Motion Detection Techniques Using Optical Flow

Motion detection is very important in image processing. One way of detecting motion is using optical flow. Optical flow cannot be computed locally, since only one independent measurement is available from the image sequence at a point, while the flow velocity has two components. A second constraint is needed. The method used for finding the optical flow in this project is assuming that the apparent velocity of the brightness pattern varies smoothly almost everywhere in the image. This technique is later used in developing software for motion detection which has the capability to carry out four types of motion detection. The motion detection software presented in this project also can highlight motion region, count motion level as well as counting object numbers. Many objects such as vehicles and human from video streams can be recognized by applying optical flow technique.

House Indoor Thermal and Health Conditions with Different Passive Designs

According to the Auckland climate, building passive design more focus on improving winter indoor thermal and health conditions. Based on field study data of indoor air temperature and relative humidity close to ceiling and floor of an insulated Auckland townhouse with and without a whole home mechanical ventilation system, this study is to analysis variation of indoor microclimate data of an Auckland townhouse using or not using the mechanical ventilation system to evaluate winter indoor thermal and health conditions for the future house design with a mechanical ventilation system.

Customization of a Real-Time Operating System Scheduler with Aspect-Oriented Programming

Tasks of an application program of an embedded system are managed by the scheduler of a real-time operating system (RTOS). Most RTOSs adopt just fixed priority scheduling, which is not optimal in all cases. Some applications require earliest deadline first (EDF) scheduling, which is an optimal scheduling algorithm. In order to develop an efficient real-time embedded system, the scheduling algorithm of the RTOS should be selectable. The paper presents a method to customize the scheduler using aspectoriented programming. We define aspects to replace the fixed priority scheduling mechanism of an OSEK OS with an EDF scheduling mechanism. By using the aspects, we can customize the scheduler without modifying the original source code. We have applied the aspects to an OSEK OS and get a customized operating system with EDF scheduling. The evaluation results show that the overhead of aspect-oriented programming is small enough.

Key Success Factors for Managing Projects

The use and management of projects has risen to a new prominence, with projects seen as critical to economic in both the private and public sectors due challenging and dynamic business environment. However, failure in managing project is encountered regularly, which cause the waste of company resources. The impacts of projects that failed to meet stakeholders expectations have left behind long lasting negative consequences in organization. Therefore, this research aims to investigate on key success factors of project management in an organization. It is believed that recognizing important factors that contribute to successful project will help companies to increase the overall profitability. 150 questionnaires were distributed to respondents and 110 questionnaires were collected and used in performing the data analysis. The result has strongly supported the relationship between independent variables and project performance.

Privacy Threats in RFID Group Proof Schemes

RFID tag is a small and inexpensive microchip which is capable of transmitting unique identifier through wireless network in a short distance. If a group of RFID tags can be scanned simultaneously by one reader, RFID Group proof could be generated. Group proof can be used in various applications, such as good management which is usually achieved using barcode system. A lot of RFID group proof schemes have been proposed by many researchers. In this paper, we introduce some existing group proof schemes and then analyze their vulnerabilities to the privacy. Moreover, we propose a new attack model, which threats the privacy of user by tracking tags in a group.

Project Management and Software Development Processes: Integrating PMBOK and OPEN

Software organizations are constantly looking for better solutions when designing and using well-defined software processes for the development of their products and services. However, while the technical aspects are virtually easier to arrange, many software development processes lack more support on project management issues. When adopting such processes, an organization needs to apply good project management skills along with technical views provided by those models. This research proposes the definition of a new model that integrates the concepts of PMBOK and those available on the OPEN metamodel, helping not only process integration but also building the steps towards a more comprehensive and automatable model.

Comparative Analysis of Mobility Support in Mobile IP and SIP

With the rapid usage of portable devices mobility in IP networks becomes more important issue in the recent years. IETF standardized Mobile IP that works in Network Layer, which involves tunneling of IP packets from HA to Foreign Agent. Mobile IP suffers many problems of Triangular Routing, conflict with private addressing scheme, increase in load in HA, need of permanent home IP address, tunneling itself, and so on. In this paper, we proposed mobility management in Application Layer protocol SIP and show some comparative analysis between Mobile IP and SIP in context of mobility.

The Role of the Dominant Party of the Republic of Kazakhstan and China's Ruling Party in a Country's Modernization: Similarities and Differences

The purpose of this work is to identify the positive and negative aspects of parties- participation in the country-s modernization, which in turn, will help a country to determine the necessary steps to improve the social-economic development. The article considers a question of the role of the dominating party of Kazakhstan and ruling party of China in the country-s modernization. Using a comparative analysis reveals differences between the People's Democratic Party “Nur Otan" and the Communist Party of China. It is discussed the policy of carrying out of modernization, the main actions of political parties of both countries with a view of modernization implementation.

