Digital Commons Network^™

Signature-Based Document Retrieval, A. Chalechale, G. Naghdy, Alfred Mertins

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

This paper presents a new approach for document image decomposition and retrieval based on connected component analysis and geometric properties of the labeled regions. The database contains document images with Arabic/Persian text combined with English text, headlines, ruling lines, trademark and signature. In particular, Arabic/Persian signature extraction is investigated using special characteristics of the signature that is fairly different from English signatures. A set of efficient, invariant and compact features is extracted for validation purposes using angular-radial partitioning of the signature region. Experimental results show the robustness of the proposed method.

Sketch-Based Image Retrieval Using Angular Partitioning, A. Chalechale, G. Naghdy, Alfred Mertins

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

This paper presents a novel approach for sketch-based image retrieval based on low-level features. The approach enables measuring the similarity between a full color image and a simple black and white sketched query and needs no cost intensive image segmentation. The proposed method can cope with images containing several complex objects in an inhomogeneous background. Abstract images are obtained using strong edges of the model image and thinned outline of the sketched image. Angular-spatial distribution of pixels in the abstract images is then employed to extract new compact and effective features using Fourier transform. The extracted features are scale and …

Monitoring Of Wheel Dressing Operations For Precision Grinding, Li Xue, Fazel Naghdy, C. Cook

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

In grinding operation, on-line process monitoring of dressing will ensure the quality of the grinding wheel and will achieve reproducible surface finish. The results of a study conducted to evaluate the feasibility and effectiveness of Acoustic Emission (AE) sensors in online monitoring of dressing is reported. Two aspects of the process are addressed. The first is the detection of undesired wheel conditions, such as an out-of-round wheel and wheel contour errors. The other is improving the surface finish of the ground workpiece by monitoring the dressing parameters. Experimental results indicate that AE signal can be effectively used to identify the …

Combinatorial Constructions Of 3- And 4-Secure Codes, Y. Wang, Jennifer Seberry, Beata J. Wysocki, Tadeusz A. Wysocki, Willy Susilo, Tianbing Xia, Y. Zhao, Le Chung Tran

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

In this paper, 3- and 4-secure codes are constructed from combinatorial designs. Both constant weight and non-constant weight codes are shown.

Online Introduction To Information Literacy: Ticking That Box Or Embedding That Attribute??, Robbie Collins, A. Hill

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

The University of Wollongong introduced an online compulsory undergraduate Information Literacy Introductory Program (ILIP) in 1999. Extensions and adjustments make ILIP 2003 a requirement for postgraduate coursework students as well as undergraduate students. ILIP is also highly recommended to incoming research students. Such policy initiatives for a compulsory online learning tool raise interesting questions about the interaction of University policy and learning and teaching policy, about the implementation of such policy and about the effectiveness of the tool both alone and as part of a process. This paper suggests that the compulsory ruling has effected the tool’s development and implementation. …

Interpretation And Orientalism: Outing Japan's Sexual Minorities To The English-Speaking World, Mark J. Mclelland

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

The growing visibility of Japanese gay men and lesbians who articulate their identities in a manner similar to activists in the west has been heightened by two recent English books Queer Japan and Coming Out in Japan. While acknowledging the need to listen to a plurality of voices from Japan, this essay critiques the manner in which the coming-out narratives in these books have been framed by their western translators and editors. In the introductions to both books, Japan is (once again) pictured as a feudal and repressive society. In their efforts to let the homosexual subaltern speak, the translators …

New Wine In Old Bottles: A Case Study Of Innovation Territories In 'New World' Wine Production, D. K. Aylward, T. Turpin

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

This article applies the concept of ‘innovation territories’ to explain the recent export success of the Australian Wine Industry. Recent data collected from four ‘New World’ wine producing countries are contrasted in order to investigate ‘innovation territories’ that in the Australian context transcend geographic and policy boundaries. The international comparison shows that these territories can be mapped and their interaction compared. A major finding from the study is that one of the major contributors to Australia’s success in gaining comparative advantage in this industry is the way local and national investments in R&D have transcended geographic and policy boundaries. Coordination …

Hermite Neural Network Correlation And Application, M. R. Mackenzie, K. Tieu

Faculty of Engineering - Papers (Archive)

A method for obtaining the correlation of two Hermite neural networks is developed. The method is based on the fact that a Hermite function is unchanged by the Fourier transform, which allows an expression for the correlation to be obtained directly from the network weights without the need for the Fourier transform. Comparative results with other neural network correlation methods are presented on simulated radar signals.

