The Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO), scheduled for launch in December 2008, will make the first space-based measurements of atmospheric CO2 with the precision, spatial and temporal resolution needed to characterize CO2 sources and sinks on regional spatial scales and seasonal to interannual time scales. Variations in surface topography have a direct impact on the retrieval of the columnaverag...

Abstract When testing the surface quality of finest structures, white‐light interferometers are in their element, both production and development, as well laboratories research. This measurement principle works on almost all materials, operates without contact, providing profiles 3D with height resolutions nanometer range. Today, large‐area measurements just possible detailed investigations hig...

A surface microtopography design and manufacturing methodology is presented that handles the intrinsic geometrical complexity of a surface microtopography by introducing topography descriptors. The concept of topography descriptor is a generalization originating from known techniques of three-dimensional surface topography analysis. Topography descriptors may be seen as transfer functions that ...

ÐThis paper investigates whether surface topography information extracted from intensity images using a recently reported shape-from-shading (SFS) algorithm can be used for the purposes of 3D object recognition. We consider how curvature and shape-index information delivered by this algorithm can be used to recognize objects based on their surface topography. We explore two contrasting object r...