Feature extraction using two dimensional (2D) legendre wavelet filter for partial iris recognition

An increasing need for biometrics recognition systems has grown substantially to address the issues of recognition and identification, especially in highly dense areas such as airports, train stations, and financial transactions. Evidence of these can be seen in some airports and also the implementation of these technologies in our mobile phones. Among the most popular biometric technologies include facial, fingerprints, and iris recognition. The iris recognition is considered by many researchers to be the most accurate and reliable form of biometric recognition because iris can neither be surgically operated with a chance of losing slight nor change due to aging. However, presently most iris recognition systems available can only recognize iris image with frontal-looking and high-quality images. Angular image and partially capture image cannot be authenticated with the existing method of iris recognition. This research investigates the possibility of developing a technique for recognition partially captured iris image. The technique is designed to process the iris image at 50%, 25%, 16.5%, and 12.5% and to find a threshold for a minimum amount of iris region required to authenticate the individual. The research also developed and implemented two Dimensional (2D) Legendre wavelet filter for the iris feature extraction. The Legendre wavelet filter is to enhance the feature extraction technique. Selected iris images from CASIA, UBIRIS, and MMU database were used to test the accuracy of the introduced technique. The technique was able to produce recognition accuracy between 70 – 90% CASIA-interval with 92.25% accuracy, CASIA-distance with 86.25%, UBIRIS with 74.95%, and MMU with 94.45%

Institutional Resilience and Informality: The Case of Land Rights Mechanisms in Greater Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso.

Land informality, or the absence of clear property rights, has been identified as a strong cause for lower economic development performance. In Africa, despite the presence of a formal institutional setting of property rights and established laws, the practice of land rights has favored a persistent informal institutional regime. This dissertation addresses the reasons for the persistence of land informality in the presence of formal laws in the case of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. Using process tracing, I dissect the processes of land conflict resolutions within the formal and informal institutions in order to pinpoint reasons for such prolong informality. I identify a very coherent and organized institutional set within the customary institutions, and the ambiguous relationship these institutions have with formal institutions. The inability of the formal institutions to resolve the informality issue is not the result of incompetence; it is the result of survival mechanisms from both the informal and formal institutions. Informality is the effect of the layered institutional setting and persists because of the resilience of survival mechanisms

Watch and Learn

Since the late 1990s, there has been a marked increase in academic interest in what are sometimes called 'utility films', intended for purposes of information, training, teaching or advertising. Although such research was long overdue, the current academic output tends to be restricted in scope, paying little attention to the films' textual features: the means they deploy in defending their informational, educational or commercial arguments. In the absence of such studies, the image survives of very 'formulaic' genres. This book seeks to modify this picture, and suggests a methodology that helps to foreground the films' rhetorical diversity. Taking her departure from a historic collection of Dutch classroom films, Masson proposes an approach that considers an audio-visual text as part of a so-called dispositif: the set-up of technology, text and viewing situation that is relevant to the specific corpus under scrutiny.Sinds de late jaren negentig is er een toenemende academische belangstelling voor zogenoemde 'gebruiksfilms': films die bedoeld zijn om te informeren, te trainen of onderwijzen, of te overtuigen van het nut van een service of product. Onderzoek richtte zich tot nu toe vooral op de productie- of distributiegeschiedenis van dergelijke films, of hun pedagogische effectiviteit. Minder aandacht is er voor hun tekstuele dimensie: de middelen die ze inzetten ter onderbouwing van hun informatieve, educatieve of commerciële argument. Intussen hebben gebruiksfilms echter nog steeds het imago van erg 'formulaire' genres. Eef Masson nuanceert dit beeld in haar boek, en stelt een methodologie voor die de aandacht vestigt op de retorische diversiteit van deze films

Beauvoir in Time

Beauvoir in Time situates Simone de Beauvoir\u27s The Second Sex in the historical context of its writing and in later contexts of its international reception, from then till now. The book takes up three aspects of Beauvoir\u27s work more recent feminists find embarrassing: bad sex, dated views about lesbians, and intersections with race and class. Through close reading of Beauvoir\u27s writing in many genres, alongside contemporaneous discourses (good and bad novels in French and English, outmoded psychoanalytic and sexological authorities, ethnographic surrealism, the writing of Richard Wright and Franz Fanon), and in light of her travels to the U.S. and China, the author uncovers insights more recent feminist methodologies obscure, showing that Beauvoir is still good to think with today

Conception et développement de composants logiciels et matériels pour un dispositif ophtalmique

