Search results for: Multi-focus image fusion

Authors: Aws Al-azawi, John Soraghan

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There is a growing interest in the use of ultrasonic speckle tracking for biomedical image formation of tissue deformation. Speckle tracking is angle independent and has an ability to differentiate soft tissue into benign and malignant regions. In this paper a simulation model for dynamic ultrasound scatterer is presented. The model composes Field-II ultrasonic scatterers and FEM (ANSYS-11) nodes as a regional tissue deformation. A performance evaluation is presented on axial displacement and strain fields estimation of a uniformly elastic model, using speckle tracking based 1D cross-correlation of optimally segmented pre and post-deformation frames. Optimum correlation window length is investigated in terms of highest signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for a selected region of interest of a smoothed displacement field. Finally, gradient based strain field of both smoothed and non-smoothed displacement fields are compared. Simulation results from the model are shown to compare favorably with FEM results.

Keywords: Speckle tracking, tissue deformation, ultrasonic simulation.

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Authors: Martin De Biasio, Raimund Leitner, Franz G. Wuertz, Sergey Verzakov, Pierre J. Elbischger

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Breast carcinoma is the most common form of cancer in women. Multicolour fluorescent in-situ hybridisation (m-FISH) is a common method for staging breast carcinoma. The interpretation of m-FISH images is complicated due to two effects: (i) Spectral overlap in the emission spectra of fluorochrome marked DNA probes and (ii) tissue autofluorescence. In this paper hyper-spectral images of m-FISH samples are used and spectral unmixing is applied to produce false colour images with higher contrast and better information content than standard RGB images. The spectral unmixing is realised by combinations of: Orthogonal Projection Analysis (OPA), Alterating Least Squares (ALS), Simple-to-use Interactive Self-Modeling Mixture Analysis (SIMPLISMA) and VARIMAX. These are applied on the data to reduce tissue autofluorescence and resolve the spectral overlap in the emission spectra. The results show that spectral unmixing methods reduce the intensity caused by tissue autofluorescence by up to 78% and enhance image contrast by algorithmically reducing the overlap of the emission spectra.

Keywords: breast carcinoma, hyperspectral imaging, m-FISH, spectral unmixing

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Authors: F.Alilat, S.Loumi, H.Merrad, B.Sansal

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In this article a modification of the algorithm of the fuzzy ART network, aiming at returning it supervised is carried out. It consists of the search for the comparison, training and vigilance parameters giving the minimum quadratic distances between the output of the training base and those obtained by the network. The same process is applied for the determination of the parameters of the fuzzy ARTMAP giving the most powerful network. The modification consist in making learn the fuzzy ARTMAP a base of examples not only once as it is of use, but as many time as its architecture is in evolution or than the objective error is not reached . In this way, we don-t worry about the values to impose on the eight (08) parameters of the network. To evaluate each one of these three networks modified, a comparison of their performances is carried out. As application we carried out a classification of the image of Algiers-s bay taken by SPOT XS. We use as criterion of evaluation the training duration, the mean square error (MSE) in step control and the rate of good classification per class. The results of this study presented as curves, tables and images show that modified fuzzy ARTMAP presents the best compromise quality/computing time.

Keywords: Neural Networks, fuzzy ART, fuzzy ARTMAP, Remote sensing, multispectral Classification.

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Authors: K. Bommanna Raja, M.Madheswaran, K.Thyagarajah

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A higher order spline interpolated contour obtained with up-sampling of homogenously distributed coordinates for segmentation of kidney region in different classes of ultrasound kidney images has been developed and presented in this paper. The performance of the proposed method is measured and compared with modified snake model contour, Markov random field contour and expert outlined contour. The validation of the method is made in correspondence with expert outlined contour using maximum coordinate distance, Hausdorff distance and mean radial distance metrics. The results obtained reveal that proposed scheme provides optimum contour that agrees well with expert outlined contour. Moreover this technique helps to preserve the pixels-of-interest which in specific defines the functional characteristic of kidney. This explores various possibilities in implementing computer-aided diagnosis system exclusively for US kidney images.

