Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Detection and Segmentation of Moving Objects in Video

This paper proposes to define moving objects in video scene in terms of MPEG like motion vectors. Local areas in a video scene where large magnitude of motion vectors is detected are regarded to contain a moving object(s). Macro blocks indicating a large motion vector are segmented from the frame of video image. In order to identify the moving object with information relevant to its geometric shape, and to track the moving object, the segmented parts of video image are further processed to find salient corners with the SUSAN edge/corner detector. Local minima of the output from the SUSAN algorithm are the representative feature points of the moving object. For the motion tracking applicable to video surveillance, correspondence between the frame to frame change of those feature points is calculated by the Scott and Longuet-Higgins algorithm, which provides a direct way of associating features of two arbitrary patterns consisting of feature points
THE MW 6.6 GISBORNE EARTHQUAKE OF 2007: PRELIMINARY RECORDS AND GENERAL SOURCE CHARACTERISATION

SUMMARY Gisborne city experienced recorded peak ground accelerations exceeding 0.25g for the third time since 1966 in the magnitude Mw 6.6 earthquake at 075516 UT (8:55 pm local time) on 20 December 2007. The earthquake was at a hypocentral distance of 64 km from Gisborne at a depth of 40 km, well within the mantle of the subducted slab of the Pacific plate as it dips beneath the North Island of New Zealand. At this location the plate interface is about 10-15 km deep. The main event was followed by sparse aftershocks consistent with a rupture of the subducted plate, with the largest aftershock of magnitude 4.6 occurring on December 22nd. The GeoNet website received 3,257 felt reports, with a strongest intensity of MM8 (heavily damaging) assigned to the main shock. The 122 strong motion records of this event show a clear regional directional variation in the wave propagation, as well as a distinct 2 Hz peak widely observed throughout the country. At a local scale, three sites in the Gisborne region recorded accelerations around 0.2g. Recordings in Gisborne city also revealed a predominant displacement direction, parallel to the main street where most of the damage occurred. Source studies from moment tensor solution, aftershock relocations, GPS and strong motion data showed that the earthquake occurred within the subducted plate on a 45 degree eastward dipping fault plane. The mainshock rupture area is about 10 km 2 reaching a maximum slip of 2.6 m. The computed high stress drop value of 17 MPa is as expected for an intraslab event and consistent with observations of very energetic seismic waves as well as heavy structural damage. GPS data recorded by continuous GPS instruments have also shown that slow slip occurred for about three weeks after the main shock. The slow slip was triggered on the subduction interface, rather than on the same fault plane as the aftershocks. This is the first clear-cut case worldwide of triggered slow slip, although three non-triggered slow-slip events have occurred in the same region since 2002.
Relationship between Chinese Mandarin intelligibility and speech transmission index STIPA under simulated tranmission conditions

The subjective Chinese speech intelligibility evaluation experiments and objective speech transmission index STIPA measurements were respectively carried out under a total of 234 simulated transmission conditions. The relationship curve between Chinese intelligibility scores and STIPA was established and compared with the standard reference curves given in IEC 60268-16 2011. It is found that remarkable differences exist among those curves; the current STI recommended by IEC standard seems to overestimate Chinese speech intelligibility, which means that even with similar STI values, the predicted speech intelligibility score according to the standard reference curve might be higher than actual speech intelligibility score for Chinese PB words test. The comparison also indicates that the differences in languages and subjective test methods may significantly influence the credibility of speech intelligibility evaluation results.
Indirect versus direct feedback in computer-based Prism Adaptation Therapy

Prism Adaptation Therapy (PAT) is an intervention method in the treatment of the attention disorder neglect (Frassinetti, Angeli, Meneghello, Avanzi, & Ladavas, 2002; Rossetti et al., 1998). The aim of this study was to investigate whether one session of PAT using a computer-attached touchscreen would produce similar after-effects to the conventional box normally used in PAT. In four experiments, 81 healthy subjects and 7 brain-injured patients diagnosed with neglect were subjected to a single session of PAT under two conditions: (1) using the original box, and (2) using a computer-based implementation of PAT. The session of PAT included a pre-exposure step involving pointing at 30 targets without feedback; an exposure step involving pointing at 90 targets with prism goggles and feedback; and a post-exposure step involving pointing at 60 targets, with no goggles and no feedback. The results indicate that the expected similarity in the after-effect produced by the two conditions seems to occur only if subjects receive feedback on pointing precision by seeing their fingertip during the exposure step. Attempts to provide feedback indirectly via icons on the computer screen failed to produce the expected size in the after-effect. The findings have direct implications for computer-based treatment of visuospatial disorders in the future and computer-assisted rehabilitation in general.
Vibration suppression for wafer transfer robot during trajectory tracking

