Aims—To investigate if the amniotic membrane (AM) promotes epithelial migration while inhibiting stromal remodelling associated with corneal haze after excimer laser keratectomy. Methods—A wound 150 μm in depth and 6.0 mm in diameter was produced in 40 rabbits using an excimer laser. One eye was randomly chosen to be covered by the AM while the other eye served as a control. Epithelial wound he...

With the increase in economic development over the past thirty years, many large cities in eastern and southwestern China are experiencing increased haze events and atmospheric pollution, causing significant impacts on the regional environment and even climate. However, knowledge on the aerosol physical and chemical properties in heavy haze conditions is still insufficient. In this study, two w...

AIMS To determine the effect of intact corneal epithelium on stromal haze and myofibroblast cell formation after excimer laser surgery. METHODS Denuded epithelium alone, photorefractive keratectomy (PRK), laser in situ keratomileusis (LASIK), or LASIK with denuded epithelium was performed in rabbit eyes. Postoperative anterior stromal haze was assessed employing a standard scale. Immunohistoc...

Air pollution in many Chinese cities has been so severe in recent years that a special terminology, the "Chinese haze", was created to describe China's air quality problem. Historically, the problem of Chinese haze has developed several decades after Western high-income countries have significantly improved their air quality from the smog-laden days in the early- and mid-20(th) century. Hence i...

Solar cell substrates require high optical transparency but also prefer high optical haze to increase the light scattering and consequently the absorption in the active materials. Unfortunately, there is a trade-off between these optical properties, which is exemplified by common transparent paper substrates exhibiting a transparency of about 90% yet a low optical haze (<20%). In this work, we ...

Spatially varying haze is a common feature of archival Landsat scenes currently being used for large-area land cover mapping and can significantly affect product quality. Robust haze reduction that is image-based and involves minimal operator intervention, is therefore a necessary a-priori step to information extraction. The practical implementation of a suitable methodology, based on a Haze Op...

Images/videos of outdoor scenes are usually degraded by the turbid medium in the atmosphere. In this paper, a novel single image-based dehazing framework is proposed to remove haze effects from image/video, where we propose two novel image priors, called the pixel-based dark channel prior and the pixel-based bright channel prior. Based on the two priors with the haze imaging model, we propose t...

[1] We use narrowband images of Titan obtained in November 1999 to explore the haze vertical structure in Titan’s lower atmosphere. The images were taken with the MountWilson 2.54m telescope using the NASA/GSFC-built Acousto-Optic Imaging Spectrometer. These images were recorded at five wavelengths surrounding the 0.94 mm methane window and are sensitive to a range of altitudes in Titan’s lower...

Outdoor images often suffer from low contrast and limited visibility due to haze, small particles such as dust, mist, and fumes which deflect light from its original course of propagation. Haze has two effects on the image: it weaken the imgage contrast and also adds an additive component to the image, so-called airlight. Recovering a haze-free image can restore the visibility of the scene and ...

The urban heat island (UHI), the phenomenon of higher temperatures in urban land than the surrounding rural land, is commonly attributed to changes in biophysical properties of the land surface associated with urbanization. Here we provide evidence for a long-held hypothesis that the biogeochemical effect of urban aerosol or haze pollution is also a contributor to the UHI. Our results are based...