Engineering Commons^™

Simulation And Analysis Of Synthetic Aperture Radar Images, Jonathan Blackledge

Books/Book chapters

The principal model for an image, generated by the interaction of an incident wave field with an inhomogeneous medium, is based on the ‘weak scattering approximation’. This approximation forms the basis for image processing, analysis and image understanding associated with applications over a broad range of frequencies. The physical limitations of such a model are typically overcome by introducing an additional stochastic field term that takes into account those effects that do not conform to the weak scattering approximation, coupled with background ‘system noise’. In this chapter, a solution to the scattering problem is presented, which is based on an …

Ultra-Wideband Antennas, Max Ammann, Matthias John, Giuseppe Ruvio

Books/Book chapters

The focus of UWB antenna research activity has matured in recent years and currently mainly concentrates on applications such as biomedicine and security. Early UWB antenna designs were driven by the FCC allocation of spectrum in 2002 and focussed on obtaining wide impedance bandwidths with reasonable group delay characteristics. Many of these were simple planar monopoles antennas with canonical geometries. The emergence of new applications channelled the emphasis towards miniaturisation and integration into devices. This required optimisation of the antenna geometries to ensure that good system performance is achieved from the integrated antenna. Many optimisation techniques are available including the …

Optical Fiber Sensors For Smart Composite Materials And Structures, Manjusha Ramakrishnan, Yuliya Semenova, Gerald Farrell, Ginu Rajan

Books/Book chapters

Composite material structures are widely used in the aerospace, marine, aviation, transport, sport/leisure and civil engineering industries. Such composite material structures are frequently subjected to external perturbations and varying environmental conditions, which may cause the structures to suffer from fatique damage and/or failure, and thus require real-time structural health monitoring (SHM). Of necessity, the diagnosis process and condition monitoring of composite structures are usually carried out during their working life. The goal of such diagnosis is to detect, identify, locate, and assess the defects that my affect the safety or performance of a structure.

Resilient Digital Image Watermarking Using A Dct- Component Perturbation Model, Jonathan Blackledge, Oleksandr Iakovenko

Books/Book chapters

The applications of the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) for Computer Generated Imagery, image processingand, in particular, image compression are well known and the DCT also forms the central kernel for a number ofdigital image watermarking methods. In this paper we consider the application of the DCT for producing a highlyrobust method of watermarking images using a block partitioning approach subject to a self-alignment strategyand bit error correction. The applications for the algorithms presented include the copyright protection of imagesand Digital Right Management for image libraries, for example. However, the principal focus of the researchreported in this paper is on the …

Economic Challenges And Optimisation Of Ocean Energy Electrical Systems, Fergus Sharkey

Books/Book chapters

No abstract provided.

Morphological Analysis From Images Of Hyphal Growth Using A Fractional Dynamic Model, Jonathan Blackledge, Dan Barry

Books/Book chapters

The development of methods capable of accurately characterising the morphology of filamentous microbes represents a significant challenge to biotechnologists. This is because the productivity of many industrial fermentation processes is heavily dependent on the morphological form adopted by an organism. It is therefore of significant value if a quantitative model and associated metric(s) for morphological forms determined by complex phenotypes can be determined non-invasively, e.g. through image analysis. Specific interest is in the quantification of the branching behaviour of an organism. This is due to the link between branching frequency, biomass and metabolite production. In this paper we present a …

The Fractal Market Hypothesis: Applications To Financial Forecasting, Jonathan Blackledge

Books/Book chapters

No abstract provided.

Object Detection And Texture Classification With Applications To The Diagnosis Of Skin Cancer, Jonathan Blackledge, D. A. Dubovitskiy

Books/Book chapters

We present an approach to object detection and recognition in a digital image using a classification method that is based on the application of a set of features that include fractal parameters such as the Lacunarity and Fractal Dimension. The principal issues associated with object recognition are presented and a self-learning procedure for designing a decision making engine using fuzzy logic and membership function theory considered. The methods discussed, and the ‘system’ developed, have a range of applications in ‘machine vision’ and in this publication, we focus on the development and implementation of a skin cancer screening system that can …

Digital Signal Processing (Second Edition), Jonathan Blackledge

Books/Book chapters

This book provides an account of the mathematical background, computational methods and software engineering associated with digital signal processing. The aim has been to provide the reader with the mathematical methods required for signal analysis which are then used to develop models and algorithms for processing digital signals and finally to encourage the reader to design software solutions for Digital Signal Processing (DSP). In this way, the reader is invited to develop a small DSP library that can then be expanded further with a focus on his/her research interests and applications.

There are of course many excellent books and software …

Digital Image Processing, Jonathan Blackledge

Books/Book chapters

Newspapers and the popular scientific press today publish many examples of highly impressive images. These images range, for example, from those showing regions of star birth in the distant Universe to the extent of the stratospheric ozone depletion over Antarctica in springtime, and to those regions of the human brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease. Processed digitally to generate spectacular images, often in false colour, they all make an immediate and deep impact on the viewer’s imagination and understanding.

Professor Jonathan Blackledge’s erudite but very useful new treatise Digital Image Processing: Mathematical and Computational Methods explains both the underlying theory and …