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Xin Tong

Publications and source records attributed to Xin Tong.

At least 145 records · Page 8Linked to original sources
arXiv2023

Single-shot 3D photoacoustic computed tomography with a densely packed array for transcranial functional imaging

Photoacoustic computed tomography (PACT) is emerging as a new technique for functional brain imaging, primarily due to its capabilities in label-free hemodynamic imaging. Despite its potential, the transcranial application of PACT has encountered hurdles, such as acoustic attenuations and distortions by the skull and limited light penetration through the skull. To overcome these challenges, we have engineered a PACT system that features a densely packed hemispherical ultrasonic transducer array with 3072 channels, operating at a central frequency of 1 MHz. This system allows for single-shot 3D imaging at a rate equal to the laser repetition rate, such as 20 Hz. We have achieved a single-shot light penetration depth of approximately 9 cm in chicken breast tissue utilizing a 750 nm laser (withstanding 3295-fold light attenuation and still retaining an SNR of 74) and successfully performed transcranial imaging through an ex vivo human skull using a 1064 nm laser. Moreover, we have proven the capacity of our system to perform single-shot 3D PACT imaging in both tissue phantoms and human subjects. These results suggest that our PACT system is poised to unlock potential for real-time, in vivo transcranial functional imaging in humans.

physics.med-ph↗
arXiv2023

Global Stabilization of Antipodal Points on n-Sphere with Application to Attitude Tracking

Existing approaches to robust global asymptotic stabilization of a pair of antipodal points on unit $n$-sphere $\mathbb{S}^n$ typically involve the non-centrally synergistic hybrid controllers for attitude tracking on unit quaternion space. However, when switching faults occur due to parameter errors, the non-centrally synergistic property can lead to the unwinding problem or in some cases, destabilize the desired set. In this work, a hybrid controller is first proposed based on a novel centrally synergistic family of potential functions on $\mathbb{S}^n$, which is generated from a basic potential function through angular warping. The synergistic parameter can be explicitly expressed if the warping angle has a positive lower bound at the undesired critical points of the family. Next, the proposed approach induces a new quaternion-based controller for global attitude tracking. It has three advantageous features over existing synergistic designs: 1) it is consistent, i.e., free from the ambiguity of unit quaternion representation; 2) it is switching-fault-tolerant, i.e., the desired closed-loop equilibria remain asymptotically stable even when the switching mechanism does not work; 3) it relaxes the assumption on the parameter of the basic potential function in literature. Comprehensive simulation confirms the high robustness of the proposed centrally synergistic approach compared with existing non-centrally synergistic approaches.

eess.SY↗
arXiv2023

Locally Attentional SDF Diffusion for Controllable 3D Shape Generation

Although the recent rapid evolution of 3D generative neural networks greatly improves 3D shape generation, it is still not convenient for ordinary users to create 3D shapes and control the local geometry of generated shapes. To address these challenges, we propose a diffusion-based 3D generation framework -- locally attentional SDF diffusion, to model plausible 3D shapes, via 2D sketch image input. Our method is built on a two-stage diffusion model. The first stage, named occupancy-diffusion, aims to generate a low-resolution occupancy field to approximate the shape shell. The second stage, named SDF-diffusion, synthesizes a high-resolution signed distance field within the occupied voxels determined by the first stage to extract fine geometry. Our model is empowered by a novel view-aware local attention mechanism for image-conditioned shape generation, which takes advantage of 2D image patch features to guide 3D voxel feature learning, greatly improving local controllability and model generalizability. Through extensive experiments in sketch-conditioned and category-conditioned 3D shape generation tasks, we validate and demonstrate the ability of our method to provide plausible and diverse 3D shapes, as well as its superior controllability and generalizability over existing work. Our code and trained models are available at https://zhengxinyang.github.io/projects/LAS-Diffusion.html

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Pilgrimage to Pureland: Art, Perception and the Wutai Mural VR Reconstruction

