Convolutional neural network with joint stepwise character/word modeling based system for scene text recognition

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Text recognition in the wild is a challenging task in the field of computer vision and machine learning. Existing optical character recognition engines cannot...     

Study of planar structure applying reciprocity technique combined with MGEC and analysis of discontinuity

The 3D structure electromagnetic computation presents several difficulties related to the volume mesh. In fact, the entire volume space must be taken into account even the smallest details. In this article, we propose a formulation based on the reciprocity theorem combined with the generalized equivalent circuit method to model a planar 3D structure with both coaxial and planar excitation. The major advantage of this formulation is the fact to reduce the computational volume into 2D ones in the discontinuity plane. In addition, we focused on the calculation of the discontinuity between the excitation source and the planar structure to determine the exact behavior of the electric coaxial excitation model. The obtained current density, electric field distributions, and the input impedance are presented and discussed in the following sections. An approximately good agreement of input impedance with those obtained by the simulator and measurement is shown.     

Design of a retention tank: comparison of stormwater quality models with various levels of complexity.

Stormwater quality simulation models are useful tools for the design and management of sewer systems. Modelling results are highly sensitive to experimental data used for calibration. This sensitivity is examined for three modelling approaches of various complexities (site mean concentration approach, event mean concentration approach and build-up, washoff and transport modelling approach) applied to a typical case study (design of a dry detention tank), accounting for the variability of calibration data and their effect on simulation results. Calibrated models with different calibration data sets were used to simulate 3 years of rainfall with different retention tank specific volumes. Annual pollutant load interception efficiencies were determined. Simulations results revealed (i) that there is no advantage in using the EMC model compared to the SMC model and (ii) that the BWT model resulted in higher design ratios than those given by the SMC/hydraulic approach. For both EMC and BWT models, using an increasing number n of events for calibration leads to narrower confidence intervals for the design ratios. It is crucial for design ratios to account for successive storm events in chronological order and to account for the maximum allowable flow to be transferred to the downstream WWTP.     

Multi-User MIMO Mobile CDMA Uplink System Employing Turbo Coding and Joint Detection Through a Multipath Rayleigh Fading Channel

In this paper, a generalized multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antenna system that can be fitted to the uplink of a wireless communication system is considered for the general case of multi-user. At the transmitter, the information bits are Turbo coded, then interleaved and passed through a serial-to-parallel converter. The channel is assumed bad urban suffering from multipath Rayleigh fading resulting in inter-symbol and multiple access interferences (ISI and MAI). At the front-end of the receiver, a number of receiving antennas are used followed by a joint multi-user estimator based on the Minimum Mean Square Error Block Linear Equalizer (MMSE-BLE).Computer simulations demonstrate a significant performance improvement in both single user and multi-user cases.This paper depends in parts on that presented at the 11th European Wireless Conference, Cyprus, Nicosia, pp. 187–192, April 2005. Yasmine A. Fahmy was born in Guiza, Egypt, on June 4, 1976. She received the B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Communication and Electronics engineering from Cairo University, Egypt on 1999, 2001 and 2005 respectively. She is presently an assistant professor at Cairo University, Egypt. Her current field of interest is wireless communication and channel estimation. Hebat-Allah M. Mourad received her B.Sc., M. Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical communication engineering from Cairo University, Egypt, in 1983, 1987 and 1994 respectively. Since 1983, she has been with the Department of Electronics and Communications, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, and is currently associate professor there. Her research interests include optical fiber communications, mobile and satellite communications. Emad K. Al-Hussaini received his B.Sc degree in Electrical Communication Engineering from Ain-Shams University, Cairo, Egypt, in 1964 and his M.Sc and Ph.D. degrees from Cairo University, Giza, Egypt, in 1974 and 1977, respectively. From 1964 to 1970, he was with the General Egyptian Aeroorganization. Since 1970, he has been with the Department of Electronics and Communications, Faculty of Engineering, Cairo University, and is currently professor there. He was a research fellow at Imperial College, London, UK, and at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA, in the academic years 1976/1977 and 1981/1982, respectively. In 1990, he received the Egyptian national encouragement award for outstanding engineering research. He has written several papers for technical international journals and conferences. His research interests include signal processing, fading channel communication, modulation, and cellular mobile radio systems. Dr Al-Hussaini is a senior member of IEEE. He is listed in Marquis Whos Who in the World and in the IBC (International Biographical Center, Cambridge) for outstanding people of the 20th century.     

FHUQI-Miner: Fast high utility quantitative itemset mining

Applied Intelligence - High utility itemset mining is a popular pattern mining task, which aims at revealing all sets of items that yield a high profit in a transaction database. Although this task...     

