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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Effects Of Wetting Agents And Approaching Anode On Lead Migration In Electrokinetic Soil Remediation, Yee Sern Ng, Bhaskar Sen Gupta, Mohd Ali Hashim Jan 2014

Effects Of Wetting Agents And Approaching Anode On Lead Migration In Electrokinetic Soil Remediation, Yee Sern Ng, Bhaskar Sen Gupta, Mohd Ali Hashim

Ng Yee-Sern

Approaching anode is one of the enhancement techniques in electrokinetic soil remediation. This technique is reported to give promising migration for heavy metals under shorter treatment time and at lower cost in comparison to normal fixed anode system. In the present study, the effectiveness of fixed anode and approaching anode techniques in electrokinetic soil remediation for lead migration under different types of wetting agents (0.01M NaNO3 and 0.1M citric acid) was investigated. The study showed that the use of citric acid enhanced lead migration in comparison to NaNO3. For NaNO3 tests, lead was found to accumulate in the middle of …


Bayesian Nonparametric Reliability Analysis For A Railway System At Component Level, Payam Mokhtarian, Mohammad-Reza Namazi-Rad, Ho Tin Kin, Thomas Suesse Sep 2013

Bayesian Nonparametric Reliability Analysis For A Railway System At Component Level, Payam Mokhtarian, Mohammad-Reza Namazi-Rad, Ho Tin Kin, Thomas Suesse

Mohammad-Reza NAMAZI-RAD Ph.D.

Railway system is a typical large-scale complex system with interconnected sub-systems which contain numerous components. System reliability is retained through appropriate maintenance measures and cost-effective asset management requires accurate estimation of reliability at the lowest level. However, real-life reliability data at component level of a railway system is not always available in practice, let alone complete. The component lifetime distributions from the manufacturers are often obscured and complicated by the actual usage and working environments. Reliability analysis thus calls for a suitable methodology to estimate a component lifetime under the conditions of a lack of failure data and unknown and/or …


Late Palaeolithic Core Reduction Strategies In Dhofar, Oman, Yamandu Hilbert, Jeffrey Rose, Richard Roberts Mar 2013

Late Palaeolithic Core Reduction Strategies In Dhofar, Oman, Yamandu Hilbert, Jeffrey Rose, Richard Roberts

Richard G Roberts

Systematic surveys conducted in the Dhofar Governorate of Oman have produced over 300 surface sites, as well as excavation of in situ archaeological deposits. A number of these assemblages have been classified as part of the Nejd Leptolithic Tradition (NLT).This study describes a selection of these assemblages from sites distributed across the southern and central Najd plateau in Dhofar,including both surface scatters and stratified rock shelters. The NLT is broadly characterized by the reduction of blades struck from single-platform cores with flat flaking surfaces, in conjunction with the faconnage manufacture of bifacial implements. Based on technological analysis and artefact conjoins, …


Plenary: Nonparametric Hypothesis Testing For A Spatial Signal, Noel A. Cressie Feb 2013

Plenary: Nonparametric Hypothesis Testing For A Spatial Signal, Noel A. Cressie

Professor Noel Cressie

Summary form only given. Nonparametric hypothesis testing for a spatial signal can involve a large number of hypotheses. For instance, two satellite images of the same scene, taken before and after an event, could be used to test a hypothesis that the event has no environmental impact. This is equivalent to testing that the mean difference of "after-before" is zero at each of the (typically thousands of) pixels that make up the scene. In such a situation, conventional testing procedures that control the overall Type I error deteriorate as the number of hypotheses increase. Powerful testing procedures are needed for …


Texture Analysis Using Partially Ordered Markov Models, Jennifer Davidson, Ashit Talukder, Noel A. Cressie Feb 2013

Texture Analysis Using Partially Ordered Markov Models, Jennifer Davidson, Ashit Talukder, Noel A. Cressie

