Search results for: Image Quality Assessment

Authors: Eiko Takaoka, Yoshiyuki Fukushima, Koichiro Hirose, Tadashi Hasegawa

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Although, all high school students in Japan are required to learn informatics, many of them do not learn this topic sufficiently. In response to this situation, we propose a support package for high school informatics classes. To examine what students learned and if they sufficiently understood the context of the lessons, a questionnaire survey was distributed to 186 students. We analyzed the results of the questionnaire and determined the weakest units, which were “basic computer configuration” and “memory and secondary storage”. We then developed a package for teaching these units. We propose that our package be applied in high school classrooms.

Keywords: Computer Science Unplugged, computer science outreach, high school curriculum, experimental evaluation.

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Authors: Haridas Kuruveettil, Dongning Zhao, Cheong Jia Hao, Minkyu Je

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We present the design of Analog front end (AFE) low noise pre-amplifier implemented in a high voltage 0.18-µm CMOS technology for  a three dimensional ultrasound  bio microscope (3D UBM) application. The fabricated chip has 4X16 pre-amplifiers implemented to interface   a 2-D array of    high frequency capacitive micro-machined ultrasound transducers (CMUT). Core AFE cell consists of a high-voltage pulser in the transmit path, and a low-noise transimpedance amplifier in the receive path. Proposed system offers a high image resolution by the use of high frequency CMUTs with associated high performance imaging electronics integrated together.  Performance requirements and the design methods of the high bandwidth transimpedance amplifier are described in the paper. A single cell of transimpedance (TIA) amplifier and the bias circuit occupies a silicon area of 250X380 µm² and the full chip occupies a total silicon area of 10x6.8 mm².

Keywords: Ultrasound, analog front end, medical imaging, beam forming, biomicroscope, transimpedance gain.

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Authors: Xu Han, Shanxiong Chen, Shiyu Zhu, Xiaoyu Lin, Fujia Zhao, Dingwang Wang

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Character detection is an important issue for character recognition of ancient Yi books. The accuracy of detection directly affects the recognition effect of ancient Yi books. Considering the complex layout, the lack of standard typesetting and the mixed arrangement between images and texts, we propose a character detection method for ancient Yi books based on connected components and regressive character segmentation. First, the scanned images of ancient Yi books are preprocessed with nonlocal mean filtering, and then a modified local adaptive threshold binarization algorithm is used to obtain the binary images to segment the foreground and background for the images. Second, the non-text areas are removed by the method based on connected components. Finally, the single character in the ancient Yi books is segmented by our method. The experimental results show that the method can effectively separate the text areas and non-text areas for ancient Yi books and achieve higher accuracy and recall rate in the experiment of character detection, and effectively solve the problem of character detection and segmentation in character recognition of ancient books.

Keywords: Computing methodologies, interest point, salient region detections, image segmentation.

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Authors: Thapanee Seechaliao

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This research paper presents guiding on how to design social media into higher education courses. The research methodology used a survey approach. The research instrument was a questionnaire about guiding on how to design social media into higher education courses. Thirty-one lecturers completed the questionnaire. The data were scored by frequency and percentage. The research results were the lecturers’ opinions concerning the designing social media into higher education courses as follows: 1) Lecturers deem that the most suitable learning theory is Collaborative Learning. 2) Lecturers consider that the most important learning and innovation Skill in the 21st century is communication and collaboration skills. 3) Lecturers think that the most suitable evaluation technique is authentic assessment. 4) Lecturers consider that the most appropriate portion used as blended learning should be 70% in the classroom setting and 30% online.

Keywords: Instructional design, social media, courses, higher education.

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Authors: Muhammad E. Rahman, Paul J. Fanning

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Many single or multispan arch bridges are strengthened with the addition of some kind of structural support between adjacent arches of multispan or beside the arch barrel of a single span to increase the strength of the overall structure. It was traditionally formed by either placing loose rubble masonry blocks between the arches and beside the arches or using mortar or concrete to construct a more substantial structural bond between the spans. On the other hand backing materials are present in some existing bridges. Existing arch assessment procedures generally ignore the effects of backing materials. In this paper an investigation of the effects of backing on ratings for masonry arch bridges is carried out. It is observed that increasing the overall lateral stability of the arch system through the inclusion of structural backing results in an enhanced failure load by reducing the likelihood of any tension occurring at the top of the arch.

