A Comparison of Experimental Data with Monte Carlo Calculations for Optimisation of the Sourceto- Detector Distance in Determining the Efficiency of a LaBr3:Ce (5%) Detector

Cerium-doped lanthanum bromide LaBr3:Ce(5%) crystals are considered to be one of the most advanced scintillator materials used in PET scanning, combining a high light yield, fast decay time and excellent energy resolution. Apart from the correct choice of scintillator, it is also important to optimise the detector geometry, not least in terms of source-to-detector distance in order to obtain reliable measurements and efficiency. In this study a commercially available 25 mm x 25 mm BrilLanCeTM 380 LaBr3: Ce (5%) detector was characterised in terms of its efficiency at varying source-to-detector distances. Gamma-ray spectra of 22Na, 60Co, and 137Cs were separately acquired at distances of 5, 10, 15, and 20cm. As a result of the change in solid angle subtended by the detector, the geometric efficiency reduced in efficiency with increasing distance. High efficiencies at low distances can cause pulse pile-up when subsequent photons are detected before previously detected events have decayed. To reduce this systematic error the source-to-detector distance should be balanced between efficiency and pulse pile-up suppression as otherwise pile-up corrections would need to be necessary at short distances. In addition to the experimental measurements Monte Carlo simulations have been carried out for the same setup, allowing a comparison of results. The advantages and disadvantages of each approach have been highlighted.

Role of Acoustic Pressure on the Dynamics of Moving Single-Bubble Sonoluminescence

Role of acoustic driving pressure on the translational-radial dynamics of a moving single bubble sonoluminescence (m-SBSL) has been numerically investigated. The results indicate that increase in the amplitude of the driving pressure leads to increase in the bubble peak temperature. The length and the shape of the trajectory of the bubble depends on the acoustic pressure and because of the spatially dependence of the radial dynamics of the moving bubble, its peak temperature varies during the acoustical pulses. The results are in good agreement with the experimental reports on m-SBSL.

Neural Networks Approaches for Computing the Forward Kinematics of a Redundant Parallel Manipulator

In this paper, different approaches to solve the forward kinematics of a three DOF actuator redundant hydraulic parallel manipulator are presented. On the contrary to series manipulators, the forward kinematic map of parallel manipulators involves highly coupled nonlinear equations, which are almost impossible to solve analytically. The proposed methods are using neural networks identification with different structures to solve the problem. The accuracy of the results of each method is analyzed in detail and the advantages and the disadvantages of them in computing the forward kinematic map of the given mechanism is discussed in detail. It is concluded that ANFIS presents the best performance compared to MLP, RBF and PNN networks in this particular application.

An Efficient Approach to Mining Frequent Itemsets on Data Streams

The increasing importance of data stream arising in a wide range of advanced applications has led to the extensive study of mining frequent patterns. Mining data streams poses many new challenges amongst which are the one-scan nature, the unbounded memory requirement and the high arrival rate of data streams. In this paper, we propose a new approach for mining itemsets on data stream. Our approach SFIDS has been developed based on FIDS algorithm. The main attempts were to keep some advantages of the previous approach and resolve some of its drawbacks, and consequently to improve run time and memory consumption. Our approach has the following advantages: using a data structure similar to lattice for keeping frequent itemsets, separating regions from each other with deleting common nodes that results in a decrease in search space, memory consumption and run time; and Finally, considering CPU constraint, with increasing arrival rate of data that result in overloading system, SFIDS automatically detect this situation and discard some of unprocessing data. We guarantee that error of results is bounded to user pre-specified threshold, based on a probability technique. Final results show that SFIDS algorithm could attain about 50% run time improvement than FIDS approach.

An Efficient Adaptive Thresholding Technique for Wavelet Based Image Denoising

This frame work describes a computationally more efficient and adaptive threshold estimation method for image denoising in the wavelet domain based on Generalized Gaussian Distribution (GGD) modeling of subband coefficients. In this proposed method, the choice of the threshold estimation is carried out by analysing the statistical parameters of the wavelet subband coefficients like standard deviation, arithmetic mean and geometrical mean. The noisy image is first decomposed into many levels to obtain different frequency bands. Then soft thresholding method is used to remove the noisy coefficients, by fixing the optimum thresholding value by the proposed method. Experimental results on several test images by using this method show that this method yields significantly superior image quality and better Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). Here, to prove the efficiency of this method in image denoising, we have compared this with various denoising methods like wiener filter, Average filter, VisuShrink and BayesShrink.

