We present a first approach to a new method to compute the motion estimation in digital videos using the two-dimensional instantaneous frequency information computed using amplitude-modulation frequency-modulation (AM-FM) methods. The optical flow vectors are computed using an iteratively reweighted norm for total variation (IRN-TV) algorithm. We compare the proposed method using synthetic videos versus a previous three-dimensional AM-FM based method and available motion estimation methods such as a phase-based, Horn-Schunck and the Lucas-Kanade methods. The results are promising producing a full density estimation with more accurate results than the other methods.

We present the first results of the teaching methodology applied at the Universidad de Ingeniería y Tecnología (UTEC), Lima, Peru, to involve undergraduate engineering students in advanced research projects starting at the freshman year. Students at UTEC start taking mandatory engineering semester projects, similar to Capstone projects, starting on the first semester. Students with good performance and, more important, with a high will to keep learning extra topics, are invited to participate, to learn using a project based learning methodology, in the Research Laboratories led by experienced professors. The successful students start participating in advanced research projects as developers. In this manuscript, we present the case of two students who started learning hardware design, in their freshman year, and by the beginning of the third academic year, their work, which was part o...

n this paper we present a robust and improved system for diabetic retinopathy (DR) screening. The goal of the system is to automatically screen out digital fundus photographs of diabetic patients who do not present signs of DR. This work is motivated by the large amount of diabetics in the world who do not receive their recommended eye exams, leading to widespread blindness as a complication of diabetes. The system is based on multiscale amplitude-modulation frequency-modulation (AM-FM) methods for feature extraction, and uses supervised and unsupervised methods to produce its final output, namely, a normal or abnormal grade. The most time-consuming processing routines of the system are implemented in C using a compute unified device architecture (CUDA) to produce results in real-time. The system was tested using 776 images from 388 patients (one macula-centered image from each eye). Dur...

Field-programmable wiring systems refer to methods and hardware that can maintain the interconnection of components of different types. Generally, field-programmable wiring systems support the use of multidomain fabrics that can be used to route analog, power, digital signals, optical, microwave signals, etc. This paper reviews fundamental concepts associated with the practical implementation of field-programmable wiring systems. The paper also provides different implementation examples and discusses a list of challenges and recommendations for future work in this area.

We present a new approach to compute the motion estimation in digital videos using 2D amplitude-modulation frequency-modulation (AM-FM) methods. The optical flow vectors are computed using an iteratively reweighted norm for total variation (IRN-TV) algorithm. We compare the proposed method using synthetic videos versus a previous three-dimensional AM-FM based method and available motion estimation methods available in free and commercial software. The proposed approach produces dense estimates that are more accurate than competitive methods.

We recently introduced the first prototype of an Adaptive Wiring Panel (AWP) which implemented a reconfigurable switch fabric that allows dynamic routing of analog, digital, and power signals for space system applications. In this paper, we consider a complete redesign and re-implementation of the AWP system to address issues associated with scalability, reliability and real-time monitoring of the switching fabric. We demonstrate the new system using 48 cells as opposed to the 6 cells of the first AWP prototype. We make our hardware and software systems open source and provide recommendations to support further extensions to our system.

We present the first hardware implementation for a FPGA-based universal link for the transmission of different low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) connections through a single LVDS connection between different devices. The main objective of this work is to reduce the number of wires in a network, for example in some satellites, with several groups of devices, to a single LVDS connection. This paper proposes a new communication protocol for successfully coding and decoding the data sent through the single connection. We propose a solution for one of the difficulties of LVDS standard due to the amount of wires needed for a duplex connection, significantly reducing the amount of wires required for a large network. The proposed solution has been implemented in an Atlys board with a Spartan 6 FPGA showing promising results.

This paper presents a multiscale method to detect neovascularization in the optic disc (NVD) using fundus images. Our method is applied to a manually selected region of interest (ROI) containing the optic disc. All the vessels in the ROI are segmented by adaptively combining contrast enhancement methods with a vessel segmentation technique. Textural features extracted using multiscale amplitude-modulation frequency-modulation, morphological granulometry, and fractal dimension are used. A linear SVM is used to perform the classification, which is tested by means of 10-fold cross-validation. The performance is evaluated using 300 images achieving an AUC of 0.93 with maximum accuracy of 88%.