Professor Noel Cressie

Texture is a phenomenon in image data that continues to receive wide-spread interest due to its broad range of applications. The paper focuses on but one of several ways to model textures, namely, the class of stochastic texture models. the authors introduce a new spatial stochastic model called partially ordered Markov models, or POMMs. They show how POMMs are a generalization of a class of models called Markov mesh models, or MMMs, that allow an explicit closed form of the joint probability, just as do MMMs. While POMMs are a type of Markov random field model (MRF), the general MRFs …


Models And Inference For Clustering Of Locations Of Mines And Minelike Objects, Noel A. Cressie, Andrew B. Lawson Feb 2013

Models And Inference For Clustering Of Locations Of Mines And Minelike Objects, Noel A. Cressie, Andrew B. Lawson

Professor Noel Cressie

Mines and mine-like objects are distributed throughout an area of interest. Remote sensing of the area form an aircraft yields image data that represent the superposition of electromagnetic emissions from the mines and mine-like objects. In this article we build a hierarchical statistical model for the reconstruction of mien locations given a point pattern of the superposition of mines and mine-like objects. It is shown how inference on the mine locations can be obtained using Markov chain Monte Carlo methods.


Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis Of Minefield Data, Noel A. Cressie, Andrew B. Lawson Feb 2013

Bayesian Hierarchical Analysis Of Minefield Data, Noel A. Cressie, Andrew B. Lawson

Professor Noel Cressie

Based on remote sensing of a potential minefield, point locations are identified, some of which may not be mines. The mines and mine-like objects are to be distinguished based on their point patterns, although it must be emphasized that all we see is the superposition of their locations. In this paper, we construct a hierarchical spatial point-process model that accounts for the different patterns of mines and mine-like objects and uses posterior analysis to distinguish between them. Our Bayesian approach is applied to COBRA image data obtained from the NSWC Coastal Systems Station, Dahlgren Division, Panama City, Florida. 2003 Copyright …


Data Mining Of Misr Aerosol Product Using Spatial Statistics, Tao Shi, Noel A. Cressie Feb 2013

Data Mining Of Misr Aerosol Product Using Spatial Statistics, Tao Shi, Noel A. Cressie

Professor Noel Cressie

In climate models, aerosol forcing is the major source of uncertainty in climate forcing, over the industrial period. To reduce this uncertainty, instruments on satellites have been put in place to collect global data. However, missing and noisy observations impose considerable difficulties for scientists researching global aerosol distribution, aerosol transportation, and comparisons between satellite observations and global-climate-model outputs. In this paper, we propose a Spatial Mixed Effects (SME) statistical model to predict the missing values, denoise the observed values, and quantify the spatial-prediction uncertainties. The computations associated with the SME model are linear scalable to the number of data points, …


Mine Boundary Detection Using Partially Ordered Markov Models, Xia Hua, Jennifer Davidson, Noel A. Cressie Feb 2013

Mine Boundary Detection Using Partially Ordered Markov Models, Xia Hua, Jennifer Davidson, Noel A. Cressie

Professor Noel Cressie

Detection of objects in images in an automated fashion is necessary for many applications, including automated target recognition. In this paper, we present results of an automated boundary detection procedure using a new subclass of Markov random fields (MRFs), called partially ordered Markov models (POMMs). POMMs offer computational advantages over general MRFs. We show how a POMM can model the boundaries in an image. Our algorithm for boundary detection uses a Bayesian approach to build a posterior boundary model that locates edges of objects having a closed loop boundary. We apply our method to images of mines with very good …


A Spatial-Temporal Statistical Approach To Command And Control Problems In Battle-Space Digitization, David A. Wendt, Noel A. Cressie, Gardar Johannesson Feb 2013

A Spatial-Temporal Statistical Approach To Command And Control Problems In Battle-Space Digitization, David A. Wendt, Noel A. Cressie, Gardar Johannesson

