Cellulose Nanostructures as Tunable Substrates for Nanocellulose-Metal Hybrid Flexible Composites

Nanocomposite represents the backbone of many industrial fabrication applications and exerts a substantial social impact. Among these composites, metal nanostructures are often employed as the active constituents, thanks to their various chemical and physical properties, which offer the ability to tune the application scenarios in thermal management, energy storage, and biostable materials, respectively. Nanocellulose, as an emerging polymer substrate, possesses unique properties of abundance, mechanical flexibility, environmental friendliness, and biocompatibility. Based on the combination of flexible nanocellulose with specific metal fillers, the essential parameters involving mechanical strength, flexibility, anisotropic thermal resistance, and conductivity can be enhanced. Nowadays, the approach has found extensive applications in thermal management, energy storage, biostable electronic materials, and piezoelectric devices. Therefore, it is essential to thoroughly correlate cellulose nanocomposites' properties with different metallic fillers. This review summarizes the extraction of nanocellulose and preparation of metal modified cellulose nanocomposites, including their wide and particular applications in modern advanced devices. Moreover, we also discuss the challenges in the synthesis, the emerging designs, and unique structures, promising directions for future research. We wish this review can give a valuable overview of the unique combination and inspire the research directions of the multifunctional nanocomposites using proper cellulose and metallic fillers.

Multiview video plus depth transmission via virtual-view-assisted complementary down/upsampling

Multiview video plus depth is a popular 3D video format which can provide viewers a vivid 3D feeling. However, its requirements in terms of computational complexity and transmission bandwidth are more than that of conventional 2D video. To mitigate these limitations, some works have proposed to reduce the amount of transmitted data by adopting different resolutions for different views, and consequently, the transmitted video is called mixed resolution video. In order to further reduce the transmitted data and maintain good quality at the decoder side; in this paper, we propose a down/upsampling algorithm for 3D multiview video which systematically takes into account the video encoder and decoder. At the encoder side, the rows of the two adjacent views are downsampled following an interlacing and complementary fashion, whereas, at the decoder side, the discarded pixels are recovered by fusing the virtual view pixels with the directional interpolated pixels from the complementary downsampled views. Moreover, the patterns of the texture surrounding the discarded pixels are used to aid the data fusion, so as to enhance edges recovery. Meanwhile, with the assistance of virtual views, at the decoder side, the proposed approach can effectively recover the discarded high-frequency details. The experimental results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed framework.