Properties such as the glass transition temperature ( T(g)) and the diffusion coefficient of ultrathin polymeric films are shown to depend on the dimensions of the system. In this work, a hard-sphere molecular dynamics methodology has been applied to simulate such systems. We investigate the influence that substrates have on the behavior of thin polymer films; we report evidence suggesting that, depending on the strength of substrate-polymer interactions, the glass transition temperature for a thin film can be significantly lower or higher than that of the bulk.

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Abstract-This paper presents a computer vision system whose aim is to detect and classify cracks on road surfaces. Most of the previous works consisted of complex and expensive acquisition systems, whereas we have developed a simpler one composed by a single camera mounted on a light truck and no additional illumination. The system also includes tracking devices in order to geolocalize the captured images. The computer vision algorithm has three steps: hard shoulder detection, cell candidate proposal, and crack classification. First the region of interest (ROI) is delimited using the Hough transform (HT) to detect the hard shoulders. The cell candidate step is divided into two substeps: Hough transform features (HTF) and local binary pattern (LBP). Both of them split up the image into nonoverlapping small grid cells and also extract edge orientation and texture features, respectively. At the fusion stage, the detection is completed by mixing those techniques and obtaining the crack seeds. Afterward, their shape is improved using a new developed morphology operator. Finally, one classification based on the orientation of the detected lines has been applied following the Chain code. Massive experiments were performed on several stretches on a Spanish road showing very good performance.

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