activity
20092022
most citedDetection of circular polarization in light scattered from photosynthetic microbes

150 citations · 342 across the 8 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

9 papers

cs.CV2022

Deblurring Photographs of Characters Using Deep Neural Networks

Thomas Germer, Tobias Uelwer, Stefan Harmeling

In this paper, we present our approach for the Helsinki Deblur Challenge (HDC2021). The task of this challenge is to deblur images of characters without knowing the point spread fu…

astro-ph.EP2020★ 12 cited

Spectropolarimetry of primitive phototrophs as global surface biosignatures

William B. Sparks, M. Niki Parenteau, Robert E. Blankenship +5

Photosynthesis is an ancient metabolic process that began on the early Earth, offering plentiful energy to organisms that utilize it, to the extent that they can achieve global sig…

cs.CV2020

Fast Multi-Level Foreground Estimation

Thomas Germer, Tobias Uelwer, Stefan Conrad +1

Alpha matting aims to estimate the translucency of an object in a given image. The resulting alpha matte describes pixel-wise to what amount foreground and background colors contri…

cs.CV2020★ 14 cited

PyMatting: A Python Library for Alpha Matting

Thomas Germer, Tobias Uelwer, Stefan Conrad +1

An important step of many image editing tasks is to extract specific objects from an image in order to place them in a scene of a movie or compose them onto another background. Alp…

astro-ph.IM2019★ 20 cited

Classical polarimetry with a twist: a compact, geometric approach

William B. Sparks, Thomas A. Germer, Rebecca M. Sparks

We present an approach to classical polarimetry that requires no moving parts, is compact and robust, and that encodes the complete polarization information on a single data frame,…

q-bio.BM2018★ 59 cited

Imaging linear and circular polarization features in leaves with complete Mueller matrix polarimetry

C. H. Lucas Patty, David A. Luo, Frans Snik +8

Spectropolarimetry of intact plant leaves allows to probe the molecular architecture of vegetation photosynthesis in a non-invasive and non-destructive way and, as such, can offer…

astro-ph.EP2012★ 28 cited

Remote Sensing of Chiral Signatures on Mars

William Sparks, James H. Hough, Thomas A. Germer +2

We describe circular polarization as a remote sensing diagnostic of chiral signatures which may be applied to Mars. The remarkable phenomenon of homochirality provides a unique bio…

astro-ph.IM2012★ 59 cited

A compact and robust method for full Stokes spectropolarimetry

William Sparks, Thomas A. Germer, John MacKenty +1

We present an approach to spectropolarimetry which requires neither moving parts nor time dependent modulation, and which offers the prospect of achieving high sensitivity. The tec…

astro-ph.EP2009★ 150 cited

Detection of circular polarization in light scattered from photosynthetic microbes

William B. Sparks, James Hough, Thomas A. Germer +9

The identification of a universal biosignature that could be sensed remotely is critical to the prospects for success in the search for life elsewhere in the universe. A candidate…