A fog-based security framework for intelligent traffic light control system

Multimedia Tools and Applications - The world is facing many problems including that of traffic congestion. To highlight the issue of traffic congestion worldwide specially in urban areas and to...     

Process monitoring using auto-associative,feed-forward artificial neural networks

The potential of using artificially simulated neural networks as intelligent, adaptive process-monitoring devices is discussed. The investigation is considered as a method for automatic, intelligent exception reporting for quality control applications. The technique is also compared with the conventional statistical approaches of principal component analysis and Kohonen's feature map. The applications of the technique in aerospace and manufacturing environments are presented and a possible extension of the method to incorporate a diagnostic function is discussed.Seconded from Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education as a Royal Society/SERC Research Fellow at Smith's Industries Aerospace and Defence Systems, Bishop's Cleeve, Cheltenham, UK.     

Video compression using spatiotemporal regularity flow.

We propose a new framework in wavelet video coding to improve the compression rate by exploiting the spatiotemporal regularity of the data. A sequence of images creates a spatiotemporal volume. This volume is said to be regular along the directions in which the pixels vary the least, hence the entropy is the lowest. The wavelet decomposition of regularized data results in a fewer number of significant coefficients, thus yielding a higher compression rate. The directions of regularity of an image sequence depend on both its motion content and spatial structure. We propose the representation of these directions by a 3-D vector field, which we refer to as the spatiotemporal regularity flow (SPREF). SPREF uses splines to approximate the directions of regularity. The compactness of the spline representation results in a low storage overhead for SPREF, which is a desired property in compression applications. Once SPREF directions are known, they can be converted into actual paths along which the data is regular. Directional decomposition of the data along these paths can be further improved by using a special class of wavelet basis called the 3-D orthonormal bandelet basis. SPREF -based video compression not only removes the temporal redundancy, but it also compensates for the spatial redundancy. Our experiments on several standard video sequences demonstrate that the proposed method results in higher compression rates as compared to the standard wavelet based compression.     

A study of neutron and gamma radiation effects on transmission of various types of glasses, optical coatings, cemented optics and fiber

A study of radiation effects on various types of glasses, dielectric optical coatings, cemented optics and fiber was undertaken with a view to select them for extreme radiation environments. Samples were exposed to different radiation doses in the Pakistan Research Reactor-I (PARR-I) for neutron and Cobalt 60 source for gamma irradiation. Transmissions were measured before and after irradiation. The dielectric coatings were subjected to additional tests (adhesion, abrasion and humidity, etc.) as per MIL-M-13508C and MIL-C-675C. All 15 glasses studied showed varying amounts of transmission loss as expected, with negligible degradation for three types. Recovery of transmissions with time/ageing was also studied, with more or less complete recovery with temperature annealing. A faster bleaching of darkened/brown glasses was achieved by using UV lamps or UV laser. The dielectric coatings (HR, AR) and one of the two commercial optical cements showed excellent resistance to neutrons and gamma radiations, and could be good candidates for the fabrication and utilization of optical components in extreme radiation environments. The data allowed several Chinese glasses to be studied for the first time.     

Investigations on the Three Commercial Species of Rosaceae

Physico-chemical properties of the seed oils of three species of Rosaceae family, namely Prunus armeniaca (apricot), Prunus cerasifera (prune), and Prunus persica (peach) have been determined. Fatty acid composition of the oils and amino acids composition of seed cake proteins have also been determined and their utility in every day life has been discussed.     

Performance analysis of multimedia based web traffic with QoS constraints

During the recent years, there has been a tremendous growth in the development and deployment of multimedia based networked applications such as video streaming, IP telephony, interactive games, among others. These applications, in contrast to elastic applications such as email and data sharing, are delay and delay jitter sensitive but can tolerate certain level of packet loss. A vital element of end-to-end delay and delay jitter is the random queueing delays in network switches and routers. Analysis of robust mechanisms for buffer management at network routers needs to be carried out in order to reduce end-to-end delay for traffic generated by multimedia applications. In this context, a threshold based buffer management scheme for accommodating multiple class multimedia traffic in network routers has been analysed. This technique effectively controls the allocation of buffer to various traffic classes according to their delay constraints. The forms of the joint state probabilities, as well as basic performance measures such as blocking probabilities are analytically established at equilibrium. Typical numerical experiments are included to illustrate the credibility of the proposed mechanism in the context of different quality of service (QoS) grades for various network traffic classes. This model, therefore, can be used as a powerful tool to provide a required grade of service to a particular class of multimedia based web traffic in any heterogeneous network.     

