Investigation of New Gait Representations for Improving Gait Recognition

This study presents new gait representations for improving gait recognition accuracy on cross gait appearances, such as normal walking, wearing a coat and carrying a bag. Based on the Gait Energy Image (GEI), two ideas are implemented to generate new gait representations. One is to append lower knee regions to the original GEI, and the other is to apply convolutional operations to the GEI and its variants. A set of new gait representations are created and used for training multi-class Support Vector Machines (SVMs). Tests are conducted on the CASIA dataset B. Various combinations of the gait representations with different convolutional kernel size and different numbers of kernels used in the convolutional processes are examined. Both the entire images as features and reduced dimensional features by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) are tested in gait recognition. Interestingly, both new techniques, appending the lower knee regions to the original GEI and convolutional GEI, can significantly contribute to the performance improvement in the gait recognition. The experimental results have shown that the average recognition rate can be improved from 75.65% to 87.50%.

Benchmarking Role in Internal Supply Chain Management of Indian Manufacturing Industries

Due to day by day competition in the market, the implementation of benchmarking practice is necessary for improving existing internal supply chain management performance of manufacturing industries. The continuous benchmarking practice might be helpful to increase the productivity of middle scale medium enterprises (MSMEs) by reducing the idle time during the flow of raw material/products, funds and information. The objective of this research paper is to provide an overview of benchmarking, benchmarking wheel, benchmarking tool and techniques and its importance through literature review of reputed journals. This concept of benchmarking may be fruitful in the process of gap identification and for improving the performance of internal supply chain management of Indian manufacturing industries.

Dry Matter, Moisture, Ash and Crude Fibre Content in Distinct Segments of ‘Durian Kampung’ Husk

An environmental friendly approach for disposal of voluminous durian husk waste could be implemented by substituting them into various valuable commodities, such as healthcare and biofuel products. Thus, the study of composition value in each segment of durian husk was very crucial to determine the suitable proportions of nutrients that need to be added and mixed in the product. A total of 12 ‘Durian Kampung’ fruits from Sg Ruan, Pahang were selected and each fruit husk was divided into four segments and labelled as P-L (thin neck area of white inner husk), P-B (thick bottom area of white inner husk), H (green and thorny outer husk) and W (whole combination of P-B and H). Four experiments have been carried out to determine the dry matter, moisture, ash and crude fibre content. The results show that the H segment has the highest dry matter content (30.47%), while the P-B segment has the highest percentage in moisture (81.83%) and ash (6.95%) content. It was calculated that the ash content of the P-B segment has a higher rate of moisture level which causes the ash content to increase about 2.89% from the P-L segment. These data have proven that each segment of durian husk has a significant difference in terms of composition value, which might be useful information to fully utilize every part of the durian husk in the future.

Social Capital in Housing Reconstruction Post Disaster Case of Yogyakarta Post Earthquake

This paper will focus on the concept of social capital for especially housing reconstruction Post Disaster. The context of the study is Indonesia and Yogyakarta Post Earthquake 2006 as a case, but it is expected that the concept can be adopted in general post disaster reconstruction. The discussion will begin by addressing issues on House Reconstruction Post Disaster in Indonesia and Yogyakarta; defining Social Capital as a concept for effective management capacity based on community; Social Capital Post Java Earthquake utilizing Gotong Royong—community mutual self-help, and Approach and Strategy towards Community-based Reconstruction.

Enabling the Physical Elements of a Pedestrian Friendly District around a Rail Station for Supporting Transit Oriented Development

Rail-station area development that is based on the concept of TOD (Transit Oriented Development) is principally oriented to pedestrian accessibility for daily mobility. The aim of this research is elaborating how far the existing physical elements of a rail-station district could facilitate pedestrian mobility and establish a pedestrian friendly district toward implementation of a TOD concept. This research was conducted through some steps: (i) mapping the rail-station area pedestrian sidewalk and pedestrian network as well as activity nodes and transit nodes, (ii) assessing the level of pedestrian sidewalk connectivity joining trip origin and destination. The research area coverage in this case is limited to walking distance of the rail station (around 500 meters or 10-15 minutes walking). The findings of this research on the current condition of the street and pedestrian sidewalk network and connectivity, show good preference for the foot modal share (more than 50%) is achieved. Nevertheless, it depends on the distance from the trip origin to destination.