Professor Noel Cressie

There are considerable difficulties in the integration, visualization, and overall management of battle-space information for the purpose of Command and Control (C2). One problem that we see as being important is the timely combination of digital information from multiple (possibly disparate) sources in a dynamically evolving environment. That is, there is a need to assimilate incoming data rapidly, so as to provide the battle commander with up-to-date knowledge about the battle-space and thereby to facilitate the command-decision process. In this paper, we present a spatial-temporal approach to obtaining accurate estimates of the constantly changing battlefield, based on noisy data from …


Development Of A New Lagrangian Float For Studying Coastal Marine Ecosystems, Alex Schwithal, Chris Roman Jan 2013

Development Of A New Lagrangian Float For Studying Coastal Marine Ecosystems, Alex Schwithal, Chris Roman

Christopher N. Roman

This paper presents an overview and initial testing results for a shallow water Lagrangian float designed to operate in coastal settings. The presented effort addresses the two main characteristics of the shallow coastal environment that preclude the direct of use of many successfully deep water floats, namely the higher variation of water densities near the coast compared with the open ocean and the highly varied bathymetry. Our idea is to develop a high capacity dynamic auto-ballasting system that is able to compensate for the expected seawater density variation over a broad range of water temperatures and salinities while using measurements …


Deep Sea Underwater Robotic Exploration In The Ice-Covered Arctic Ocean With Auvs, Clayton Kunz, Chris Murphy, Richard Camilli, Hanumant Singh, John Bailey, Ryan M. Eustice, Chris Roman, Michael Jakuba, Claire Willis, Taichi Sato, Ko-Ichi Nakamura, Robert A. Sohn Jan 2013

Deep Sea Underwater Robotic Exploration In The Ice-Covered Arctic Ocean With Auvs, Clayton Kunz, Chris Murphy, Richard Camilli, Hanumant Singh, John Bailey, Ryan M. Eustice, Chris Roman, Michael Jakuba, Claire Willis, Taichi Sato, Ko-Ichi Nakamura, Robert A. Sohn

Christopher N. Roman

The Arctic seafloor remains one of the last unexplored areas on Earth. Exploration of this unique environment using standard remotely operated oceanographic tools has been obstructed by the dense Arctic ice cover. In the summer of 2007 the Arctic Gakkel Vents Expedition (AGAVE) was conducted with the express intention of understanding aspects of the marine biology, chemistry and geology associated with hydrothermal venting on the section of the mid-ocean ridge known as the Gakkel Ridge. Unlike previous research expeditions to the Arctic the focus was on high resolution imaging and sampling of the deep seafloor. To accomplish our goals we …


Terrain Constrained Stereo Correspondence, Gabrielle Inglis, Chris Roman Dec 2012

Terrain Constrained Stereo Correspondence, Gabrielle Inglis, Chris Roman

Christopher N. Roman

There is a persistent need in the oceanographic community for accurate three dimensional reconstructions of seafloor structures. To meet this need underwater mapping techniques have expanded to include the use of stereo vision and high frequency multibeam sonar for mapping scenes 10's to 100's of square meters in size. Both techniques have relative advantages and disadvantages that depend on the task at hand and the desired accuracy. In this paper, we develop a method to constrain the often problematic stereo correspondence search to small sections of the image that correspond to estimated ranges along the epipolar lines calculated from coregistered …


Application Of Structured Light Imaging For High Resolution Mapping Of Underwater Archaeological Sites, Chris Roman, Gabrielle Inglis, James Rutter Dec 2012

Application Of Structured Light Imaging For High Resolution Mapping Of Underwater Archaeological Sites, Chris Roman, Gabrielle Inglis, James Rutter

Christopher N. Roman

This paper presents results from recent work using structured light laser profile imaging to create high resolution bathymetric maps of underwater archaeological sites. Documenting the texture and structure of submerged sites is a difficult task and many applicable acoustic and photographic mapping techniques have recently emerged. This effort was completed to evaluate laser profile imaging in comparison to stereo imaging and high frequency multibeam mapping. A ROV mounted camera and inclined 532 nm sheet laser were used to create profiles of the bottom that were then merged into maps using platform navigation data. These initial results show very promising resolution …


