Distribution-Based Dimensionality Reduction Applied to Articulated Motion Recognition

Some articulated motion representations rely on frame-wise abstractions of the statistical distribution of low-level features such as orientation, color, or relational distributions. As configuration among parts changes with articulated motion, the distribution changes, tracing a trajectory in the latent space of distributions, which we call the configuration space. These trajectories can then be used for recognition using standard techniques such as dynamic time warping. The core theory in this paper concerns embedding the frame-wise distributions, which can be looked upon as probability functions, into a low-dimensional space so that we can estimate various meaningful probabilistic distances such as the Chernoff, Bhattacharya, Matusita, Kullback-Leibler (KL) or symmetric-KL distances based on dot products between points in this space. Apart from computational advantages, this representation also affords speed-normalized matching of motion signatures. Speed normalized representations can be formed by interpolating the configuration trajectories along their arc lengths, without using any knowledge of the temporal scale variations between the sequences. We experiment with five different probabilistic distance measures and show the usefulness of the representation in three different contexts—sign recognition (with large number of possible classes), gesture recognition (with person variations), and classification of human-human interaction sequences (with segmentation problems). We find the importance of using the right distance measure for each situation. The low-dimensional embedding makes matching two to three times faster, while achieving recognition accuracies that are close to those obtained without using a low-dimensional embedding. We also empirically establish the robustness of the representation with respect to low-level parameters, embedding parameters, and temporal-scale parameters.     

Compact electrostatic beam optics for multi-element focused ion beams: simulation and experiments

Electrostatic beam optics for a multi-element focused ion beam (MEFIB) system comprising of a microwave multicusp plasma (ion) source is designed with the help of two widely known and commercially available beam simulation codes: AXCEL-INP and SIMION. The input parameters to the simulations are obtained from experiments carried out in the system. A single and a double Einzel lens system (ELS) with and without beam limiting apertures (S) have been investigated. For a 1 mm beam at the plasma electrode aperture, the rms emittance of the focused ion beam is found to reduce from ～0.9 mm mrad for single ELS to ～0.5 mm mrad for a double ELS, when S of 0.5 mm aperture size is employed. The emittance can be further improved to ～0.1 mm mrad by maintaining S at ground potential, leading to reduction in beam spot size (～10 μm). The double ELS design is optimized for different electrode geometrical parameters with tolerances of ±1 mm in electrode thickness, electrode aperture, inter electrode distance, and ±1° in electrode angle, providing a robust design. Experimental results obtained with the double ELS for the focused beam current and spot size, agree reasonably well with the simulations.     

Kinetics of inactivation of indicator pathogens during thermophilic anaerobic digestion

Thermophilic anaerobic sludge digestion is a promising process to divert waste to beneficial use, but an important question is the required temperature and holding time to achieve a given degree of pathogen inactivation. In this study, the kinetics of inactivation of Ascaris suum and vaccine strain poliovirus type 1 (PVS-1), selected as indicators for helminth ova and enteric viruses respectively, were determined during anaerobic digestion at temperatures ranging from 51 to 56 °C. Inactivation of both indicator organisms was fast with greater than two log reductions achieved within 2 h for A. suum and three log reductions for PVS-1, suggesting that the current U.S. regulations are largely conservative. The first-order inactivation rate constants k followed Arrhenius relationship with activation energies of 105 and 39 KJ mol^?1 for A. suum and PVS-1, respectively indicating that A. suum was more sensitive to temperature. Although inactivation was fast, the presence of compounds in the sludge that are known to be protective of pathogen inactivation was observed, suggesting that composition-dependent time–temperature relationships are necessary.     

Web services in the retail industry

It is a well-known fact that the retail industry always works on razorthin margins and the key to survival lies in optimization of resources both in space and time dimensions as well as maximization of customer satisfaction. Access to timely and even real-time information to a wide variety of channel and trading partners, sales personnel, line managers, store managers etc. is the key to achieving this. Web services technology holds out a lot of promise for the retail industry in this respect. It is a platform-neutral, easy to deploy set of standards for achieving business data and process integration, without going for proprietary point to point connections. It promises to connect the information providers and information consumers across a wide variety of platforms, devices and on an on-demand basis. Being based on service-oriented architecture (SOA) principles it can also form the enabling service interface layer for other emerging technologies like BAM, BPM, mobile and RFID. In this paper, we attempt to understand information-flow needs in the retail industry and also suggest a roadmap approach by which the retail enterprise could exploit the potential of web services at minimal risk.     