Virtual reality (VR) supports audiences to engage with cultural heritage proactively. We designed an easy-to-access and guided Pilgrimage To Pureland VR reconstruction of Dunhuang Mogao Grottoes to offer the general public an accessible and engaging way to explore the Dunhuang murals. We put forward an immersive VR reconstruction paradigm that can efficiently convert complex 2D artwork into a VR environment. We reconstructed the Mt. Wutai pilgrimage mural in Cave 61, Mogao Grottoes, Dunhuang, into an immersive VR environment and created a plot-based and interactive experience that offers users a more accessible solution to visit, understand and appreciate the complex religious, historical, and artistic value of Dunhuang murals. \textcolor{black}{Our system remarkably smoothed users' approaches to those elusive cultural heritages. Appropriate adaptation of plots and 3D VR transfer consistent with the original art style could enhance the accessibility of cultural heritages.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Generation of rotational ground state HD$^+$ ions in an ion trap using a resonance-enhanced threshold photoionization process

We report a method for producing ultracold HD+ molecular ions populated in a rotational ground state in an ion trap based on [2+1'] resonance-enhanced threshold photoionization (RETPI) and sympathetic cooling with the laser-cooled Be$^+$ ions. The effect of electric field of the ion trap on the RETPI process of neutral HD molecules and the blackbody radiation (BBR) on the population evolution of rotational states of the generated polar HD+ ions have been studied. The initial rotational ground state population of HD$^+$ ions is 0.93(12). After the cumulation time of 5 s, the rotational ground state population is reduced to 0.77(8) due to the BBR coupling. This method of generating ultracold state-selected HD$^+$ ions is beneficial for the studies in precision rovibrational spectroscopy, state-controlled cold chemical reaction, and quantum logic spectroscopy.

physics.atom-ph↗
arXiv2023

3D-aware Image Generation using 2D Diffusion Models

In this paper, we introduce a novel 3D-aware image generation method that leverages 2D diffusion models. We formulate the 3D-aware image generation task as multiview 2D image set generation, and further to a sequential unconditional-conditional multiview image generation process. This allows us to utilize 2D diffusion models to boost the generative modeling power of the method. Additionally, we incorporate depth information from monocular depth estimators to construct the training data for the conditional diffusion model using only still images. We train our method on a large-scale dataset, i.e., ImageNet, which is not addressed by previous methods. It produces high-quality images that significantly outperform prior methods. Furthermore, our approach showcases its capability to generate instances with large view angles, even though the training images are diverse and unaligned, gathered from "in-the-wild" real-world environments.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Synergistic Potential Functions from Single Modified Trace Function on SO(3)

This paper is about the construction of a family of centrally synergistic potential functions from a single modified trace function on SO(3). First, we demonstrate that it is possible to complete the construction through angular warping with multiple directions, particularly effective in the unresolved cases in the literature. Second, it can be shown that for each potential function in the family, there exists a subset of the family such that the synergistic gap is positive at the unwanted critical points. This allows the switching condition to be checked within the selected subsets while implementing synergistic hybrid control. Furthermore, the positive lower bound of synergistic gap is explicitly expressed by selecting a traditional warping angle function. Finally, we apply the proposed synergistic potential functions to obtain robust global attitude tracking.

eess.SY↗
arXiv2023

ReBotNet: Fast Real-time Video Enhancement

Most video restoration networks are slow, have high computational load, and can't be used for real-time video enhancement. In this work, we design an efficient and fast framework to perform real-time video enhancement for practical use-cases like live video calls and video streams. Our proposed method, called Recurrent Bottleneck Mixer Network (ReBotNet), employs a dual-branch framework. The first branch learns spatio-temporal features by tokenizing the input frames along the spatial and temporal dimensions using a ConvNext-based encoder and processing these abstract tokens using a bottleneck mixer. To further improve temporal consistency, the second branch employs a mixer directly on tokens extracted from individual frames. A common decoder then merges the features form the two branches to predict the enhanced frame. In addition, we propose a recurrent training approach where the last frame's prediction is leveraged to efficiently enhance the current frame while improving temporal consistency. To evaluate our method, we curate two new datasets that emulate real-world video call and streaming scenarios, and show extensive results on multiple datasets where ReBotNet outperforms existing approaches with lower computations, reduced memory requirements, and faster inference time.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Quasi One-Dimensional Ising-like Antiferromagnetism in the Rare-earth Perovskite Oxide TbScO$_3$

