Sharif Digital Repository

A major class of image and video watermarking algorithms, i.e. content-based watermarking, is based on the concept of Human Visual System (HVS) in order to adapt more efficiently to the local characteristics of the host signal. In this paper, a content-based video watermarking scheme is developed and the concept of entropy masking effect is employed to significantly improve the use of the HVS model. Entropy masking effect states that the human eye's sensitivity decreases in high entropy regions, i.e. regions with spatial or temporal complexity. The spatial entropy masking effect has been exploited in a number of previous works in order to enhance the robustness of image-adaptive watermarks.... 

Density current is a dense fluid, which is continuously released from a source and spreads down a sloping surface inside a lighter, motionless fluid. A low-Reynolds number k-ε model (Launder and Sharma, 1974) has been used to simulate the behavior of 3-D density currents. Density current with a uniform velocity and concentration enters the channel via a sluice gate into a lighter ambient fluid and moves forward down-slope. The model has been verified with the experimental data sets. Although the k-ε Launder and Sharma model is applied here to a conservative density current, it seems the analysis is valid in general for turbidity current laden with fine particles. Copyright © 2006 by ASME  

Massively multi-user virtual environments (MMVE) incorporate computer graphics, sound and haptics to simulate the experience of real-time interaction among multiple users in a shared three-dimensional virtual world. Such applications therefore deal with the distribution of updates among their users to provide them with a common sense of time and place while interacting in the virtual environment. As MMVEs grow larger in terms of size and numbers of users, they tend to rely on P2P architecture as a scalable way of exchanging the huge bulk of updates among their users without the need for the exponential increase in their central servers. While much work has been done on P2P architectures for... 

The objective of this paper is designing, modeling and wrench feasible workspace analysis of a 3D cable suspended robot as IRPM (Incompletely Restrained Positioning Mechanism). This type of robots supports a load platform in space by less than or equal to six spatially arranged cables. We use the model of 6 cables spanned in the same manner as a Stewart parallel mechanism. This mechanism is suitable for the accurate positioning of heavy loads. Concentrating on the operations of heavy loads handling, studying the workspace and ways of increasing it is of high importance. Several workspaces exist amongst which the constant and total orientation statically reachable combined and wrench feasible... 

Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) is a multiple criteria decision making approach which is widely used in different engineering domains. The hierarchical structure of AHP makes it a very suitable approach for behavior design in artificial life-based games. But the details of an AHP is always designed by a series of interviews with experts of the domain, and this is not possible for problems in which an expert does not exist such as computer simulations. In such cases, the behavioral engineering of agents is a very complicated task because the designer may not be able to see all different aspects of agents' life. To overcome this problem, this paper has used an artificial life algorithm to... 

In this paper a new approach is introduced for structural health monitoring of offshore jacket platforms. The procedure uses the measured ambient vibration responses and the corresponding readable natural frequencies and mode shapes of the structural system. Since offshore platforms are composed of heavy topsides supported by jacket structures, participation of the first mode is dominant in each direction in the response of the structure under field excitations. Moreover, ambient vibrations such as wave loads and boat impacts only excite the first modes of the structure. Therefore, it is difficult to find higher modes and the pertinent frequencies by use of accelerometers data. The... 

Spinal posture is a crucial input in biomechanical models and an essential factor in ergonomics investigations to evaluate risk of low back injury. In vivo measurement of spinal posture through the common motion capture techniques is limited to equipped laboratories and thus impractical for workplace applications. Posture prediction models are therefore considered indispensable tools. This study aims to investigate the capability of artificial neural networks (ANNs) in predicting the three-dimensional posture of the spine (S1, T12 and T1 orientations) in various activities. Two ANNs were trained and tested using measurements from spinal postures of 40 male subjects by an inertial tracking... 

The 3D simulation of the hydrodynamic behavior of a rotating disc contactor (RDC) by means of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) was investigated for the n-butanol-succinic acid-water (BSW) system. For the two-phase liquid-liquid flow, the velocity distribution of the continuous phase and drop size distributions were determined using the k-ω turbulence model in conjunction with the Eulerian-Eulerian approach and MUSIG model. In this system in which the holdup of the dispersed phase is low, the continuous phase velocity was computed by simultaneously solving the Navier-Stokes equations beside the different models of turbulence. The motions of the dispersed phase was calculated while... 

Problems related to the three-dimensional (3D) dynamics of the deploying flexible arms subjected to base angular motions are studied with simulated tip payloads and actual deployment trajectories. To facilitate the solution, an equivalent dynamical system is developed by introducing the inertial reaction forces on the arm, while the equations of motion are derived in the non-Newtonian reference frame attached to the arm. The dynamic behavior of the arm is investigated both by the finite element and assumed Modes methods for the purpose of verification. This study reveals that base angular motions lead to considerable couplings between the two lateral displacements and axial motions.... 

Water impact phenomenon in the case of a circular cylinder is an important issue in offshore industry where cross members may be in the splash zone of the incident wave. An analytical method as well as a numerical solution are employed to study the water entry problem of a circular section. The procedure for derivation of the analytical formulas is demonstrated step by step. The volume of fluid (VOF) simulation of the water entry problem is also performed to offer comparison of the results of the linearized analytical solution with a fully nonlinear and viscous fluid flow solution. To achieve this, the FLOW- 3D code is utilized. Some consideration has also been given to the points of... 

