Under a single excitation wavelength of 365 nm, the sensor exhibits dual-emissions centered at 445 and 603 nm. The fluorescence of CdTe QDs is selectively quenched by DA, whereas the fluorescence of CDs is insensitive to the analyte. In the presence of different amounts of DA, the variations in the dual emission intensity ratios exhibit a continuous color change from pink to... 

Storing information from incoming stimuli in working memory (WM) is essential for decision-making. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) plays a key role to support this process. Previous studies have characterized different neuronal populations in the PFC for working memory judgements based on whether an originally presented stimulus matches a subsequently presented one (matching-rule decision-making). However, much remains to be understood about this mechanism at the population level of PFC neurons. Here, we hypothesized differences in processing of feature vs. spatial WM within the PFC during a matching-rule decision-making task. To test this hypothesis, the modulation of neural activity within the... 

An invisible image watermarking scheme tends to insert the mark in a transparent manner, with the highest possible energy. Several watermarking algorithms use human visual models as perceptual masks to maximize the power of watermark. We take advantage of inhibitory and excitatory characteristics of eye receptors which yield an extra capacity, for amplifying watermark power, while still satisfying imperceptibility constraint. Spatial-domain image entropy is used as a measure of strength of inhibitory effect. The principle of our idea is based on the decomposition of mark sequence into two parts, corresponding to two complementary sets of pixels in spatial-domain. These sets are determined... 

Retinal vessels tortuosity is one of the important signs of cardiovascular diseases such as diabetic retinopathy and hypertension. In this paper we present a simple and efficient algorithm to measure the grade of tortuosity in retinal images. This algorithm consists of four main steps,vessel detection, extracting vascular skeleton via thinning, detection of vessel crossovers and bifurcations and finally calculating local and global tortuosity. The last stage is based on a circular mask that is put on every skeleton point of retinal vessels. While the skeleton of vessel splits the circle in each position, the local tortuosity is considered to be the bigger to smaller area ratio. The proposed... 

Introduction: Utilization of computed tomography (CT) scans is increasing annually. This study aimed to reduce the absorbed dose of sensitive organs in the head (eye lenses and thyroid) and to assess changes in resultant images quality in head scans when the radiation dose is decreased. Material and Methods: An anthropomorphic phantom was examined with head protocols in both helical and sectional modes using two 16-slice CT scanners. The entrance surface dose of eye lenses and thyroid was measured with standard protocols and after reducing the mAS and kilo-voltage using thermo-luminescence dosimeters (TLDs). Results: In sectional mode with standard protocol, the highest surface dose was 2.3... 

A set of transforms (SVD transforms) were introduced in (Shahshahani and Tavakoli Targhi) for understanding images. These transforms have been applied to some problems in computer vision including segmentation, detection of objects in a texture environment, classification of textures, detection of cracks or other imperfections, etc. This technique is shown to be applicable to determination of the location of eyes in a facial image. This method makes no use of color cues, prior geometric knowledge or other assumptions and does not require training. It is also insensitive to local perturbations in lighting, change of orientation and pose, scaling, and complexity of the background including...