Characterization of Urine Stem Cell-Derived Extracellular Vesicles Reveals B Cell Stimulating Cargo

Elucidation of the biological functions of extracellular vesicles (EVs) and their potential roles in physiological and pathological processes is an expanding field of research. In this study, we characterized USC–derived EVs and studied their capacity to modulate the human immune response in vitro. We found that the USC–derived EVs are a heterogeneous population, ranging in size from that of micro–vesicles (150 nm–1 μm) down to that of exosomes (60–150 nm). Regarding their immunomodulatory functions, we found that upon isolation, the EVs (60–150 nm) induced B cell proliferation and IgM antibody secretion. Analysis of the EV contents unexpectedly revealed the presence of BAFF, APRIL, IL–6, and CD40L, all known to play a central role in B cell stimulation, differentiation, and humoral immunity. In regard to their effect on T cell functions, they resembled the function of mesenchymal stem cell (MSC)–derived EVs previously described, suppressing T cell response to activation. The finding that USC–derived EVs transport a potent bioactive cargo opens the door to a novel therapeutic avenue for boosting B cell responses in immunodeficiency or cancer.     

The Impact of Metastable Intermolrecular Nanocomposite Particles on Kinetic Decomposition of Heterocyclic Nitramines Using Advanced Solid‐Phase Decomposition Models

Journal of Inorganic and Organometallic Polymers and Materials - Surface oxygen of oxide catalyst has low coordination number; they are negatively charged. Surface oxygen can act active site for...     

The effect of heat on metal incorporated silica gels

Silica gel prepared under varying conditions indicated that, in addition to the pH and kind of acid, the mode of adding the solutions govern the evolution of surface area of the produced xerogel. Co-precipitation with the oxides of iron, copper, or nickel showed a marked effect in decreasing the surface area of the dry gel. Xerogels incorporated with iron oxide suffered from a sharp sintering that appeared upon heating to 900 °C. Copper oxide-incorporated silicas showed a small decrease in surface area at the same temperature. However, silica incorporated with nickel oxide seems to be resistant to heat treatment at 900 °C, and exhibits only a small change in surface area. Acid treatment of the incorporated silicas resulted in negligible variations in surface area, probably due to the low content of oxides.     

A frame-based approach for capturing semantics from Arabic text for text-to-sign language MT

This paper describes the design and implementation of a computational model for Arabic natural language semantics, a semantic parser for capturing the deep semantic representation of Arabic text. The parser represents a major part of an Interlingua-based machine translation system for translating Arabic text into Sign Language. The parser follows a frame-based analysis to capture the overall meaning of Arabic text into a formal representation suitable for NLP applications that need for deep semantics representation, such as language generation and machine translation. We will show the representational power of this theory for the semantic analysis of texts in Arabic, a language which differs substantially from English in several ways. We will also show that the integration of WordNet and FrameNet in a single unified knowledge resource can improve disambiguation accuracy. Furthermore, we will propose a rule based algorithm to generate an equivalent Arabic FrameNet, using a lexical resource alignment of FrameNet1.3 LUs and WordNet3.0 synsets for English Language. A pilot study of motion and location verbs was carried out in order to test our system. Our corpus is made up of more than 2000 Arabic sentences in the domain of motion events collected from Algerian first level educational Arabic books and other relevant Arabic corpora.     

A large vocabulary system for Arabic online handwriting recognition

The success of using Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) for speech recognition application has motivated the adoption of these models for handwriting recognition especially the online handwriting that has large similarity with the speech signal as a sequential process. Some languages such as Arabic, Farsi and Urdo include large number of delayed strokes that are written above or below most letters and usually written delayed in time. These delayed strokes represent a modeling challenge for the conventional left-right HMM that is commonly used for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. In this paper, we introduce a new approach for handling delayed strokes in Arabic online handwriting recognition using HMMs. We also show that several modeling approaches such as context based tri-grapheme models, speaker adaptive training and discriminative training that are currently used in most state-of-the-art ASR systems can provide similar performance improvement for Hand Writing Recognition (HWR) systems. Finally, we show that using a multi-pass decoder that use the computationally less expensive models in the early passes can provide an Arabic large vocabulary HWR system with practical decoding time. We evaluated the performance of our proposed Arabic HWR system using two databases of small and large lexicons. For the small lexicon data set, our system achieved competing results compared to the best reported state-of-the-art Arabic HWR systems. For the large lexicon, our system achieved promising results (accuracy and time) for a vocabulary size of 64k words with the possibility of adapting the models for specific writers to get even better results.