Keywords: Arch, Backing, Bridge, Masonry

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Authors: Tirtha S. Das, Ayan K. Sau, Subir K. Sarkar

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Digital watermarking is a way to provide the facility of secure multimedia data communication besides its copyright protection approach. The Spread Spectrum modulation principle is widely used in digital watermarking to satisfy the robustness of multimedia signals against various signal-processing operations. Several SS watermarking algorithms have been proposed for multimedia signals but very few works have discussed on the issues responsible for secure data communication and its robustness improvement. The current paper has critically analyzed few such factors namely properties of spreading codes, proper signal decomposition suitable for data embedding, security provided by the key, successive bit cancellation method applied at decoder which have greater impact on the detection reliability, secure communication of significant signal under camouflage of insignificant signals etc. Based on the analysis, robust SS watermarking scheme for secure data communication is proposed in wavelet domain and improvement in secure communication and robustness performance is reported through experimental results. The reported result also shows improvement in visual and statistical invisibility of the hidden data.

Keywords: Spread spectrum modulation, spreading code, signaldecomposition, security, successive bit cancellation

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Authors: Hang Yu

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The visualization of geographic information on mobile devices has become popular as the widespread use of mobile Internet. The mobility of these devices brings about much convenience to people-s life. By the add-on location-based services of the devices, people can have an access to timely information relevant to their tasks. However, visual analysis of geographic data on mobile devices presents several challenges due to the small display and restricted computing resources. These limitations on the screen size and resources may impair the usability aspects of the visualization applications. In this paper, a variable-scale visualization method is proposed to handle the challenge of small mobile display. By merging multiple scales of information into a single image, the viewer is able to focus on the interesting region, while having a good grasp of the surrounding context. This is essentially visualizing the map through a fisheye lens. However, the fisheye lens induces undesirable geometric distortion in the peripheral, which renders the information meaningless. The proposed solution is to apply map generalization that removes excessive information around the peripheral and an automatic smoothing process to correct the distortion while keeping the local topology consistent. The proposed method is applied on both artificial and real geographical data for evaluation.

Keywords: Map simplification, visualization, mobile devices.

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Authors: Kuo-Lung Lor, Chi-Hsuan Tsou, Yeun-Chung Chang, Chung-Ming Chen

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For evaluating the severity of Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), one is interested in inspecting the airway wall thickening due to inflammation. Although airway segmentations have being well developed to reconstruct in high order, airway wall segmentation remains a challenge task. While tackling such problem as a multi-surface segmentation, the interrelation within surfaces needs to be considered. We propose a new method for three-dimensional airway wall segmentation using spring structural active contour model. The method incorporates the gravitational field of the image and repelling force field of the inner lumen as the soft constraint and the geometric spring structure of active contour as the hard constraint to approximate a three-dimensional coupled surface readily for thickness measurements. The results show the preservation of topology constraints of coupled surfaces. In conclusion, our springy, soft-tissue-like structure ensures the globally optimal solution and waives the shortness following by the inevitable improper inner surface constraint.

Keywords: active contour model, airway wall, COPD, geometric spring structure

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Authors: Zhong Ma, Zhuping Wang, Congxin Liu, Xiangzeng Liu

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Satellite imagery classification is a challenging problem with many practical applications. In this paper, we designed a deep convolution neural network (DCNN) to classify the satellite imagery. The contributions of this paper are twofold — First, to cope with the large-scale variance in the satellite image, we introduced the inception module, which has multiple filters with different size at the same level, as the building block to build our DCNN model. Second, we proposed a genetic algorithm based method to efficiently search the best hyper-parameters of the DCNN in a large search space. The proposed method is evaluated on the benchmark database. The results of the proposed hyper-parameters search method show it will guide the search towards better regions of the parameter space. Based on the found hyper-parameters, we built our DCNN models, and evaluated its performance on satellite imagery classification, the results show the classification accuracy of proposed models outperform the state of the art method.

Keywords: Satellite imagery classification, deep convolution network, genetic algorithm, hyper-parameter optimization.

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Authors: Yiannis Smirlis, Dimitris K. Despotis

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This study performs a comparative analysis of the 21 Greek Universities in terms of their public funding, awarded for covering their operating expenditure. First it introduces a DEA/MCDM model that allocates the fund into four expenditure factors in the most favorable way for each university. Then, it presents a common, consensual assessment model to reallocate the amounts, remaining in the same level of total public budget. From the analysis it derives that a number of universities cannot justify the public funding in terms of their size and operational workload. For them, the sufficient reduction of their public funding amount is estimated as a future target. Due to the lack of precise data for a number of expenditure criteria, the analysis is based on a mixed crisp-ordinal data set.