Forensic Computing, X. Li, Jennifer Seberry

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Technology is rapidly changing the speed and manner in which people interact with each other and with the world. As technology helps criminals to operate more easily and quickly across borders, so law enforcement capability must continuously improve to keep one step ahead. Computer forensics has become a specialized and accepted investigative technique with its own tools and legal precedents that validate the discipline. Specially designed forensic software is also widely used during the whole process of computer forensic investigation. This article introduces computer forensic and computer evidence, introduces and compares some forensic software, and summarizes its likely future development.

A Developmental Approach To Teaching Internet Marketing, Rohan Miller, Ray Stace, Gwyneth Howell

Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Education) - Papers

Just as buying and selling over the Internet represents a new frontier for commerce, teaching students how to best use the Internet in marketing presents educators with new challenges and new opportunities. Perhaps the most distinguishing feature of Internet commerce that must be confronted by educators is the general absence of inter-personal communication in customer exchanges. As most Internet marketing takes place using a self-service technology (SST) that enables customers to consume products independent of direct service employee involvement (Meuter, Ostrom, Roundtree and Bitner 2000), it seems inappropriate to teach marketing in an Internet environment by relying on traditional lecture-tutorial …

Living On The Edge-Plants And Global Change In Continental And Maritime Antarctica, Sharon A. Robinson, J. Wasley, A. K. Tobin

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Antarctic terrestrial ecosystems experience some of the most extreme growth conditions on Earth and are characterised by extreme aridity and sub-zero temperatures. Antarctic vegetation is therefore at the physiological limits of survival and, as a consequence, even slight changes to growth conditions are likely to have a large impact, rendering Antarctic terrestrial communities sensitive to climate change. Climate change is predicted to affect the high latitude regions first and most severely. In recent decades, the Antarctic has undergone significant environmental change, including the largest increases in ultraviolet B (UV-B; 290-320nm) radiation levels in the world and, in the maritime region …

Issues In Strategy Classifications In Language Learning: A Framework For Kanji Learning Strategy Research, G. Haththotuwa Gamage

Faculty of Arts - Papers (Archive)

A significant amount of research has contributed to our understanding of language learning strategies in the past decade. Orthography-specific characteristics of kanji (Chinese characters used in Japanese language) have seen the development of a growing interest in kanji learning strategy research. This paper examines recent trends in language learning strategies in general and identifies unresolved issues related to research in kanji learning strategies. A conceptual framework for further research is discussed in order to assist approaches to kanji learning strategies and research conducted within the area.

Data-Driven Market Segmentation - A Structure-Based Conceptual Framework For Management Decision Support, Sara Dolnicar, Friedrich Leisch

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Market segmentation increasingly uses homogeneous groups of consumers determined on the basis of empirical market data as target segments (a posteriori-, data-driven-, post hoc segmentation) rather than splitting individuals according to single, typically socio-demographic or geographic, criteria (a priori-, commen sense segmentation). A vast amount of contributions has been made to improve methodology of identifying or constructing data-based market segments. However, real world data sets often do not contain clearly separated density clusters. Therefore all techniques used in data-based market segmentation can render multiple solutions of similar quality. So far no attempt has been made to construct a framework enabling …

Corporate Governance, The Environment And The Internet, Jane Andrew

Faculty of Commerce - Papers (Archive)

Corporate use of the internet for a variety of business purposes is now commonplace. Owning and occupying internet space is almost essential for publicly traded companies, either as a place to do business or as a place to exchange information about business. It has also been documented that the internet provides a global meeting ground for those interested in social and environmental change. The two ideas are now combining, leading to a situation in which corporations are using their web pages to provide environmental information about their activities as part of their corporate governance strategy. This paper performs an initial …

Career Potential For New Science Journalists, Troy Coyle

Faculty of Creative Arts - Papers (Archive)

Despite public support for science reportage, science stories are rare in Australian media. The reasons for this are not clear but the net impact is that there are few opportunities for aspiring science journalists in a market that is dominated by a few high-profile individuals. Thus, budding science journalists would probably be best served by trying to create new opportunities and widening the market for science journalism, rather than competing for the few existing niche positions. This study investigates the potential career paths for new science journalists as well as the challenges facing science journalism in Australia.

