Sharif Digital Repository

Automatic image annotation has emerged as an important research topic due to the existence of the semantic gap and in addition to its potential application on image retrieval and management. In this paper we present an approach which combines regional contexts and visual topics to automatic image annotation. Regional contexts model the relationship between the regions, whereas visual topics provide the global distribution of topics over an image. Conventional image annotation methods neglected the relationship between the regions in an image, while these regions are exactly explanation of the image semantics, therefore considering the relationship between them are helpful to annotate the... 

Several researches have been done to identify visual system characteristics. Some of them are based on the processing of the brain signal recordings. Visual evoked potentials (VEPs) are electrical signals which are produced in response to the visual stimuli and recorded by means of electrodes placed on the head. These signals are usually characterized by the amplitude and latency of their peaks. Different types of visual stimuli and visual system characteristics can affect the shape and hence the characteristics of VEPs. In this paper, proper visual stimuli were used and VEPs were recorded in order to classify visual acuity. To achieve this goal, visual evoked potentials were recorded and... 

Abstract: Underwater vehicles when yawed to free stream flow, like submarines in a turning maneuver, produce large vortical separated regions. This vortical flow affects acoustic, body drag, control effectiveness and maneuverability. A suitable way to reduce the effects of this separated flow is to use vortex generators. The main goal of this study is to investigate the effect of the vortex generator on the flow field around a standard underwater model employing the vortex generators by using the oil flow visualization method in wind tunnel only in yaw direction (0° ≤ β ≤ 30° angles of attack, due to the experimental cost) and the CFD method in the pitch direction (0° ≤ α ≤ 30° angles of... 

Development of visual detection methods regarding water pollutants can effectively facilitate water resource monitoring programs. A wide color-varying ratiometric approach has been developed for sensitive determination of sulfide by mixing orange emissive glutathione stabilized gold nanoclusters (AuNCs) and blue emissive urea stabilized carbon dots (CDs) in an appropriate ratio. Under a single excitation wavelength of 365 nm, the ratiometric fluorescence (RF) probe exhibited two distinct emission bands at 452 and 607 nm corresponding to CDs and AuNCs, respectively. Owing to the high affinity of sulfide ions to AuNCs in alkaline medium, the fluorescence (FL) of AuNCs was turned-off while the... 

A novel burst correction coding for correction of bulk errors in block-based image coding is developed. The algorithm makes artificial correlation between image pixels that distorts the image. By choosing appropriate parameters, one can control this distortion to lie in acceptable ranges. Our method can exactly correct an erroneously decoded block when using lossless codecs. In the presence of lossy codecs, the algorithm encounters a processing error which makes a noisy image after correction. The Wiener filter is used to reduce this noise. Experimental results show that our method can correct corrupted large blocks in images; the ability that other previously reported approaches have not... 

Much attention has been directed to different aspects of the design of pipelines. Design of the control logic of non-linear pipelines has however, been considered as a subsidiary issue in that an RTL description for such logic can easily be obtained from a behavioral description, with the use of widely available synthesis tools. But, as the complexity of a non-linear pipeline increases, so does the complexity of the control logic. The complexity may be to an extent that obtaining even a behavioral description for the control logic is rendered difficult. This paper focuses on further automating the development of systems consisting of non-linear or multi-function pipelines by proposing an... 

Inferior temporal (IT) cortex is the most important part of the brain and plays an important role in response to visual stimuli. In this study, object decoding has been performed using neuron spikes in IT cortex region. Single Unit Activity (SUA) was recorded from 123 neurons in IT cortex. Pseudo-population firing rate vectors were created, then dimension reduction was done and an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) was used for object decoding. Object decoding accuracy was calculated for various window lengths from 50 ms to 200 ms and various window steps from 25 ms to 100 ms. The results show that 150 ms length and 50 ms window step size gives an optimum performance in average accuracy  

Tapered circular cylinders are employed in a variety of ocean engineering applications. While being geometrically simple, this configuration creates a complex flow pattern in the near wake of the structure. Most previous experimental studies on tapered circular cylinders were dealing with stationary cylinders to explore the wake flow field and vortex shedding patterns past the cylinder. Few studies paid attentions to the vortex induced vibration of the tapered cylinders. This paper reports some results from in-water towing-tank experiments on the vortex-excited vibrations of tapered circular cylinders in a uniform flow. Cylinders with different mean diameters (28 and 78 mm), mass ratios (6.1... 