In order to solve the vibration during the process of transferring wafers and achieve the purpose of transferring wafers accurately and stably, the wafer transfer robot dynamic model was modelled and the strategy of vibration suppression based on input shaping was proposed. Based on the characteristics of wafer transfer robot, ZV input shaper and skewed shaper was designed to solve the single axis's vibration caused by timing belt and harmonic reducer, and most importantly, the vibration of end effector during trajectory tracking was suppressed with input shapers using multi-modal system cascade method in the Cartesian space. Through comparison of different effects during the straight-line trajectory tracking in different spaces, the experiments demonstrated that the input shaping in Cartesian space suppressed vibration of end effector and improved the accuracy of trajectory tracking.
Learning from Multiple Graphs Using a Sigmoid Kernel

This paper studies the problem of learning from a set of input graphs, each of them representing a different relation over the same set of nodes. Our goal is to merge those input graphs by embedding them into an Euclidean space related to the commute time distance in the original graphs. This is done with the help of a small number of labeled nodes. Our algorithm output a combined kernel that can be used for different graph learning tasks. We consider two combination methods: the (classical) linear combination and the sigmoid combination. We compare the combination methods on node classification tasks using different semi-supervised graph learning algorithms. We note that the sigmoid combination method exhibits very positive results.
Negligence of Phrase Indexing in Search Engines

Currently, search engines suffer from conceptual problems despite the application of refi ned techniques. The fundamental problem lies in the absence of classical information processing concepts in search engine processing. The limitation of search engines in phrase processing is highlighted in this paper. The results of search engine retrievals are compared with propriety database search results. The inferences if applied in search engine processing would lead to high precision in search engine retrievals.
Experimental study on manipulator design for low collision impact force

This paper experimentally studies how the mechanism and system design of a manipulator affect the impact force when the manipulator collides with its environment. Although considerable safety-related research has been conducted, there has been no research comparing tendon-driven and direct-driven mechanisms. In this paper, from the perspective of impact force and impulse, two types of driving mechanisms are experimentally compared; a tendon-driven mechanism and a direct-driven mechanism. Also the effect of the absorber and the collision detection system are experimentally investigated. Finally, based on the knowledge obtained above, a single system design method of the manipulator to reduce the collision impact force is proposed and experimentally evaluated.
Patient Related Outcome Measures Dovepress Quality of Life and Use of Health Care Resources among Patients with Chronic Depression

you hereby accept the Terms. Non-commercial uses of the work are permitted without any further permission from Dove Medical Press Limited, provided the work is properly attributed. For permission for commercial use of this work, please see paragraphs 4.2 and 5 of our Terms Purpose: This study estimates the health-related quality of life and the health care resource utilization of patients diagnosed with chronic depression (CD) in Spain. Patients and methods: We used the Spanish National Health Survey 2011–2012, a cross-sectional survey representative at the national level, that selects people aged between 18 and 64 years (n=14,691). We estimated utility indices through the EuroQol five-dimensional descriptive system questionnaire included in the survey. We calculated percentage use of health care resources (medical visits, hospitalizations, emergency services, and drug consumption) and average number of resources used when available. A systematic comparison was made between people diagnosed with CD and other chronic conditions (OCCs). The chi-square test, Mann–Whitney U-test, and Kruskal–Wallis test were used to determine the statistical significance of differences between comparison groups. Multivariate analyses (Poisson regression, logistic regression, and linear regression) were also carried out to assess the relationship between quality of life and consumption of health care resources. Results: Approximately, 6.1% of the subjects aged between 18 and 64 years were diagnosed with CD (average age 48.3±11 years, 71.7% females). After controlling for age, sex, and total number of comorbidities, a diagnosis of CD reduced utility scores by 0.09 (P<0.05) vs OCCs, and increased the average number of hospitalizations by 15%, the average number of days at hospital by 51%, and the average number of visits to emergency services by 15% (P<0.05). CD also increased the average number of visits to secondary care by 14% and visits to general practitioners by 4%. People with CD had a higher probability of consuming drugs than people with OCCs (odds ratio [OR]: 1.24, P<0.05), but only 38.6% took antidepressants. Conclusion: People with CD had significantly lower health-related quality of life than people with OCCs. CD was associated with increased hospital length of stay and involved a higher consumption of emergency services and drugs than OCCs.
DRAFT 1 DRAFT DRAFT An operational framework for seeing and simulating feedbacks in land change science

