Abstract: Provided is an apparatus for separating, in a medium, a component from a composition comprising: (1) an array of three or more electrodes arrayed along a pathway along which molecules of the composition are transported; and (2) a power source device for delivering to voltage to the electrodes; wherein the voltages delivered to the electrode array by the power source device are effective to: (a) alter the relative movement along the transport pathway of two or more of the molecules caused by a motive force, or (b) cause the molecules to move along the transport pathway.

Abstract: An apparatus and a concomitant method is disclosed for encoding wavelet trees in a wavelet-based coding technique, which the use of band dependent tables to address specific bands of the wavelet tree addresses.

Abstract: An exemplary power supply provides low power dissipation in standby mode by disabling the start-up circuit and by implementing variable frequency operation independent of the feedback signal. A standby mode detection circuit automatically implements the variable frequency operation, and an under voltage lockout signal implements the start-up circuit disable. Once the start time expires or when feedback control enables, the start-up circuit is disabled so that it dissipates negligible power. A voltage controlled oscillator responsive to the rectified DC line voltage provides for variable frequency operation in standby mode. The frequency output of the VCO is inversely proportional to the line voltage—as line voltage increases the switching frequency decreases, which decreases the output power.

Abstract: A spectrum-based speech enhancement system estimates and tracks the noise spectrum of a mixed speech and noise signal. The system frames and windows a digitized signal and applies the frames to a fast Fourier transform processor to generate discrete Fourier transformed (DFT) signals representing the speech plus noise signal. The system calculates the power spectrum of each frame. The speech enhancement system employs a leaky integrator that is responsive to identified noise-only components of the signal. The leaky integrator has an adaptive time-constant which compensates for non-stationary environmental noise. In addition, the speech enhancement system identified noise-only intervals by using a technique that monitors the Teager energy of the signal. The transition between noise-only signals and speech plus noise signals is softened by being made non-binary. Once the noise spectrum has been estimated, it is used to generate gain factors that multiply the DFT signals to produce noise-reduced DFT signals.

Abstract: An integrated double sided metal supported display device has a green tape stack on both sides of the metal support. The green tape stacks incorporate circuitry and conductor filled vias to access the circuitry electrically on each green tape layer. The metal support has a plurality of openings to access both of the green tape stacks. These openings are made by forming the openings in the metal support, filling them with a dielectric that has a thermal coefficient of expansion close to that of the metal support, forming an opening in the dielectric and filling the opening with a conductive ink.

Abstract: A disposable in-the-ear monitoring instrument includes a monitoring assembly for monitoring one or more vital health signs of a user, a transmitter assembly for transmitting the monitored vital health signs to a remote receiving unit, and a battery for energizing the assemblies. The assemblies and battery are mounted on a printed circuit which is disposed in a cylindrical shell. And the cylindrical shell is itself mounted in an earmold. The disposable in-the-ear monitoring instrument is of an optimum design having a minimum number of components, and thus is easy to assemble on an automated basis. The automated assembly of the in-the-ear monitoring instrument and its optimum design reduces costs and allows for the disposability of the monitoring instrument.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for performing image quality assessment that does not require the use or availability of a reference image. The apparatus comprises a vision pre-processor, a virtual reference generator, a virtual distortion generator, and a image quality metric generator. The vision preprocessor performs a vision-like transformation upon an input image sequence to produce a vision energy map. The virtual reference generator operates upon the vision energy map to produce a virtual reference while the virtual distortion generator produces distortion estimates that are used by the virtual reference generator to produce the virtual reference. The virtual distortion and virtual reference are used by the image quality metric generator to produce a image quality metric for the input video sequence without the use of a reference video sequence.

Abstract: Apparatus and method for classifying regions of an image, based on the relative “importance” of the various areas and to adaptively use the importance information to allocate processing resources, e.g., bit allocation in an encoding environment.

Abstract: A display as for images and/or information comprises a plurality of light-emitting fibers disposed in side-by-side arrangement to define a viewing surface. Each light-emitting fiber includes a plurality of light-emitting elements disposed along its length, each having two electrodes between which are applied electrical signals to cause the light-emitting element to emit light to display a pixel or sub-pixel of the image and/or information. The light-emitting fiber includes an electrical conductor disposed along its length to serve as a first electrode, a layer of light-emissive material disposed thereon, and a plurality of electrical contacts disposed on the light-emissive material to serve as the second electrodes of the light-emitting elements.

Abstract: An apparatus and a concomitant method is disclosed for encoding wavelet trees to generate bitstreams with flexible degrees of spatial, quality and complexity scalabilities. The zerotree entropy (ZTE) encoding method is extended to achieve a fully scalable coding method by implementing a multiscale zerotree coding scheme.

Abstract: A method and apparatus for accurately computing parallax information as captured by imagery of a scene. The method computes the parallax information of each point in an image by computing the parallax within windows that are offset with respect to the point for which the parallax is being computed. Additionally, parallax computations are performed over multiple frames of imagery to ensure accuracy of the parallax computation and to facilitate correction of occluded imagery.

