This paper presents an automatic method for producing stipple renderings from photographs, following the style of professional hedcut illustrations. For effective depiction of image features, we introduce a novel dot placement algorithm which adapts stipple dots to the local shapes. The core idea is to guide the dot placement along 'feature flow' extracted from the feature lines, resulting in a dot distribution that conforms to feature shapes. The sizes of dots are adaptively determined from the input image for proper tone representation. Experimental results show that such feature-guided stippling leads to the production of stylistic and feature-emphasizing dot illustrations.

No abstract

No abstract

We present a novel method for enhancing details in a digital photograph, inspired by the principle of art photography. In contrast to the previous methods that primarily rely on tone scaling, our technique provides a flexible tone transform model that consists of two operators: shifting and scaling. This model permits shifting of the tonal range in each image region to enable significant detail boosting regardless of the original tone. We optimize these shift and scale factors in our constrained optimization framework to achieve extreme detail enhancement across the image in a piecewise smooth fashion, as in art photography. The experimental results show that the proposed method brings out a significantly large amount of details even from an ordinary low-dynamic range image.

Bone marrow stem cells (BMSCs) can be obtained from the vertebral body (VB) and iliac crest (IC) for augmenting spinal arthrodesis. However, it is still not evaluated, which of the two sites would have a better BMSCs potential on Proliferation and osteoblastic differentiation is still not evaluated. Fourteen patients (10 men and 4 women) undergoing posterolateral lumbar arthrodesis and pedicle screw instrumentation were involved. The mean age was 54.7 years (range 31-75 years). Bone marrow aspirates were obtained from the vertebral body through the bilateral pedicle and were quantified relative to matched, bilateral aspirates from the iliac crest that were obtained from the same patient and at the same time. The mononuclear cell count and concentration of BMSCs were calculated and compared. Proliferation and osteoblastic differentiation of each of the BMSCs were characterized using biochemical and molecular biology techniques. Concentration (cells/mL) of BMSCs from VB and IC were 3.73 × 10(3) and 3.19 × 10(3), respectively (P > 0.05). VB and IC exhibited similar proliferation pattern at 3, 5 and 7 days, but BMSCs from the VB exhibited an increased mineralization staining with Alizarin Red S at 14 days. BMSCs from both anatomic sites expressed comparable levels of CD29, CD34, CD44, CD90 and CD105. VB and IC displayed similar levels of expression of ALP, type I collagen and osterix, but VB expressed higher level of osteocalcin and Runx-2, especially at 14 and 21 days. Our studies show that BMSCs from VB have osteogenic differentiation potential similar to IC. Based on these findings, we suggest that BMSCs from VB would be comparable candidates for osseous graft supplementation especially in spinal fusion procedures.

No abstract

This study examines articulatory characteristics of the three-way contrast in labial stops /p php*/ (lenis, aspirated, fortis, respectively) in Korean in phrase-initial and phrase-medial prosodic positions with a two-fold goal. First, it investigates supralaryngeal articulatory reflexes of the stops and explores articulatory invariance of these stops across prosodic positions. Second, it investigates Korean stops in kinematic terms from the perspective of domain-initial strengthening, and explores the nature of prosodically-conditioned speech production from a dynamical perspective. Results showed that the articulatory reflex of the three-way contrast was invariantly observed across prosodic positions with lip constriction degree (/p/</ph/</p*/), while lip constriction duration showed a binary distinction (/p/</php*/). Kinematically, there was only very weak articulatory evidence for the contrast across prosodic positions: The V-to-C lip closing movement tended to be faster for /ph/ than for /p/, and the C-to-V lip opening movement tended to be larger for /php*/ than for /p/. As for domain-initial strengthening, the consonantal lip closing gesture was characterized by a larger, longer and slower articulation, whereas the vocalic lip opening gesture (after the release) was larger and faster, but not longer. Kinematic relations indicated that the lip closing movement is most likely controlled by a rate of the clock (possibly modulated by a temporal modulation gesture, or π-gesture) comparable to boundary effects in English, but the boundary-induced lip opening movement was better accounted for by a change in target (possibly modulated by a spatial modulation gesture, or μ-gesture) which was comparable to prominence rather than boundary effects in English. The cross-linguistic difference was interpreted as coming from different prosodic systems between Korean and English, presumably instantiated in dynamical terms of how the temporal and the spatial modulation gestures are phased with constriction gestures in relation to boundary marking versus prominence marking.

No abstract