Progress towards sustainability demands recognizing nonlinear, time delayed interactions that are at the heart of dynamic integrated socioeconomic and biophysical systems. Sustainability and land change science communities have recognized the need to go beyond static and vague depictions of nonlinear feedback processes in the study of these integrated systems. But to date, there have been few attempts to move beyond conceptualizations to develop operational frameworks that i) are spatially explicit and ii) incorporate feedbacks as endogenous structural sources of the observed behavior patterns iii) both within and across scales. Land use land cover change (LUCC) is a significant component of integrated socioeconomic and biophysical systems. We present an operational framework that takes its strength from its clear emphasis on nonlinear feedback interactions as drivers of LUCC. The framework addresses both local-and regional-level processes by employing the complementary use of systems modeling and spatially-explicit discrete-choice modeling. We demonstrate the potential of the approach on a rapidly urbanizing region, Pearl River Delta (PRD) in South China. Urbanization as a significant land change process puts pressure on landscapes in both direct and indirect ways through conversion of land to urban uses and increased demands for various natural resources, respectively. To this end, we employ our systemic framework and identify the most influential feedbacks and linkages impacting the urban land conversion over the course of urban and economic growth as experienced in PRD. The integrated framework allows tracking both local and regional level dynamics simultaneously. We also discuss the potential of systems approaches and use of complementary methods in advancing land change science both in theory and in practice. DRAFT 3 DRAFT 1. Introduction Advance in sustainability science requires uncovering those processes of integrated socioeconomic and biophysical systems that are relevant for the research questions at hand. These processes are a culmination of complex, and sometimes simply complicated interactions between the components of these systems and require the integration of knowledge from diverse natural and social science disciplines (Grimm, Morgan Grove et al. 2000; Alberti, Marzluff et al. 2003; Ostrom 2007). The challenge in dealing with integrated socioeconomic and biophysical systems stems from the fact that typically, in such complex systems, the cause and effect are not only simultaneously distant and interlocking in both time and space Lambin et al. 2007) but may also be separated across different spatio-temporal scales (Turner, Dale et al. 1989; Gibson, Ostrom et al. 2000). Nonlinear feedback interactions and …
An Overview on Dictionary and Sparse Representation in Image Denoising

The goal of natural image denoising is to estimate a clean version of a given noisy image, utilizing prior knowledge on the statistics of natural images. Noise removal from natural images is a challenging task. Image denoising is an applicable issue for image processing and computer vision problems. There are several existing methods are available for image denoising. A most applicable and expected property of an image denoising is that it should totally remove the noise as well as its preserve edges. This paper represents the review of parameter and algorithms available for image denoising. Index Terms: Image noise, sparse, over-complete dictionary, Redundancy parameters.
Multithreaded test synthesis for deadlock detection

Designing and implementing thread-safe multithreaded libraries can be a daunting task as developers of these libraries need to ensure that their implementations are free from concurrency bugs, including deadlocks. The usual practice involves employing software testing and/or dynamic analysis to detect deadlocks. Their effectiveness is dependent on well-designed multithreaded test cases. Unsurprisingly, developing multithreaded tests is significantly harder than developing sequential tests for obvious reasons. In this paper, we address the problem of automatically synthesizing multithreaded tests that can induce deadlocks. The key insight to our approach is that a subset of the properties observed when a deadlock manifests in a concurrent execution can also be observed in a single threaded execution. We design a novel, automatic, scalable and directed approach that identifies these properties and synthesizes a deadlock revealing multithreaded test. The input to our approach is the library implementation under consideration and the output is a set of deadlock revealing multithreaded tests. We have implemented our approach as part of a tool, named OMEN1. OMEN is able to synthesize multithreaded tests on many multithreaded Java libraries. Applying a dynamic deadlock detector on the execution of the synthesized tests results in the detection of a number of deadlocks, including 35 real deadlocks in classes documented as thread-safe. Moreover, our experimental results show that dynamic analysis on multithreaded tests that are either synthesized randomly or developed by third-party programmers are ineffective in detecting the deadlocks.
Analysing the Performance of Speaker Verification Task using Different Features

Speaker recognition is the identification of the person who is speaking by characteristics of their voices, also called “voice recognition”. The components of Speaker Recognition includes Speaker Identification(SI) and Speaker Verification(SV). Speaker identification is the task of determining an unknown speakers identity. If the speaker claims to be of a certain identity and the voice is to verify this claim, this is called Speaker Verification. It determines whether an unknown voice matches the known voice of a speaker whose identity is being claimed. This paper proposes Speaker Verification task. There are two phases in the Speaker Verification task namely, training and testing. In the training phase, different features such as Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient(MFCC), Linear Predictive Cepstral Coefficient(LPCC), Perceptual Linear Predictive(PLP) are extracted from the speech signal and is trained by Support Vector Machine to get the target speaker model. It is trained with both actual speaker and impostor utterances. In the testing phase, features are extracted from the test speech signal . The test features are extracted for different duration of time. The extracted feature vectors are given to the claimed speaker model and the decision is taken as authorised speaker or an impostor. The performance of a speaker verification task is analysed using different features with different utterance sizes. The result shows that the performance of a speaker verification task decreases when the duration of the speech utterances decreased.
An Efficient Algorithm for Data Cleaning