This paper introduces a new file manager to support multiple categorization. The proposed file manager is designed based on a subtle idea named Conceptual File Management (CFM). According to this approach, files are not contained by folders; nevertheless, each file can be a member of one or more folders (concepts). A prototype file manager is designed and implemented based on the new approach. Filtering by set operations and also manual concept selection improves retrieval of the files. CFM improves file system's clarity and avoids ambiguity and redundancy. As a result, it reduces the size of file system and enhances file access  

Norouzak oil seeds that are the source of bio-diesel (Norouzak) fuel grow mostly in Gonabad and Kashmar located in Khorasan, north east of Iran. Spray characteristics of Norouzak bio-diesel have been experimentally and theoretically studied in this work. Norouzak fuel is added to the conventional diesel fuel, and mixture formations of several blends have been investigated and compared with each other. Moreover, by varying ambient and injection conditions, behaviors of spray of different blends have been explored. Microscopic and macroscopic properties of spray such as Sauter Mean Diameter (SMD), Ohnesorge number, spray tip penetration, spray cone angle, spray projected area and volume have... 

In this paper, we exploit a fuzzy controller on a flexible bevel-tip needle to manipulate the needle's base in order to steer its tip in a preset obstacle-free and target-tracking path. Although the needle tends to follow a curvature path, spinning the needle with an extremely high rotational velocity makes it symmetric with respect to the tissue to follow a straight path. The fuzzy controller determines an appropriate spinning to generate the planned trajectory and, the closed-loop system tries to match the needle body with that trajectory. The swine's brain tissue model, extracted from an in-vitro experimental setup, is a non-homogenous, uncertain and fast-updatable network to model real... 

In this paper, the problem of convolutive source separation via multimodal soft Nonnegative Matrix Co-Factorization (NMCF) is addressed. Different aspects of a phenomenon may be recorded by sensors of different types (e.g., audio and video of human speech), and each of these recorded signals is called a modality. Since the underlying phenomenon of the modalities is the same, they have some similarities. Especially, they usually have similar time changes. It means that changes in one of them usually correspond to changes in the other one. So their active or inactive periods are usually similar. Assuming this similarity, it is expected that the activation coefficient matrices of their... 

Pulsating heat pipes (PHPs) are among the best solutions for the electronics cooling due to their low cost, effectiveness and being passive. Experiments to study the effective factors on heat transfer performance have been designed and as a result, improvement of ferrofluid PHP performance has been achieved. Two different heat pipes made of copper and glass were prepared to investigate the behavior of magnetic nanofluids. In order to find the best condition for heat transfer performance, different concentrations of nanofluid with a filling ratio of 50% were tested in 3 different cases of magnetic field. The results indicated that the ferrofluid is more stable in the glass PHP. It also shows... 

An experimental study was carried out on an axisymmetric supersonic inlet with external compression in order to investigate the buzz phenomenon at different angles of attack and mass flow rates. The model was equipped with accurate and high-frequency pressure sensors, and the tests were conducted at Mach numbers varying from 1.8 to 2.5, for various angles of attack. Shadowgraph visualization technique, together with a high-speed camera, was used to provide the visual description of the shock structure in front of the inlet and to study the characteristics of buzz. Furthermore, pressure distribution over the spike surface was measured using several pressure sensors. Frequency of the buzz and... 

Noise reduction is a major concern in digital image processing systems, which have been investigated by several techniques. One kind of important noises in images is known as Salt & Pepper, which may have different causes. In this paper a new approach for eliminating this type of noise is presented. The approach is different from all previous works in this field, and is based on classification. More precisely, it tries to classify pixels of an image to one of two categories: noisy or not noisy. Afterward, it employs a median filter for pixels which have been classified as noisy, and remains others unchanged; hence, edges and other fine details are kept. Experimental results show this... 

A novel method based on EEG nonlinear analysis and analysis of steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) has been processed. The EEG phase space is reconstructed, and some new geometrical features are extracted. Statistical analysis is carried out based on ANOVA, and most significant features are selected and then fed into a multi-class support vector machine (MSVM). Both offline and online phases are considered to fully address SSVEP detection. In the offline mode, the whole design evaluation, feature selection, and classifier training are performed. In the online scenario, the proposed method is evaluated and the detection rate is reported for both phases. Subject-dependent and... 

In this paper, a new stimulation protocol is proposed to detect the P300 component. In this protocol visual oddball paradigm is used to evoke Event Related Potentials (ERPs). Two types of stimulation protocol for P300 detection (the proposed and standard protocols) are compared in terms of the R-square coefficient and the amplitude of the P300 component. Statistical analysis (paired t-test) is applied to determine the significant differences between the two protocols. The proposed method can enhance the ability to detect the P300 component in comparison to the common protocol that has been provided so far (standard protocol)  

An experimental study was carried out on an axisymmetric supersonic inlet with external compression in order to investigate the buzz phenomenon at different angles of attack and mass flow rates. The model was equipped with accurate and high-frequency pressure sensors, and the tests were conducted at Mach numbers varying from 1.8 to 2.5, for various angles of attack. Shadowgraph visualization technique, together with a high-speed camera, was used to provide the visual description of the shock structure in front of the inlet and to study the characteristics of buzz. Furthermore, pressure distribution over the spike surface was measured using several pressure sensors. Frequency of the buzz and...