7 research outputs found

    African Handbook of Climate Change Adaptation

    Get PDF
    This open access book discusses current thinking and presents the main issues and challenges associated with climate change in Africa. It introduces evidences from studies and projects which show how climate change adaptation is being - and may continue to be successfully implemented in African countries. Thanks to its scope and wide range of themes surrounding climate change, the ambition is that this book will be a lead publication on the topic, which may be regularly updated and hence capture further works. Climate change is a major global challenge. However, some geographical regions are more severly affected than others. One of these regions is the African continent. Due to a combination of unfavourable socio-economic and meteorological conditions, African countries are particularly vulnerable to climate change and its impacts. The recently released IPCC special report "Global Warming of 1.5º C" outlines the fact that keeping global warming by the level of 1.5º C is possible, but also suggested that an increase by 2º C could lead to crises with crops (agriculture fed by rain could drop by 50% in some African countries by 2020) and livestock production, could damage water supplies and pose an additonal threat to coastal areas. The 5th Assessment Report produced by IPCC predicts that wheat may disappear from Africa by 2080, and that maize— a staple—will fall significantly in southern Africa. Also, arid and semi-arid lands are likely to increase by up to 8%, with severe ramifications for livelihoods, poverty eradication and meeting the SDGs. Pursuing appropriate adaptation strategies is thus vital, in order to address the current and future challenges posed by a changing climate. It is against this background that the "African Handbook of Climate Change Adaptation" is being published. It contains papers prepared by scholars, representatives from social movements, practitioners and members of governmental agencies, undertaking research and/or executing climate change projects in Africa, and working with communities across the African continent. Encompassing over 100 contribtions from across Africa, it is the most comprehensive publication on climate change adaptation in Africa ever produced

    Poor Man vote with M-ary classifiers. Application to Iris recognition.

    No full text
    Achieving good performance in biometrics requires matching the capacity of the classifier or a set of classifiers to the size of the available training set. A classifier with too many adjustable parameters (large capacity) is likely to learn the training set without difficulty but be unable to generalize properly to new patterns. If the capacity is too small, the training set might not be learned without appreciable error. There is thus advantage to control the capacity through a variety of methods involving not only the structure of the classifiers themselves, but also the property of the input space. This paper proposes an original non parametric method to combine optimaly multiple classifier responses. Highly favorable results have been obtained using the above method

    Non-ideal iris recognition

    Get PDF
    Of the many biometrics that exist, iris recognition is finding more attention than any other due to its potential for improved accuracy, permanence, and acceptance. Current iris recognition systems operate on frontal view images of good quality. Due to the small area of the iris, user co-operation is required. In this work, a new system capable of processing iris images which are not necessarily in frontal view is described. This overcomes one of the major hurdles with current iris recognition systems and enhances user convenience and accuracy. The proposed system is designed to operate in two steps: (i) preprocessing and estimation of the gaze direction and (ii) processing and encoding of the rotated iris image. Two objective functions are used to estimate the gaze direction. Later, the off-angle iris image undergoes geometric transformations involving the estimated angle and is further processed as if it were a frontal view image. Two methods: (i) PCA and (ii) ICA are used for encoding. Three different datasets are used to quantify performance of the proposed non-ideal recognition system

    "poor man" vote with m-ary non-parametric classifiers based on mutual information. application to iris recognition

    No full text
    Achieving good performance in biometrics requires matching the capacity of the classifier or a set of classifiers to the size of the available training set. A classifier with too many adjustable parameters (large capacity) is likely to learn the training set without difficulty but be unable to generalize properly to new patterns. If the capacity is too small, the training set might not be learned without appreciable error. There is thus advantage tocontrol the capacity through a variety of methods involving not only the structure of the classifiers themselves, but also the property of the input space. This paper proposes an original non parametric method to combine optimaly multiple classifier responses. Highly favorable results have been obtained using the above method

    The Australasian schoolmaster and literary review

    Get PDF
    corecore