Abstract: Human pose estimation can be executed using Active Shape Models. The existing techniques for applying to human-body research using Active Shape Models, such as human detection, primarily take the form of silhouette of human body. This technique is not able to estimate accurately for human pose to concern two arms and legs, as the silhouette of human body represents the shape as out of round. To solve this problem, we applied the human body model as stick-figure, “skeleton". The skeleton model of human body can give consideration to various shapes of human pose. To obtain effective estimation result, we applied background subtraction and deformed matching algorithm of primary Active Shape Models in the fitting process. The images which were used to make the model were 600 human bodies, and the model has 17 landmark points which indicate body junction and key features of human pose. The maximum iteration for the fitting process was 30 times and the execution time was less than .03 sec.
Abstract: This paper presents a multi-objective model for addressing two main objectives in designing rural roads networks: minimization of user operation costs and maximization of population covered. As limited budgets often exist, a reasonable trade-off must be obtained in order to account for both cost and social benefits in this type of networks. For a real-world rural road network, the model is solved, where all non-dominated solutions were obtained. Afterwards, an analysis is made on the (possibly) most interesting solutions (the ones providing better trade-offs). This analysis, coupled with the knowledge of the real world scenario (typically provided by decision makers) provides a suitable method for the evaluation of road networks in rural areas of developing countries.
Abstract: With the exponentially increasing demand for
wireless communications the capacity of current cellular systems will
soon become incapable of handling the growing traffic. Since radio
frequencies are diminishing natural resources, there seems to be a
fundamental barrier to further capacity increase. The solution can be
found in smart antenna systems.
Smart or adaptive antenna arrays consist of an array of antenna
elements with signal processing capability, that optimize the
radiation and reception of a desired signal, dynamically. Smart
antennas can place nulls in the direction of interferers via adaptive
updating of weights linked to each antenna element. They thus cancel
out most of the co-channel interference resulting in better quality of
reception and lower dropped calls. Smart antennas can also track the
user within a cell via direction of arrival algorithms. This implies that
they are more advantageous than other antenna systems. This paper
focuses on few issues about the smart antennas in mobile radio
networks.
Abstract: This paper presents a rule-based text- to- speech
(TTS) Synthesis System for Standard Malay, namely SMaTTS. The
proposed system using sinusoidal method and some pre- recorded
wave files in generating speech for the system. The use of phone
database significantly decreases the amount of computer memory
space used, thus making the system very light and embeddable. The
overall system was comprised of two phases the Natural Language
Processing (NLP) that consisted of the high-level processing of text
analysis, phonetic analysis, text normalization and morphophonemic
module. The module was designed specially for SM to overcome
few problems in defining the rules for SM orthography system before
it can be passed to the DSP module. The second phase is the Digital
Signal Processing (DSP) which operated on the low-level process of
the speech waveform generation. A developed an intelligible and
adequately natural sounding formant-based speech synthesis system
with a light and user-friendly Graphical User Interface (GUI) is
introduced. A Standard Malay Language (SM) phoneme set and an
inclusive set of phone database have been constructed carefully for
this phone-based speech synthesizer. By applying the generative
phonology, a comprehensive letter-to-sound (LTS) rules and a
pronunciation lexicon have been invented for SMaTTS. As for the
evaluation tests, a set of Diagnostic Rhyme Test (DRT) word list was
compiled and several experiments have been performed to evaluate
the quality of the synthesized speech by analyzing the Mean Opinion
Score (MOS) obtained. The overall performance of the system as
well as the room for improvements was thoroughly discussed.
Abstract: During 2011 and 2012 seasons, Zaghloul date palms received four sprays of silicon (Si) at 0.05 to 0.1% and selenium (Se) at 0.01 to 0.02%. Growth, nutritional status, yield as well as physical and chemical characteristics of the fruits in response to application of silicon and selenium were investigated. Single and combined applications of silicon at 0.05 to 0.1% and selenium at 0.01 to 0.02% was very effective in enhancing the leaf area, total chlorophylls, percentages of N, P and K in the leaves, yield, bunch weight as well as physical and chemical characteristics of the fruits in relative to the check treatment. Silicon was superior to selenium in this respect. Combined application was favorable than using each alone in this connection. Treating Zaghloul date palms four times with a mixture of silicon at 0.05% + selenium at 0.01% resulted in an economical yield and producing better fruit quality.