Keywords: Ultrasound Kidney Image – Kidney Segmentation –Active Contour – Markov Random Field – Higher Order SplineInterpolation

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Authors: Yuan Zheng

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3D model-based vehicle matching provides a new way for vehicle recognition, localization and tracking. Its key is to construct an evaluation function, also called fitness function, to measure the degree of vehicle matching. The existing fitness functions often poorly perform when the clutter and occlusion exist in traffic scenarios. In this paper, we present a practical and efficient fitness function. Unlike the existing evaluation functions, the proposed fitness function is to study the vehicle matching problem from both local and global perspectives, which exploits the pixel gradient information as well as the silhouette information. In view of the discrepancy between 3D vehicle model and real vehicle, a weighting strategy is introduced to differently treat the fitting of the model’s wireframes. Additionally, a normalization operation for the model’s projection is performed to improve the accuracy of the matching. Experimental results on real traffic videos reveal that the proposed fitness function is efficient and robust to the cluttered background and partial occlusion.

Keywords: 3D-2D matching, fitness function, 3D vehicle model, local image gradient, silhouette information.

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Authors: S.Jerald Jeba Kumar, M.Madheswaran

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The structure of retinal vessels is a prominent feature, that reveals information on the state of disease that are reflected in the form of measurable abnormalities in thickness and colour. Vascular structures of retina, for implementation of clinical diabetic retinopathy decision making system is presented in this paper. Retinal Vascular structure is with thin blood vessel, whose accuracy is highly dependent upon the vessel segmentation. In this paper the blood vessel thickness is automatically detected using preprocessing techniques and vessel segmentation algorithm. First the capture image is binarized to get the blood vessel structure clearly, then it is skeletonised to get the overall structure of all the terminal and branching nodes of the blood vessels. By identifying the terminal node and the branching points automatically, the main and branching blood vessel thickness is estimated. Results are presented and compared with those provided by clinical classification on 50 vessels collected from Bejan Singh Eye hospital..

Keywords: Diabetic retinopathy, Binarization, SegmentationClinical Decision Support Systems.

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Authors: Marcell S. A. Martins, Benedito S. R. Neto, Gerson L. Serejo, Carlos G. R. Santos

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Indoor positioning systems use sensors such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, and Wi-Fi, as well as cameras for image capture, which can be fixed or mobile. These computer vision-based positioning approaches are low-cost to implement, mainly when it uses a mobile camera. The present study aims to create a design of a fiducial marker for a low-cost indoor localization system. The marker is tape-shaped to perform a continuous reading employing two detection algorithms, one for greater distances and another for smaller distances. Therefore, the location service is always operational, even with variations in capture distance. A minimal localization and reading algorithm was implemented for the proposed marker design, aiming to validate it. The accuracy tests consider readings varying the capture distance between [0.5, 10] meters, comparing the proposed marker with others. The tests showed that the proposed marker has a broader capture range than the ArUco and QRCode, maintaining the same size. Therefore, reducing the visual pollution and maximizing the tracking since the ambient can be covered entirely.

Keywords: Multiscale recognition, indoor localization, tape-shaped marker, Fiducial Marker.

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Authors: Tung-Liang Chen, Ming - Yi Huang, Tchiu-Hui Su

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This study investigates the relationships between Work Motivation, Work Stress, and Job Satisfaction toward cross-strait employees. The target subjects are three manufacturing firms in Mainland China and Taiwan. Out of 450 distributed surveys, 352 valid surveys were obtained with the response rate of 78.22%.The findings have addressed three main pull factors toward cross-strait employees in choosing jobs, which are (1) high level of firm stability, (2) good firm image, and (3) good employee benefits. In addition, various employee attributes exert different impacts on Work Motivation, Work Stress, and Job Satisfaction. The comparison between expected and actual perceived Job Satisfaction toward cross-strait employees shows that “salary" ranks highest regarding expected Job Satisfaction whereas “co-worker relationship" ranks highest regarding actual perceived Job Satisfaction, which implies actual perceived Job Satisfaction do not match employee expectations. Therefore, this research further concludes that there exists differences between employees- expected and actual perceived Job Satisfaction.