Keywords: Data envelopment analysis, Greek universities, operating expenditures, ordinal data.

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Authors: J. Marzbanrad, A. Yadollahi

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In the present paper, Fatigue life assessment of an anti-roll bar component of a passenger vehicle, is investigated by ANSYS 11 software. A stress analysis is also carried out by the finite element technique for the determination of highly stressed regions on the bar. Anti-roll bar is a suspension element used at the front, rear, or at both ends of a car that reduces body roll by resisting any unequal vertical motion between the pair of wheels to which it is connected. As a first stage, fatigue damage models proposed by some well-known references and the corresponding assumptions are discussed and some enhancements are proposed. Then, fracture analysis of an anti-roll bar of an automobile is carried out. The analysed type of the anti-roll bar is especially important as many cases are reported about the fracture after a 100,000 km of travel fatigue and fracture conditions. This paper demonstrates fatigue life of an anti-roll bar and then evaluated by experimental analytically results from other researcher.

Keywords: Anti-roll bar, Fracture, Fatigue life, Random loading

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Authors: R. Alipour, F. Nadjarian, A. Alinaghizade

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Considering complexity of products, new geometrical design and investment tolerances that are necessary, measuring and dimensional controlling involve modern and more precise methods. Photo digitizing method using two cameras to record pictures and utilization of conventional method named “cloud points" and data analysis by the use of ATOUS software, is known as modern and efficient in mentioned context. In this paper, benefits of photo digitizing method in evaluating sampling of machining processes have been put forward. For example, assessment of geometrical integrity surface in 5-axis milling process and measurement of carbide tool wear in turning process, can be can be brought forward. Advantages of this method comparing to conventional methods have been expressed.

Keywords: photo digitizing, tool wear, geometrical integrity, cloud points

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Authors: A. Harras, A. Tsuji, K. Terada

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Tracking of moving people has gained a matter of great importance due to rapid technological advancements in the field of computer vision. The objective of this study is to design a motion based detection and tracking multiple walking pedestrians randomly in different directions. In our proposed method, Gaussian mixture model (GMM) is used to determine moving persons in image sequences. It reacts to changes that take place in the scene like different illumination; moving objects start and stop often, etc. Background noise in the scene is eliminated through applying morphological operations and the motions of tracked people which is determined by using the Kalman filter. The Kalman filter is applied to predict the tracked location in each frame and to determine the likelihood of each detection. We used a benchmark data set for the evaluation based on a side wall stationary camera. The actual scenes from the data set are taken on a street including up to eight people in front of the camera in different two scenes, the duration is 53 and 35 seconds, respectively. In the case of walking pedestrians in close proximity, the proposed method has achieved the detection ratio of 87%, and the tracking ratio is 77 % successfully. When they are deferred from each other, the detection ratio is increased to 90% and the tracking ratio is also increased to 79%.

Keywords: Automatic detection, tracking, pedestrians.

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Authors: Mateen Abbas, Abdul Muqeet Khan, Muhammad Rafique Asi, Javed Akhtar

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Mycotoxin (aflatoxins) contamination of peanuts is a great concern for human health. A total of 72 samples of unripe, roasted, and salty peanuts were collected randomly from Pothohar plateau of Pakistan for the assessment of aflatoxin. Samples were dried, ground and extracted by acetonitrile (84%). The filtered extracts were cleaned up by MycoSep-226 and analyzed by high performance liquid chromatography with flourescence detector. Quantification limit of Aflatoxin was 1 μg/kg and 70% Recovery was observed in spiked samples in the range 1–10 μg/kg. The screening of mycotoxins indicated that aflatoxins were present in most of the samples being detected in 82%, in concentrations from 14.25 μg/kg to 98.80 μg/kg. Optimal conditions for mycotoxin production and fungal growth are frequently found in the crop fields as well as in store houses. Human exposure of such toxin can be controlled by pointed out such awareness and implemented the regulations.

