A growing number of modern applications such as position determination, object recognition and collision prevention depend on accurate scene analysis. The estimation of an object's distance relative to an observers position by image analysis or laser scan techniques is thereby still the most time-consuming and expansive part. A lower-priced and much faster alternative is the distance measurement with modulated, coherent infrared light based on the Photo Mixing Detector (PMD) technique. As this approach is a rather new and unexplored method, proper calibration techniques have not been widely investigated yet. This paper describes an accurate distance calibration approach for PMD-based distance sensoring.

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Aminopeptidase N (APN) is the major cell surface receptor for group 1 coronaviruses. In this study, we have isolated and characterized a feline APN cDNA and shown that the transfection of human embryonic kidney cells with this cDNA renders them susceptible to infection with the feline coronavirus feline infectious peritonitis virus, the human coronavirus (HCV) 229E and the porcine coronavirus porcine transmissible gastroenteritis virus. By using chimeric APN genes, assembled from porcine and feline sequences, we have shown that, analogously to the human APN protein, a region within the amino-terminal part of the feline APN protein (encompassing amino acids 132-295) is essential

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