Keywords: Cross-strait, job satisfaction, work motivation, work stress

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Authors: G. M. Ozkan, H. Akilli

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The aim of present study is to control the unsteady flow structure downstream of a circular cylinder by use of attached permeable plates. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) technique and dye visualization experiments were performed in deep water and the flow characteristics were evaluated by means of time-averaged streamlines, Reynolds Shear Stress and Turbulent Kinetic Energy concentrations. The permeable plate was made of a chrome-nickel screen having a porosity value of β=0.6 and it was attached on the cylinder surface along its midspan. Five different angles were given to the plate (θ=0^o, 15^o, 30^o, 45^o, 60^o) with respect to the centerline of the cylinder in order to examine its effect on the flow control. It was shown that the permeable plate is effective on elongating the vortex formation length and reducing the fluctuations in the wake region. Compared to the plain cylinder, the reductions in the values of maximum Reynolds shear stress and Turbulent Kinetic Energy were evaluated as 72.5% and 66%, respectively for the plate angles of θ=45^oand 60^o which were also found to be suggested for applications concerning the vortex shedding and consequent Vortex-Induced Vibrations.

Keywords: Bluff body, flow control, permeable plate, PIV, VIV, vortex shedding.

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Authors: Hyun June Kim, Tailong Shi, Seden Akdagli, Sam Most, Yuling Yan

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Quantitative analyses of whisker movements provide a means to study functional recovery and regeneration of mouse facial nerve after an injury. However, accurate tracking of the mouse whisker movement is challenging. Most methods for whisker tracking require manual intervention, e.g. fixing the head of the mouse during a study. Here we describe a semi-automated image processing method, which is applied to high-speed video recordings of free-moving mice to track the whisker movements. We first track the head movement of a mouse by delineating the lower head contour frame-by-frame that allows for detection of the location and orientation of the head. Then, a region of interest is identified for each frame; the subsequent application of a mask and the Hough transform detects the selected whiskers on each side of the head. Our approach is used to examine the functional recovery of damaged facial nerves in mice over a course of 21 days.

Keywords: Mystacial macrovibrissae, whisker tracking, head tracking, facial nerve recovery.

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Authors: I. Yalcin Enis, J. Vojtech, T. Gok Sadikoglu

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In this study, polycaprolactone (PCL) was dissolved in chloroform:ethanol solvent system at a concentration of 18 w/v %. 1, 2, 4, and 6 droplets of formic acid were added to the prepared 10ml PCL-chloroform:ethanol solutions separately. Fibrous webs were produced by electrospinning technique based on the horizontal working principle. Morphology of the webs was investigated by using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) whereas fiber diameters were measured by Image J Software System. The effect of formic acid addition to the mostly used chloroform solvent on fiber morphology was examined. Results indicate that there is a distinct fall in fiber diameter with the addition of formic acid drops. The average fiber diameter was measured as 2.22μm in PCL /chloroform:ethanol solution system. On the other hand, 328nm and 256 nm average fiber diameters were measured for the samples of 4 drops and 6 drops formic acid added. This study offers alternative solvent systems to produce nanoscaled, nontoxic PCL fibrous webs by electrospinning technique.

Keywords: Chloroform, electrospinning, formic acid polycaprolactone.

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Authors: Dimitrios Zarpalas, Anastasios Zafeiropoulos, Petros Daras, Nicos Maglaveras

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Segmentation techniques based on Active Contour Models have been strongly benefited from the use of prior information during their evolution. Shape prior information is captured from a training set and is introduced in the optimization procedure to restrict the evolution into allowable shapes. In this way, the evolution converges onto regions even with weak boundaries. Although significant effort has been devoted on different ways of capturing and analyzing prior information, very little thought has been devoted on the way of combining image information with prior information. This paper focuses on a more natural way of incorporating the prior information in the level set framework. For proof of concept the method is applied on hippocampus segmentation in T1-MR images. Hippocampus segmentation is a very challenging task, due to the multivariate surrounding region and the missing boundary with the neighboring amygdala, whose intensities are identical. The proposed method, mimics the human segmentation way and thus shows enhancements in the segmentation accuracy.

Keywords: Medical imaging & processing, Brain MRI segmentation, hippocampus segmentation, hippocampus-amygdala missingboundary, weak boundary segmentation, region based segmentation, prior information, local weighting scheme in level sets, spatialdistribution of labels, gradient distribution on boundary.

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Authors: Bireswar Paul, Amitava Datta

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Indoor air environment is a big concern in the last few decades in the developing countries, with increased focus on monitoring the air quality. In this work, an experimental study has been conducted to establish the existence of carbon nanoparticles below the size range of 10 nm in the non-sooting zone of a LPG/air partially premixed flame. Mainly, four optical techniques, UV absorption spectroscopy, fluorescence spectroscopy, dynamic light scattering and TEM have been used to characterize and measure the size of carbon nanoparticles in the sampled materials collected from the inner surface of the flame front. The existence of the carbon nanoparticles in the sampled material has been confirmed with the typical nature of the absorption and fluorescence spectra already reported in the literature. The band gap energy shows that the particles are made up of three to six aromatic rings. The size measurement by DLS technique also shows that the particles below the size range of 10 nm. The results of DLS are also corroborated by the TEM image of the same material. 

