A New Approach to Face Recognition Using Dual Dimension Reduction

In this paper a new approach to face recognition is presented that achieves double dimension reduction, making the system computationally efficient with better recognition results and out perform common DCT technique of face recognition. In pattern recognition techniques, discriminative information of image increases with increase in resolution to a certain extent, consequently face recognition results change with change in face image resolution and provide optimal results when arriving at a certain resolution level. In the proposed model of face recognition, initially image decimation algorithm is applied on face image for dimension reduction to a certain resolution level which provides best recognition results. Due to increased computational speed and feature extraction potential of Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT), it is applied on face image. A subset of coefficients of DCT from low to mid frequencies that represent the face adequately and provides best recognition results is retained. A tradeoff between decimation factor, number of DCT coefficients retained and recognition rate with minimum computation is obtained. Preprocessing of the image is carried out to increase its robustness against variations in poses and illumination level. This new model has been tested on different databases which include ORL , Yale and EME color database.

Impact of Metallic Furniture on UWB Channel Statistical Characteristics by BER

The bit error rate (BER) performance for ultra-wide band (UWB) indoor communication with impact of metallic furniture is investigated. The impulse responses of different indoor environments for any transmitter and receiver location are computed by shooting and bouncing ray/image and inverse Fourier transform techniques. By using the impulse responses of these multipath channels, the BER performance for binary pulse amplitude modulation (BPAM) impulse radio UWB communication system are calculated. Numerical results have shown that the multi-path effect by the metallic cabinets is an important factor for BER performance. Also the outage probability for the UWB multipath environment with metallic cabinets is more serious (about 18%) than with wooden cabinets. Finally, it is worth noting that in these cases the present work provides not only comparative information but also quantitative information on the performance reduction.

Some Solid Transportation Models with Crisp and Rough Costs

In this paper, some practical solid transportation models are formulated considering per trip capacity of each type of conveyances with crisp and rough unit transportation costs. This is applicable for the system in which full vehicles, e.g. trucks, rail coaches are to be booked for transportation of products so that transportation cost is determined on the full of the conveyances. The models with unit transportation costs as rough variables are transformed into deterministic forms using rough chance constrained programming with the help of trust measure. Numerical examples are provided to illustrate the proposed models in crisp environment as well as with unit transportation costs as rough variables.

Implementation of an On-Line PD Measurement System Using HFCT

In order to perform on-line measuring and detection of PD signals, a total solution composing of an HFCT, A/D converter and a complete software package is proposed. The software package includes compensation of HFCT contribution, filtering and noise reduction using wavelet transform and soft calibration routines. The results have shown good performance and high accuracy.

Thermal Modeling of Dry-Transformers and Estimating Temperature Rise

Temperature rise in a transformer depends on variety of parameters such as ambient temperature, output current and type of the core. Considering these parameters, temperature rise estimation is still complicated procedure. In this paper, we present a new model based on simple electrical equivalent circuit. This method avoids the complication associated to accurate estimation and is in very good agreement with practice.

A Simple Method for Tracing PV Curve of a Radial Transmission Line

Analytical expression for maximum power transfer through a transmission line limited by voltage stability has been formulated using exact representation of transmission line with ABCD parameters. The expression has been used for plotting PV curve at different power factors of a radial transmission line. Limiting values of reactive power have been obtained.

The Management in Large Emergency Situations – A Best Practise Case Study based on GIS for Management of Evacuation

In most of the cases, natural disasters lead to the necessity of evacuating people. The quality of evacuation management is dramatically improved by the use of information provided by decision support systems, which become indispensable in case of large scale evacuation operations. This paper presents a best practice case study. In November 2007, officers from the Emergency Situations Inspectorate “Crisana" of Bihor County from Romania participated to a cross-border evacuation exercise, when 700 people have been evacuated from Netherlands to Belgium. One of the main objectives of the exercise was the test of four different decision support systems. Afterwards, based on that experience, software system called TEVAC (Trans Border Evacuation) has been developed “in house" by the experts of this institution. This original software system was successfully tested in September 2008, during the deployment of the international exercise EU-HUROMEX 2008, the scenario involving real evacuation of 200 persons from Hungary to Romania. Based on the lessons learned and results, starting from April 2009, the TEVAC software is used by all Emergency Situations Inspectorates all over Romania.

