Abstract: A rate adjustable backplane includes a set of switch slots configured to receive one or more switch cards forming a switch core and a plurality of line slots each configured to receive a line card. A low speed bus couples the line slots to the set of switch slots. A high speed bus also couples the line slots to the set of switch slots. Each line slot includes a low speed connector coupled to the low speed bus and a high speed connector coupled to the high speed bus. The low speed connector is adapted to receive a mating connector of a line card to establish a low speed communication connection between the line card and the switch core. The high speed connector is adapted to receive a mating connector of the line card to establish a high speed link between the line card and the switch core.

Abstract: A switch card for telecommunications node includes a shared memory operable to store traffic channels. A time slot interchanger (TSI) is coupled to a first bus and to the shared memory. The TSI is operable based on predefined switching instructions to access the shared memory to stored traffic channels received from the first bus and to retrieve traffic channels for transmission on the first bus. An asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switch is operable to switch a traffic cell based on header information in the traffic cell. A traffic converter is operable to convert traffic channels retrieved from the shared memory to traffic cells for processing by a bus fuser and to convert traffic cells to traffic channels for storage in the shared memory. The bus fuser is coupled to the shared memory through the traffic converter, the ATM switch, and a second bus.

Abstract: A novel scene reconstruction technique is presented, different from previous approaches in its ability to cope with large changes in visibility and its modeling of intrinsic scene color and texture information. The method avoids image correspondence problems by working in a discretized scene space whose voxels are traversed in a fixed visibility ordering. This strategy takes full account of occlusions and allows the input cameras to be far apart and widely distributed about the environment. The algorithm identifies a special set of invariant voxels which together form a spatial and photometric reconstruction of the scene, fully consistent with the input images.