Perfect Plastic Deformation of a Circular Thin Bronze Plate due to the Growth and Collapse of a Vapour Bubble

Dynamics of a vapour bubble generated due to a high local energy input near a circular thin bronze plate in the absence of the buoyancy forces is numerically investigated in this paper. The bubble is generated near a thin bronze plate and during the growth and collapse of the bubble, it deforms the nearby plate. The Boundary Integral Equation Method is employed for numerical simulation of the problem. The fluid is assumed to be incompressible, irrotational and inviscid and the surface tension on the bubble boundary is neglected. Therefore the fluid flow around the vapour bubble can be assumed as a potential flow. Furthermore, the thin bronze plate is assumed to have perfectly plastic behaviour. Results show that the displacement of the circular thin bronze plate has considerable effect on the dynamics of its nearby vapour bubble. It is found that by decreasing the thickness of the thin bronze plate, the growth and collapse rate of the bubble becomes higher and consequently the lifetime of the bubble becomes shorter.

Development of Maximum Entropy Method for Prediction of Droplet-size Distribution in Primary Breakup Region of Spray

Droplet size distributions in the cold spray of a fuel are important in observed combustion behavior. Specification of droplet size and velocity distributions in the immediate downstream of injectors is also essential as boundary conditions for advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and two-phase spray transport calculations. This paper describes the development of a new model to be incorporated into maximum entropy principle (MEP) formalism for prediction of droplet size distribution in droplet formation region. The MEP approach can predict the most likely droplet size and velocity distributions under a set of constraints expressing the available information related to the distribution. In this article, by considering the mechanisms of turbulence generation inside the nozzle and wave growth on jet surface, it is attempted to provide a logical framework coupling the flow inside the nozzle to the resulting atomization process. The purpose of this paper is to describe the formulation of this new model and to incorporate it into the maximum entropy principle (MEP) by coupling sub-models together using source terms of momentum and energy. Comparison between the model prediction and experimental data for a gas turbine swirling nozzle and an annular spray indicate good agreement between model and experiment.

Modeling and Simulation of a Hybrid Scooter

This paper presents a hybrid electric scooter model developed and simulated using Matlab/Simulink. This hybrid scooter modeled has a parallel hybrid structure. The main propulsion units consist of a two stroke internal combustion engine and a hub motor attached to the front wheel of the scooter. The methodology used to optimize the energy and fuel consumption of the hybrid electric scooter is the multi-mode approach. Various case studies were presented to check the model and were compared to the literatures. Results shown that the model developed was feasible and valuable.

A Note on Penalized Power-Divergence Test Statistics

In this paper, penalized power-divergence test statistics have been defined and their exact size properties to test a nested sequence of log-linear models have been compared with ordinary power-divergence test statistics for various penalization, λ and main effect values. Since the ordinary and penalized power-divergence test statistics have the same asymptotic distribution, comparisons have been only made for small and moderate samples. Three-way contingency tables distributed according to a multinomial distribution have been considered. Simulation results reveal that penalized power-divergence test statistics perform much better than their ordinary counterparts.

Qanat (Subterranean Canal) Role in Traditional Cities and Settlements Formation of Hot-Arid Regions of Iran

A passive system "Qanat" is collection of some underground wells. A mother-well was dug in a place far from the city where they could reach to the water table maybe 100 meters underground, they dug other wells to direct water toward the city, with minimum possible gradient. Using the slope of the earth they could bring water close to the surface in the city. The source of water or the appearance of Qanat, land slope and the ownership lines are the important and effective factors in the formation of routes and the segment division of lands to the extent that making use of Qanat as the techniques of extracting underground waters creates a channel of routes with an organic order and hierarchy coinciding the slope of land and it also guides the Qanat waters in the tradition texture of salt desert and border provinces of it. Qanats are excavated in a specified distinction from each other. The quantity of water provided by Qanats depends on the kind of land, distance from mountain, geographical situation of them and the rate of water supply from the underground land. The rate of underground waters, possibility of Qanat excavation, number of Qanats and rate of their water supply from one hand and the quantity of cultivable fertile lands from the other hand are the important natural factors making the size of cities. In the same manner the cities with several Qanats have multi central textures. The location of cities is in direct relation with land quality, soil fertility and possibility of using underground water by excavating Qanats. Observing the allowable distance for Qanat watering is a determining factor for distance between villages and cities. Topography, land slope, soil quality, watering system, ownership, kind of cultivation, etc. are the effective factors in directing Qanats for excavation and guiding water toward the cultivable lands and it also causes the formation of different textures in land division of farming provinces. Several divisions such as orderly and wide, inorderly, thin and long, comb like, etc. are the introduction to organic order. And at the same time they are complete coincidence with environmental conditions in the typical development of ecological architecture and planning in the traditional cities and settlements order.