Abstract: The use of sewage sludge and effluents from
wastewater treatment plants for irrigation of agricultural lands is on
the rise particularly in peri-urban areas of developing countries.
The reuse of nutrients and organic matter in treated wastewater
and sewage sludge via land application is a desirable goal. However,
trace or heavy metals present in sludge pose the risk of human or
phytotoxicity from land application. Long-term use of sewage
sludge, heavy metals can accumulate to phytotoxic levels and results
in reduced plants growth and/or enhanced metal concentrations in
plants, which consumed by animals then enter the food chain. In this
research, the amount of heavy metals was measured in plants
irrigated with wastewater and sludge application. For this purpose,
three pilots were made in a Shush treatment plant in south of Tehran.
Three plants species, spinach, lettuce and radish were selected and
planted in the pilots.First pilot was irrigated just with wastewater of
treatment plant and second pilot was irrigated with wastewater and
sludge application .Third pilot was irrigated with simulated heavy
metals solution equal 50 years of irrigation. The results indicate that
the average of amount of heavy metals Pb, Cd in three plant species
in first pilot were lower than permissible limits .In second pilot,
Cadmium accumulations are high in three species plants and more
than the standard limits. Concentration of Cd , Pb have exceed their
permitted limits in plants in third pilot . It was concluded that the use
of wastewater and sludge application in agricultural lands enriched
soils with heavy metals to concentrations that may pose potential
environmental and health risks in the long-term.
Abstract: Linear convolutive filters are fast in calculation and in application, and thus, often used for real-time processing of continuous data streams. In the case of transient signals, a filter has not only to detect the presence of a specific waveform, but to estimate its arrival time as well. In this study, a measure is presented which indicates the performance of detectors in achieving both of these tasks simultaneously. Furthermore, a new sub-class of linear filters within the class of filters which minimize the quadratic response is proposed. The proposed filters are more flexible than the existing ones, like the adaptive matched filter or the minimum power distortionless response beamformer, and prove to be superior with respect to that measure in certain settings. Simulations of a real-time scenario confirm the advantage of these filters as well as the usefulness of the performance measure.
Abstract: The environmental performance of rapeseed oil (RO)
and rapeseed methyl ester(RME) from winter rape as fuels produced
in Romanian agroclimate is analyzed in this paper. The proposed
methodology is life cycle assessment (LCA) and takes into
consideration the influence of grain production and agroclimatic
conditions. This study shows favorable results first for RO and then
for RME. When compared to diesel fuel, both studied biofuels show
better results in the following impact categories: Abiotic depletion
potential (ADP), Ozone layer depletion (ODP) and Photochemical
ozone creation potential (POCP).Furthermore, the environmental
performance of the two biofuels studied can be improved by
changing the type of fertilizer used and also by using biofuels instead
of diesel in the field works.
Abstract: This paper describes a combined mathematicalgraphical
approach for optimum tool path planning in order to
improve machining efficiency. A methodology has been used that
stabilizes machining operations by adjusting material removal rate in
pocket milling operations while keeping cutting forces within limits.
This increases the life of cutting tool and reduces the risk of tool
breakage, machining vibration, and chatter. Case studies reveal the
fact that application of this approach could result in a slight increase
of machining time, however, a considerable reduction of tooling cost,
machining vibration, noise and chatter can be achieved in addition to
producing a better surface finish.
Abstract: In Secondary Surveillance Radar (SSR) systems, it is
more difficult to locate and recognise aircrafts in the neighbourhood of civil airports since aerial traffic becomes greater. Here, we propose to apply a recent Blind Source Separation (BSS) algorithm based
on Time-Frequency Analysis, in order to separate messages sent by different aircrafts and falling in the same radar beam in reception. The above source separation method involves joint-diagonalization
of a set of smoothed version of spatial Wigner-Ville distributions.
The technique makes use of the difference in the t-f signatures of the nonstationary sources to be separated. Consequently, as the SSR sources emit different messages at different frequencies, the above fitted to this new application. We applied the technique in simulation to separate SSR replies. Results are provided at the end
of the paper.