The rare-earth perovskite TbScO$_3$ has been widely used as a substrate for the growth of epitaxial ferroelectric and multiferroic thin films, while its detailed low-temperature magnetic properties were rarely reported. In this paper, we performed detailed magnetization, specific heat and single crystal neutron scattering measurements, along with the crystalline electric field calculations to study the low-temperature magnetic properties of TbScO$_3$. All our results suggest the magnetic Tb$^{3+}$ has an Ising-like pseudo-doublet ground state at low temperatures. Due to the constrain of local point symmetry, these Tb$^{3+}$ Ising moments are confined in the $ab$ plane with a tilt angle of $φ= \pm48^{\mathrm{o}}$ to the $a$ axis. In zero field, the system undergoes an antiferromagnetic phase transition at $T_{\mathrm{N}}=2.53$ K, and forms a $G_xA_y$ noncollinear magnetic structure below $T_{\mathrm{N}}$. We find the dipole-dipole interactions play an important role to determine the magnetic ground state, which are also responsible for the quasi-one-dimensional magnetism in TbScO$_3$. The significant anisotropic diffuse scatterings further confirm the quasi-one-dimensional magnetism along the $c$ axis. The magnetic phase diagram with the field along the easy $b$ axis is well established. In addition to the $G_xA_y$ antiferromagnetic state, there is an exotic field-induced phase emerged near the critical field $B_{\mathrm{c}}\simeq0.7$ T, where three-dimensional magnetic order is suppressed but strong one-dimensional correlations may still exist.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2023

Quantum imaging of biological organisms through spatial and polarization entanglement

Quantum imaging can potentially provide certain advantages over classical imaging. Thus far, however, the signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) are poor; the resolvable pixel counts are low; biological organisms have not been imaged; birefringence has not been quantified. Here, we introduce quantum imaging by coincidence from entanglement (ICE). Utilizing spatially and polarization entangled photon pairs, ICE exhibits higher SNRs, greater resolvable pixel counts, imaging of biological organisms, and ghost birefringence quantification; it also enables 25 times greater suppression of stray light than classical imaging. ICE can potentially empower quantum imaging towards new applications in life sciences and remote sensing.

quant-ph↗
arXiv2023

Prior normalization for certified likelihood-informed subspace detection of Bayesian inverse problems

Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods form one of the algorithmic foundations of Bayesian inverse problems. The recent development of likelihood-informed subspace (LIS) methods offers a viable route to designing efficient MCMC methods for exploring high-dimensional posterior distributions via exploiting the intrinsic low-dimensional structure of the underlying inverse problem. However, existing LIS methods and the associated performance analysis often assume that the prior distribution is Gaussian. This assumption is limited for inverse problems aiming to promote sparsity in the parameter estimation, as heavy-tailed priors, e.g., Laplace distribution or the elastic net commonly used in Bayesian LASSO, are often needed in this case. To overcome this limitation, we consider a prior normalization technique that transforms any non-Gaussian (e.g. heavy-tailed) priors into standard Gaussian distributions, which makes it possible to implement LIS methods to accelerate MCMC sampling via such transformations. We also rigorously investigate the integration of such transformations with several MCMC methods for high-dimensional problems. Finally, we demonstrate various aspects of our theoretical claims on two nonlinear inverse problems.