Study of the S-Bend Intake Hammershock Based on Improved Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation

Numerical investigation of hammershock propagation in the S-bend intake caused by engine surge has been conducted by using Improved Delayed Detach-Eddy Simulation (IDDES). The effects of surge signatures on hammershock characteristics are obtained. It was shown that once the hammershock is produced, it moves upward to the intake entrance quickly with constant speed, however, the strength of hammershock keeps increasing. Meanwhile, being influenced by the centrifugal force, the hammershock strength on the larger radius side is much larger. Hammershock propagation speed and strength are sensitive to the ramp upgradient of surge signature. A larger ramp up gradient results in higher propagation speed and greater strength. Nevertheless, ramp down profile of surge signature have no obvious effect on the propagation speed and strength of hammershock. Increasing the maximum value of surge signature leads to enhance in the intensity of hammershock, they approximately match quadratic function distribution law.

An Efficient Stud Krill Herd Framework for Solving Non-Convex Economic Dispatch Problem

The problem of economic dispatch (ED) is the basic problem of power framework, its main goal is to find the most favorable generation dispatch to generate each unit, reduce the whole power generation cost, and meet all system limitations. A heuristic algorithm, recently developed called Stud Krill Herd (SKH), has been employed in this paper to treat non-convex ED problems. The proposed KH has been modified using Stud selection and crossover (SSC) operator, to enhance the solution quality and avoid local optima. We are demonstrated SKH effects in two case study systems composed of 13-unit and 40-unit test systems to verify its performance and applicability in solving the ED problems. In the above systems, SKH can successfully obtain the best fuel generator and distribute the load requirements for the online generators. The results showed that the use of the proposed SKH method could reduce the total cost of generation and optimize the fulfillment of the load requirements.

The Inhibition of Relapse of Orthodontic Tooth Movement by NaF Administration in Expressions of TGF-β1, Runx2, Alkaline Phosphatase and Microscopic Appearance of Woven Bone

The prevalence of post-treatment relapse in orthodontics in the community is high enough; therefore, relapses in orthodontic treatment must be prevented well. The aim of this study is to experimentally test the inhibition of relapse of orthodontics tooth movement in NaF of expression TGF-β1, Runx2, alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and microscopic of woven bone. The research method used was experimental laboratory research involving 30 rats, which were divided into three groups. Group A: rats were not given orthodontic tooth movement and without NaF. Group B: rats were given orthodontic tooth movement and without 11.5 ppm by topical application. Group C: rats were given orthodontic tooth movement and 11.75 ppm by topical application. Orthodontic tooth movement was conducted by applying ligature wires of 0.02 mm in diameter on the molar-1 (M-1) of left permanent maxilla and left insisivus of maxilla. Immunohistochemical examination was conducted to calculate the number of osteoblast to determine TGF β1, Runx2, ALP and haematoxylin to determine woven bone on day 7 and day 14. Results: It was shown that administrations of Natrium Fluoride topical application proved effective to increase the expression of TGF-β1, Runx2, ALP and to increase woven bone in the tension area greater than administration without natrium fluoride topical application (p < 0.05), except the expression of ALP on day 7 and day 14 which was significant. The results of the study show that NaF significantly increases the expressions of TGF-β1, Runx2, ALP and woven bone. The expression of the variables enhanced on day 7 compared on that on day 14, except ALP. Thus, it can be said that the acceleration of woven bone occurs on day 7.

