Search

This paper proposes a novel technique for fabricating microchannels in SU-8 by inserting optical-fibers as sacrificial moulds. The embedded circular microchannels, with inner diameters of 36, 80, and 125 μm (i.e., the diameters of optical-fibers), have been made successfully using a low-temperature fabrication process; where the SU-8 transparent negative-bone photo-resist is selected as the structure layer built in multilayers. Additionally, low-cost ultraviolet is applied as the exposure source to pattern the thin film photo-resist. Preliminary results show that the microchannels fabricated with the proposed technique have an average surface roughness (Ra) of the inner wall less than 10 nm and roundness deviation less than 7%. This paper also discusses the wetting behavior of the SU-8 surfaces before and after dipping in the hydrofluoric acid, and summarizes the relationship between the etching rate of sacrificial optical-fibers, etching temperature, concentration, and channel size. Finally, the etching rate of sacrificial optical-fibers vs. etching temperature subject to different concentrations and channel sizes is summarized and explained. This new fabrication technique of microchannel manufacture provides a new approach in selecting SU-8 for the structure material containing microchannels. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Content-based music retrieval has been studied for many years. However, it is not easy to achieve effective and efficient retrieval because two issues such as search strategy and music feature are not considered simultaneously. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an innovative music search method using automated navigations and semantic features to cope with these issues. For automated navigations, it is a novel autonomous-feedback technique that moves the search towards the user interest space effectively and efficiently. For semantic features, the low-level audio features are transformed into high-level semantic features to effectively associate with user concepts. To reveal the performance of the proposed method, we conducted a set of comprehensive evaluations on two real music datasets. In the comparative experiments, semantic features are shown to be more effective than audio features. Additionally, the proposed method is superior to state-of-the-art methods in terms of precision, which indicates the average improvements of 151.67% and 148.02% on two datasets, respectively. Moreover, the subjective evaluation shows that the proposed method can earn the users' satisfactions in the materialized system. In summary, the proposed automated navigations and semantic features are useful for dealing with issues of search strategy and music feature in content-based music retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]