Tolerance Of Control-Flow Testing Criteria, S. A. Vilkomir, K. Kapoor, J. P. Bowen

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Effectiveness of testing criteria is the ability to detect failure in a software program. We consider not only effectiveness of some testing criterion in itself but a variance of effectiveness of different test sets satisfied the same testing criterion. We name this property "tolerance" of a testing criterion and show that, for practical using a criterion, a high tolerance is as well important as high effectiveness. The results of empirical evaluation of tolerance for different criteria, types of faults and decisions are presented. As well as quite simple and well-known control-flow criteria, we study more complicated criteria: full predicate coverage, …

Extreme Marine Inundations (Tsunamis?) Of Coastal Western Australia, J. Nott, Edward A. Bryant

Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)

Along 2500 km of the Western Australian coast, prehistoric ephemeral marine inundations (storm surges or tsunamis) were much larger than those that occurred since European settlement. The evidence is in the form of shell and coral deposits atop 30-m-high headlands, sand deposits containing large boulders, shell and coral several kilometers inland, and fields of large imbricated boulders across shore platforms. The size of transported boulders and the altitude of these deposits suggest that tsunamis were responsible, not large storm waves. The orientation of boulders reveals paleowave directions. Radiocarbon dating of the deposits suggest three very large tsunamis along this coast …

Building Research Capacity: An Exploratory Model Of Gps’ Training Needs And Barriers To Research Involvement, Alison Jones, Teresa A. Burgess, Elizabeth Farmer, Jeffrey Fuller, Nigel P. Stocks, Judy E. Taylor, Raechel L. Waters

Graduate School of Medicine - Papers (Archive)

Aims: To determine general practitioners’ research training needs, and the barriers to involvement in research.

Method: Semi-structured interviews with 11 GPs in rural and metropolitan South Australia, analysed using a grounded theory approach.

Results: General practitioners’ perceptions about their research needs were limited by their own experience and focussed at an individual level. Overlapping needs and barriers emerged, categorised as: ‘individual issues’ (a lack of research training or experience, concepts and attitudes to research, and research interest) and ‘systems issues’ (funding arrangements for general practice, access to resources, opportunity for publication and the role of The Royal Australian College of …

Reducing Redundancy In The Hypertree Decomposition Scheme, Peter Harvey, Aditya K. Ghose

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Hypertree decomposition is a powerful technique for transforming near-acyclic CSPs into acyclic CSPs. Acyclic CSPs have efficient, polynomial time solving techniques, and so these conversions are of interest to the constraints community. We present here an improvement on the opt-k-decomp algorithm for finding an optimal hypertree decomposition.

A Novel Approach To History: Arnold Bennett, Marie Corelli And The Interior Lives Of Single Middle-Class Women, England, 1880-1914, Sharon Crozier-De Rosa

Faculty of Law, Humanities and the Arts - Papers (Archive)

There are many ‘gaps’ or ‘silences’1 in women’s history – especially in relation to their interior lives. Historians seeking to penetrate the thoughts and emotions of ‘ordinary’ single middle-class women living during the Late Victorian and Edwardian years have a challenging task. These women rarely left personal documents for historians to analyse. Novels, particularly popular or bestselling novels, represent one pathway into this realm. Popular novels are numbered among the few written sources that are available to help historians to fill in some of the absences in the conventional historical record. I have chosen a selection of the novels of …

Fading Characteristics For Indoor Wireless Channels At 5 Ghz Unlicensed Bands, M. Carroll, Tadeusz A. Wysocki

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The paper reports on experiments undertaken at the University of Wollongong to characterise fading profiles of indoor wireless channels at the 5 GHz bands. The measurements were undertaken at different locations around the campus with results recorded for post-processing to calculate the Rician k-factor, the level crossing rate and the average fade duration.

Performance Measurement Of Watermark Embedding Patterns, R. Scealy, R. Safavi-Naini, N. P. Sheppard

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Segmented watermarking is an approach to multiple watermarking that can be used to acknowledge the contribution of multiple authors or to embed a fingerprint code-word, but is susceptible to cropping attacks that discard portions of the watermarked media. Careful selection of the watermark embedding pattern can increase the resilence of a segmented watermark in the presence of cropping attacks. In this paper, we consider performance measures for embedding patterns and compare the performance of several proposed embedding patterns using these measures.

