Recent progress in road and lane detection: a survey

The problem of road or lane perception is a crucial enabler for advanced driver assistance systems. As such, it has been an active field of research for the past two decades with considerable progress made in the past few years. The problem was confronted under various scenarios, with different task definitions, leading to usage of diverse sensing modalities and approaches. In this paper we survey the approaches and the algorithmic techniques devised for the various modalities over the last 5 years. We present a generic break down of the problem into its functional building blocks and elaborate the wide range of proposed methods within this scheme. For each functional block, we describe the possible implementations suggested and analyze their underlying assumptions. While impressive advancements were demonstrated at limited scenarios, inspection into the needs of next generation systems reveals significant gaps. We identify these gaps and suggest research directions that may bridge them.     

Thermal characterization of n‐alkyl maleate‐styrene‐allyl propionate terpolymers

Thermal characterization of maleic anhydride‐styrene‐allyl propionate (MA‐St‐AP) terpolymer and its ester derivatives named as n‐alkyl maleate and shown as nPr MA‐St‐AP, nBu MA‐St‐AP, nPn MA‐St‐AP, and nBz MA‐St‐AP was carried out. The thermal characterization was performed using thermal analysis techniques such as TGA, DTA, DSC, and TMA. Different results were observed between the original terpolymer and its ester derivatives. Thermal stabilities of the terpolymer and its ester derivatives were compared by using various measurements plotted as TGA, DTA, DSC, and TMA curves. The increase in the alcohols' carbon numbers added to the original terpolymer results in ester derivatives with different thermal stability behavior. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci 103: 600–604, 2007     

AHP and multichoice goal programming integration for course planning

Course planning is one of the important problems in the education systems of universities. The processes cannot continue efficiently without planning, and various interruptions can appear in the system. This way decisions concerning which courses, when, how, and for what purposes should be answered by considering the available resources and stakeholders’ preferences. Besides, universities aiming to be in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) have to adapt their systems to the Bologna process in order to create a lifelong student‐centered, learning‐oriented area based on quality assurance. In this study, an integrated approach based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and multichoice goal programming (MCGP) model was proposed to construct an efficient course plan following the Bologna process. The proposed approach was applied in an industrial engineering department.     

Interpretation of MR images using self-organizing maps and knowledge-based expert systems

A new image segmentation system is presented to automatically segment and label brain magnetic resonance (MR) images to show normal and abnormal brain tissues using self-organizing maps (SOM) and knowledge-based expert systems. Elements of a feature vector are formed by image intensities, first-order features, texture features extracted from gray-level co-occurrence matrix and multiscale features. This feature vector is used as an input to the SOM. SOM is used to over segment images and a knowledge-based expert system is used to join and label the segments. Spatial distributions of segments extracted from the SOM are also considered as well as gray level properties. Segments are labeled as background, skull, white matter, gray matter, cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) and suspicious regions.     

Complications after extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL) and methods of management of such cases

The authors presented the complications which occurred in patients after extracorporeal shock wave lithotripsy (ESWL), and discussed the methods of management of such patients. It was found that the most common complications were: renal colic, fever, "calculus route", and, less frequently, subcapsular and perirenal haematomas. In most patients conservative treatment was adequate. Some of these patients required admission to hospital and proper specialized management.     

Preparation and characterization of conductive polypyrrole/kaolinite composites

Conductive polypyrrole (PPy)/kaolinite clay composites were prepared by in situ chemical polymerization of pyrrole in the presence of kaolinite using FeCl₃ as oxidant. The PPy content and conductivity of the composites reached 32.8% and 8.3×10^?2 S/cm at HCl concentrations of 1.5 M and 0.5 M, respectively. The microhardness of the composites containing different amounts of PPy was higher than that of the PPy and kaolinite components. The highest microhardness observed was 30.17 kg/mm² for the composite containing 9.6% PPy. The electrical resistance of the composites was monitored during heating–cooling cycles over the range 5–120 °C. The change in resistance with temperature was more repeatable for the composite than for PPy. The composites were characterized by Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), X-ray diffraction (XRD), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and scanning electron microscopy (SEM). The humidity-sensing properties were also examined.