Sharif Digital Repository

A new approach to Image Quality Assessment (IQA) is presented. The idea is based on the fact that two images are similar if their structural relationship within their blocks is preserved. To this end, a transition matrix is defined which exploits structural transitions between corresponding blocks of two images. The matrix contains valuable information about differences of two images, which should be transformed to a quality index. Eigen-value analysis over the transition matrix leads to a new distance measure called Eigen-gap. According to simulation results, the Eigen-gap is not only highly correlated to subjective scores but also, its performance is as good as the SSIM, a trustworthy... 

The problem of signal detection using a flexible and general model is considered. Owing to applicability and flexibility of sparse signal representation and approximation, it has attracted a lot of attention in many signal processing areas. In this study, the authors propose a new detection method based on sparse decomposition in a union of subspaces model. Their proposed detector uses a dictionary that can be interpreted as a bank of matched subspaces. This improves the performance of signal detection, as it is a generalisation for detectors. Low-rank assumption for the desired signals implies that the representations of these signals in terms of some proper bases would be sparse. Their... 

Dictionary learning (DL) for sparse representation has been widely investigated during the last decade. A DL algorithm uses a training data set to learn a set of basis functions over which all training signals can be sparsely represented. In practice, training signals may contain a few outlier data, whose structures differ from those of the clean training set. The presence of these unpleasant data may heavily affect the learning performance of a DL algorithm. In this paper we propose a robust-to-outlier formulation of the DL problem. We then present an algorithm for solving the resulting problem. Experimental results on both synthetic data and image denoising demonstrate the promising... 

This paper studies denoising of images contaminated with additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN). In recent years, clustering-based methods have shown promising performances. In this paper we show that low-rank subspace clustering provides a suitable clustering problem that minimizes the lower bound on the MSE of the denoising, which is optimum for Gaussian noise. Solving the corresponding clustering problem is not easy. We study some global and local sub-optimal solutions already presented in the literature and show that those that solve a better approximation of our problem result in better performances. A simple image denoising method based on dictionary learning using the idea of... 

Exact recovery of a sparse solution for an underdetermined system of linear equations implies full search among all possible subsets of the dictionary, which is computationally intractable, while ℓ1 minimization will do the job when a Restricted Isometry Property holds for the dictionary. Yet, practical sparse recovery algorithms may fail to recover the vector of coefficients even when the dictionary deviates from the RIP only slightly. To enjoy ℓ1 minimization guarantees in a wider sense, a method based on a combination of full-search and ℓ1 minimization is presented. The idea is based on partitioning the dictionary into atoms which are in some sense... 

Nanofluid is the term applied to a suspension of solid, nanometer-sized particles in conventional fluids; the most prominent features of such fluids include enhanced heat characteristics, such as convective heat transfer coefficient, in comparison to the base fluid without considerable alterations in physical and chemical properties. In this study, nanofluids of aluminum oxide and copper oxide were prepared in ethylene glycol separately. The effect of forced convective heat transfer coefficient in turbulent flow was calculated using a double pipe and plate heat exchangers. Furthermore, we calculated the forced convective heat transfer coefficient of the nanofluids using theoretical... 

Using multiple antennas at the transmit and receive sides of a passive radar brings both the benefits of MIMO radar and passive radar. However one of the obstacles arisen in such configuration is the receive antennas placement in proper positions so that the radar performance is improved. Here we just consider the case of positioning one receiver among multiple illuminators of opportunity. Indeed it is a start for the solution of optimizing the geometry of the multiple receivers in a passive radar  

SbCl3 supported on montmorillonite K-10 is an efficient catalyst for the ring opening of epoxides with aromatic amines under solvent-free conditions and microwave irradiation to give the corresponding b-amino alcohols in high yields with high regioselectivity  

In this paper, we consider an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) system with wireless power transfer (WPT) where an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based radar serves a group of energy-limited communication users in addition to its sensing functionality. In this architecture, the radar senses the environment in phase 1 (namely sensing phase) and mean-while, the communications users (nodes) harvest and store the energy from the radar transmit signal. The stored energy is then used for information transmission from the nodes to UAV in phase 2, i.e., uplink phase. Performance of the radar system depends on the transmit signal as well as the receive filter; the energy of the transmit... 

One of the important obstacles in MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) radars is the issue of designing proper transmit signals. Indeed, the capability of signal design is a significant advantage in MIMO radars, through which, the system can achieve much better performance. Many different aspects of this performance improvement have been considered yet, and the transmit signals have been designed to attain such goal, e.g., getting higher SNR or better detector's performance at the receiver. However, an important tool for evaluating the radar's performance is its ambiguity function. In this paper, we consider the problem of transmit signal design, in order to optimize the ambiguity function... 