Multilateral well is a promising technology in developing oil reservoirs. Because this technology may increase the production rate per well and reduce the costs of field development, it is rapidly replacing the old methods. This study uses a three-dimensional line-source model with direct search methods, including pattern search and genetic algorithms to optimize the well trajectories. This method was applied to several cases, with different forms of wells and reservoirs. In all cases, significant improvement was observed in the production rate. Furthermore, the production enhancement using the optimized well trajectories which have curved-paths is compared to the case with linear well... 

Modern search engines use link structure of the World Wide Web in order to gain better results for ranking the results of users' queries. One of the most popular ranking algorithms which is based on link analysis is HITS. It generates very accurate outputs but because of huge amount of online computations, this algorithm is relatively slow. In this paper we introduce PHITS, a parallelized version of the HITS algorithm that is suitable for working with huge web graphs in a reasonable time. For implementing this algorithm, we use WebGraph framework and we focus on parallelizing access to web graph as the main bottleneck in the HITS algorithm. © 2006 IEEE  

In this study, the fluid dynamics and convective heat transfer for turbulent flows through a 3-sub channel of a rod bundle, which is representative of those used in VVER-1000, are examined. The rod bundle is constructed from parallel rods in a hexagonal array. The rods are on constant pitch by spacer grids spaced axially along the rod bundle. The geometry details of the bundle and heat flux from the fuel rod are similar to that of the Iranian nuclear reactor under construction. A numerical study using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) was carried out to estimate the flow field, pressure loss and heat transfer coefficients in spacer grids and rod bundles. Turbulence has been modeled using... 

3D scene understanding is an open challenge in the field of computer vision. Most of the focus is on 2D methods in which the semantic labeling of each RGB pixel is considered. But, in this paper, the 3D semantic labeling of RGB-D images is considered. In the proposed method, to extract some meaningful features, the superpixel generation algorithm is applied to the RGB image to segment it into a set of disjoint pixels. After that, the set of three powerful classifiers are utilized to semantically label each superpixel. In the proposed method, the probability outputs of these classifiers are concatenated as the novel feature vector for each superpixel. Consequently, to analyze the strengths... 

3D scene understanding is one of the most important problems in the field of computer vision. Although, in the past decades, considerable attention has been devoted on the 2D scene understanding problem, now with the development of the depth sensors (like Microsoft Kinect), the 3D scene understanding has become a very challenging task. Traditionally, the scene understanding problem was considered as the semantic labeling of each image pixel. Semantic labeling of RGB-D images has not attained a comparable success, as the RGB semantic labeling, due to the lack of a challenging dataset. With the introduction of an RGB-D dataset, called NYU-V2, it became possible to propose a novel method to... 

One of the most important steps towards 3D scene understanding is the semantic segmentation of images. The 3D scene understanding is considered as the crucial requirement in computer vision and robotic applications. With the availability of RGB-D cameras, it is desired to improve the accuracy of the scene understanding process by exploiting the depth along with appearance features. One of the main problems in RGB-D semantic segmentation is how to fuse or combine these two modalities to achieve more advantages of the common and specific features of each modality. Recently, the methods that encounter deep convolutional neural networks have reached the state-of-the-art results in dense... 

The construction of a facies model could be employed as a conditional data for any property simulation that results in a more reliable reservoir characterization in further steps. In this study, an Iranian gas reservoir with six wells was studied to determine the 3D reservoir facies model. Fifteen reservoir facies were first detected along one of the wells with detailed core and thin section descriptions. Due to the significant difference between the core and log data resolution, facies were clustered into four major groups regarding the digenetic processes and petrophysical lithofacies properties (permeability and porosity). The lithofacies specification effect on petrophysical properties... 

The graphics processing unit (GPU) is the most promising candidate platform for achieving faster improvements in peak processing speed, low latency and high performance. The highly programmable and multithreaded nature of GPUs makes them a remarkable candidate for general purpose computing. However, supporting non-graphics computing on graphics processors requires addressing several architectural challenges. In this paper, we focus on improving performance by better hiding long waiting time for transferring data from the slow global memory. Furthermore, we show that the proposed method can reduce power and energy. Reduction in access time to off-chip data has a noticeable role in reducing... 

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is the most promising candidate platform for faster rate of improvement in peak processing speed, low latency and high performance. The highly programmable and multithreaded nature of GPUs makes them a remarkable candidate for general purpose computing. However, supporting non-graphics computing on graphics processors requires addressing several architecture challenges. In this paper, we focus on improving performance by better hiding long waiting time to transfer data from the slow global memory. Thereupon study an effective light-overhead prefetching mechanism, which utilizes idle processing elements. Our results show that we can potentially improve... 

3D wound core is a newly proposed core structure, which is used for construction of distribution transformers. Although many advantages have been proposed for transformer with 3D wound core and it has found increasing application in some countries such as China and Iran, no model has been presented so far in the literature for such transformers. In this paper, a low frequency model, derived based on the duality principle for transformer with 3D wound core, which can be used for both steady state and low-frequency transient studies. The validity of the model in steady state condition is then verified by experimental results. © 2017 IEEE