Image Segmentation Using the K-means Algorithm for Texture Features

This study aims to segment objects using the K-means algorithm for texture features. Firstly, the algorithm transforms color images into gray images. This paper describes a novel technique for the extraction of texture features in an image. Then, in a group of similar features, objects and backgrounds are differentiated by using the K-means algorithm. Finally, this paper proposes a new object segmentation algorithm using the morphological technique. The experiments described include the segmentation of single and multiple objects featured in this paper. The region of an object can be accurately segmented out. The results can help to perform image retrieval and analyze features of an object, as are shown in this paper.

A Semi-Fragile Signature based Scheme for Ownership Identification and Color Image Authentication

In this paper, a novel scheme is proposed for ownership identification and authentication using color images by deploying Cryptography and Digital Watermarking as underlaying technologies. The former is used to compute the contents based hash and the latter to embed the watermark. The host image that will claim to be the rightful owner is first transformed from RGB to YST color space exclusively designed for watermarking based applications. Geometrically YS ÔèÑ T and T channel corresponds to the chrominance component of color image, therefore suitable for embedding the watermark. The T channel is divided into 4×4 nonoverlapping blocks. The size of block is important for enhanced localization, security and low computation. Each block along with ownership information is then deployed by SHA160, a one way hash function to compute the content based hash, which is always unique and resistant against birthday attack instead of using MD5 that may raise the condition i.e. H(m)=H(m'). The watermark payload varies from block to block and computed by the variance factorα . The quality of watermarked images is quite high both subjectively and objectively. Our scheme is blind, computationally fast and exactly locates the tampered region.

Robust Sensorless Speed Control of Induction Motor with DTFC and Fuzzy Speed Regulator

Recent developments in Soft computing techniques, power electronic switches and low-cost computational hardware have made it possible to design and implement sophisticated control strategies for sensorless speed control of AC motor drives. Such an attempt has been made in this work, for Sensorless Speed Control of Induction Motor (IM) by means of Direct Torque Fuzzy Control (DTFC), PI-type fuzzy speed regulator and MRAS speed estimator strategy, which is absolutely nonlinear in its nature. Direct torque control is known to produce quick and robust response in AC drive system. However, during steady state, torque, flux and current ripple occurs. So, the performance of conventional DTC with PI speed regulator can be improved by implementing fuzzy logic techniques. Certain important issues in design including the space vector modulated (SVM) 3-Ф voltage source inverter, DTFC design, generation of reference torque using PI-type fuzzy speed regulator and sensor less speed estimator have been resolved. The proposed scheme is validated through extensive numerical simulations on MATLAB. The simulated results indicate the sensor less speed control of IM with DTFC and PI-type fuzzy speed regulator provides satisfactory high dynamic and static performance compare to conventional DTC with PI speed regulator.

Effects of pH, Temperature, Enzyme and Substrate Concentration on Xylooligosaccharides Production

Agricultural residue such as oil palm fronds (OPF) is cheap, widespread and available throughout the year. Hemicelluloses extracted from OPF can be hydrolyzed to their monomers and used in production of xylooligosaccharides (XOs). The objective of the present study was to optimize the enzymatic hydrolysis process of OPF hemicellulose by varying pH, temperature, enzyme and substrate concentration for production of XOs. Hemicelluloses was extracted from OPF by using 3 M potassium hydroxide (KOH) at temperature of 40°C for 4 hrs and stirred at 400 rpm. The hemicellulose was then hydrolyzed using Trichoderma longibrachiatum xylanase at different pH, temperature, enzyme and substrate concentration. XOs were characterized based on reducing sugar determination. The optimum conditions to produced XOs from OPF hemicellulose was obtained at pH 4.6, temperature of 40°C , enzyme concentration of 2 U/mL and 2% substrate concentration. The results established the suitability of oil palm fronds as raw material for production of XOs.

Ratio Type Estimators of the Population Mean Based on Ranked Set Sampling

Ranked set sampling (RSS) was first suggested to increase the efficiency of the population mean. It has been shown that this method is highly beneficial to the estimation based on simple random sampling (SRS). There has been considerable development and many modifications were done on this method. When a concomitant variable is available, ratio estimation based on ranked set sampling was proposed. This ratio estimator is more efficient than that based on SRS. In this paper some ratio type estimators of the population mean based on RSS are suggested. These estimators are found to be more efficient than the estimators of similar form using simple random sample.

Application of Wireless Visual Sensor for Semi- Autonomous Mine Navigation System

The present paper represent the efforts undertaken for the development of an semi-automatic robot that may be used for various post-disaster rescue operation planning and their subsequent execution using one-way communication of video and data from the robot to the controller and controller to the robot respectively. Wireless communication has been used for the purpose so that the robot may access the unapproachable places easily without any difficulties. It is expected that the information obtained from the robot would be of definite help to the rescue team for better planning and execution of their operations.