Visual Regression is a general task in the area of computer vision, with input visual data space and continuous output space. Most learning-based visual estimation tasks, where the output variables take values in continuous space, are related to visual regression. Examples of visual regression include many emerging but very difficult...
In the last decade, global mobile data traffic increased by more than a hundred fold times while maintaining essentially the same monthly charge to the average mobile user. Cisco predicts that overall mobile data traffic will continue to grow rapidly at a compound annual growth rate of 60 percent between...
2018-1The human visual system has a remarkable ability for understanding material properties on the basis of texture appearance, such as', 'telling whether the food is fresh, the fabric is soft, the soil is wet, or the skin is dry. Such visual judgments of material properties mostly rely on the perception...
Ultrathin optical platform including two-dimensional materials and metasurfaces have emerged as potential candidates for novel nanophotonic applications. In this dissertation, I will present the possibility to achieve full active control of the electromagnetic waves with the platform in the flatland. We could achieve the amplitude control, which will be useful...
Maxwell equations are behind an incredible number of physical phenomena, explaining the behavior of light, electricity and magnetism, from Gamma rays to ultra-low frequency radio-waves. Since their inception in 1861, many approximations have been derived, many devices have been modelled and fabricated to manipulate the electromagnetic fields, and more recently...
In this dissertation thesis, I introduce three-dimensional (3D) image reconstruction algorithms for multi-focus microscopy (MFM). MFM provides a fast way to obtain 3D information of the sample by simultaneously capturing multiple focal planes on a single camera shot. However, stacking the sub-images from different focal planes does not provide a...
Neural networks have revolutionized the field of computer vision since they provide solutions to a number of previously unsolved problems and achieve promising performance both in terms of accuracy and computational efficiency. It has increasingly become recognized as providing high performance for applications as diverse as image classification, object detection,...
Free space optical communication (FSO) offers a promising solution to the “last mile” bottleneck of high-speed telecommunications. Data is encoded using a modulated laser and optically sent through the air to a receiving photodetector. Although this requires FSO systems to have direct line-of-sight between the emitter and receiver, this is...
This project is comprised of primary source research on the field of semiconductor microscopy. We were interested in determining a more interdisciplinary application of this technology, as the most frequently cited applications are for defense purposes such as drug screening or infrared imaging. When we researched, we found that these...
Agents of online platforms often have to make purchase decisions in the face the uncertainty of the true value of an item. Observing the other agents’ actions and/or reviews is one common method to learn about an item. However such observational learning can lead to an information cascade, in which...
Optical interferometry is a powerful technique which has been widely utilized for well over a century in making the world’s most precise measurements. By measuring how the interference between two waves is affected by a physical process, one can deduce the magnitude of this process. Because the wavelength of a...
In this dissertation, we start with the dictionary learning (DL) based single-frame super-resolution (SR) problem, where low resolution (LR) input frames are super-resolved to high resolution (HR) output frames. We propose to extend the previous single-frame SR methods to multiple-frames, i.e., estimating single HR output frame by multiple LR input...
This dissertation focuses on exploring novel light steering and spectral engineering functionalities by flat optics, which includes photonic architectures of flat plasmonic metasurfaces, nanoparticle arrays, and thin film coatings. We have designed, fabricated and characterized different plasmonic metasurfaces (trapezoid-shaped antennas, nanorings/nanowires, etc.), nanoparticle arrays (single-layered or multilayered nanocubes and nanodisks),...
Recent advances in optical switching have yielded an all-fiber, all-optical, device capable of routing single-photon quantum signals at high rates (≈25 GHz), with almost immeasurably small degradation of the quantum state[1, 2, 3]. These switches can facilitate complex quantum networking and quantum information processing schemes. However, the complexity of these...
Short-wave infrared (SWIR) photon detection has become an essential technology in the modern world. Sensitive SWIR detectors with low noise levels, and high signal-to-noise-ratios are highly desirable for a variety of applications including light detection and ranging, optical tomography, and astronomical imaging. As such many efforts in infrared detector research...
By 2020, there will be more than 200 billion sensor enabled objects world-wide in the Internet of Things (IoT). The biggest challenge of future IoT is to provide ultra scalable wireless access for a massive number of devices. The goal of this thesis is to build up a model for...
Amorphous In-Ga-Zn-O (a-IGZO) and other amorphous oxide semiconductors are attracting increasing attention from the display industry for their high electron mobility, ease of large-area manufacture, and potential for future flexible electronics. However, such amorphous materials often show instability under gate voltage bias, temperature, and illumination stress, with extremely slow relaxation...
Meeting the exploding demand for wireless data services will require access to new wireless spectrum. However, the traditional approach of clearing spectrum and reallocating is becoming increasingly difficult. This in turn has led to much interest in new approaches for sharing spectrum among different users, such as the those being...
Anisotropic semiconducting thin films have attracted attention in recent years for important applications such as electrical interconnects, electronic sensors, field-emission devices and thermoelectric devices. However, the characterization of the full conductivity tensor, especially the cross-plane conductivity, remains a great challenge for anisotropic thin films. In addition, the synthesis of large-area...