Lie Analysis Of The Webster Horn Equation With Application To Audio Object Recognition, Tania M. Barrett, Ian S. Burnett, Jason Lukasiak

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

The Webster horn equation describes the pressure wave in a duct of slowly varying cross section. We discuss symmetry reductions and exact solutions of the Webster horn equation using the classical Lie method of infinitesimals. The particular case of the exponential horn is examined and a complete set of reductions and solutions is formulated. The generation of a complete set of solutions using Lie analysis produces a set of group transformations. Particular attention is given to a new solution found, which contains an exponentially decaying Bessel function. The use of these group transformations as a tool for audio object recognition …

Web Agents For Requirements Consistency Management, Z. Chen, Aditya K. Ghose

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Inconsistency handling is an aspect of requirements engineering that has attracted considerable research attention. We explore novel ways to applying semantic Web technologies to this problem, in the context of a Web-based agent-mediated environment for distributed requirements engineering.

Accelerated Iterative Blind Deconvolution Of Still Images, Prashan Premaratne, M. Premaratne

Faculty of Engineering - Papers (Archive)

We propose an approach for blind deconvolution of still images with moderate noise contamination. The iterative technique is based on the general concepts of iterative techniques for blind deconvolution. The ill-convergence problem associated with most of the iterative techniques is circumvented in our approach using zero-sheet separation techniques. This technique can handle real images blurred by complex point spread functions (PSF), which is a common imaging problem, with blur signal-to-noise ratios (BSNR) of 70 dB and above for PSF of size 32/spl times/32 and larger. The technique performs much better for PSF of smaller sizes with low BSNR around 30 …

Line Segment Distribution Of Sketches For Persian Signature Recognition, A. Chalechale, Alfred Mertins

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

A novel fast method for line segment extraction based on chain code representation of thinned sketches (or edge maps) is presented and exploited for Persian signature recognition. The method has a parallel nature and can be employed on parallel machines. It breaks the macro chains into several micro chains after applying shifting, smoothing and differentiating. The micro chains are then approximated by straight line segments. Length and position distributions of the extracted line segments are used to make a compact feature vector for Iranian cursive signature. The feature vector is invariant under affine transforms and can be used effectively in …

A Fully Snr, Spatial And Temporal Scalable 3dspiht-Based Video Coding Algorithm For Video Streaming Over Heterogeneous Networks, H. Danyali, Alfred Mertins

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Video streaming over heterogeneous networks (e.g. the Internet) requires high degree of scalability from the video coding. To achieve all types of scalability required for a fully scalable video coding, a modification of the 3DSPIHT algorithm is presented in this paper. The proposed algorithm, called fully scalable 3DSPIHT (FS-3DSPIHT), adds spatial and temporal scalability features to the 3DSPIHT algorithm, through the introduction of resolution dependent lists and a resolution-dependent sorting pass. The important features of the original 3DSPIHT coder such as compression efficiency and full embeddedness are kept. The output bitstream of the FS-3DSPIHT encoder consists of a set of …

Trends In The Selection Of Automatic Identification Technology In Electronic Commerce Applications, Katina Michael

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

Since the 1970s, automatic identification (auto-ID) technologies have been evolving to revolutionise the way people live and work. Previous research has not addressed auto-ID technological innovation as a field of study, despite its growing importance on consumer, business and government electronic commerce (EC) applications. This paper is specifically concerned with five auto-ID technologies, bar codes, magnetic-stripe card, smart card, biometrics and radiofrequency identification (RF/ID) tags and transponders. Using multiple embedded case studies and applying the fundamental concepts of the systems of innovation (SI) approach, the overall aim is to understand the selection environment of the auto-ID industry. The results show …

Two-Phase (Air And Water) Flow Through Rock Joints: Analytical And Experimental Study, Buddhima Indraratna, P. G. Ranjith, J. R. Price, W. Gale

Faculty of Engineering - Papers (Archive)

This research study deals with the characterization of two-phase flow in a fractured rock mass. A comprehensive mathematical model with which to predict the quantity of each flow component in a single joint is developed. A joint with two parallel walls filled with layers of water and air (stratified) is analyzed. The effects of mechanical deformation of the joint, the compressibility of fluids, the solubility of air in water, and the phase change between fluids have been taken into account to develop analytical expressions which describe the behavior at the air–water interface. The model was calibrated using a newly designed …

Mpeg-21: Goals And Achievements, I. Burnett, R. Van De Walle, K. Hill, J. Bormans, F. Pereira

Faculty of Informatics - Papers (Archive)

MPEG-21 is an open standards-based framework for multimedia delivery and consumption. It aims to enable the use of multimedia resources across a wide range of networks and devices. We discuss MPEG-21's parts, achievements, ongoing activities, and opportunities for new technologies.