Research and Application of Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems Wireless Communications Standards for Spacecraft

According to the new requirements of the future spacecraft, such as networking, modularization and non-cable, this paper studies the CCSDS wireless communications standards, and focuses on the low data-rate wireless communications for spacecraft monitoring and control. The application fields and advantages of wireless communications are analyzed. Wireless communications technology has significant advantages in reducing the weight of the spacecraft, saving time in spacecraft integration, etc. Based on this technology, a scheme for spacecraft data system is put forward. The corresponding block diagram and key wireless interface design of the spacecraft data system are given. The design proposal of the wireless node and information flow of the spacecraft are also analyzed. The results show that the wireless communications scheme is reasonable and feasible. The wireless communications technology can meet the future spacecraft demands in networking, modularization and non-cable.

Evaluation of Classification Algorithms for Road Environment Detection

The road environment information is needed accurately for applications such as road maintenance and virtual 3D city modeling. Mobile laser scanning (MLS) produces dense point clouds from huge areas efficiently from which the road and its environment can be modeled in detail. Objects such as buildings, cars and trees are an important part of road environments. Different methods have been developed for detection of above such objects, but still there is a lack of accuracy due to the problems of illumination, environmental changes, and multiple objects with same features. In this work the comparison between different classifiers such as Multiclass SVM, kNN and Multiclass LDA for the road environment detection is analyzed. Finally the classification accuracy for kNN with LBP feature improved the classification accuracy as 93.3% than the other classifiers.

An Optimization Modelling to Evaluate Flights Scheduling at Tourist Airports

Airport’s serving a tourist destination are an essential counterpart of the tourist demand supply chain, and their productivity is related to the region’s attractiveness and is enhanced by the air transport business. In this paper, the evaluation framework of the scheduled flights between two tourist airports is taken into consideration. By adopting a systemic approach, the arrivals from an airport that its connectivity heavily depended on the departures of another major airport are reviewed. The methodology framework, based on inventory control theory and the numerical example, promotes the use of the modelling formulation. The results would be essential for comparison and exercising to other similar cases.

An Improved C-Means Model for MRI Segmentation

Medical images are important to help identifying different diseases, for example, Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can be used to investigate the brain, spinal cord, bones, joints, breasts, blood vessels, and heart. Image segmentation, in medical image analysis, is usually the first step to find out some characteristics with similar color, intensity or texture so that the diagnosis could be further carried out based on these features. This paper introduces an improved C-means model to segment the MRI images. The model is based on information entropy to evaluate the segmentation results by achieving global optimization. Several contributions are significant. Firstly, Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used for achieving global optimization in this model where fuzzy C-means clustering algorithm (FCMA) is not capable of doing that. Secondly, the information entropy after segmentation is used for measuring the effectiveness of MRI image processing. Experimental results show the outperformance of the proposed model by comparing with traditional approaches.

Minimizing the Drilling-Induced Damage in Fiber Reinforced Polymeric Composites

Fiber reinforced polymeric (FRP) composites are finding wide-spread industrial applications because of their exceptionally high specific strength and specific modulus of elasticity. Nevertheless, it is very seldom to get ready-for-use components or products made of FRP composites. Secondary processing by machining, particularly drilling, is almost always required to make holes for fastening components together to produce assemblies. That creates problems since the FRP composites are neither homogeneous nor isotropic. Some of the problems that are encountered include the subsequent damage in the region around the drilled hole and the drilling – induced delamination of the layer of ply, that occurs both at the entrance and the exit planes of the work piece. Evidently, the functionality of the work piece would be detrimentally affected. The current work was carried out with the aim of eliminating or at least minimizing the work piece damage associated with drilling of FPR composites. Each test specimen involves a woven reinforced graphite fiber/epoxy composite having a thickness of 12.5 mm (0.5 inch). A large number of test specimens were subjected to drilling operations with different combinations of feed rates and cutting speeds. The drilling induced damage was taken as the absolute value of the difference between the drilled hole diameter and the nominal one taken as a percentage of the nominal diameter. The later was determined for each combination of feed rate and cutting speed, and a matrix comprising those values was established, where the columns indicate varying feed rate while and rows indicate varying cutting speeds. Next, the analysis of variance (ANOVA) approach was employed using Minitab software, in order to obtain the combination that would improve the drilling induced damage. Experimental results show that low feed rates coupled with low cutting speeds yielded the best results.