Keywords: Indoor air, carbon nanoparticles, LPG, partially premixed flame, optical techniques.

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Authors: Ahmad R. Naghsh-Nilchi, Mohammad Roshanzamir

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One of the popular methods for recognition of facial expressions such as happiness, sadness and surprise is based on deformation of facial features. Motion vectors which show these deformations can be specified by the optical flow. In this method, for detecting emotions, the resulted set of motion vectors are compared with standard deformation template that caused by facial expressions. In this paper, a new method is introduced to compute the quantity of likeness in order to make decision based on the importance of obtained vectors from an optical flow approach. For finding the vectors, one of the efficient optical flow method developed by Gautama and VanHulle[17] is used. The suggested method has been examined over Cohn-Kanade AU-Coded Facial Expression Database, one of the most comprehensive collections of test images available. The experimental results show that our method could correctly recognize the facial expressions in 94% of case studies. The results also show that only a few number of image frames (three frames) are sufficient to detect facial expressions with rate of success of about 83.3%. This is a significant improvement over the available methods.

Keywords: Facial expression, Facial features, Optical flow, Motion vectors.

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Authors: Lewis E. Hibell, Honghai Liu, David J. Brown

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This paper presents the results of enhancing images from a left and right stereo pair in order to increase the resolution of a 3D representation of a scene generated from that same pair. A new neural network structure known as a Self Delaying Dynamic Network (SDN) has been used to perform the enhancement. The advantage of SDNs over existing techniques such as bicubic interpolation is their ability to cope with motion and noise effects. SDNs are used to generate two high resolution images, one based on frames taken from the left view of the subject, and one based on the frames from the right. This new high resolution stereo pair is then processed by a disparity map generator. The disparity map generated is compared to two other disparity maps generated from the same scene. The first is a map generated from an original high resolution stereo pair and the second is a map generated using a stereo pair which has been enhanced using bicubic interpolation. The maps generated using the SDN enhanced pairs match more closely the target maps. The addition of extra noise into the input images is less problematic for the SDN system which is still able to out perform bicubic interpolation.

Keywords: Genetic Evolution, Image Enhancement, Neuron Networks, Stereo Vision

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Authors: A. Bahar Ganiyeva, M. Sabuhi Tanriverdiyev

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The article analyzes state support and policy mechanisms aimed at driving tourism as one of the vibrant and rapidly developing economies. State programs and long-range strategic roadmaps and previous programs execution, results and their impact on the particular countries economy have been raised during the research. This theme provides a useful framework for discussions with a wider range of stakeholders as the implications arising are of importance both for academics and practitioners engaged in hospitality and tourism development and research. The impact that tourism has on sustainable regional development in emerging markets is highly substantial. For Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia, and Russia, with their rich natural resources and cultural heritage, tourism can be an important basis for economic expansion, and a way to form an acceptable image of the countries as safe, open, hospitable, and complex.

Keywords: Sustainable tourism, hospitality, destination, strategic roadmap, tourism, economy, growth, state support, mechanism, policy formation, state program.

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Authors: Kamal Amarouche, Houda Benbrahim, Ismail Kassou

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Nowadays, e-commerce shopping websites have experienced noticeable growth. These websites have gained consumers’ trust. After purchasing a product, many consumers share comments where opinions are usually embedded about the given product. Research on the automatic management of opinions that gives suggestions to potential consumers and portrays an image of the product to manufactures has been growing recently. After launching the product in the market, the reviews generated around it do not usually contain helpful information or generic opinions about this product (e.g. telephone: great phone...); in the sense that the product is still in the launching phase in the market. Within time, the product becomes old. Therefore, consumers perceive the advantages/ disadvantages about each specific product feature. Therefore, they will generate comments that contain their sentiments about these features. In this paper, we present an unsupervised method to extract different product features hidden in the opinions which influence its purchase, and that combines Time Weighting (TW) which depends on the time opinions were expressed with Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF). We conduct several experiments using two different datasets about cell phones and hotels. The results show the effectiveness of our automatic feature extraction, as well as its domain independent characteristic.