Abstract: This paper presents a computational study of the separated flow in a planer asymmetric diffuser. The steady RANS equations for turbulent incompressible fluid flow and six turbulence closures are used in the present study. The commercial software code, FLUENT 6.3.26, was used for solving the set of governing equations using various turbulence models. Five of the used turbulence models are available directly in the code while the v2-f turbulence model was implemented via User Defined Scalars (UDS) and User Defined Functions (UDF). A series of computational analysis is performed to assess the performance of turbulence models at different grid density. The results show that the standard k-ω, SST k-ω and v2-f models clearly performed better than other models when an adverse pressure gradient was present. The RSM model shows an acceptable agreement with the velocity and turbulent kinetic energy profiles but it failed to predict the location of separation and attachment points. The standard k-ε and the low-Re k- ε delivered very poor results.
Abstract: There is a world-wide need for the development of sustainable management strategies to control pest infestation and the development of phosphine (PH3) resistance in lesser grain borer (Rhyzopertha dominica). Computer simulation models can provide a relatively fast, safe and inexpensive way to weigh the merits of various management options. However, the usefulness of simulation models relies on the accurate estimation of important model parameters, such as mortality. Concentration and time of exposure are both important in determining mortality in response to a toxic agent. Recent research indicated the existence of two resistance phenotypes in R. dominica in Australia, weak and strong, and revealed that the presence of resistance alleles at two loci confers strong resistance, thus motivating the construction of a two-locus model of resistance. Experimental data sets on purified pest strains, each corresponding to a single genotype of our two-locus model, were also available. Hence it became possible to explicitly include mortalities of the different genotypes in the model. In this paper we described how we used two generalized linear models (GLM), probit and logistic models, to fit the available experimental data sets. We used a direct algebraic approach generalized inverse matrix technique, rather than the traditional maximum likelihood estimation, to estimate the model parameters. The results show that both probit and logistic models fit the data sets well but the former is much better in terms of small least squares (numerical) errors. Meanwhile, the generalized inverse matrix technique achieved similar accuracy results to those from the maximum likelihood estimation, but is less time consuming and computationally demanding.
Abstract: Recently many research has been conducted to
retrieve pertinent parameters and adequate models for automatic
music genre classification. In this paper, two measures based upon
information theory concepts are investigated for mapping the features
space to decision space. A Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) is used
as a baseline and reference system. Various strategies are proposed
for training and testing sessions with matched or mismatched
conditions, long training and long testing, long training and short
testing. For all experiments, the file sections used for testing are
never been used during training. With matched conditions all
examined measures yield the best and similar scores (almost 100%).
With mismatched conditions, the proposed measures yield better
scores than the GMM baseline system, especially for the short testing
case. It is also observed that the average discrimination information
measure is most appropriate for music category classifications and on
the other hand the divergence measure is more suitable for music
subcategory classifications.
Abstract: It-s difficult for China-s current land transfer
institutions limited to county-wide to solve the contradiction between
urban-rural development and construction land shortage. On the basis of analyzing China-s construction land transfer system, and evaluation
toward Transfer of development rights (TDR) practices in Anhui and
Chongqing, the passage proposes: (1) we should establish a multi-level
land indicators trade market under the guidance of regional spatial
objectives, and allow land transfer paid across cities and counties
within a specific area following the regulation of both government and
market; (2) it would be better to combine organically the policy ntentions of land plan, regional plan, urban plan and economic plan, and link them with land indicators transfer to promote a wider range of
urban-rural balance and regional coordination.
Abstract: Culture and family structure provide a sense security.
Further, the chrono, macro and micro contexts of development
influence developmental transitions and timetable particularly owing
to variations in the macrosystem associated with non normative life
events like migration. Migration threatens family links, security and
attachment bonds. Rising migratory trends have prompted an
increased interest in migration consequences on familial bonds,
developmental autonomy, socialization process, and sense of
security. This paper takes a narrative approach and applies the
attachment paradigm from a lifespan perspective, to examine the
settlement experiences of an India-born migrant student in Sydney,
Australia. It focuses on her quest to preserve family ties; her remote
secure base; her continual struggle to balance dependency and
autonomy, a major developmental milestone. As positional parental
power is culturally more potent in the Indian society, the paper
therefore raises some important concerns related to cultural
expectations, adaptation, acculturative stress and sense of security.
