Weighted Residual Numerical Differentiation Algorithm Applied to Experimental Bending Moment Data

A weighted-residual approach for differentiating one-dimensional discrete data is presented and applied to an experimental program in which distributions of bending moment were measured along a model pile foundation in a centrifuge test. The weighted-residual approach is validated by first differentiating a sinusoidal bending moment distribution, and errors in first and second derivatives associated with various ratios of wavelength to sampling interval are computed. A bending moment distribution from a finite-element simulation of a pile foundation is differentiated using the weighted-residual technique, by fitting cubic splines, and by polynomial regression, and second derivatives are compared with the recorded subgrade reaction distributions. The influence of adding noise to the sampled bending moment distribution prior to differentiation is explored and is found to be most influential when sampling intervals are small. Bending moment data recorded during the centrifuge experiment are double differentiated and uncertainty in strain gauge calibration factors and position are incorporated using a Monte Carlo simulation to assess potential errors in the computed second derivatives.     

Simulation of Plasma Focus Devices with Hemisphere Electrodes

A magneto-hydrodynamic simulation of a plasma focus device with hemisphere electrodes is constructed. The snowplow model is used with help of the momentum conservation equation to describe the motion of the plasma sheath between the two concentric hemispheres. The model simulates various plasma parameters like plasma temperature and plasma sheath velocity. The circuit equation is used to calculate the discharge current and electrodes voltage across the two hemisphere terminals. A comparison between the cylindrical and spherical devices is built. The results show that the current dip and the spike voltage is expected to be much pronounced in the spherical devices. It is found also that the plasma sheath velocity and temperature in the case of the cylindrical system are higher than that in the spherical one.     

Evaluation of curing and physical properties of NR/SBR blends using radiation-grafting copolymer

The curing characterizations of natural rubber (NR) and styrene butadiene rubber (SBR) lattices and their blends with and without NR-g-MA and SBR-g-MA were studied by using oscillating disc rheometer methods. The minimum value for torque decreases with increasing NR in the blends and with the incorporation ofNR-g-MA and SBR-g-MA. The value of maximum torque increases with increasing of SBR in the blend and with the presence of (NR-g-MA and SBR-g-MA) is decreased. The mechanical properties of the samples were studied. The tensile strengths increased steadily with an increase of NR content in the blend. Thermal characteristics of these latex blends were studied by thermogravimetric analysis. Thermal degradation of these individual lattices and their blends were investigated with special reference to blend ratio and vulcanization techniques. As the SBR content in the blends increased their thermal stability was also found to increase. POLYM. COMPOS., 2009. © 2009 Society of Plastics Engineers     

LTE‐Based Passive Bistatic Radar System for Detection of Ground‐Moving Targets

Use of a passive bistatic radar (PBR) system in the surveillance or monitoring of an area has its advantages. For example, a PBR system is able to utilize any available signal of opportunity (for example, broadcasting, communication, or radio navigation signals) for the purposes of surveillance. With this in mind, there are potentially many research areas to be explored; in particular, the capability of signals from existing and future communication systems, such as 4G and 5G. Long‐Term Evolution (LTE) is the world's most current communication system. Given this fact, this paper presents the latest feasibility studies and experimental results from using LTE signals in PBR applications. Details are provided about aspects such as signal characteristics, experimental configurations, and SNR studies. Six experimental scenarios are carried out to investigate the detection performance of our proposed system on ground‐moving targets. The ability to detect is demonstrated through use of the cross‐ambiguity function. The detection results suggest that LTE signals are suitable as a source signal for PBR.     

Speeded up robust features for efficient iris recognition

Iris recognition system is one of the biometric systems in which the development is growing rapidly. In this paper, speeded up robust features (SURFs) are used for detecting and describing iris keypoints. For feature matching, simple fusion rules are applied at different levels. Contrast-limited adaptive histogram equalization (CLAHE) is applied on the normalized image and is compared with histogram equalization (HE) and adaptive histogram equalization (AHE). The aim is to find the best enhancement technique with SURF and to verify the necessity of iris image enhancement. The recognition accuracy in each case is calculated. Experimental results demonstrate that CLAHE is a crucial enhancement step for SURF-based iris recognition. More keypoints can be extracted with enhancement using CLAHE compared to HE and AHE. This alleviates the problem of feature loss and increases the recognition accuracy. The accuracies of recognition using left and right iris images are 99 and 99.5 %, respectively. Fusion of local distances and choosing suitable fusion rules affect the recognition accuracy, noticeably. The proposed SURF-based algorithm is compared with scale-invariant feature transform, histogram of oriented gradients, maximally stable extremal regions and DAISY. Results show that the proposed algorithm is robust to different image variations and gives the highest recognition accuracy.     

A New Model for Determining Slope Stability Based on Seismic Motion Performance

The factor of safety is one of the major aspects for designing specific structures like embankment, landslide, and artificial slopes. In this context, some huge damages are particularly reported due to the effect of earthquakes. In this paper, 700 slopes were designed based on the limit equilibrium method, and relevant factor of safety values were obtained. In the modelling process, the parameters with the greatest effect (slope height, slope degree, soil cohesion, and internal angle of friction with peak ground acceleration), were considered as predictors or model inputs. As a result, the factor of safety under the impact of seismic motion is significantly reduced when the peak ground acceleration increases. A multiple regression model was developed. Coefficients of determination for the training and testing datasets indicate the excellent ability of the proposed model to estimate the seismic factor of safety. Peak ground acceleration and soil cohesion were obtained as the parameters with the most and least effect on the factor of safety, respectively.     

Cancellable template generation for speaker recognition based on spectrogram patch selection and deep convolutional neural networks

International Journal of Speech Technology - Nowadays, biometric systems have replaced password-or token-based authentication systems in many fields to improve the security level. However,...     

Strain-aging of vanadium, niobium or titanium-strengthened high-strength low-alloy steels

Four commercially available high-strength low-alloy (HSLA) steels were evaluated in this study. It was determined that all four steels were susceptible to strain-aging by interstitial solutes. The increase in strength due to strain-aging was similar to that observed in a low carbon steel studied for comparison. At high levels of prestrain, the percent loss in ductility in the HSLA steels was comparable to that observed in the low-carbon steel in specimens prestrained to the same fraction of the total elongation of the as-received metal. However, when considered on an absolute basis, the residual ductility in the HSLA steels was 25 to 50 pct of that observed in the low-carbon steel. The kinetics of strain-aging were briefly examined. Indications are that the kinetics are slower in the HSLA steels than they are in the low-carbon steel.     

Simultaneous Fusion and Denoising of Panchromatic and Multispectral Satellite Images

To identify objects in satellite images, multispectral (MS) images with high spectral resolution and low spatial resolution, and panchromatic (Pan) images with high spatial resolution and low spectral resolution need to be fused. Several fusion methods such as the intensity–hue–saturation (IHS), the discrete wavelet transform, the discrete wavelet frame transform (DWFT), and the principal component analysis have been proposed in recent years to obtain images with both high spectral and spatial resolutions. In this paper, a hybrid fusion method for satellite images comprising both the IHS transform and the DWFT is proposed. This method tries to achieve the highest possible spectral and spatial resolutions with as small distortion in the fused image as possible. A comparison study between the proposed hybrid method and the traditional methods is presented in this paper. Different MS and Pan images from Landsat-5, Spot, Landsat-7, and IKONOS satellites are used in this comparison. The effect of noise on the proposed hybrid fusion method as well as the traditional fusion methods is studied. Experimental results show the superiority of the proposed hybrid method to the traditional methods. The results show also that a wavelet denoising step is required when fusion is performed at low signal-to-noise ratios.