Keywords: Aflatoxin, HPLC, Pakistan, Peanuts, Punjab

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Authors: Sankaran Rajendran

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Remote sensing plays a vital role in mapping of resources and monitoring of environments of the earth. In the present research study, mapping and monitoring of clay siltations occurred in the Alkhod Dam of Muscat, Sultanate of Oman are carried out using low-cost multispectral Landsat and ASTER data. The dam is constructed across the Wadi Samail catchment for ground water recharge. The occurrence and spatial distribution of siltations in the dam are studied with five years of interval from the year 1987 of construction to 2014. The deposits are mainly due to the clay, sand and silt occurrences derived from the weathering rocks of ophiolite sequences occurred in the Wadi Samail catchment. The occurrences of clays are confirmed by minerals identification using ASTER VNIR-SWIR spectral bands and Spectral Angle Mapper supervised image processing method. The presence of clays and their spatial distribution are verified in the field. The study recommends the technique and the low-cost satellite data to similar region of the world.

Keywords: Alkhod Dam, ASTER Siltation, Landsat, Remote Sensing, Oman.

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Authors: Giovanni Luca Masala

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Pattern recognition is the research area of Artificial Intelligence that studies the operation and design of systems that recognize patterns in the data. Important application areas are image analysis, character recognition, fingerprint classification, speech analysis, DNA sequence identification, man and machine diagnostics, person identification and industrial inspection. The interest in improving the classification systems of data analysis is independent from the context of applications. In fact, in many studies it is often the case to have to recognize and to distinguish groups of various objects, which requires the need for valid instruments capable to perform this task. The objective of this article is to show several methodologies of Artificial Intelligence for data classification applied to biomedical patterns. In particular, this work deals with the realization of a Computer-Aided Detection system (CADe) that is able to assist the radiologist in identifying types of mammary tumor lesions. As an additional biomedical application of the classification systems, we present a study conducted on blood samples which shows how these methods may help to distinguish between carriers of Thalassemia (or Mediterranean Anaemia) and healthy subjects.

Keywords: Computer Aided Detection, mammary tumor, pattern recognition, dissimilarity

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Authors: Izabela Pietras

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The level of visual abilities, language, memory processes and intellectual functioning development affects the quality of a written text. The following analysis will present the results of diagnostic tests indicating the most common criterion for a group and stating whether a person has been diagnosed with having cognitive developmental level below the group-s average or not.The study-s aim is to determine whether there are specific patterns of cognitive deficits, which can be distinguished among the group of young people with spelling disorders.

Keywords: cognitive deficits, cognitive functions, spellingdisorders

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Authors: E. E. Marschalko, K. Kalcza-Janosi, I. Kotta, B. Bibok

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There is a scarcity of validated instruments in Hungarian for the assessment of self-determination related traits and behaviors. In order to fill in this gap, the aim of this study was the translation, cultural adaptation and validation of Self-Determination Scale (SDS) for the Hungarian population. A total of 4335 adults participated in the study. The mean age of the participants was 27.97 (SD = 9.60). The sample consisted mostly of females, less than 20% were males. Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analysis was performed for factorial structure checking and validation Cronbach’s alpha was used to examine the reliability of the factors. Our results revealed that the Hungarian version of SDS has good psychometric properties and it is a reliable tool for psychologists who would like to study or assess self-determination traits in their clients. The adapted and validated Hungarian version of SDS is presented in this paper.

Keywords: self-determination, traits, self-determination scale, awareness of self, perceived choice, adults, Hungarian, psychometric properties

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Authors: A. M. Tahsini

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The Spalart and Allmaras turbulence model has been implemented in a numerical code to study the compressible turbulent flows, which the system of governing equations is solved with a finite volume approach using a structured grid. The AUSM+ scheme is used to calculate the inviscid fluxes. Different benchmark problems have been computed to validate the implementation and numerical results are shown. A special Attention is paid to wall jet applications. In this study, the jet is submitted to various wall boundary conditions (adiabatic or uniform heat flux) in forced convection regime and both two-dimensional and axisymmetric wall jets are considered. The comparison between the numerical results and experimental data has given the validity of this turbulence model to study the turbulent wall jets especially in engineering applications.

Keywords: Wall Jet, Heat transfer, Numerical Simulation, Spalart-Allmaras Turbulence model.