Speech Enhancement Using Wavelet Coefficients Masking with Local Binary Patterns

In this paper, we present a wavelet coefficients masking based on Local Binary Patterns (WLBP) approach to enhance the temporal spectra of the wavelet coefficients for speech enhancement. This technique exploits the wavelet denoising scheme, which splits the degraded speech into pyramidal subband components and extracts frequency information without losing temporal information. Speech enhancement in each high-frequency subband is performed by binary labels through the local binary pattern masking that encodes the ratio between the original value of each coefficient and the values of the neighbour coefficients. This approach enhances the high-frequency spectra of the wavelet transform instead of eliminating them through a threshold. A comparative analysis is carried out with conventional speech enhancement algorithms, demonstrating that the proposed technique achieves significant improvements in terms of PESQ, an international recommendation of objective measure for estimating subjective speech quality. Informal listening tests also show that the proposed method in an acoustic context improves the quality of speech, avoiding the annoying musical noise present in other speech enhancement techniques. Experimental results obtained with a DNN based speech recognizer in noisy environments corroborate the superiority of the proposed scheme in the robust speech recognition scenario.

Animation of Objects on the Website by Application of CSS3 Language

Scientific work analytically explores and demonstrates techniques that can animate objects and geometric characters using CSS3 language by applying proper formatting and positioning of elements. This paper presents examples of optimum application of the CSS3 descriptive language when generating general web animations (e.g., billiards and movement of geometric characters, etc.). The paper presents analytically, the optimal development and animation design with the frames within which the animated objects are. The originally developed content is based on the upgrading of existing CSS3 descriptive language animations with more complex syntax and project-oriented work. The purpose of the developed animations is to provide an overview of the interactive features of CSS3 descriptive language design for computer games and the animation of important analytical data based on the web view. It has been analytically demonstrated that CSS3 as a descriptive language allows inserting of various multimedia elements into websites for public and internal sites.

Effect of Three Drying Methods on Antioxidant Efficiency and Vitamin C Content of Moringa oleifera Leaf Extract

Moringa oleifera is a plant containing many nutrients that are mostly concentrated within the leaves. Commonly, the separation process of these nutrients involves solid-liquid extraction followed by evaporation and drying to obtain a concentrated extract, which is rich in proteins, vitamins, carbohydrates, and other essential nutrients that can be used in the food industry. In this work, three drying methods were used, which involved very different temperature and pressure conditions, to evaluate the effect of each method on the vitamin C content and the antioxidant efficiency of the extracts. Solid-liquid extractions of Moringa leaf (LE) were carried out by employing an ethanol solution (35% v/v) at 50 °C for 2 hours. The resulting extracts were then dried i) in a convective oven (CO) at 100 °C and at an atmospheric pressure of 750 mbar for 8 hours, ii) in a vacuum evaporator (VE) at 50 °C and at 300 mbar for 2 hours, and iii) in a freeze-drier (FD) at -40 °C and at 0.050 mbar for 36 hours. The antioxidant capacity (EC50, mg solids/g DPPH) of the dry solids was calculated by the free radical inhibition method employing DPPH˙ at 517 nm, resulting in a value of 2902.5 ± 14.8 for LE, 3433.1 ± 85.2 for FD, 3980.1 ± 37.2 for VE, and 8123.5 ± 263.3 for CO. The calculated antioxidant efficiency (AE, g DPPH/(mg solids·min)) was 2.920 × 10-5 for LE, 2.884 × 10-5 for FD, 2.512 × 10-5 for VE, and 1.009 × 10-5 for CO. Further, the content of vitamin C (mg/L) determined by HPLC was 59.0 ± 0.3 for LE, 49.7 ± 0.6 for FD, 45.0 ± 0.4 for VE, and 23.6 ± 0.7 for CO. The results indicate that the convective drying preserves vitamin C and antioxidant efficiency to 40% and 34% of the initial value, respectively, while vacuum drying to 76% and 86%, and freeze-drying to 84% and 98%, respectively.