Performance Analysis of HSDPA Systems using Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC)Coding as Compared to Turbo Coding

HSDPA is a new feature which is introduced in Release-5 specifications of the 3GPP WCDMA/UTRA standard to realize higher speed data rate together with lower round-trip times. Moreover, the HSDPA concept offers outstanding improvement of packet throughput and also significantly reduces the packet call transfer delay as compared to Release -99 DSCH. Till now the HSDPA system uses turbo coding which is the best coding technique to achieve the Shannon limit. However, the main drawbacks of turbo coding are high decoding complexity and high latency which makes it unsuitable for some applications like satellite communications, since the transmission distance itself introduces latency due to limited speed of light. Hence in this paper it is proposed to use LDPC coding in place of Turbo coding for HSDPA system which decreases the latency and decoding complexity. But LDPC coding increases the Encoding complexity. Though the complexity of transmitter increases at NodeB, the End user is at an advantage in terms of receiver complexity and Bit- error rate. In this paper LDPC Encoder is implemented using “sparse parity check matrix" H to generate a codeword at Encoder and “Belief Propagation algorithm "for LDPC decoding .Simulation results shows that in LDPC coding the BER suddenly drops as the number of iterations increase with a small increase in Eb/No. Which is not possible in Turbo coding. Also same BER was achieved using less number of iterations and hence the latency and receiver complexity has decreased for LDPC coding. HSDPA increases the downlink data rate within a cell to a theoretical maximum of 14Mbps, with 2Mbps on the uplink. The changes that HSDPA enables includes better quality, more reliable and more robust data services. In other words, while realistic data rates are only a few Mbps, the actual quality and number of users achieved will improve significantly.

Web Personalization to Build Trust in E-Commerce: A Design Science Approach

With the development of the Internet, E-commerce is growing at an exponential rate, and lots of online stores are built up to sell their goods online. A major factor influencing the successful adoption of E-commerce is consumer-s trust. For new or unknown Internet business, consumers- lack of trust has been cited as a major barrier to its proliferation. As web sites provide key interface for consumer use of E-Commerce, we investigate the design of web site to build trust in E-Commerce from a design science approach. A conceptual model is proposed in this paper to describe the ontology of online transaction and human-computer interaction. Based on this conceptual model, we provide a personalized webpage design approach using Bayesian networks learning method. Experimental evaluation are designed to show the effectiveness of web personalization in improving consumer-s trust in new or unknown online store.

The Cinema in Turkey During 1940s

The cinema in Turkey during the 1940s was shaped under the Second World War conditions. The amateur film makers from different socioeconomic roots experienced movie production in those years. Having similar socioeconomic characteristics and autobiographies, each of them has a different understanding of cinema. Nevertheless, they joined in making movies which address native culture and audience. They narrated indigenous stories with native music, amateur players and simple settings. Although the martial law, censorship and economical deficiencies, they started to produce films in the Second World War. The cinematographers of the 1940s usually called as thetransition period cinematographers in Turkey, producing in the passage between the period of thetheatre playersand the period of thenational cinema. But, 1940- 1950 period of Turkish cinema should be defined not as a transition but a period of forming the professional conscioussness in cinema.

Effect of Sintering Temperature Curve in Wick Manufactured for Loop Heat Pipe

This investigation examines the effect of the sintering temperature curve in manufactured nickel powder capillary structure (wick) for a loop heat pipe (LHP). The sintering temperature curve is composed of a region of increasing temperature; a region of constant temperature and a region of declining temperature. The most important region is that in which the temperature increases, as an index in the stage in which the temperature increases. The wick of nickel powder is manufactured in the stage of fixed sintering temperature and the time between the stage of constant temperature and the stage of falling temperature. When the slope of the curve in the region of increasing temperature is unity (equivalent to 10 °C/min), the structure of the wick is complete and the heat transfer performance is optimal. The result of experiment test demonstrates that the heat transfer performance is optimal at 320W; the minimal total thermal resistance is approximately 0.18°C/W, and the heat flux is 17W/cm2; the internal parameters of the wick are an effective pore radius of 3.1 μm, a permeability of 3.25×10-13m2 and a porosity of 71%.