Keywords: Opinion mining, product feature extraction, sentiment analysis, SentiWordNet.

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Authors: Fattah Alizadeh, Saeed Nalousi, Chiman Savari

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Because of increasing demands for security in today-s society and also due to paying much more attention to machine vision, biometric researches, pattern recognition and data retrieval in color images, face detection has got more application. In this article we present a scientific approach for modeling human skin color, and also offer an algorithm that tries to detect faces within color images by combination of skin features and determined threshold in the model. Proposed model is based on statistical data in different color spaces. Offered algorithm, using some specified color threshold, first, divides image pixels into two groups: skin pixel group and non-skin pixel group and then based on some geometric features of face decides which area belongs to face. Two main results that we received from this research are as follow: first, proposed model can be applied easily on different databases and color spaces to establish proper threshold. Second, our algorithm can adapt itself with runtime condition and its results demonstrate desirable progress in comparison with similar cases.

Keywords: face detection, skin color modeling, color, colorfulimages, face recognition.

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Authors: Mallikarjuna Rao Gundavarapu, Ch. Mallikarjuna Rao, K. Anuradha Bai

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Real Time Video Tracking is a challenging task for computing professionals. The performance of video tracking techniques is greatly affected by background detection and elimination process. Local regions of the image frame contain vital information of background and foreground. However, pixel-level processing of local regions consumes a good amount of computational time and memory space by traditional approaches. In our approach we have explored the concurrent computational ability of General Purpose Graphic Processing Units (GPGPU) to address this problem. The Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) with adaptive weighted kernels is used for detecting the background. The weights of the kernel are influenced by local regions and are updated by inter-frame variations of these corresponding regions. The proposed system has been tested with GPU devices such as GeForce GTX 280, GeForce GTX 280 and Quadro K2000. The results are encouraging with maximum speed up 10X compared to sequential approach.

Keywords: Connected components, Embrace threads, Local weighted kernel, Structuring element.

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Authors: Mahmoud Elmezain, Samar El-shinawy

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Many approaches to pattern recognition are founded on probability theory, and can be broadly characterized as either generative or discriminative according to whether or not the distribution of the image features. Generative and discriminative models have very different characteristics, as well as complementary strengths and weaknesses. In this paper, we study these models to recognize the patterns of alphabet characters (A-Z) and numbers (0-9). To handle isolated pattern, generative model as Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and discriminative models like Conditional Random Field (CRF), Hidden Conditional Random Field (HCRF) and Latent-Dynamic Conditional Random Field (LDCRF) with different number of window size are applied on extracted pattern features. The gesture recognition rate is improved initially as the window size increase, but degrades as window size increase further. Experimental results show that the LDCRF is the best in terms of results than CRF, HCRF and HMM at window size equal 4. Additionally, our results show that; an overall recognition rates are 91.52%, 95.28%, 96.94% and 98.05% for CRF, HCRF, HMM and LDCRF respectively.

Keywords: Statistical Pattern Recognition, Generative Model, Discriminative Model, Human Computer Interaction.

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Authors: Hyun-Koo Kim, Sagong Kuk, MinKwan Kim, Ho-Youl Jung

Abstract:

This paper presents an effective method for detecting vehicles in front of the camera-assisted car during nighttime driving. The proposed method detects vehicles based on detecting vehicle headlights and taillights using techniques of image segmentation and clustering. First, to effectively extract spotlight of interest, a segmentation process based on automatic multi-level threshold method is applied on the road-scene images. Second, to spatial clustering vehicle of detecting lamps, a grouping process based on light tracking and locating vehicle lighting patterns. For simulation, we are implemented through Da-vinci 7437 DSP board with near infrared mono-camera and tested it in the urban and rural roads. Through the test, classification performances are above 97% of true positive rate evaluated on real-time environment. Our method also has good performance in the case of clear, fog and rain weather.

Keywords: Assistance Driving System, Multi-level Threshold Method, Near Infrared Mono Camera, Nighttime Vehicle Detection.

