Hardware code generation from dataflow programs, in Design and Architectures for Signal and Image Processing (DASIP) 2010. The ORCC compiler is used for code generation. It has an earlier publication, titled “OpenDF: a dataflow toolset for reconfigurable hardware and multicore systems“, in sigarch news 2008. There is a website, http://www.opendf.org/, for the Open Dataflow community. The website has a download page, which links to multiple open source projects. Jorn Janneck has some related publications.

Altera is planning optical interfaces on its FPGAs.

Microwatt Embedded Processor Platform for Medical System-on-Chip Applications, from TI, in JSSC April 2011. Its subthreshold 6T SRAM is more area efficient than the previous work, and achieves three orders of magnitude reduction on leakage.

Some old papers on foreground / background subtraction:

• Adaptive background mixture models for real-time tracking, in CVPR 1999.
• Urban surveillance systems: from the laboratory to the commercial world, in Proceeding of IEEE 2001.

EUV Litho is promoting EUV Lithography via Consulting, Workshops and Education. The tech reports and the annual EUVL workshop are of high quality.

Papers in the “Motion and Tracking” and “Stereo and Structure from Motion” tracks of CVPR 2010 are all with high quality. There is hardly any mediocre paper in these tracks.

Some random links to recent works on visual SLAM (simultaneous localization and mapping):

• Fusing Monocular Information in Multicamera SLAM, in TRO 2008. It has some interesting discussions on the differences between structure from motion (SfM) and monocular SLAM, and the differences between visual odometry (VO) and stereo SLAM.
• Parallel, real-time visual SLAM, in IROS 2010. GPU is used to accelerate parts of the application, e.g. SIFT.
• RSLAM: A System for Large-Scale Mapping in Constant-Time Using Stereo, from the Relative SLAM project in Oxford.
• GFT: GPU Fast Triangulation of 3D Points , in ICCVG 2010.
• Fusion of IMU and Vision for Absolute Scale Estimation in Monocular SLAM , from the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH Zurich, in Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems 2011. It embeds an EKF into the PTAM with an inertial sensor.
• Real-time hierarchical stereo Visual SLAM in large-scale environments, from University of Alcala, in Robotics and Autonomous Systems 2010.
• Scalable active matching, from the Robot Vision Group of Imperial College, in CVPR 2010.
• Registration Based on Scene Recognition and Natural Features Tracking Techniques for Wide-Area Augmented Reality Systems, in Transactions on Multimedia 2009. GPU is used to accelerate SIFT.
• Combining monoSLAM with object recognition for scene augmentation using a wearable camera, from the Simultaneous Recognition and Localization for Scene Augmentation project in Oxford, in j.imavis 2010.
• Pushing the envelope of modern methods for bundle adjustment, in CVPR 2010. The BLAS3 is used in the bundle adjustment (BA), which is an essential part of structure from motion (SfM), in CVPR 2010.
• A relative frame representation for fixed-time bundle adjustment in SFM, from the Active Vision group of Oxford, in ICRA 2009.
• Real-Time Detection and Tracking for Augmented Reality on Mobile Phones, from TU Graz, in TCVG 2010. It proposes PhonySIFT and PhoneFerns, which achieve real time performance on mobile platforms.
• Vision-Based SLAM: Stereo and Monocular Approaches, in Int. J. of Computer Vision 2007. It has a nice overview on related works.

Maurice Schneiders has some interesting publications on high precision mechatronic systems.

The Optical Mouse, and an Architectural Methodology for Smart Digital Sensors, by Richard F. Lyon, in 1981. It was published as a techreport of Xerox PARC lab.

Avago is offering some optical sensor sample kits, which come with sensors, lenses, lightings, etc. The price of the low end kits, e.g. ADNK-2080, ADNK-2700, ADNK-3000, are about 50 Euro. These sensors can achieve more than 1000 fps at a resolution of about 15×15 pixels.

Some random links on image sensors:

• Topics on CMOS Image Sensors, by Leif Lindgren, in 2005.
• Noise analysis in CMOS image sensors, PhD thesis of Hui Tian, in 2000.
• Smart image sensing in CMOS technology, in 2005.
• A multiresolution 100-GOPS 4-Gpixels/s programmable smart vision sensor for multisense imaging, by Leif Lindgren, in JSSCC 2005.

Architecture-Aware Technique for Mapping Area-Time Efficient Custom Instructions onto FPGAs, in TC May 2011.

The First Plastic Computer Processor, from IMEC, TNO, and Polymer Vision.

openMCAPI, an open source implementation of Multicore Communication API (MCAPI).

Proceeding of IEEE April 2011 is a Special Issue on 3-D Media and Displays.

High-Level Synthesis for FPGAs: From Prototyping to Deployment, from AutoESL, in TCAD April 2011.

Design methodology for the IBM POWER7 microprocessor, in IBM Journal of Research and Development May-June 2011.

The effect of increasing the sampling rate on the effectiveness of the matched filter, in Instrumentation and Measurement Technology Conference (IMTC) 2009.

A few interesting papers in the TPAMI May 2011:

• SIFT Flow: Dense Correspondence across Scenes and Its Applications
• Space-Time Super-Resolution Using Graph-Cut Optimization

Some interesting papers in TVLSI April 2011:

• A Dual-Shader 3-D Graphics Processor With Fast 4-D Vector Inner Product Units and Power-Aware Texture Cache, from KAIST.
• A Multi-Granularity Power Modeling Methodology for Embedded Processors

Some papers on control protocol:

• Fieldbus Technology in Industrial Automation, in Proceeding of IEEE 2005.
• Ethernet-Based Real-Time and Industrial Communications, in Proceeding of IEEE 2005.
• The Emergence of Industrial Control Networks for Manufacturing Control, Diagnostics, and Safety Data, in Proceeding of IEEE 2007. The uncertainty is analysed thoroughly.
• Limits of increasing the performance of Industrial Ethernet protocols, in Emerging Technologies and Factory Automation (ETFA) 2007. It has detailed breakdown of the EtherCAT delay, but does not analyse the uncertainty.

Introduction to Embedded Systems – A Cyber-Physical Systems Approach, a new book by Edward A. Lee and Sanjit A. Seshia. The digital version is available for free.

CPS Week 2011, five conferences on Cyber-physical Systems (CPS). Thanks for the pointer of Yang Yang.

Cyber-Physical Systems – Are Computing Foundations Adequate? , by Edward Lee, position paper of the CPS workshop in 2006.

Some interesting papers in TIP April 2011:

• Variational Bayesian Super Resolution
• 1-D Transforms for the Motion Compensation Residual

Magnetically Levitated Slice Motors—An Overview, in Transactions on Industrial Applications March-April 2011. It uses simple DIP control, which is well motivated.

Data-Parallel Octrees for Surface Reconstruction, in TVCG May 2011. Theoretically, this algorithm can be used for surface reconstruction based on feature points. The workload would be different though.