Abstract: The InAlGaN alloy has only recently began receiving
serious attention into its growth and application. High quality InGaN
films have led to the development of light emitting diodes (LEDs) and
blue laser diodes (LDs). The quaternary InAlGaN however, represents
a more versatile material since the bandgap and lattice constant can be
independently varied. We report an ultraviolet (UV) quaternary
InAlGaN multi-quantum wells (MQWs) LD study by using the
simulation program of Integrated System Engineering (ISE TCAD).
Advanced physical models of semiconductor properties were used in
order to obtain an optimized structure. The device performance which
is affected by piezoelectric and thermal effects was studied via
drift-diffusion model for carrier transport, optical gain and loss. The
optical performance of the UV LD with different numbers of quantum
wells was numerically investigated. The main peak of the emission
wavelength for double quantum wells (DQWs) was shifted from 358
to 355.8 nm when the forward current was increased. Preliminary
simulated results indicated that better output performance and lower
threshold current could be obtained when the quantum number is four,
with output power of 130 mW and threshold current of 140 mA.
Abstract: Linear two-point boundary value problem of order two is solved using extended cubic B-spline interpolation method. There is one free parameters, λ, that control the tension of the solution curve. For some λ, this method produced better results than cubic B-spline interpolation method.
Abstract: For a variety of safety and economic reasons, engineering undergraduates in Australia have experienced diminishing access to the real hardware that is typically the embodiment of their theoretical studies. This trend will delay the development of practical competence, decrease the ability to model and design, and suppress motivation. The author has attempted to address this concern by creating a software tool that contains both photographic images of real machinery, and sets of graphical modeling 'tools'. Academics from a range of disciplines can use the software to set tutorial tasks, and incorporate feedback comments for a range of student responses. An evaluation of the software demonstrated that students who had solved modeling problems with the aid of the electronic tutor performed significantly better in formal examinations with similar problems. The 2-D graphical diagnostic routines in the Tutor have the potential to be used in a wider range of problem-solving tasks.
Abstract: In recent years, “Bottom-up Planning Approach" has been widely accepted and expanded from planning theorists. Citizen participation becomes more important in decision-making in informal settlements. Many of previous projects and strategies due to ignorance of citizen participation, have been failed facing with informal settlements and in some cases lead physical expansion of these neighbourhoods. According to recent experiences, the new participatory approach was in somehow successful. This paper focuses on local experiences in Iran. A considerable amount of people live in informal settlements in Iran. With the previous methods, the government could not solve the problems of these settlements. It is time to examine new methods such as empowerment of the local citizens and involve them to solve the current physical, social, and economic problems. The paper aims to address the previous and new strategies facing with informal settlements, the conditions under which citizens could be involved in planning process, limits and potentials of this process, the main actors and issues and finally motivations that are able to promote citizen participation. Documentary studies, observation, interview and questionnaire have been used to achieve the above mentioned objectives. Nearly 80 percent of responder in Saadi Community are ready to participate in regularising their neighbourhoods, if pre-conditions of citizen involvement are being provided. These pre-conditions include kind of problem and its severity, the importance of issue, existence of a short-term solution, etc. Moreover, confirmation of dweller-s ownership can promote the citizen engagement in participatory projects.
Abstract: In this paper, the babbitting of a bearing in boiler feed pump of an electromotor has been studied. These bearings have an important role in reducing the shut down times in the pumps, compressors and turbines. The most conventional method in babbitting is casting as a melting method. The comparison between thermal spray and casting methods in babbitting shows that the thermal spraying babbitt layer has better performance and tribological behavior. The metallurgical and tribological analysis such as SEM, EDS and wet chemical analysis has been made in the Babbitt alloys and worn surfaces. Two type of babbitt materials: tinbase and lead-base babbitt was used. The benefits of thermally sprayed babbitt layers are completely clear especially in large bearings.