Blackberry (Canada)

The geometry of a point cloud is commonly represented by an octree recursively decomposing a 3D volume into eight child sub-volumes. Said volumes and sub-volumes are associated with nodes and child-nodes of the octree. The geometry is defined by the occupancy information indicating the presence or not of a point in each of the sub-volumes. This naturally leads to an eight-bit occupancy information to be coded for each internal node of the tree. This paper introduces a new binarization scheme to efficiently compress the occupancy information using an optimal set of binary entropy coders. Then, it is shown how using the occupancy information of neighbouring nodes helps to compress the occupancy bits associated with the child nodes of the current node. This information is used to contextualise the binarization scheme by computing, firstly a neighbour configuration, secondly a number of neighbours with occupied child nodes adjacent to the current child node, and thirdly an intra predictor. Objective results show lossless geometry compression gains between 60% and 75% on virtual reality oriented dense point clouds used by MPEG, reaching sub-bit per point bit-rates for the lossless intra coding of such point clouds. Solid gains (between 5% and 25% depending upon the sampling) are also observed on sparse point clouds captured by a LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) device attached to a moving vehicle or representing 3D maps.

Platelet-rich plasma (PRP) and hyperacute serum (HAS) were compared in a novel human model of ex vivo bone damage induced by oxygen-glucose deprivation (OGD). Osteoarthritic subchondral bone pieces were harvested from discarded femoral heads during hip replacement surgery and subjected to transient OGD. Proteome profiling revealed that PRP is more angiopoietic, whereas HAS is more antiangiopoietic in composition. However, treatment of OGD-exposed bone with multiple PRP preparations had no effect on cell counts, whereas HAS restored cell proliferation capacity and rescued viable cell number following OGD. A similar pro-proliferation effect was observed with recombinant growth factors, indicating that HAS may be an alternative agent for enhancing the regeneration of damaged bone cells.

This paper reports on downsampling-based techniques to achieve low power consumption and fast readout for capacitive touch screen panels. Here, touch interactivity is processed as an image, which is downsampled and reconstructed to estimate the touch position. After the reconstruction, a regional scan is performed around the reconstructed touch location to retrieve accurate touch information. Based on experimental and simulation results, we successfully decreased readout time and power consumption by 11.3 ms (68%) and 8.79 mW (68.7%), respectively, when only 25% sensors were selected. The presented technique yields higher responsivity and lower power consumption while maintaining detection accuracy.