P2cp: A New Cloud Storage Model To Enhance Performance Of Cloud Services, Zhe Sun, Jun Shen, Ghassan Beydoun Dec 2012

P2cp: A New Cloud Storage Model To Enhance Performance Of Cloud Services, Zhe Sun, Jun Shen, Ghassan Beydoun

Associate Professor Ghassan Beydoun

This paper presents a storage model named Peer to Cloud and Peer (P2CP). Assuming that the P2CP model follows the Poisson process or Little’s law, we prove that the speed and availability of P2CP is generally better than that of the pure Peer to Peer (P2P) model, the Peer to Server, Peer (P2SP) model or the cloud model. A key feature of our P2CP is that it has three data transmission tunnels: the cloud-user data transmission tunnel, the clients’ data transmission tunnel, and the common data transmission tunnel. P2CP uses the cloud storage system as a common storage system. When …


Evaluating Usage Of Wsmo And Owl-S In Semantic Web Services, Lina Azleny Kamaruddin, Jun Shen, Ghassan Beydoun Dec 2012

Evaluating Usage Of Wsmo And Owl-S In Semantic Web Services, Lina Azleny Kamaruddin, Jun Shen, Ghassan Beydoun

Associate Professor Ghassan Beydoun

Applying ontologies is the most promising approach to semantically enrich Web services. To facilitate this, two efforts contributed the most in enabling the creation of ontologies: OWL-S from the US and WSMO in Europe. These two compete and promote their ontologies from the design perspective, reflecting their inventors’ bias but not offering much help to Web service developers using them. To bypass existing biases and enable evaluation of ontologies expressed in these two languages, this paper provides a study of the two important facilitators, OWL-S and WSMO, surveying their usage in several SWS Projects and identifying their respective and outstanding …


A Pipeline For Structured Light Bathymetric Mapping, Gabrielle Inglis, Clara Smart, J. Vaughn, Chris Roman Oct 2012

A Pipeline For Structured Light Bathymetric Mapping, Gabrielle Inglis, Clara Smart, J. Vaughn, Chris Roman

Christopher N. Roman

This paper details a methodology for using structured light laser imaging to create high resolution bathymetric maps of the sea floor. The system includes a pair of stereo cameras and an inclined 532nm sheet laser mounted to a remotely operated vehicle (ROV). While a structured light system generally requires a single camera, a stereo vision set up is used here for in-situ calibration of the laser system geometry by triangulating points on the laser line. This allows for quick calibration at the survey site and does not require precise jigs or a controlled environment. A batch procedure to extract the …


Greedy Approximation Of Kernel Pca By Minimizing The Mapping Error, Peng Cheng, Wanqing Li, Philip Ogunbona Sep 2012

Greedy Approximation Of Kernel Pca By Minimizing The Mapping Error, Peng Cheng, Wanqing Li, Philip Ogunbona

Professor Philip Ogunbona

In this paper we propose a new kernel PCA (KPCA) speed-up algorithm that aims to find a reduced KPCA to approximate the kernel mapping. The algorithm works by greedily choosing a subset of the training samples that minimizes the mean square error of the kernel mapping between the original KPCA and the reduced KPCA. Experimental results have shown that the proposed algorithm is more efficient in computation and effective with lower mapping errors than previous algorithms.