Two gains play key roles in recently developed MIMO wireless communication systems: "spatial diversity" gain and "spatial multiplexing" gain. The diversity gain refers to the capability to decrease the error rate of the MIMO channel, while the multiplexing gain implicitly refers to the amount of increase in the capacity of the MIMO channel. It has been shown that there is a fundamental tradeoff between these two types of gains, meaning interplay between increasing reliability (via an increase in the diversity gain) and increasing data rate (via an increase in the multiplexing gain). On the other hand, recently, MIMO radars have attracted much attention for their superior ability to enhance... 

It is a well known fact that using multiple antennas at transmit and receive sides improves the detection performance. However, in such multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) configuration, proper positioning of transmitters and receivers is a big challenge that can have significant influence on the performance of the overall system. In addition, determining the power of each transmitter under a total power constraint is a problem that should be solved in order to enhance the performance and coverage of such a system. In this paper, we design the Neyman-Pearson detector under the Rayleigh scatter model and use it to introduce a criterion for the antenna placement at both transmit and receive... 

There has been much interest, recently, towards exploiting the Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) technique in radar. It is shown that using multiple antennas at transmit and receive sides can improve the performance of the system. However, in order to analyze the system's performance, its ambiguity function, i.e. the ambiguity function of a MIMO radar, is needed to be defined. In this paper, beginning from the information theoretic definitions, we derive such function, specifically for a MIMO radar with widely separated antennas  

By combining the two ideas of MIMO (Multiple Input Multiple Output) and PCL (Passive Coherent Location) in radar, one can achieve the advantages of both recently developed techniques simultaneously. While using multiple antennas at the receive side provides a spatial diversity of the object to be detected, using multiple illuminators of opportunity, most importantly, makes the radar covert to the interceptors. One obstacle in such MIMO configuration is choosing the positions of the receive antennas. In this paper, after analyzing the Neyman-Pearson detector for the DVB-T based PCL, we introduce the probability of missed detection as a criterion to place the receive antenna. Here, we only... 

One of the most important obstacles in passive radar applications is removing the direct signal from the target channel. Otherwise, week echoes from the targets in the target channel would be ignored due to the limited dynamic range of the system. One of the most effective techniques in this field is using adaptive filters. In this paper various adaptive filters are introduced and their performances are shown and compared  

It has been shown that using multiple antennas in a radar system improves the performance considerably, since multiple target echoes are received from different aspect angles of the target. In this way, the target detection is improved. However, when using multiple antennas, some problems, such as designing the transmit signals, synchronization, etc. emerge that should be solved. One of such problems is the receiver placement. Receiver placement deals with choosing a proper position for the receive antenna in order to optimize the whole system's performance. In this paper, a receiver placement procedure based on improving the radar ambiguity function is proposed for the case of a multisite... 

By employing the MIMO (multiple-input-multiple-output) technology in radar, some new problems emerged, that, in order to benefit the MIMO gains in radar, it was necessary to solve them suitably. One of such obstacles is determining the positions of receive antennas in a MIMO radar system with widely separated antennas (WS MIMO radar), since it is shown that the antennas' positions affect the whole system's performance considerably. In this study, a proper receivers' positioning procedure is proposed. To do this end, four criteria are developed based on the proposed MIMO detector and the MIMO ambiguity function. The simulations verify that the proposed positioning procedure improves the... 

Phenols and alcohols are silylated with hexamethyldisilazane (HMDS) under microwave irradiation in solvent-free condition in good to excellent yields  

Modified couple stress theory is a size-dependent theorem capturing the micro/nanoscale effects influencing the mechanical behaviors of the micro- and nanostructures. In this paper, it is applied to investigate the nonlinear vibration of carbon nanotubes under step DC voltage. The vibration, natural frequencies and dynamic pull-in characteristics of the carbon nanotubes are studied in detail. Moreover, the effects of various boundary conditions and geometries are scrutinized on the dynamic characteristics. The results reveal that application of this theory leads to the higher values of the natural frequencies and dynamic pull-in voltages  

We study a classical problem in communication and wireless networks called Finding White Space Regions. In this problem, we are given a set of antennas (points) some of which are noisy (black) and the rest are working fine (white). The goal is to find a set of convex hulls with maximum total area that cover all white points and exclude all black points. In other words, these convex hulls make it safe for white antennas to communicate with each other without any interference with black antennas. We study the problem on three different settings (based on overlapping between different convex hulls) and find hardness results and good approximation algorithms