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Point clouds are a general format for representing realistic 3D objects in diverse 3D applications. Since point clouds have large data sizes, developing efficient point cloud compression methods is crucial. However, excessive compression leads to various distortions, which deteriorates the point cloud quality perceived by end users. Thus, establishing reliable point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) methods is essential as a benchmark to develop efficient compression methods. This paper presents an accurate full-reference point cloud quality assessment (FR-PCQA) method called full-reference quality assessment using support vector regression (FRSVR) for various types of degradations such as compression distortion, Gaussian noise, and down-sampling. The proposed method demonstrates accurate PCQA by integrating five FR-based metrics covering various types of errors (e.g., considering geometric distortion, color distortion, and point count) using support vector regression (SVR). Moreover, the proposed method achieves a superior trade-off between accuracy and calculation speed because it includes only the calculation of these five simple metrics and SVR, which can perform fast prediction. Experimental results with three types of open datasets show that the proposed method is more accurate than conventional FR-PCQA methods. In addition, the proposed method is faster than state-of-the-art methods that utilize complicated features such as curvature and multi-scale features. Thus, the proposed method provides excellent performance in terms of the accuracy of PCQA and processing speed. Our method is available from https://github.com/STAC-USC/FRSVR-PCQA., Comment: Source code: https://github.com/STAC-USC/FRSVR-PCQA

Point clouds in 3D applications frequently experience quality degradation during processing, e.g., scanning and compression. Reliable point cloud quality assessment (PCQA) is important for developing compression algorithms with good bitrate-quality trade-offs and techniques for quality improvement (e.g., denoising). This paper introduces a full-reference (FR) PCQA method utilizing spectral graph wavelets (SGWs). First, we propose novel SGW-based PCQA metrics that compare SGW coefficients of coordinate and color signals between reference and distorted point clouds. Second, we achieve accurate PCQA by integrating several conventional FR metrics and our SGW-based metrics using support vector regression. To our knowledge, this is the first study to introduce SGWs for PCQA. Experimental results demonstrate the proposed PCQA metric is more accurately correlated with subjective quality scores compared to conventional PCQA metrics.

Point clouds are utilized in various 3D applications such as cross-reality (XR) and realistic 3D displays. In some applications, e.g., for live streaming using a 3D point cloud, real-time point cloud denoising methods are required to enhance the visual quality. However, conventional high-precision denoising methods cannot be executed in real time for large-scale point clouds owing to the complexity of graph constructions with K nearest neighbors and noise level estimation. This paper proposes a fast graph-based denoising (FGBD) for a large-scale point cloud. First, high-speed graph construction is achieved by scanning a point cloud in various directions and searching adjacent neighborhoods on the scanning lines. Second, we propose a fast noise level estimation method using eigenvalues of the covariance matrix on a graph. Finally, we also propose a new low-cost filter selection method to enhance denoising accuracy to compensate for the degradation caused by the acceleration algorithms. In our experiments, we succeeded in reducing the processing time dramatically while maintaining accuracy relative to conventional denoising methods. Denoising was performed at 30fps, with frames containing approximately 1 million points., Comment: Published in the proceeding of 2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP 2024)

In the quiet regions on the solar surface, turbulent convective motions of granulation play an important role in creating small-scale magnetic structures, as well as in energy injection into the upper atmosphere. The turbulent nature of granulation can be studied using spectral line profiles, especially line broadening, which contains information on the flow field smaller than the spatial resolution of an instrument. Moreover, the Doppler velocity gradient along a line-of-sight (LOS) causes line broadening as well. However, the quantitative relationship between velocity gradient and line broadening has not been understood well. In this study, we perform bisector analyses using the spectral profiles obtained using the Spectro-Polarimeter of the Hinode/Solar Optical Telescope to investigate the relationship of line broadening and bisector velocities with the granulation flows. The results indicate that line broadening has a positive correlation with the Doppler velocity gradients along the LOS. We found excessive line broadening in fading granules, that cannot be explained only by the LOS velocity gradient, although the velocity gradient is enhanced in the process of fading. If this excessive line broadening is attributed to small-scale turbulent motions, the averaged turbulent velocity is obtained as 0.9 km/s., Comment: Accepted for publication in ApJ