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Authors: M. I. Ribah, M. Jibir, Y. A. Bashar, S. S. Manga

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Food safety is a significant and growing public health problem in the world and Nigeria as a developing country, since food-borne diseases are important contributors to the huge burden of sickness and death of humans. In Nigeria, traditional ready-to-eat meat products (RTE-MPs) like balangu, tsire, guru and dried meat products like kilishi, dambun nama, banda, were reported to be highly appreciated because of their eating qualities. The consumption of these products was considered as safe due to the treatments that are usually involved during their production process. However, during processing and handling, the products could be contaminated by pathogens that could cause food poisoning. Therefore, a hazard identification for pathogenic bacteria on some traditional RTE-MPs was conducted in Kebbi and Sokoto States, Nigeria. A total of 116 RTE-MPs (balangu-38, kilishi-39 and tsire-39) samples were obtained from retail outlets and analyzed using standard cultural microbiological procedures in general and selective enrichment media to isolate the target pathogens. A six-fold serial dilution was prepared and using the pour plating method, colonies were counted. Serial dilutions were selected based on the prepared pre-labeled Petri dishes for each sample. A volume of 10-12 ml of molten Nutrient agar cooled to 42-45°C was poured into each Petri dish and 1 ml each from dilutions of 102, 104 and 106 for every sample was respectively poured on a pre-labeled Petri plate after which colonies were counted. The isolated pathogens were identified and confirmed after series of biochemical tests. Frequencies and percentages were used to describe the presence of pathogens. The General Linear Model was used to analyze data on pathogen presence according to RTE-MPs and means were separated using the Tukey test at 0.05 confidence level. Of the 116 RTE-MPs samples collected, 35 (30.17%) samples were found to be contaminated with some tested pathogens. Prevalence results showed that Escherichia coli, salmonella and Staphylococcus aureus were present in the samples. Mean total bacterial count was 23.82×106 cfu/g. The frequency of individual pathogens isolated was; Staphylococcus aureus 18 (15.51%), Escherichia coli 12 (10.34%) and Salmonella 5 (4.31%). Also, among the RTE-MPs tested, the total bacterial counts were found to differ significantly (P < 0.05), with 1.81, 2.41 and 2.9×104 cfu/g for tsire, kilishi, and balangu, respectively. The study concluded that the presence of pathogenic bacteria in balangu could pose grave health risks to consumers, and hence, recommended good manufacturing practices in the production of balangu to improve the products’ safety.

Keywords: Ready-to-eat meat products, retail outlets, safety assessment, public health.

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Authors: Irina Severin, M. Caramihai, K. Chung, G. Tasca, T. Park

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The current study has investigated the ageing phenomena of silica optical fibres in relation to water activity which might be accelerated when exposed to a supplementary energy, such as microwaves. A controlled stress by winding fibres onto accurate diameter mandrel was applied. Taking into account that normally a decrease in fibre strength is induced in time by chemical action of water, the effects of cumulative reagents such as: water, applied stress and supplementary energy (microwave) in some cases acted in the opposite manner. The microwave effect as a structural relaxation catalyst appears unexpected, even if the overall gain in fibre strength is not high, but the stress corrosion factor revealed significant increase in certain simulation conditions.

Keywords: optical fibres, mechanical testing, aging, microwave, structural relaxation.

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Authors: Yunbin Yang, Liangli He, Fengjun Wang

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The essentiality of maintenance assessment and maintenance optimization in design stage is analyzed, and the existent problems of conventional maintenance design method are illuminated. MDMVM (Maintenance Design Method based Virtual Maintenance) is illuminated, and the process of MDMVM established, and the MDMVM architecture is given out. The key techniques of MDMVM are analyzed, and include maintenance design based KBE (Knowledge Based Engineering) and virtual maintenance based physically attribute. According to physical property, physically based modeling, visual object movement control, the simulation of operation force and maintenance sequence planning method are emphatically illuminated. Maintenance design system based virtual maintenance is established in foundation of maintenance design method.

Keywords: Digital mock-up, virtual maintenance, knowledge engineering, maintenance sequence planning.

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Authors: Jaedo Kim, Youngjoon Han, Hernsoo Hahn

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This paper propose the robust character segmentation method for license plate with topological transform such as twist,rotation. The first step of the proposed method is to find a candidate region for character and license plate. The character or license plate must be appeared as closed loop in the edge image. In the case of detecting candidate for character region, the evaluation of detected region is using topological relationship between each character. When this method decides license plate candidate region, character features in the region with binarization are used. After binarization for the detected candidate region, each character region is decided again. In this step, each character region is fitted more than previous step. In the next step, the method checks other character regions with different scale near the detected character regions, because most license plates have license numbers with some meaningful characters around them. The method uses perspective projection for geometrical normalization. If there is topological distortion in the character region, the method projects the region on a template which is defined as standard license plate using perspective projection. In this step, the method is able to separate each number region and small meaningful characters. The evaluation results are tested with a number of test images.