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Authors: Rujijan Vichivanives, Kittiya Poonsilp, Canasanan Wanavijit

Abstract:

This research aims to create mobile tools to analyze rice disease quickly and easily. The principle of object-oriented software engineering and objective-C language were used for software development methodology and the principle of decision tree technique was used for analysis method. Application users can select the features of rice disease or the color appears on the rice leaves for recognition analysis results on iOS mobile screen. After completing the software development, unit testing and integrating testing method were used to check for program validity. In addition, three plant experts and forty farmers have been assessed for usability and benefit of this system. The overall of users’ satisfaction was found in a good level, 57%. The plant experts give a comment on the addition of various disease symptoms in the database for more precise results of the analysis. For further research, it is suggested that image processing system should be developed as a tool that allows users search and analyze for rice diseases more convenient with great accuracy.

Keywords: Rice disease, analysis system, mobile application, iOS operating system.

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Authors: Lars Steiner, Zahra Ahmadi

Abstract:

Public housing is a vital factor in community development. Successful city, housing and eco system regeneration design is essential in providing positive community development. This concerns work places, nice dwellings, providing premises for child care, care of the elderly, providing qualitative premises for different kinds of commercial service, providing a nice built environment and housing areas and not the least activating tenants. The public housing companies give value to society by stimulating people, renovating socially and economically sustainable as well as being partners to local business and authorities. By their activities the housing companies contribute to sustainable local and regional growth and the identity and reputation of cities. A Social, Economic and Ecological Reputation Effect (SEERE) model for actions to promote housing and community reputation is presented. The model emphasizes regenerative actions to restore natural eco systems as part of housing renewal strategies and to strengthen municipality reputation.

Keywords: Community Development, Image and Reputation, Public Housing, Renewal Strategies.

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Authors: Vishal Awasthi, Atul Kumar Agnihotri

Abstract:

Face is a non-intrusive strong biometrics for identification of original and dummy facial by different artificial means. Face recognition is extremely important in the contexts of computer vision, psychology, surveillance, pattern recognition, neural network, content based video processing. The availability of a widespread face database is crucial to test the performance of these face recognition algorithms. The openly available face databases include face images with a wide range of poses, illumination, gestures and face occlusions but there is no dummy face database accessible in public domain. This paper presents a face detection algorithm based on the image segmentation in terms of distance from a fixed point and template matching methods. This proposed work is having the most appropriate number of nodal points resulting in most appropriate outcomes in terms of face recognition and detection. The time taken to identify and extract distinctive facial features is improved in the range of 90 to 110 sec. with the increment of efficiency by 3%.

Keywords: Face recognition, Principal Component Analysis, PCA, Linear Discriminant Analysis, LDA, Improved Support Vector Machine, iSVM, elastic bunch mapping technique.

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Authors: Mohammed M. Siddeq, Mohammed H. Rasheed, Omar M. Salih, Marcos A. Rodrigues

Abstract:

This research proposes a data encoding and decoding method based on the Matrix Minimization algorithm. This algorithm is applied to high-frequency coefficients for compression/encoding. The algorithm starts by converting every three coefficients to a single value; this is accomplished based on three different keys. The decoding/decompression uses a search method called QSS (Quick Sequential Search) Decoding Algorithm presented in this research based on the sequential search to recover the exact coefficients. In the next step, the decoded data are saved in an auxiliary array. The basic idea behind the auxiliary array is to save all possible decoded coefficients; this is because another algorithm, such as conventional sequential search, could retrieve encoded/compressed data independently from the proposed algorithm. The experimental results showed that our proposed decoding algorithm retrieves original data faster than conventional sequential search algorithms.

Keywords: Matrix Minimization Algorithm, Decoding Sequential Search Algorithm, image compression, Discrete Cosine Transform, Discrete Wavelet Transform.

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Authors: A. Taoufyq, B. Bakiz, A. Benlhachemi, L. Patout, D. V. Chokouadeua, F. Guinneton, G. Nolibe, A. Lyoussi, J-R. Gavarri

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The aim of this study was to investigate the photocatalytic activity of polycrystalline phases of bismuth tungstate of formula Bi2WO6. Polycrystalline samples were elaborated using a coprecipitation technique followed by a calcination process at different temperatures (300, 400, 600 and 900°C). The obtained polycrystalline phases have been characterized by X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Crystal cell parameters and cell volume depend on elaboration temperature. High-resolution electron microscopy images and image simulations, associated with X-ray diffraction data, allowed confirming the lattices and space groups Pca21. The photocatalytic activity of the as-prepared samples was studied by irradiating aqueous solutions of Rhodamine B, associated with Bi2WO6 additives having variable crystallite sizes. The photocatalytic activity of such bismuth tungstates increased as the crystallite sizes decreased. The high specific area of the photocatalytic particles obtained at 300°C seems to condition the degradation kinetics of RhB.