Abstract: An apparatus and method for receiving a bitstream containing timing information and respective program information, the program information is processed and associated with locally generated timing information to form an output bitstream, the locally generated timing information is synchronized to the received timing information so that the timing relationships of the received program information are preserved even after the program information is processed.

Abstract: A method and apparatus using the discrete cosine transform (DCT) to resize an image. To reduce an image, the method and apparatus exploits the convolution-multiplication property of the DCT to implement the anti-aliasing filter in the DCT domain, then the filtered coefficients are operated on to produce DCT coefficients of the reduced-size image. To increase an image, the DCT coefficients of the original image are operated on to produce coefficients of the larger image, then the convolution-multiplication property of the DCT is used to implement an anti-imaging filter. These DCT operations can be applied to the image as a whole or can be applied to non-overlapping blocks of the image.

Abstract: During video coding, a transform such as a discrete cosine transform (DCT) is applied to blocks of image data (e.g., motion-compensated interframe pixel differences) and the resulting transform coefficients for each block are quantized at a specified quantization level. Notwithstanding the fact that some coefficients are quantized to non-zero values, at least one non-zero quantized coefficient is treated as if it had a value of zero for purposes of further processing (e.g., run-length encoding (RLE) the quantized data). When segmentation analysis is performed to identify two or more different regions of interest in each frame, the number of coefficients that are treated as having a value of zero for RLE is different for different regions of interest (e.g., more coefficients for less-important regions).

Abstract: A display as for images and/or information comprises a plurality of linearly addressed light-emitting fibers disposed in side-by-side arrangement to define a viewing surface. Each light-emitting fiber includes a plurality of light-emitting elements disposed along its length which is linearly addressed by signals provided by a drive circuit at one end thereof. Linear addressing signals are either optical signals or electrical signals, and may be frequency modulated, digitally encoded or analog encoded. A detector associated with each pixel detects the linear addressing signal and decodes same to activate and deactivate organic or inorganic light-emitting material elements. Thus, the light-emitting elements emit light to display a pixel or sub-pixel of the image and/or information. The light-emitting fiber may include a transparent fiber as substrate for propagating the optical signals therethrough and may include electrical conductors disposed along its length for propagating the electrical signals.

Abstract: A color display system comprises a radiation generator in which the intensity of at least four wavelength bands can be controlled to reproduce a desired color. The system includes an intensity modulator that generates a multiplicity of modulation control signals each corresponding to a respectively different one of the wavelength bands. A multi-wavelength radiation source provides a plurality of narrow-band radiation signals, each corresponding to a respectively different one of the wavelength bands. The radiation source is responsive to the control signals to control the intensity of each of the narrow-band radiation signals to provide a plurality of modulated narrow-band radiation signals. The plurality of narrow-band radiation signals are combined to reproduce the desired color.

Abstract: A display as for images and/or information comprises a plurality of light-emitting fibers disposed in side-by-side arrangement to define a viewing surface. Each light-emitting fiber includes a plurality of light-emitting elements disposed along its length, each having two electrodes between which are applied electrical signals to cause the light-emitting element to emit light to display a pixel or sub-pixel of the image and/or information. The light-emitting fiber includes an electrical conductor disposed along its length to serve as a first electrode, a layer of light-emissive material disposed thereon, and a plurality of electrical contacts disposed on the light-emissive material to serve as the second electrodes of the light-emitting elements.

Abstract: A disposable in-the-ear monitoring instrument includes a monitoring assembly for monitoring one or more vital health signs of a user, a transmitter assembly for transmitting the monitored vital health signs to a remote receiving unit, and a battery which is sealed within the monitoring instrument for energizing the assemblies. The assemblies and battery are mounted on a flexible printed circuit which is disposed in a flexible, cylindrical casing. And the casing itself is mounted in an earmold made of soft and compliant material, with conical fins extending from an outer surface of the earmold so that the earmold and monitoring circuitry may be easily deformed to comfortably fit a user. The disposable in-the-ear monitoring instrument is of a design having minimal components, and thus is easy to assemble on an automated basis. The automated assembly of the in-the-ear monitoring instrument and its minimal design reduces cost and allows for the disposability of the monitoring instrument.

Abstract: An image is divided into one or more (e.g., foreground) regions of interest with transition regions defined between each region of interest and the relatively least-important (e.g., background) region. Each region is encoded using a single selected quantization level, where quantizer values can differ between different regions. In general, in order to optimize video quality while still meeting target bit allocations, the quantizer assigned to a region of interest is preferably lower than the quantizer assigned to the corresponding transition region, which is itself preferably lower than the quantizer assigned to the background region. The present invention can be implemented iteratively to adjust the quantizer values as needed to meet the frame's specified bit target. The present invention can also be implemented using a non-iterative scheme that can be more easily implemented in real time.

Abstract: An infrared imager includes an array of capacitance sensors that operate at room temperature. Each infrared capacitance sensor includes a deflectable first plate which expands due to absorbed thermal radiation relative to a non-deflectable second plate. In one embodiment each infrared capacitance sensor is composed of a bi-material strip which changes the position of one plate of a sensing capacitor in response to temperature changes due to absorbed incident thermal radiation. The bi-material strip is composed of two materials with a large difference in thermal expansion coefficients.