math.NA↗
arXiv2023

RemoteTouch: Enhancing Immersive 3D Video Communication with Hand Touch

Recent research advance has significantly improved the visual realism of immersive 3D video communication. In this work we present a method to further enhance this immersive experience by adding the hand touch capability ("remote hand clapping"). In our system, each meeting participant sits in front of a large screen with haptic feedback. The local participant can reach his hand out to the screen and perform hand clapping with the remote participant as if the two participants were only separated by a virtual glass. A key challenge in emulating the remote hand touch is the realistic rendering of the participant's hand and arm as the hand touches the screen. When the hand is very close to the screen, the RGBD data required for realistic rendering is no longer available. To tackle this challenge, we present a dual representation of the user's hand. Our dual representation not only preserves the high-quality rendering usually found in recent image-based rendering systems but also allows the hand to reach the screen. This is possible because the dual representation includes both an image-based model and a 3D geometry-based model, with the latter driven by a hand skeleton tracked by a side view camera. In addition, the dual representation provides a distance-based fusion of the image-based and 3D geometry-based models as the hand moves closer to the screen. The result is that the image-based and 3D geometry-based models mutually enhance each other, leading to realistic and seamless rendering. Our experiments demonstrate that our method provides consistent hand contact experience between remote users and improves the immersive experience of 3D video communication.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2023

Anomalous Nernst effect in a ferrimagnetic nodal-line semiconductor Mn$_3$Si$_2$Te$_6$

In the ferrimagnetic nodal-line semiconductor Mn$_3$Si$_2$Te$_6$, colossal magnetoresistance (CMR) arises below $T_\mathrm{c}=78$ K due to the interplay of magnetism and topological nodal-line fermiology. The Berry curvature associated with the topological nodal-line is expected to produce an anomalous Nernst effect. Here, we present sizable anomalous Nernst signal in Mn$_3$Si$_2$Te$_6$ below $T_\mathrm{c}$. In the low-magnetic-field region where CMR is most apparent, the scaling ratio between the Nernst signal and magnetization is significantly enhanced compared to that in conventional magnetic materials. The enhanced Nernst effect and CMR likely share the same mechanisms, which are closely linked to the nodal-line topology.

cond-mat.str-el↗
arXiv2023

The Exploration and Evaluation of Generating Affective 360$^\circ$ Panoramic VR Environments Through Neural Style Transfer

Affective virtual reality (VR) environments with varying visual style can impact users' valence and arousal responses. We applied Neural Style Transfer (NST) to generate 360$^\circ$ VR environments that elicited users' varied valence and arousal responses. From a user study with 30 participants, findings suggested that generative VR environments changed participants' arousal responses but not their valence levels. The generated visual features, e.g., textures and colors, also altered participants' affective perceptions. Our work contributes novel insights about how users respond to generative VR environments and provided a strategy for creating affective VR environments without altering content.

cs.HC↗
arXiv2023

Sparse Ellipsometry: Portable Acquisition of Polarimetric SVBRDF and Shape with Unstructured Flash Photography

Ellipsometry techniques allow to measure polarization information of materials, requiring precise rotations of optical components with different configurations of lights and sensors. This results in cumbersome capture devices, carefully calibrated in lab conditions, and in very long acquisition times, usually in the order of a few days per object. Recent techniques allow to capture polarimetric spatially-varying reflectance information, but limited to a single view, or to cover all view directions, but limited to spherical objects made of a single homogeneous material. We present sparse ellipsometry, a portable polarimetric acquisition method that captures both polarimetric SVBRDF and 3D shape simultaneously. Our handheld device consists of off-the-shelf, fixed optical components. Instead of days, the total acquisition time varies between twenty and thirty minutes per object. We develop a complete polarimetric SVBRDF model that includes diffuse and specular components, as well as single scattering, and devise a novel polarimetric inverse rendering algorithm with data augmentation of specular reflection samples via generative modeling. Our results show a strong agreement with a recent ground-truth dataset of captured polarimetric BRDFs of real-world objects.