Person Identification using Gait by Combined Features of Width and Shape of the Binary Silhouette

Current image-based individual human recognition methods, such as fingerprints, face, or iris biometric modalities generally require a cooperative subject, views from certain aspects, and physical contact or close proximity. These methods cannot reliably recognize non-cooperating individuals at a distance in the real world under changing environmental conditions. Gait, which concerns recognizing individuals by the way they walk, is a relatively new biometric without these disadvantages. The inherent gait characteristic of an individual makes it irreplaceable and useful in visual surveillance. In this paper, an efficient gait recognition system for human identification by extracting two features namely width vector of the binary silhouette and the MPEG-7-based region-based shape descriptors is proposed. In the proposed method, foreground objects i.e., human and other moving objects are extracted by estimating background information by a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) and subsequently, median filtering operation is performed for removing noises in the background subtracted image. A moving target classification algorithm is used to separate human being (i.e., pedestrian) from other foreground objects (viz., vehicles). Shape and boundary information is used in the moving target classification algorithm. Subsequently, width vector of the outer contour of binary silhouette and the MPEG-7 Angular Radial Transform coefficients are taken as the feature vector. Next, the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is applied to the selected feature vector to reduce its dimensionality. These extracted feature vectors are used to train an Hidden Markov Model (HMM) for identification of some individuals. The proposed system is evaluated using some gait sequences and the experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

A New Approach for Mobile Agent Security

A mobile agent is a software which performs an action autonomously and independently as a person or an organizations assistance. Mobile agents are used for searching information, retrieval information, filtering, intruder recognition in networks, and so on. One of the important issues of mobile agent is their security. It must consider different security issues in effective and secured usage of mobile agent. One of those issues is the integrity-s protection of mobile agents. In this paper, the advantages and disadvantages of each method, after reviewing the existing methods, is examined. Regarding to this matter that each method has its own advantage or disadvantage, it seems that by combining these methods, one can reach to a better method for protecting the integrity of mobile agents. Therefore, this method is provided in this paper and then is evaluated in terms of existing method. Finally, this method is simulated and its results are the sign of improving the possibility of integrity-s protection of mobile agents.

Structural Parsing of Natural Language Text in Tamil Using Phrase Structure Hybrid Language Model

Parsing is important in Linguistics and Natural Language Processing to understand the syntax and semantics of a natural language grammar. Parsing natural language text is challenging because of the problems like ambiguity and inefficiency. Also the interpretation of natural language text depends on context based techniques. A probabilistic component is essential to resolve ambiguity in both syntax and semantics thereby increasing accuracy and efficiency of the parser. Tamil language has some inherent features which are more challenging. In order to obtain the solutions, lexicalized and statistical approach is to be applied in the parsing with the aid of a language model. Statistical models mainly focus on semantics of the language which are suitable for large vocabulary tasks where as structural methods focus on syntax which models small vocabulary tasks. A statistical language model based on Trigram for Tamil language with medium vocabulary of 5000 words has been built. Though statistical parsing gives better performance through tri-gram probabilities and large vocabulary size, it has some disadvantages like focus on semantics rather than syntax, lack of support in free ordering of words and long term relationship. To overcome the disadvantages a structural component is to be incorporated in statistical language models which leads to the implementation of hybrid language models. This paper has attempted to build phrase structured hybrid language model which resolves above mentioned disadvantages. In the development of hybrid language model, new part of speech tag set for Tamil language has been developed with more than 500 tags which have the wider coverage. A phrase structured Treebank has been developed with 326 Tamil sentences which covers more than 5000 words. A hybrid language model has been trained with the phrase structured Treebank using immediate head parsing technique. Lexicalized and statistical parser which employs this hybrid language model and immediate head parsing technique gives better results than pure grammar and trigram based model.

Development of Workplace Environmental Monitoring Systems Using Ubiquitous Sensor Network

In this study, workplace environmental monitoring systems were established using USN(Ubiquitous Sensor Networks) and LabVIEW. Although existing direct sampling methods enable finding accurate values as of the time points of measurement, those methods are disadvantageous in that continuous management and supervision are difficult and costs for are high when those methods are used. Therefore, the efficiency and reliability of workplace management by supervisors are relatively low when those methods are used. In this study, systems were established so that information on workplace environmental factors such as temperatures, humidity and noises is measured and transmitted to the PC in real time to enable supervisors to monitor workplaces through LabVIEW on the PC. When any accidents have occurred in workplaces, supervisors can immediately respond through the monitoring system and this system enables integrated workplace management and the prevention of safety accidents. By introducing these monitoring systems, safety accidents due to harmful environmental factors in workplaces can be prevented and these monitoring systems will be also helpful in finding out the correlation between safety accidents and occupational diseases by comparing and linking databases established by this monitoring system with existing statistical data.