Bowden Cable Based Powered Ball and Socket Wrist Actuator

A 2-Degrees of freedom powered prosthetic wrist actuator has been proposed that can provide the Abduction/Adduction & Flexion/Extension movements of the human wrist. The basic structure of the actuator is a Ball and Socket joint and the force is transmitted from the DC geared servo motors to the joint through the Bowden cables. The proposed design is capable of providing the required DOF in both axes i.e. 85° & 90° in flexion extension axis. The size and weight of the actuator lies within the ranges of an average human being-s wrist.

Conventional and PSO Based Approaches for Model Reduction of SISO Discrete Systems

Reduction of Single Input Single Output (SISO) discrete systems into lower order model, using a conventional and an evolutionary technique is presented in this paper. In the conventional technique, the mixed advantages of Modified Cauer Form (MCF) and differentiation are used. In this method the original discrete system is, first, converted into equivalent continuous system by applying bilinear transformation. The denominator of the equivalent continuous system and its reciprocal are differentiated successively, the reduced denominator of the desired order is obtained by combining the differentiated polynomials. The numerator is obtained by matching the quotients of MCF. The reduced continuous system is converted back into discrete system using inverse bilinear transformation. In the evolutionary technique method, Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) is employed to reduce the higher order model. PSO method is based on the minimization of the Integral Squared Error (ISE) between the transient responses of original higher order model and the reduced order model pertaining to a unit step input. Both the methods are illustrated through numerical example.

An ACO Based Algorithm for Distribution Networks Including Dispersed Generations

With Power system movement toward restructuring along with factors such as life environment pollution, problems of transmission expansion and with advancement in construction technology of small generation units, it is expected that small units like wind turbines, fuel cells, photovoltaic, ... that most of the time connect to the distribution networks play a very essential role in electric power industry. With increase in developing usage of small generation units, management of distribution networks should be reviewed. The target of this paper is to present a new method for optimal management of active and reactive power in distribution networks with regard to costs pertaining to various types of dispersed generations, capacitors and cost of electric energy achieved from network. In other words, in this method it-s endeavored to select optimal sources of active and reactive power generation and controlling equipments such as dispersed generations, capacitors, under load tapchanger transformers and substations in a way that firstly costs in relation to them are minimized and secondly technical and physical constraints are regarded. Because the optimal management of distribution networks is an optimization problem with continuous and discrete variables, the new evolutionary method based on Ant Colony Algorithm has been applied. The simulation results of the method tested on two cases containing 23 and 34 buses exist and will be shown at later sections.

A Tool for Creation Artificial Symbiotic Associations of Wheat

This paper reports optimization of characteristics of bioballistic transformation of spring soft wheat (Triticum aestivum L. cultivar Raduga) and getting of transgenic plants, carrying pea lectin gene. This gene will let to create new associative wheat symbiosis with nodule bacteria of field pea, which has growth encouraging, fungistatic and other useful characteristics.

Cloning of a β-Glucosidase Gene (BGL1) from Traditional Starter Yeast Saccharomycopsis fibuligera BMQ 908 and Expression in Pichia pastoris

β-Glucosidase is an important enzyme for production of ethanol from lignocellulose. With hydrolytic activity on cellooligosaccharides, especially cellobiose, β-glucosidase removes product inhibitory effect on cellulases and forms fermentable sugars. In this study, β-glucosidase encoding gene (BGL1) from traditional starter yeast Saccharomycosis fibuligera BMQ908 was cloned and expressed in Pichia pastoris. BGL1 of S. fibuligera BMQ 908 shared 98% nucleotide homology with the closest GenBank sequence (M22475) but identity in amino-acid sequences of catalytic domains. Recombinant plasmid pPICZαA/BGL1 containing the sequence encoding BGL1 mature protein and α-factor secretion signal was constructed and transformed into methylotrophic yeast P. pastoris by electroporation. The recombinant strain produced single extracellular protein with molecular weight of 120 kDa and cellobiase activity of 60 IU/ml. The optimum pH of the recombinant β-glucosidase was 5.0 and the optimum temperature was 50°C.