The quality of real world data that is being fed into a data warehouse is a major concern of today. As the data comes from a variety of sources before loading the data in the data warehouse, it must be checked for errors and anomalies. There may be exact duplicate records or approximate duplicate records in the source data. The presence of incorrect or inconsistent data can significantly distort the results of analyses, often negating the potential benefits of information-driven approaches. This paper addresses issues related to detection and correction of such duplicate records. Also, it analyzes data quality and various factors that degrade it. A brief analysis of existing work is discussed, pointing out its major limitations. Thus, a new framework is proposed that is an improvement over the existing technique.
Estimating Dynamic Discrete Choice Models Via Convex Analysis

Using results from convex analysis, we characterize the identification and estimation of dynamic discrete-choice models based on the random utility framework. Based on these insights, we propose a new two-step estimator for these models, which is easily applicable to models in which the utility shocks may not derive from an extreme- value distribution, and may be mutually correlated with each other and with the state variables. Monte Carlo results demonstrate the good performance of this estimator, and we provide a short application using the dynamic bus engine replacement model in Rust (1987).
Phosphorylation of AMPA-type glutamate receptors by calcium/calmodulin- dependent protein kinase II and protein kinase C in cultured hippocampal neurons

Phosphorylation of glutamate receptors (GluRs) is emerging as an important regulatory mechanism. In this study 32P labeling of non-NMDA GluRs was investigated in cultured hippocampal neurons stimulated 2–15 min with agonists that selectively stimulate either Ca2+/calmodulin- dependent protein kinase II (CaM-kinase II), Ca2+/phospholipid- dependent protein kinase C (PKC), or cAMP-dependent protein kinase A (PKA). Treatment of hippocampal neurons with glutamate/glycine (Glu/Gly), ionomycin, or 12-O-tetradecanoylphorbol 13-acetate (TPA) increased 32P labeling of immunoprecipitated alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5- methyl-4-isoxazoleproprionate (AMPA)-type GluRs by 145%, 180%, and 227%, respectively, of control values. This increased phosphorylation of GluRs was predominantly 32P-Ser with little 32P-Thr and no detectable 32P-Tyr. Glu/Gly and ionomycin, but not TPA, also increased 32P labeling of CaM-kinase II by 175% and 195%, respectively, of control values. Of these three agonists, only TPA stimulated phosphorylation of MARCKS (225% of control), a specific substrate of PKC. Forskolin treatment gave a three- to fourfold increase in the active catalytic subunit of PKA but did not result in the 32P labeling of AMPA-type GluRs, CaM-kinase II, or MARCKS. Phosphorylation of GluRs in response to Glu/Gly was blocked by a specific NMDA receptor/ion channel antagonist (DL-2-amino-5-phosphonovaleric acid) or by a cell- permeable inhibitor of CaM-kinase II (1-[N,O-bis(1,5- isoquinolinesulfonyl)-N-methyl-L-tyrosyl]-4- phenylpiperazine, KN-62). These results are consistent with the hypothesis that Ca2+ influx through the NMDA-type ion channel can activate CaM-kinase II, which in turn can phosphorylate and regulate AMPA-type GluR ion channels (McGlade-McCulloh et al., 1993). (ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
TRUST BY ASSOCIATION: A META‐REPUTATION SYSTEM FOR PEER‐TO‐PEER NETWORKS

Trust mechanisms are used in peer‐to‐peer (P2P) networks to help well‐behaving peers find other well‐behaving peers with which to trade. Unfortunately, these trust mechanisms often do little to keep badly behaving peers from entering and taking advantage of the network, which makes the resulting network difficult or impossible to use for legitimate purposes such as e‐commerce. We propose trust by association, a way of tying peers together in invitation‐only P2P networks in such a way as to encourage the removal of badly behaving peers. We use invitations to create a structure within the otherwise ad hoc P2P network. Using this structure, we create a meta‐reputation system where we measure a peer’s trustworthiness not only by its own behavior, but also by the behavior of the peers it has invited to join. The connection created between the peers takes advantage of the external social relationship that must exist before a peer can be invited into the network. The result is a P2P network where, rather than just trying to marginalize badly behaving peers, there is incentive to kick them out of the network. We present results from a simple simulation showing that our approach works well in general when combined with and compared to an existing trust mechanism.
General splitting and merging of 2-D DCT in the DCT domain

An efficient method for splitting an N/spl times/N 2-D DCT block into four (N/2)/spl times/(N/2) or two N/spl times/(N/2) (or (N/2)/spl times/N) 2-D DCT blocks is presented and vice versa. The computational complexity of the proposed methods is lower than the direct approach and the same as the most efficient converting approach existed in the literature. Besides, the proposed DCT splitter/merger is suitable for implementation by specific multimedia instruction set available nowadays. When N=8, our method can be applied to realize the transcoding between the latest video coding standards AVC/H.264 and the older ones, such as MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 part 2.