Keywords: Bismuth tungstate, crystallite sizes, electron microscopy, photocatalytic activity, X-ray diffraction.

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Authors: Aaminah Hassan

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Advertisements carry a great potential to influence our lives because they are crafted to meet particular ends. Stereotypical representation in advertisements is capable of forming unconscious attitudes among people towards any gender and their abilities. This study focuses on gender representation in Pakistani prime time advertisements. For this purpose, 13 advertisements were selected from three different categories of foods and beverages, cosmetics, cell phones and cellular networks from the prime time slots of one of the leading Pakistani entertainment channel, ‘Urdu 1’. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are carried out for range of variables like gender, age, roles, activities, setting, appearance and voice overs. The results revealed that gender representation in advertisements is stereotypical. Moreover, in few instances, the portrayal of women is not only culturally inappropriate but is demeaning to the image of women as well. Their bodily charm is used to promote products. Comparing different entertainment channels for their prime time advertisements and broadening the scope of this research will yield greater implications for the researchers who want to carry out the similar research. It is hoped that the current study would help in the promotion of media literacy among the viewers and media authorities in Pakistan.

Keywords: Advertisements, content analysis, gender, prime time.

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Authors: Zullina H. Shaari, Amzairi Amar, Abdul Mutalib Embong, Hezlina Hashim

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University websites are considered as one of the brand primary touch points for multiple stakeholders, but most of them did not have great designs to create favorable impressions. Some of the elements that web designers should carefully consider are the appearance, the content, the functionality, usability and search engine optimization. However, priority should be placed on website simplicity and negative space. In terms of content, previous research suggests that universities should include reputation, learning environment, graduate career prospects, image destination, cultural integration, and virtual tour on their websites. The study examines how top 200 world ranking science and technology-based universities present their brands online and whether the websites capture the content dimensions. Content analysis of the websites revealed that the top ranking universities captured these dimensions at varying degree. Besides, the UK-based university had better priority on website simplicity and negative space compared to the Malaysian-based university.

Keywords: Science and technology programs, top-ranked universities, online brands, university websites.

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Authors: Yiqin Lin, Wenbo Li

Abstract:

Dimensionality reduction and feature extraction are of crucial importance for achieving high efficiency in manipulating the high dimensional data. Two-dimensional discriminant locality preserving projection (2D-DLPP) and two-dimensional discriminant supervised LPP (2D-DSLPP) are two effective two-dimensional projection methods for dimensionality reduction and feature extraction of face image matrices. Since 2D-DLPP and 2D-DSLPP preserve the local structure information of the original data and exploit the discriminant information, they usually have good recognition performance. However, 2D-DLPP and 2D-DSLPP only employ single-sided projection, and thus the generated low dimensional data matrices have still many features. In this paper, by combining the discriminant supervised LPP with the bidirectional projection, we propose the bidirectional discriminant supervised LPP (BDSLPP). The left and right projection matrices for BDSLPP can be computed iteratively. Experimental results show that the proposed BDSLPP achieves higher recognition accuracy than 2D-DLPP, 2D-DSLPP, and bidirectional discriminant LPP (BDLPP).

Keywords: Face recognition, dimension reduction, locality preserving projection, discriminant information, bidirectional projection.

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Authors: Imran Ahmed, Muhammad Islam, Syed Inayat Ali Shah, Awais Adnan

Abstract:

The identification and classification of weeds are of major technical and economical importance in the agricultural industry. To automate these activities, like in shape, color and texture, weed control system is feasible. The goal of this paper is to build a real-time, machine vision weed control system that can detect weed locations. In order to accomplish this objective, a real-time robotic system is developed to identify and locate outdoor plants using machine vision technology and pattern recognition. The algorithm is developed to classify images into broad and narrow class for real-time selective herbicide application. The developed algorithm has been tested on weeds at various locations, which have shown that the algorithm to be very effectiveness in weed identification. Further the results show a very reliable performance on weeds under varying field conditions. The analysis of the results shows over 90 percent classification accuracy over 140 sample images (broad and narrow) with 70 samples from each category of weeds.

Keywords: Weed detection, Image Processing, real-timerecognition, Standard Deviation.

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