Les recherches menées au cours de cette thèse de Doctorat s'inscrivent dans les activités du laboratoire commun OPERA (OPtique EmbaRquée Active) impliquant ESSILOR-LUXOTTICA et le CNRS. L'objectif est de contribuer au développement des "lunettes du futur" intégrant des fonctions d'obscurcissement, de focalisation ou d'affichage qui s'adaptent en permanence à la scène et au regard de l'utilisateur. Ces nouveaux dispositifs devront être dotés de capacités de perception, de décision et d'action, et devront respecter des contraintes d'encombrement, de poids, de consommation énergétique et de temps de traitement. Ils présentent par conséquent des connexions évidentes avec la robotique. Dans ce contexte, les recherches ont consisté à investiguer la structure et la construction de tels systèmes afin d'identifier leurs enjeux et difficultés. Pour ce faire, la première tâche a été de mettre en place des émulateurs de divers types de lunettes actives, qui permettent de prototyper et d'évaluer efficacement diverses fonctions. Dans cette phase de prototypage et de test, ces émulateurs s'appuient naturellement sur une architecture logicielle modulaire typique de la robotique. La seconde partie de la thèse s'est focalisée sur le prototypage d'un composant clé des lunettes du futur, qui implique une contrainte supplémentaire de basse consommation : le système de suivi du regard, aussi appelé oculomètre. Le principe d'un assemblage de photodiodes et d'un traitement par réseau de neurones a été proposé. Un simulateur a été mis au point, ainsi qu'une étude de l'influence de l'agencement des photodiodes et de l'hyper-paramétrisation du réseau sur les performances de l'oculomètre.The research carried out during this doctoral thesis takes place within the OPERA joint laboratory (OPtique EmbaRquée Active) involving ESSILOR-LUXOTTICA and the CNRS. The aim is to contribute to the development of "glasses of the future", which feature obscuration, focus or display capabilities that continuously adapt to the scene and the user gaze. These new devices will be endowed with perception, decision and action capabilities, and will have to respect constraints of space, weight, energy consumption and processing time. They therefore show obvious connections with robotics. In this context, the structure and building of such systems has been investigated in order to identify their issues and difficulties. To that end, the first task was to set up emulators of various types of active glasses, which enable the prototyping and effective testing of various functions. In this prototyping and testing phase, these emulators naturally rely on a modular software architecture typical of robotics. The second part of the thesis focused on the prototyping of a key component which implies an additional constraint on low consumption, namely the eye tracking system, also known as gaze tracker. The principle of a photodiode assembly and of a neural network processing has been proposed. A simulator has been developed, as well as a study of the influence of the arrangement of photodiodes and the hyper-parametrization of the network on the performance of the oculometer

The Discursive Construction of the Ivorian Nation in the Period of Ivoirité

Nationalism in Africa has to deal with a conception of the category of nation as a mediator between self and world which is complicated by a number of competing factors. Colonialism and neocolonialism, ethnic, racial and religious considerations, and other supra-national and intra-national factors all vie for the power to variously define the nation or reject it. With a cultural raison d'être at the core of any nation's distinctiveness, I study five Ivorian authors' evolving conceptions of the Côte d'Ivoire within their novels—their cultural products—from 1995 to 2006. This time period in the Côte d'Ivoire is one of a civil war and the lead-up to it—a time of extreme tension on the national identity's definition. I argue that works from Amadou Kourouma, Kitia Touré, Amadou Koné, Véronique Tadjo, and Tanella Boni from this period all perform an Ivorian-ness which contrasts in various ways from the state's official doctrine of Ivoirité—a uniquely Ivorian discourse which reinforced a budding agonism in the conception of the nation on the ground and ultimately served to foment the exclusion of the Northern half of the country. Using tools taken by analogy primarily from Jameson's The Political Unconscious, I demonstrate that allegorical readings serve well as a basis from which to make deeper insights and reveal deeper traces of each novel's performance of its own conception of Ivorian-ness. In this way I show that despite its history as an imposed, artificial, and modern category of identity, the cultural agents and producers of the Côte d'Ivoire are invested in nation's potential, not as a temporary step toward more global poles of mediation between self and world, not as an institution inevitably fraught with internal minorities and divisions, but as a positive unit of solidarity in and of itself

Analyse et recherche d'oeuvres d'art 2D selon le contenu pictural

État de l'art des méthodes manuelles et automatiques d'analyse des oeuvres d'art 2D -- Recherche d'images selon l'organisation spatiale des couleurs -- Seuil automatique pour la recherche d'images selon l'OSC -- Extraction des contours des traits -- Analyse de l'impact pictural dans les oeuvres au trait -- Conclusion et perspectives

Proceedings of the 19th Sound and Music Computing Conference

Proceedings of the 19th Sound and Music Computing Conference - June 5-12, 2022 - Saint-Étienne (France). https://smc22.grame.f