Matching-Pursuits Dissimilarity Measure for Shape-Based Comparison and Classification of High-Dimensional Data

In this paper, a new matching pursuits dissimilarity measure (MPDM) is presented that compares two signals using the information provided by their matching pursuits (MP) approximations, without requiring any prior domain knowledge. MPDM is a flexible and differentiable measure that can be used to perform shape-based comparisons and fuzzy clustering of very high-dimensional, possibly compressed, data. A novel prototype based classification algorithm, which is termed the computer aided minimization procedure (CAMP), is also proposed. The CAMP algorithm uses the MPDM with the competitive agglomeration (CA) fuzzy clustering algorithm to build reliable shape based prototypes for classification. MP is a well known sparse signal approximation technique, which is commonly used for video and image coding. The dictionary and coefficient information produced by MP has previously been used to define features to build discrimination and prototype based classifiers. However, existing MP based classification applications are quite problem domain specific, thus making their generalization to other problems quite difficult. The proposed CAMP algorithm is the first MP based classification system that requires no assumptions about the problem domain and builds a bridge between the MP and fuzzy clustering algorithms. Experimental results also show that the CAMP algorithm is more resilient to outliers in test data than the multilayer perceptron (MLP) and support-vector-machine (SVM) classifiers, as well as prototype-based classifiers using the Euclidean distance as their dissimilarity measure.     

A class-based scheme for E-commerce web servers: Formal specification and performance evaluation

This paper is an investigation into the performance of E-commerce applications. E-commerce has become one of the most popular applications of the web as a large population of web users is now benefiting from various on-line services including product searches, product purchases and product comparison. E-commerce provides users with 24-7 shopping facilities. However, the consequence of these benefits and facilities is the excessive load on E-commerce web servers and the performance degradation of E-commerce (eCom) requests they process. This paper addresses this issue and proposes a class-based priority scheme which classifies eCom requests into high and low priority requests. In E-commerce, some requests (e.g. payment) are generally considered more important than others (e.g. search or browse). We believe that by assigning class-based priorities at multiple service levels, E-commerce web servers can perform better and can improve the performance of high priority eCom requests. In this paper, we formally specify and implement the proposed scheme and evaluate its performance using multiple servers. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly improves the performance of high priority eCom requests.     

Performance evaluation of dynamic probabilistic broadcasting for flooding in mobile ad hoc networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), flooding is a required message dissemination technique for network-wide broadcast. The conventional blind flooding algorithm causes broadcast storm problem, a high number of unnecessary packet rebroadcasts thus resulting in high contention and packet collisions. This paper proposes a new probabilistic approach that dynamically fine-tunes the rebroadcasting probability of a node for routing request packets (RREQs) according to the number of neighbour nodes. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach for the ad hoc on demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol and compared against the blind flooding, fixed probabilistic and adjusted probabilistic flooding [L.M.M.M. Bani-Yassein, M. Ould-Khaoua et al., Performance analysis of adjusted probabilistic broadcasting in mobile ad hoc networks, International Journal of Wireless Information Networks 13(2) (2006) 127–140; M.B. Yassein, M.O. Khaoua et al., Improving route discovery in on-demand routing protocols using local topology information in MANETs, Proceedings of the ACM international workshop on Performance Monitoring, Measurement, and Evaluation of Heterogeneous Wireless and Wired Networks, Terromolinos, Spain, ACM Press, 2006, pp. 95–99.] approaches. The simulation results show that our proposed approach demonstrates better performance than blind flooding, fixed probabilistic and adjusted flooding approaches.