Sharif Digital Repository

In the present study, a prediction model was derived for the effective angle of shearing resistance (φ′) of soils using a novel hybrid method coupling genetic programming (GP) and orthogonal least squares algorithm (OLS). The proposed nonlinear model relates φ′ to the basic soil physical properties. A comprehensive experimental database of consolidated-drained triaxial tests was used to develop the model. Traditional GP and least square regression analyses were performed to benchmark the GP/OLS model against classical approaches. Validity of the model was verified using a part of laboratory data that were not involved in the calibration process. The statistical measures of correlation... 

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has been one of the most active areas of research. The retrieval principle of CBIR systems is based on visual features such as colour, texture and shape or the semantic meaning of the images. A CBIR system can be used to locate medical images in large databases. This paper presents a CBIR system for retrieving digital human brain magnetic resonance images (MRI) based on textural features and the support vector machine (SVM) learning method. This system can retrieve similar images from the database in two groups: normal and tumoural. This research uses the knowledge of the CBIR approach to the application of medical decision support and discrimination... 

An important security challenge in database outsourcing scenarios is the correctness verification of query results. The proposed approaches in the literature, impose high overhead on both the service provider and specially the clients. In this paper, we propose the Trust-Based Fake Tuples approach to audit the correctness of query results. In this approach, some fake tuples are included among the real ones in order to verify the correctness of the results. The experience learnt from past results is used in this paper to evaluate the trust toward the service provider. This trust value is used to tune the number of fake tuples and subsequently the imposed overhead. As the trust value toward... 

Security of database outsourcing, due to the untrustworthiness of service provider, is a basic challenge to have Database As a Service in a cloud computing environment. Having disparate assumptions to solve different aspects of security such as confidentiality and integrity is an obstacle for an integrated secure solution through the combination of existing approaches. Concentrating on confidentiality and integrity aspects of database outsourcing, this paper proposes an approach in which each attribute value is split up between several data servers using a customized threshold secret sharing scheme. Our approach preserves data confidentiality and at the same time provides the correctness... 

A novel distance measure for distance-based speaker segmentation is proposed. This distance measure is nonparametric, in contrast to common distance measures used in speaker segmentation systems, which often assume a Gaussian distribution when measuring the distance between two audio segments. This distance measure is essentially a k-nearest-neighbor distance measure. Non-vowel segment removal in preprocessing stage is also proposed. Speaker segmentation performance is tested on artificially created conversations from the TIMIT database and two AMI conversations. For short window lengths, Missed Detection Rated is decreased significantly. For moderate window lengths, a decrease in both... 

In this paper, we proposed a method based on time-frequency dependent features extracted from Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMFs) and physiological feature such as the number of premature beats (PBs) to predict the onset of Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation (PAF) by using electrocardiogram (ECG) signal. To extract IMFs, we used Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD). In order to predict PAF, we used variance of IMFs of signals, the area under the absolute of IMF curves and the number of PBs, since increasing of all of these parameters are a clear sign of PAF occurrence. We used clinical database which was provided for the 2001 Computer in Cardiology Challenge (CinC). The test set of this database... 

Electrocardiogram is one of the most prominent cardiac signals being capable to be utilized for medical uses such as arrhythmia detection. Over the years, the feasibility of using this signal for human identification issue has been investigated, and some methods have been proposed. In this Paper a novel approach is proposed for electrocardiogram (ECG) based human identification using Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). The innovation signal of EKF has been considered as feature which is used to classify different subjects. In this paper a general issue, human identification, is summarized to a classification problem in which the proposed features of each subject is calculated, and the... 

Transportation has significant and long lasting economical, social and environmental impacts, and so is an important dimension of urban sustainability. Some attempts have been made to develop sustainable transport indicators, STI. A few studies actually apply STI to compare sustainability among various world cities. In this paper various world cities ranked in terms of urban sustainable transport composite index. The study database is created from UITP databank: "Millennium cities database for sustainable mobility" or MCDST. Firstly sustainable transportation indicators were selected by reviewing past researches. Some indicators are edited or redefined. Consequently 9 STI were developed, 3... 

A new face recognition method is proposed in this paper. The proposed method is based on fuzzy regularized linear discriminant analysis (FR-LDA) and combines the regularized linear discriminant analysis (R-LDA) and the fuzzy set theory. R-LDA is based on a new regularized Fisher's discriminant criterion, which is particularly robust against the small sample size problem compared to the traditional one used in LDA. In the proposed method, we calculate the membership degree matrix by Fuzzy K-nearest neighbor (FKNN) and then incorporate the membership degree into the definition of the between-class and within-class scatter matrices and get the fuzzy between-class and within-class scatter... 

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) has turned into an important and active potential research field with the advance of multimedia and imaging technology. It makes use of image features, such as color, texture and shape, to index images with minimal human intervention. A CBIR system can be used to locate medical images in large databases. In this paper we propose a CBIR system which describes the methodology for retrieving digital human brain magnetic resonance images (MRI) based on textural features and the Adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS) learning to retrieve similar images from database in two categories: normal and tumoral. A fuzzy classifier has been used, because of the... 