"Flow valve" microfluidic devices for simple, detectorless, and label-free analyte quantitation

Simplified analysis systems that offer the performance of benchtop instruments but the convenience of portability are highly desirable. We have developed novel, miniature devices that feature visual inspection readout of a target's concentration from a ～1 μL volume of solution introduced into a microfluidic channel. Microchannels are constructed within an elastomeric material, and channel surfaces are coated with receptors to the target. When a solution is flowed into the channel, the target cross-links multiple receptors on the surface, resulting in constriction of the first few millimeters of the channel and stopping of flow. Quantitation is performed by measuring the distance traveled by the target solution in the channel before flow stops. A key advantage of our approach is that quantitation is accomplished by simple visual inspection of the channel, without the need for complex detection instrumentation. We have tested these devices using the model system of biotin as a receptor and streptavidin as the target. We have also characterized three factors that influence flow distance: solution viscosity, device thickness, and channel height. We found that solution capillary flow distance scales with the negative logarithm of target concentration and have detected streptavidin concentrations as low as 1 ng/mL. Finally, we have identified and evaluated a plausible mechanism wherein time-dependent channel constriction in the first few millimeters leads to concentration-dependent flow distances. Their simplicity coupled with performance makes these "flow valve" systems especially attractive for a host of analysis applications.     

Selective Cluster-Based Temperature Monitoring System for Homogeneous Wireless Sensor Networks

Over the past few decades, there has been a revolution in ICT, and this has led to the evolution of wireless sensor networks(WSN), in particular, wireless body area networks. Such networks comprise a specialized collection of sensor nodes(SNs) that may be deployed randomly in a body area network to collect data from the human body. In a health monitoring system, it may be essential to maintain constant environmental conditions within a specific area in the hospital. In this paper, we propose a temperature-monitoring system and describe a case study of a health-monitoring system for patents critically ill with the same disease and in the same environment. We propose Enhanced LEACH Selective Cluster(E-LEACH-SC) routing protocol for monitoring the temperature of an area in a hospital. We modified existing Selective Cluster LEACH protocol by using a fixed-distance-based threshold to divide the coverage region in two subregions. Direct data transmission and selective cluster-based data transmission approaches were used to provide short-range and long-distance coverage for the collection of data from the body of ill patients. Extensive simulations were run by varying the ratio of node densities of the two subregions in the health-monitoring system. Last Node Alive(LNA), which is a measure of network lifespan, was the parameter for evaluating the performance of the proposed scheme. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme significantly increases network lifespan compared with traditional LEACH and LEACH-SC protocols, which by themselves improve the overall performance of the health-monitoring system.     

Tactile internet and its applications in 5G era: A comprehensive review

Over the last few years, communication latency has been a major hurdle for most of the applications deployed in different network domains. During this era, a number of communication protocols and standards were developed and used by the community. However, still, the problem of latency persists keeping in view of the quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE) for different applications. To mitigate the aforementioned issues, in this paper, we present an in‐depth survey of state‐of‐the art proposals having tactile internet as a backbone for delay mitigation using 5G networks for future ultra‐reliable low‐latency applications such as Healthcare 4.0, Industry 4.0, virtual reality and augmented reality, and smart education. From the existing proposals, it has been observed that tactile internet can provide interactions between virtual objects to give a feel of real environment with maximum latency of 1 millisecond. Also, this paper highlights the key differences between the tactile internet and Internet of Things in context with 5G revolution. Then open issues and challenges of tactile internet for smart applications are analyzed. Finally, a comparison of existing proposals with respect to various parameters is presented, which allows the end users to select one of the proposals in comparison with its merits over the others.     

Effect of silhouette quality on hard problems in Gait recognition.

Gait as a behavioral biometric has been the subject of recent investigations. However, understanding the limits of gait-based recognition and the quantitative study of the factors effecting gait have been confounded by errors in the extracted silhouettes, upon which most recognition algorithms are based. To enable us to study this effect on a large population of subjects, we present a novel model based silhouette reconstruction strategy, based on a population based hidden Markov model (HMM), coupled with an eigen-stance model, to correct for common errors in silhouette detection arising from shadows and background subtraction. The model is trained and benchmarked using manually specified silhouettes for 71 subjects from the recently formulated HumanID Gait Challenge database. Unlike other essentially pixel-level silhouette cleaning methods, this method can remove shadows, especially between feet for the legs-apart stance, and remove parts due to any objects being carried, such as briefcase or a walking cane. After quantitatively establishing the improved quality of the silhouette over simple background subtraction, we show on the 122 subjects HumanID Gait Challenge Dataset and using two gait recognition algorithms that the observed poor performance of gait recognition for hard problems involving matching across factors such as surface, time, and shoe are not due to poor silhouette quality, beyond what is available from statistical background subtraction based methods.     

Growth and characterization of Hg1-xCdxTe epitaxial films by isothermal vapour phase epitaxy (ISOVPE)

Growth of Hg_1-xCd_xTe epitaxial films by a new technique called asymmetric vapour phase epitaxy (ASVPE) has been carried out on CdTe and CZT substrates. The critical problems faced in normal vapour phase epitaxy technique like poor surface morphology, composition gradient and dislocation multiplication have been successfully solved. The epitaxial films have been electrically characterized by using the Hall effect and capacitance-voltage (C-V) measurements.