Perceived Similarity And Visual Descriptions In Content-Based Image Retrieval, Yuan Zhong, Lei Ye, Wanqing Li, Philip Ogunbona Sep 2012

Perceived Similarity And Visual Descriptions In Content-Based Image Retrieval, Yuan Zhong, Lei Ye, Wanqing Li, Philip Ogunbona

Professor Philip Ogunbona

The use of low-level feature descriptors is pervasive in content-based image retrieval tasks and the answer to the question of how well these features describe users’ intention is inconclusive. In this paper we devise experiments to gauge the degree of alignment between the description of target images by humans and that implicitly provided by low-level image feature descriptors. Data was collected on how humans perceive similarity in images. Using images judged by humans to be similar, as ground truth, the performance of some MPEG-7 visual feature descriptors were evaluated. It is found that various descriptors play different roles in different …


Emotional States Control For On-Line Game Avatars, Ce Zhan, Wanqing Li, Farzad Safaei, Philip Ogunbona Sep 2012

Emotional States Control For On-Line Game Avatars, Ce Zhan, Wanqing Li, Farzad Safaei, Philip Ogunbona

Professor Philip Ogunbona

Although detailed animation has already been achieved in a number of Multi-player On-line Games (MOGs), players have to use text commands to control emotional states of avatars. Some systems have been proposed to implement a real-time automatic system facial expression recognition of players. Such systems can then be used to control avatars emotional states by driving the MOG's "animation engine" instead of text commands. Some of the challenges of such systems is the ability to detect and recognize facial components from low spatial resolution face images. In this paper a system based on an improved face detection method of Viola …


Modelling Of Color Cross-Talk In Cmos Image Sensors, Wanqing Li, Philip Ogunbona, Yan Shi, Igor Kharitonenko Sep 2012

Modelling Of Color Cross-Talk In Cmos Image Sensors, Wanqing Li, Philip Ogunbona, Yan Shi, Igor Kharitonenko

Professor Philip Ogunbona

This paper presents a way to model the cross-talk effect in CMOS image sensors. Two algorithms are derived from the model; both of them work on the Bayer raw data and have low computational complexity. Experiments on Macbeth color chart and real images have shown the effectiveness of the modeling to eliminate the cross-talk effect and produce better quality images with traditional color interpolation and correction algorithms designed for CCD image sensors.


Application Of Visual Modelling In Image Restoration And Colour Image Processing, Aziz Qureshi, Philip Ogunbona Sep 2012

Application Of Visual Modelling In Image Restoration And Colour Image Processing, Aziz Qureshi, Philip Ogunbona

Professor Philip Ogunbona

This paper describes the application of human visual models in (i) defining a visually uniform colour representation space and (ii) the formulation of visually weighted Kalman filtering for image restoration. The former being useful in colour image quantisation and compression. For (i), the uniformity of chromaticity differences at the ouptut of Frei ’s colour vision model [3] is tested and compensated for by using MacAdam’s uniform chromaticity space. For (ii), the dynamical image model of the Kalman filter is visually weighted using the frequency response of Stockham’s model [l] of human vision.


Channel-Optimized Vector Trellis Source Coding For The Awgn Channel, Philip Secker, Philip Ogunbona Sep 2012

Channel-Optimized Vector Trellis Source Coding For The Awgn Channel, Philip Secker, Philip Ogunbona

Professor Philip Ogunbona

A channel-optimised (joint source and channel) trellis source coder is designed for the AWGN channel. The optimum decoder is a non-linear function of the real channel information. The extension to 2D vector alphabets coupled with modifications to the signal space are found to improve performance. Favourable comparisons are made against a trellis source coder/TCM system.


Visual Perceptual Process Model And Object Segmentation, Wanqing Li, P. Ogunbona, Lei Ye, Igor Kharitonenko Sep 2012

Visual Perceptual Process Model And Object Segmentation, Wanqing Li, P. Ogunbona, Lei Ye, Igor Kharitonenko

Professor Philip Ogunbona

Modeling human visual process is crucial for automatic object segmentation that is able to produce consistent results to human perception. Based on the latest understanding of how human performs the task of extracting objects from images, we proposed a graph-based computational framework to model the visual process. The model supports the hierarchical nature of human visual perception and consists of the key steps of human visual perception including pre-attentive (pre-constancy) grouping, figure-and-ground organization, and attentive (post-constancy) grouping. A divide-and-conquer implementation of the model based on the concept of shortest spanning tree (SST) has demonstrated the potential of the model for …