Performance Improvement of Moving Object Recognition and Tracking Algorithm using Parallel Processing of SURF and Optical Flow

The paper proposes a way of parallel processing of SURF and Optical Flow for moving object recognition and tracking. The object recognition and tracking is one of the most important task in computer vision, however disadvantage are many operations cause processing speed slower so that it can-t do real-time object recognition and tracking. The proposed method uses a typical way of feature extraction SURF and moving object Optical Flow for reduce disadvantage and real-time moving object recognition and tracking, and parallel processing techniques for speed improvement. First analyse that an image from DB and acquired through the camera using SURF for compared to the same object recognition then set ROI (Region of Interest) for tracking movement of feature points using Optical Flow. Secondly, using Multi-Thread is for improved processing speed and recognition by parallel processing. Finally, performance is evaluated and verified efficiency of algorithm throughout the experiment.

Decision Trees for Predicting Risk of Mortality using Routinely Collected Data

It is well known that Logistic Regression is the gold standard method for predicting clinical outcome, especially predicting risk of mortality. In this paper, the Decision Tree method has been proposed to solve specific problems that commonly use Logistic Regression as a solution. The Biochemistry and Haematology Outcome Model (BHOM) dataset obtained from Portsmouth NHS Hospital from 1 January to 31 December 2001 was divided into four subsets. One subset of training data was used to generate a model, and the model obtained was then applied to three testing datasets. The performance of each model from both methods was then compared using calibration (the χ2 test or chi-test) and discrimination (area under ROC curve or c-index). The experiment presented that both methods have reasonable results in the case of the c-index. However, in some cases the calibration value (χ2) obtained quite a high result. After conducting experiments and investigating the advantages and disadvantages of each method, we can conclude that Decision Trees can be seen as a worthy alternative to Logistic Regression in the area of Data Mining.

Complex Condition Monitoring System of Aircraft Gas Turbine Engine

Researches show that probability-statistical methods application, especially at the early stage of the aviation Gas Turbine Engine (GTE) technical condition diagnosing, when the flight information has property of the fuzzy, limitation and uncertainty is unfounded. Hence the efficiency of application of new technology Soft Computing at these diagnosing stages with the using of the Fuzzy Logic and Neural Networks methods is considered. According to the purpose of this problem training with high accuracy of fuzzy multiple linear and non-linear models (fuzzy regression equations) which received on the statistical fuzzy data basis is made. For GTE technical condition more adequate model making dynamics of skewness and kurtosis coefficients- changes are analysed. Researches of skewness and kurtosis coefficients values- changes show that, distributions of GTE workand output parameters of the multiple linear and non-linear generalised models at presence of noise measured (the new recursive Least Squares Method (LSM)). The developed GTE condition monitoring system provides stage-by-stage estimation of engine technical conditions. As application of the given technique the estimation of the new operating aviation engine technical condition was made.

Compiler-Based Architecture for Context Aware Frameworks

Computers are being integrated in the various aspects of human every day life in different shapes and abilities. This fact has intensified a requirement for the software development technologies which is ability to be: 1) portable, 2) adaptable, and 3) simple to develop. This problem is also known as the Pervasive Computing Problem (PCP) which can be implemented in different ways, each has its own pros and cons and Context Oriented Programming (COP) is one of the methods to address the PCP. In this paper a design for a COP framework, a context aware framework, is presented which has eliminated weak points of a previous design based on interpreter languages, while introducing the compiler languages power in implementing these frameworks. The key point of this improvement is combining COP and Dependency Injection (DI) techniques. Both old and new frameworks are analyzed to show advantages and disadvantages. Finally a simulation of both designs is proposed to indicating that the practical results agree with the theoretical analysis while the new design runs almost 8 times faster.

Data Oriented Model of Image: as a Framework for Image Processing

This paper presents a new data oriented model of image. Then a representation of it, ADBT, is introduced. The ability of ADBT is clustering, segmentation, measuring similarity of images etc, with desired precision and corresponding speed.