Transformation of Vocal Characteristics: A Review of Literature

The transformation of vocal characteristics aims at modifying voice such that the intelligibility of aphonic voice is increased or the voice characteristics of a speaker (source speaker) to be perceived as if another speaker (target speaker) had uttered it. In this paper, the current state-of-the-art voice characteristics transformation methodology is reviewed. Special emphasis is placed on voice transformation methodology and issues for improving the transformed speech quality in intelligibility and naturalness are discussed. In particular, it is suggested to use the modulation theory of speech as a base for research on high quality voice transformation. This approach allows one to separate linguistic, expressive, organic and perspective information of speech, based on an analysis of how they are fused when speech is produced. Therefore, this theory provides the fundamentals not only for manipulating non-linguistic, extra-/paralinguistic and intra-linguistic variables for voice transformation, but also for paving the way for easily transposing the existing voice transformation methods to emotion-related voice quality transformation and speaking style transformation. From the perspectives of human speech production and perception, the popular voice transformation techniques are described and classified them based on the underlying principles either from the speech production or perception mechanisms or from both. In addition, the advantages and limitations of voice transformation techniques and the experimental manipulation of vocal cues are discussed through examples from past and present research. Finally, a conclusion and road map are pointed out for more natural voice transformation algorithms in the future.

3D CFD Simulation of Thermal Hydraulic Performances on Louvered Fin Automotive Heat Exchangers

This study deals with Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) studies of the interactions between the air flow and louvered fins which equipped the automotive heat exchangers. 3D numerical simulation results are obtained by using the ANSYS Fluent 13.0 code and compared to experimental data. The paper studies the effect of louver angle and louver pitch geometrical parameters, on overall thermal hydraulic performances of louvered fins. The comparison between CFD simulations and experimental data show that established 3-D CFD model gives a good agreement. The validation agrees, with about 7% of deviation respectively of friction and Colburn factors to experimental results. As first, it is found that the louver angle has a strong influence on the heat transfer rate. Then, louver angle and louver pitch variation of the louvers and their effects on thermal hydraulic performances are studied. In addition to this study, it is shown that the second half of the fin takes has a significant contribution on pressure drop increase without any increase in heat transfer.

Inferring Hierarchical Pronunciation Rules from a Phonetic Dictionary

This work presents a new phonetic transcription system based on a tree of hierarchical pronunciation rules expressed as context-specific grapheme-phoneme correspondences. The tree is automatically inferred from a phonetic dictionary by incrementally analyzing deeper context levels, eventually representing a minimum set of exhaustive rules that pronounce without errors all the words in the training dictionary and that can be applied to out-of-vocabulary words. The proposed approach improves upon existing rule-tree-based techniques in that it makes use of graphemes, rather than letters, as elementary orthographic units. A new linear algorithm for the segmentation of a word in graphemes is introduced to enable outof- vocabulary grapheme-based phonetic transcription. Exhaustive rule trees provide a canonical representation of the pronunciation rules of a language that can be used not only to pronounce out-of-vocabulary words, but also to analyze and compare the pronunciation rules inferred from different dictionaries. The proposed approach has been implemented in C and tested on Oxford British English and Basic English. Experimental results show that grapheme-based rule trees represent phonetically sound rules and provide better performance than letter-based rule trees.

Effect of Helium-Argon Mixtures on the Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow in Gas Tungsten Arc Welding

A transient finite element model has been developed to study the heat transfer and fluid flow during spot Gas Tungsten Arc Welding (GTAW) on stainless steel. Temperature field, fluid velocity and electromagnetic fields are computed inside the cathode, arc-plasma and anode using a unified MHD formulation. The developed model is then used to study the influence of different helium-argon gas mixtures on both the energy transferred to the workpiece and the time evolution of the weld pool dimensions. It is found that the addition of helium to argon increases the heat flux density on the weld axis by a factor that can reach 6.5. This induces an increase in the weld pool depth by a factor of 3. It is also found that the addition of only 10% of argon to helium decreases considerably the weld pool depth, which is due to the electrical conductivity of the mixture that increases significantly when argon is added to helium.