Abstract

This research sought to optimize the mix of Peruvian cocoa beans and the cocoa content for the dark chocolate formulation, having as an optimization criterion the improvement of the physical properties of chocolate: color, particle size, rheological properties and texture, applying the response surface methodology. It was found that the optimal formulation presented a mixture of cocoa beans of 10 parts of CCN 51 plus 90 parts of ICS 6, dark chocolate at 70 % cocoa content, 29.6 % sugar and 0.4 % lecithin. Finally, the validation of physical properties reached 91.6 % on average.

Abstract

Gold leaf Murano glass is a unique product that over the centuries, especially during Byzantine period, has been used as facing forming big flat or curved mosaics that result in an architecture full of light and symbolism. This product is presented in a format of squared piastras with the same approximate dimensions that the gold leaves ones have (8x8 cm). Piastras are cut in smaller squares (1-1,5cm) in order to obtain the tiles that form mosaic’s cladding. This cladding technique was incorporated during Catalan Modernism. Through this technique, beautiful pieces of tesseras of gold leaf Murano glass combined with others of opaline glass. In order to overcome the artistic challenges from this architectural movement, new mosaics were placed outdoors in order to shine by the incident sun beams and the square tiles were replaced by irregular tiles that form polygonal meshes capable of coating double curvature surfaces with great elegance. This location and prolonged exposure to the weather cause, over time, a deteriorated appearance, despite being composed of great resistant materials such as gold and glass. Studies oriented to know the phenomenology of this deterioration are being carried out and its impact on the expected durability of this coating. Being a handmade product and completely manual execution, the first studies have aimed to identify the primary anomalies that are originally generated in the different layers of this product at the time of manufacture, transport and handling. Knowing these primary anomalies must allow to prevent their occurrence and reduce their incidence in the manifestation of so-called secondary anomalies. All this in order to prolong the useful life of this appreciated architectural cladding.

Abstract

The increasing importance of outdoor applications such as driver assistance systems or video surveillance tasks has recently triggered the development of optical flow methods that aim at performing robustly under uncontrolled illumination. Most of these methods are based on patch-based features such as the normalized cross correlation, the census transform or the rank transform. They achieve their robustness by locally discarding both absolute brightness and contrast. In this paper, we follow an alternative strategy: Instead of discarding potentially important image information, we propose a novel variational model that jointly estimates both illumination changes and optical flow. The key idea is to parametrize the illumination changes in terms of basis functions that are learned from training data. While such basis functions allow for a meaningful representation of illumination effects, they also help to distinguish real illumination changes from motion-induced brightness variations if supplemented by additional smoothness constraints. Experiments on the KITTI benchmark show the clear benefits of our approach. They do not only demonstrate that it is possible to obtain meaningful basis functions, they also show state-of-the-art results for robust optical flow estimation. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book