Keywords: License Plate Detection, Character Segmentation, Perspective Projection, Topological Transform.

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Authors: Lina Fernandes, G. N. Nayak, D. Ilangovan

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Two short sediment cores collected from mangrove areas of Manori and Thane creeks along Mumbai coast were analysed for sediment composition and metals (Fe, Mn, Cu, Pb, Co, Ni, Zn, Cr and V). The statistical analysis of Pearson correlation matrix proved that there is a significant relationship between metal concentration and finer grain size in Manori creek while poor correlation was observed in Thane creek. Based on the enrichment factor, the present metal to background metal ratios clearly reflected maximum enrichment of Cu and Pb in Manori creek and Mn in Thane creek. Geoaccumulation index calculated indicate that the study area is unpolluted with respect to Fe, Mn, Co, Ni, Zn and Cr in both the cores while moderately polluted with Cu and Pb in Manori creek. Based on contamination degree, both the core sediments were found to be considerably contaminated with metals.

Keywords: Creek, Igeo, Mumbai, trace metals

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Authors: Vladyslav Povoroznyuk, Larysa Martynyuk, Iryna Syzonenko, Liliya Martynyuk

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Medical, social, and economic relevance of osteoporosis is caused by reducing quality of life, increasing disability and mortality of the patients as a result of fractures due to the low-energy trauma. This study is aimed to examine the associations of metabolic syndrome components, bone mineral density (BMD) and trabecular bone score (TBS) in menopausal women with non-vertebral fractures. 1161 menopausal women aged 50-79 year-old were examined and divided into three groups: A included 419 women with increased body weight (BMI - 25.0-29.9 kg/m²), B – 442 females with obesity (BMI >29.9 kg/m²)i and C – 300 women with metabolic syndrome (diagnosis according to IDF criteria, 2005). BMD of lumbar spine (L1-L4), femoral neck, total body and forearm was investigated with usage of dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. The bone quality indexes were measured according to Med-Imaps installation. All analyses were performed using Statistical Package 6.0. BMD of lumbar spine (L1-L4), femoral neck, total body, and ultradistal radius was significant higher in women with obesity and metabolic syndrome compared to the pre-obese ones (p<0.001). TBS was significantly higher in women with increased body weight compared to obese and metabolic syndrome patients. Analysis showed significant positive correlation between waist circumference, triglycerides level and BMD of lumbar spine and femur. Significant negative association between serum HDL level and BMD of investigated sites was established. The TBS (L1-L4) indexes positively correlated with HDL (high-density lipoprotein) level. Despite the fact that BMD indexes were better in women with metabolic syndrome, the frequency of non-vertebral fractures was significantly higher in this group of patients.

Keywords: Bone mineral density, trabecular bone score, metabolic syndrome, fracture.

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Authors: E. Cenderelli, E. Bruno, G. Iacoviello, A. Lazzini

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The financial sector is exposed to the risk of cyber-attacks like any other industrial sector. Furthermore, the topic of CybeRisk (cyber risk) has become particularly relevant given that Information Technology (IT) attacks have increased drastically in recent years, and cannot be stopped by single organizations requiring a response at international and national level. IT risk is never a matter purely for the IT manager, although he clearly plays a key role. A bank's risk management function requires a thorough understanding of the evolving risks as well as the tools and practical techniques available to address them. Upon the request of European and national legislation regarding CybeRisk in the financial system, banks are therefore called upon to strengthen the operational model for CybeRisk management. This will require an important change with a more intense collaboration with the structures that deal with information security for the development of an ad hoc system for the evaluation and control of this type of risk. The aim of the work is to propose a framework for the management and control of CybeRisk that will bridge the gap in the literature regarding the understanding and consideration of CybeRisk as an integral part of business management. The IT function has a strong relevance in the management of CybeRisk, which is perceived mainly as operational risk, but with a positive tendency on the part of risk management to the identification of CybeRisk assessment methods that are increasingly complete, quantitative and able to better describe the possible impacts on the business. The paper provides answers to the research questions: Is it possible to define a CybeRisk governance structure able to support the comparison between risk and security? How can the relationships between IT assets be integrated into a cyberisk assessment framework to guarantee a system of protection and risks control? From a methodological point of view, this research uses a case study approach. The choice of “Monte dei Paschi di Siena” was determined by the specific features of one of Italy’s biggest lenders. It is chosen to use an intensive research strategy: an in-depth study of reality. The case study methodology is an empirical approach to explore a complex and current phenomenon that develops over time. The use of cases has also the advantage of allowing the deepening of aspects concerning the "how" and "why" of contemporary events, on which the scholar has little control. The research bases on quantitative data and qualitative information obtained through semi-structured interviews of an open-ended nature and questionnaires to directors, members of the audit committee, risk, IT and compliance managers, and those responsible for internal audit function and anti-money laundering. The added value of the paper can be seen in the development of a framework based on a mapping of IT assets from which it is possible to identify their relationships for purposes of a more effective management and control of cyber risk.

