Ercília Sousa

Ercília Sousa, Can Li

A one dimensional fractional diffusion model with the Riemann-Liouville fractional derivative is studied. First, a second order discretization for this derivative is presented and then an unconditionally stable weighted average finite difference method is derived. The stability of this scheme is established by von Neumann analysis. Some numerical results are shown, which demonstrate the efficiency and convergence of the method. Additionally, some physical properties of this fractional diffusion system are simulated, which further confirm the effectiveness of our method.

Somayeh Gh. Bardeji, Isabel N. Figueiredo, Ercília Sousa

An optical flow variational model is proposed for a sequence of images defined on a domain in $\mathbb{R}^2$. We introduce a regularization term given by the $L^1$ norm of a fractional differential operator. To solve the minimization problem we apply the split Bregman method. Extensive experimental results, with performance evaluation, are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the new model and method and to show that our algorithm performs favorably in comparison to another existing method. We also discuss the influence of the order $α$ of the fractional operator in the estimation of the optical flow, for $0 \leq α\leq 2$. We observe that the values of $α$ for which the method performs better depends on the geometry and texture complexity of the image. Some extensions of our algorithm are also discussed.

Adérito Araújo, Amal K. Das, Cidália Neves et al.

Numerical solutions of a non-Fickian diffusion equation belonging to a hyperbolic type are presented in one space dimension. The Brownian particle modelled by this diffusion equation is subjected to a symmetric periodic potential whose spatial shape can be varied by a single parameter. We consider a numerical method which consists of applying Laplace transform in time; we then obtain an elliptic diffusion equation which is discretized using a finite difference method. We analyze some aspects of the convergence of the method. Numerical results for particle density, flux and mean-square-displacement (covering both inertial and diffusive regimes) are presented.