Industrial Computer Vision Using Undefined Feature Extraction, Phil Evans, John A. Fulcher, Philip Ogunbona Sep 2012

Industrial Computer Vision Using Undefined Feature Extraction, Phil Evans, John A. Fulcher, Philip Ogunbona

Professor Philip Ogunbona

This paper presents an application of computer The implementation and operation of the system is vision in a real-world uncontrolled environment found at BHP Steel Port Kembla. The task is visual identification of torpedo ladles at a Blast Furnace wlahdilceh. is achieved by reading numbers attached to each 3. IMPLEMENTATION Number recognition is achieved through use of feature extraction using a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) Artificial Neural Network (ANN). The novelty in the method used in this application is that the features the MLP is being trained to extract are undefined before the MLP is initialised. The results of the MLP …


Kernel Pca Of Hog Features For Posture Detection, Peng Cheng, Wanqing Li, Philip Ogunbona Sep 2012

Kernel Pca Of Hog Features For Posture Detection, Peng Cheng, Wanqing Li, Philip Ogunbona

Professor Philip Ogunbona

Motivated by the non-linear manifold learning ability of the Kernel Principal Component Analysis (KPCA), we propose in this paper a method for detecting human postures from single images by employing KPCA to learn the manifold span of a set of HOG features that can effectively represent the postures. The main contribution of this paper is to apply the KPCA as a non-linear learning and open-set classification tool, which implicitly learns a smooth manifold from noisy data that scatter over the feature space. For a new instance of HOG feature, its distance to the manifold that is measured by its reconstruction …


Index Factorised Image Adaptive Vector Quantisation, Jamshid Shanbehzadeh, Philip Ogunbona Sep 2012

Index Factorised Image Adaptive Vector Quantisation, Jamshid Shanbehzadeh, Philip Ogunbona

Professor Philip Ogunbona

No abstract provided.


On Multiple Watermarking, Nicholas Paul Sheppard, Reihaneh Safavi-Naini, Philip Ogunbona Sep 2012

On Multiple Watermarking, Nicholas Paul Sheppard, Reihaneh Safavi-Naini, Philip Ogunbona

Professor Philip Ogunbona

Mintzer and Braudaway once asked: If one watermark is good, are more better? In this paper, we discuss some techniques for embedding multiple watermarks into a single multimedia object and report some observations on implementations of these techniques.


Methods Of Channel-Optimised Trellis Source Coding For The Awgn Channel, Philip Secker, Philip Ogunbona Sep 2012

Methods Of Channel-Optimised Trellis Source Coding For The Awgn Channel, Philip Secker, Philip Ogunbona

Professor Philip Ogunbona

Improvements to channel-optimised trellis source coding for the AWGN channel are obtained by using, in various forms, real or ‘soft’ channel information. The proposed 1 bit/sample systems use a channel-optimised encoder matched to 1) a simple decision feedback detector, 2) an expanded codebook with 2-bit quantized information and 3) an optimum non-linear estimator decoder. The third system is further improved by considering vector alphabets and both constant and average energy constrained 2D signal constellations.


Face To Face Communications In Multiplayer Online Games: A Real-Time System, Ce Zhan, Wanqing Li, Farzad Safaei, Philip Ogunbona Sep 2012

Face To Face Communications In Multiplayer Online Games: A Real-Time System, Ce Zhan, Wanqing Li, Farzad Safaei, Philip Ogunbona

Professor Philip Ogunbona

Multiplayer online games (MOG) bring HCI into a new era of human-human interactions in computer world. Although current MOG provide more interactivity and social interaction in the virtual world, natural facial expression as a key factor in emulating face to face communications has been neglected by game designers. In this work, we propose a real-time automatic system to recognize players’ facial expressions, so that the recognition results can be used to drive the MOG’s “facial expression engine” instead of “text commands”. Our major contributions are the evaluation, improvement and efficient implementation of existing algorithms to build a real-time system that …