Keywords: Bank, CybeRisk, information technology, risk management.

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Authors: Cherdvong Saengsupavanich

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The impact of a proposed pier on tidal current alteration was evaluated. The proposed pier location was in Salad Bay on Koa Kood Island, Trat province, Thailand, and was designed to accommodate passenger ships with a draft of less than 2 m. The study began with collecting necessary data, including bathymetric, water elevation and tidal current characteristics. The impact was assessed using a software package (MIKE21). Although the results showed that the pier would affect the existing current pattern, the change was determined to be insignificant, as the design of the piles for the pier provided sufficient spacing to let the current flow as freely as possible. Consequences of the altered current, such as seabed erosion, water stagnation, sediment deposition and navigational risk were assessed. Environmental mitigation measures might be necessary if the impacts were considered unacceptable.

Keywords: Environmental impact assessment, pier, tidal currentchange, coastal engineering and management

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Authors: M. Zeegers, D. Barron

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In this paper we canvass three case studies of unique research partnerships between universities and schools in the wider community. In doing so, we consider those areas of indeterminate zones of professional practice explored by academics in their research activities within the wider community. We discuss three cases: an artist-in-residence program designed to engage primary school children with new understandings about local Indigenous Australian issues in their pedagogical and physical landscapes; an assessment of pedagogical concerns in relation to the use of physical space in classrooms; and the pedagogical underpinnings of a costumed museum school program. In doing so, we engage issues of research as playing an integral part in the development, implementation and maintenance of academic engagements with wider community issues.

Keywords: communities of interest, universities, schools, partnerships

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Authors: Kahil Amar, Boukais Said, Kezmane Ali, Hamizi Mohand, Hannachi Naceur Eddine

Abstract:

The principle of the seismic performance evaluation methods is to provide a measure of capability for a building or set of buildings to be damaged by an earthquake. The common objective of many of these methods is to supply classification criteria. The purpose of this study is to present a method for assessing the seismic performance of structures, based on Pushover method; we are particularly interested in reinforced concrete frame structures, which represent a significant percentage of damaged structures after a seismic event. The work is based on the characterization of seismic movement of the various earthquake zones in terms of PGA and PGD that is obtained by means of SIMQK_GR and PRISM software and the correlation between the points of performance and the scalar characterizing the earthquakes will developed.

Keywords: Seismic performance, Pushover method, characterization of seismic motion, harmfulness of the seismic signal

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Authors: Aliakbar Sayadi, Thomas R. Neitzert, G. Charles Clifton, Min Cheol Han

Abstract:

The present study aims to assess the performance of vermiculite concrete containing poly-lactic acid beads as an eco-friendly aggregate. Vermiculite aggregate was replaced by poly-lactic acid in percentages of 0%, 20%, 40%, 60% and 80%. Mechanical and thermal properties of concrete were investigated. Test results indicated that the inclusion of poly-lactic acid decreased the PH value of concrete and all the poly-lactic acid particles were dissolved due to the formation of sodium lactide and lactide oligomers when subjected to the high alkaline environment of concrete. In addition, an increase in thermal conductivity value of concrete was observed as the ratio of poly-lactic acid increased. Moreover, a set of equations was proposed to estimate the water-cement ratio, cement content and water absorption ratio of concrete.

Keywords: Poly-lactic acid, PLA, vermiculite, concrete, eco-friendly, mechanical properties.

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