cs.GR↗
arXiv2023

Men Can't Always be Transformed into Mice: Decision Algorithms and Complexity for Sorting by Symmetric Reversals

Sorting a permutation by reversals is a famous problem in genome rearrangements. Since 1997, quite some biological evidence were found that in many genomes the reversed regions are usually flanked by a pair of inverted repeats. This type of reversals are called symmetric reversals, which, unfortunately, were largely ignored until recently. In this paper, we investigate the problem of sorting by symmetric reversals, which requires a series of symmetric reversals to transform one chromosome $A$ into the another chromosome $B$. The decision problem of sorting by symmetric reversals is referred to as {\em SSR} (when the input chromosomes $A$ and $B$ are given, we use {\em SSR(A,B)}) and the corresponding optimization version (i.e., when the answer for {\em SSR(A,B)} is yes, using the minimum number of symmetric reversals to convert $A$ to $B$), is referred to as {\em SMSR(A,B)}. The main results of this paper are summarized as follows, where the input is a pair of chromosomes $A$ and $B$ with $n$ repeats. (1) We present an $O(n^2)$ time algorithm to solve the decision problem {\em SSR(A,B)}, i.e., determine whether a chromosome $A$ can be transformed into $B$ by a series of symmetric reversals. (2) We design an $O(n^2)$ time algorithm for a special 2-balanced case of {\em SMSR(A,B)}, where chromosomes $A$ and $B$ both have duplication number 2 and every repeat appears twice in different orientations in $A$ and $B$. (3) We show that SMSR is NP-hard even if the duplication number of the input chromosomes are at most 2, hence showing that the above positive optimization result is the best possible. As a by-product, we show that the \emph{minimum Steiner tree} problem on \emph{circle graphs} is NP-hard, settling the complexity status of a 38-year old open problem.

cs.DS↗
arXiv2022

A scheme for excitation of thorium-229 nuclei based on the electronic bridge excitaion

Thorium-229 possesses the lowest nuclear first excited state with an energy of about 8 eV. The extremely narrow linewidth of the nuclear first excited state with the uncertainty of 53 THz prevents the direct laser excitation and the realization of the nuclear clock. We present a proposal using the Coulomb crystal of a linear chain formed by the $^{229}$Th$^{3+}$ ions, the nuclei of $^{229}$Th$^{3+}$ ions in the ion trap are excited by the electronic bridge (EB) process. The 7$P_{1/2}$ state of the thorium-229 nuclear ground state is chosen for the EB excitation. Using the two-level optical Bloch equation under experimental conditions, we calculate that 2 out of 36 prepared thorium ions in the Coulomb crystal can be excited to the nuclear first excited state, and it takes about 2 hours to scan over the uncertainty of 0.22 eV. Taking the advantage of transition enhancement of the EB and the long stability of the Coulomb crystal, the energy uncertainty of the first excited state can be limited to the order of 1 GHz.

physics.atom-ph↗
arXiv2022

NeRFInvertor: High Fidelity NeRF-GAN Inversion for Single-shot Real Image Animation

Nerf-based Generative models have shown impressive capacity in generating high-quality images with consistent 3D geometry. Despite successful synthesis of fake identity images randomly sampled from latent space, adopting these models for generating face images of real subjects is still a challenging task due to its so-called inversion issue. In this paper, we propose a universal method to surgically fine-tune these NeRF-GAN models in order to achieve high-fidelity animation of real subjects only by a single image. Given the optimized latent code for an out-of-domain real image, we employ 2D loss functions on the rendered image to reduce the identity gap. Furthermore, our method leverages explicit and implicit 3D regularizations using the in-domain neighborhood samples around the optimized latent code to remove geometrical and visual artifacts. Our experiments confirm the effectiveness of our method in realistic, high-fidelity, and 3D consistent animation of real faces on multiple NeRF-GAN models across different datasets.

cs.CV↗