In this paper, we propose a mapping from low level feature space to the semantic space drawn by the users through relevance feedback to enhance the performance of current content based image retrieval (CBIR) systems. The proposed approach makes a rule base for its inference and configures it using the feedbacks gathered from users during the life cycle of the system. Each rule makes a hypercube (HC) in the feature space corresponding to a semantic concept in the semantic space. Both short and long term strategies are taken to improve the accuracy of the system in response to each feedback of the user and gradually bridge the semantic gap. A scoring paradigm is designed to determine the... 

Automatic image annotation is a challenging problem in the field of image retrieval. Dealing with large databases makes the annotation problem more difficult and therefore an effective approach is needed to manage such databases. In this work, an annotation system has been developed which considers images in separate categories and constructs a profiling model for each category. To describe an image, we propose a new feature extraction method based on color and texture information that describes image content using discrete distribution signatures. Image signatures of one category are partitioned using spectral clustering and a prototype is determined for each cluster by solving an... 

We propose a novel image steganalysis method, based on singular value decomposition and noise estimation, for the spatial domain LSB embedding families. We first define a content independence parameter, DS, that is calculated for each LSB embedding rate. Next, we estimate the DS curve and use noise estimation to improve the curve approximation accuracy. It is shown that the proposed approach gives an estimate of the LSB embedding rate, as well as information about the existence of the embedded message (if any). The proposed method can effectively be applied to a wide range of the image LSB steganography families in spatial domain. To evaluate the proposed scheme, we applied the method to a... 

This paper addresses the problem of finding the nearest neighbor (or one of the R-nearest neighbors) of a query object q in a database of n objects, when we can only use a comparison oracle. The comparison oracle, given two reference objects and a query object, returns the reference object most similar to the query object. The main problem we study is how to search the database for the nearest neighbor (NN) of a query, while minimizing the questions. The difficulty of this problem depends on properties of the underlying database. We show the importance of a characterization: combinatorial disorder D which defines approximate triangle inequalities on ranks. We present a lower bound of Ω(Dlog... 

In this Paper a new approach is proposed for electrocardiogram (ECG) based human identification using wavelet distance measurement. The main advantage of this method is that it guarantees high accuracy even in abnormal cases. Furthermore, it possesses low sensitivity to noise. The algorithm was applied on 11 normal subjects and 10 abnormal subjects of MIT-BIH Database using single lead data, and a 100% human identification rate was on both normal and abnormal subjects. Adding artificial white noise to signals shows that the method is nearly accurate in SNR level above 5dB in normal subjects and 20dB in abnormal subjects  

The goal of image segmentation is to find regions that represent objects or meaningful parts of objects. In this paper a new method is presented for color image segmentation which involves the ideas used for community detection in social networks. In the proposed method an initial segmentation is applied to partition input image into small homogeneous regions. Then a weighted network is constructed from the regions, and a community detection algorithm is applied to it. The detected communities represent segments of the image. A remarkable feature of the method is the ability to segments the image automatically by optimizing the modularity value in the constructed network. The performance of... 

Automatic translation of a high-level specification language to an executable implementation would be highly useful in maximizing the benefits of formal methods. We will introduce a set of translation functions to fill the specification-implementation gap in the domain of database applications. Because the mathematical foundation of Z has many properties in common with SQL, a direct mapping from Z to SQL structures can be found. We derive a set of translation functions from Z to SQL for the generation of a database. The proposed methodology results in reducing the expenses and duration of the software development, and also, prevents the errors originated from the manual translation of... 

There are some elements such as competition among companies and changes in demands which result in changes of customers' behaviors. Therefore, paying no attention to these changes may lead to a reduction in company benefits and loss of customers. Since data and their analyses determine the activities and decision makings of companies, data quality is of paramount in analyzing them because misinformation leads to wrong decision making. Since data mining has been designed to find out multi repetition patterns, it can be used to improve the product sales violations by sales people and increase the quality of data. Most of data mining models available try to find patterns in one table, but the... 

In this paper, we present a novel multilinear algebra based feature extraction approach for face recognition which preserves some implicit structural or locally-spatial information among elements of the original images. We call this method three-dimensional modular discriminant analysis (3DMDA). Our approach uses a new data model called third-order tensor model (3TM) for representing the face images. In this model, each image is partitioned into the several equal size local blocks, and the local blocks are combined to represent the image as a third-order tensor. Then, a new optimization algorithm called direct mode (d-mode) is introduced for learning three optimal projection axes. Extensive... 

A probabilistic formulation for semantic image annotation and retrieval is proposed. Annotation and retrieval are posed as classification problems where each class is defined as the group of database images labeled with a common semantic label. It is shown that, by establishing this one-to-one correspondence between semantic labels and semantic classes, a minimum probability of error annotation and retrieval are feasible with algorithms that are 1) conceptually simple and 2) computationally efficient. In this article, a content-based image retrieval and annotation architecture is proposed. Its attitude is decreasing the semantic gap by partitioning the image to its semantic regions and using...