We investigated the effects of $c/a$ anisotropy and local crystal structure on superconductivity (SC) in As/P solid solution systems, $A\mathrm{Fe_{2}}(\mathrm{As}_{1-x}\mathrm{P}_{x}\mathrm{)_{2}}$ ($A$122P) with various $A$ ions. With decreasing $A$ site atomic size from $A$=Ba to Eu, the structural anisotropy decreases, and the rate of decreasing with $x$ also increases. The rapid narrowing of the region of antiferromagnetic composition ($x$) can be considered to be a result of this anisotropy change due mainly to the change in the Fermi surface (FS) nesting condition. By contrast, although the structural anisotropy systematically changes, the maximum $T_{\mathrm{c}}$ values are almost the same in all $A$122P systems except for Eu122P. These results indicate that the modification of the FS topology via the structural anisotropy does not affect SC. However local structural parameters, such as pnictogen height, are crucial for $T_{\mathrm{c}}$., Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, 1 table

We investigated SrFe$\mathrm{_2}$(As$\mathrm{_{1-x}}$P$\mathrm{_x}$)$\mathrm{_2}$ single crystals with four different phosphorus concentrations x in the superconducting phase (x = 0.35, 0.46) and in the magnetic phase (x = 0, 0.2). The superconducting samples display a V-shaped superconducting gap, which suggests nodal superconductivity. Furthermore we determined the superconducting coherence length by measuring the spatially resolved superconducting density of states (DOS). Using inelastic tunneling spectroscopy we investigated excitations in the samples with four different phosphorus concentrations. Inelastic peaks are related to bosonic modes. Phonon and non-phonon mechanism for the origin of these peaks are discussed., Comment: 7 pages, 6 figures

The in-plane anisotropy of resistivity has been investigated for Ba(Fe$_{1-x}$TM$_{x}$)$_2$As$_2$ (TM-Ba122, TM$=$Cr, Mn, and Co) where the substitution sites are the same but the doped carriers are different for different TM elements. The Hall coefficient measurements indicated that hole carriers are effectively doped by Cr substitution but not by Mn substitution. It has been found that the resistivity difference $\Delta\rho=\rho_{\rm b}-\rho_{\rm a}$ in the antiferromagnetic-orthorhombic (AFO) phase of Cr-Ba122 is initially positive but it turns to negative with increasing Cr content, whereas the positive $\Delta\rho$ monotonically increases with Mn substitution in Mn-Ba122. In the paramagnetic-tetragonal phase, $\Delta\rho$ is always positive, but it decreases with substitution in Cr-Ba122, in contrast to the electron-doped case. These results demonstrate that the resistivity anisotropy exhibits electron-hole asymmetry in both AFO and nematic phases and that it depends on the Fermi surface topology whether the carrier scattering results in a positive or negative $\Delta\rho$., Comment: 13 pages, 5 figures

We have investigated the electronic properties of SrFe$_2$(As$_{1-x}$P$_x$)$_2$ ($0\leqq x\leqq1$) single crystals with postannealing treatment and established a phase diagram of this system. The postannealing treatment reduced the residual resistivity in an antiferromagnetic-orthorhombic phase and enhanced the superconducting transition temperature to $T_{c, optimal}$=33\,K in the superconducting phase. The obtained phase diagram and electronic properties are similar to those of BaFe$_2$(As$_{1-x}$P$_x$)$_2$ despite the large difference in lattice constants. This indicates that, for superconductivity, the dimensionality of the Fermi surface determined by the crystal structural anisotropy is less important than the pnictogen height from the Fe plane., Comment: 14 pages, 7 figures, Accepted for publication in J. Phys. Soc. Jpn