Analysis and Design of Offshore Triceratops under Ultra-Deep Waters

Offshore platforms for ultra-deep waters are form-dominant by design; hybrid systems with large flexibility in horizontal plane and high rigidity in vertical plane are preferred due to functional complexities. Offshore triceratops is relatively a new-generation offshore platform, whose deck is partially isolated from the supporting buoyant legs by ball joints. They allow transfer of partial displacements of buoyant legs to the deck but restrain transfer of rotational response. Buoyant legs are in turn taut-moored to the sea bed using pre-tension tethers. Present study will discuss detailed dynamic analysis and preliminary design of the chosen geometric, which is necessary as a proof of validation for such design applications. A detailed numeric analysis of triceratops at 2400 m water depth under random waves is presented. Preliminary design confirms member-level design requirements under various modes of failure. Tether configuration, proposed in the study confirms no pull-out of tethers as stress variation is comparatively lesser than the yield value. Presented study shall aid offshore engineers and contractors to understand suitability of triceratops, in terms of design and dynamic response behaviour.

Crashworthiness Optimization of an Automotive Front Bumper in Composite Material

In the last years, the crashworthiness of an automotive body structure can be improved, since the beginning of the design stage, thanks to the development of specific optimization tools. It is well known how the finite element codes can help the designer to investigate the crashing performance of structures under dynamic impact. Therefore, by coupling nonlinear mathematical programming procedure and statistical techniques with FE simulations, it is possible to optimize the design with reduced number of analytical evaluations. In engineering applications, many optimization methods which are based on statistical techniques and utilize estimated models, called meta-models, are quickly spreading. A meta-model is an approximation of a detailed simulation model based on a dataset of input, identified by the design of experiments (DOE); the number of simulations needed to build it depends on the number of variables. Among the various types of meta-modeling techniques, Kriging method seems to be excellent in accuracy, robustness and efficiency compared to other ones when applied to crashworthiness optimization. Therefore the application of such meta-model was used in this work, in order to improve the structural optimization of a bumper for a racing car in composite material subjected to frontal impact. The specific energy absorption represents the objective function to maximize and the geometrical parameters subjected to some design constraints are the design variables. LS-DYNA codes were interfaced with LS-OPT tool in order to find the optimized solution, through the use of a domain reduction strategy. With the use of the Kriging meta-model the crashworthiness characteristic of the composite bumper was improved.

A Review of the Characteristics and Optimization of Optical Properties of Zirconia Ceramics for Aesthetic Dental Restorations

The ceramic yttria-stabilized tetragonal zirconia polycrystal (Y-TZP) has been used as a dental biomaterial for several decades. The strength and toughness of this material can be accounted for by its toughening mechanisms, which include transformation toughening, crack deflection, zone shielding, contact shielding, and crack bridging. Prevention of crack propagation is of critical importance in high-fatigue situations, such as those encountered in mastication and para-function. However, the poor translucence of Y-TZP in polycrystalline form is such that it may not meet the aesthetic requirements due to its white/grey appearance. To improve the optical properties of Y-TZP, more detailed study of the optical properties is required; in particular, precise evaluation of the refractive index, absorption coefficient, and scattering coefficient are necessary. The measurement of the optical parameters has been based on the assumption that light scattered from biological media is isotropically distributed over all angles. In fact, the optical behavior of real biological materials depends on the angular scattering of light due to the anisotropic nature of the materials. The purpose of the present work is to evaluate the optical properties (including color, opacity/translucence, scattering, and fluorescence) of zirconia dental ceramics and their control through modification of the chemical composition, phase composition, and surface microstructure.

Scope of Internal Supply Chain Management Benchmarking in Indian Manufacturing Industries

Internal supply chain management benchmarking practice is necessary to overcome manufacturing industrial performance gap. The main purpose of this research work is to combine the benchmarking and internal supply chain practices to improve the performance of Indian manufacturing industries. In this paper, the main aim is to discuss the components of internal supply chain between suppliers and customers after that explain the scope of ISCM benchmarking in manufacturing industries.