INCORPORATING MACHINE VISION IN PRECISION DAIRY FARMING TECHNOLOGIES

The inclusion of precision dairy farming technologies in dairy operations is an area of increasing research and industry direction. Machine vision based systems are suitable for the dairy environment as they do not inhibit workflow, are capable of continuous operation, and can be fully automated. The research of this dissertation developed and tested 3 machine vision based precision dairy farming technologies tailored to the latest generation of RGB+D cameras. The first system focused on testing various imaging approaches for the potential use of machine vision for automated dairy cow feed intake monitoring. The second system focused on monitoring the gradual change in body condition score (BCS) for 116 cows over a nearly 7 month period. Several proposed automated BCS systems have been previously developed by researchers, but none have monitored the gradual change in BCS for a duration of this magnitude. These gradual changes infer a great deal of beneficial and immediate information on the health condition of every individual cow being monitored. The third system focused on automated dairy cow feature detection using Haar cascade classifiers to detect anatomical features. These features included the tailhead, hips, and rear regions of the cow body. The features chosen were done so in order to aid machine vision applications in determining if and where a cow is present in an image or video frame. Once the cow has been detected, it must then be automatically identified in order to keep the system fully automated, which was also studied in a machine vision based approach in this research as a complimentary aspect to incorporate along with cow detection. Such systems have the potential to catch poor health conditions developing early on, aid in balancing the diet of the individual cow, and help farm management to better facilitate resources, monetary and otherwise, in an appropriate and efficient manner. Several different applications of this research are also discussed along with future directions for research, including the potential for additional automated precision dairy farming technologies, integrating many of these technologies into a unified system, and the use of alternative, potentially more robust machine vision cameras

Cryptocurrencies and asset bubbles

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Standard practices for the implementation of computer software

A standard approach to the development of computer program is provided that covers the file cycle of software development from the planning and requirements phase through the software acceptance testing phase. All documents necessary to provide the required visibility into the software life cycle process are discussed in detail

Provenance of "after the fact" harmonised community-based demographic and HIV surveillance data from ALPHA cohorts

Background: Data about data, metadata, for describing Health and Demographic Surveillance System (HDSS) data have often received insufficient attention. This thesis studied how to develop provenance metadata within the context of HDSS data harmonisation - the network for Analysing Longitudinal Population-based HIV/ AIDS data on Africa (ALPHA). Technologies from the data documentation community were customised, among them: A process model - Generic Longitudinal Business Process Model (GLBPM), two metadata standards - Data Documentation Initiative (DDI) and Standard for Data and Metadata eXchange (SDMX) and a data transformations description language - Structured Data Transform Language (SDTL). Methods: A framework with three complementary facets was used: Creating a recipe for annotating primary HDSS data using the GLBPM and DDI; Approaches for documenting data transformations. At a business level, prospective and retrospective documentation using GLBPM and DDI and retrospectively recovering the more granular details using SDMX and SDTL; Requirements analysis for a user-friendly provenance metadata browser. Results: A recipe for the annotation of HDSS data was created outlining considerations to guide HDSS on metadata entry, staff training and software costs. Regarding data transformations, at a business level, a specialised process model for the HDSS domain was created. It has algorithm steps for each data transformation sub-process and data inputs and outputs. At a lower level, the SDMX and SDTL captured about 80% (17/21) of the variable level transformations. The requirements elicitation study yielded requirements for a provenance metadata browser to guide developers. Conclusions: This is a first attempt ever at creating detailed metadata for this resource or any other similar resources in this field. HDSS can implement these recipes to document their data. This will increase transparency and facilitate reuse thus potentially bringing down costs of data management. It will arguably promote the longevity and wide and accurate use of these data

Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Being infrastructure-less and without central administration control, wireless ad-hoc networking is playing a more and more important role in extending the coverage of traditional wireless infrastructure (cellular networks, wireless LAN, etc). This book includes state-of the-art techniques and solutions for wireless ad-hoc networks. It focuses on the following topics in ad-hoc networks: vehicular ad-hoc networks, security and caching, TCP in ad-hoc networks and emerging applications. It is targeted to provide network engineers and researchers with design guidelines for large scale wireless ad hoc networks

Connected Attribute Filtering Based on Contour Smoothness

A new attribute measuring the contour smoothness of 2-D objects is presented in the context of morphological attribute filtering. The attribute is based on the ratio of the circularity and non-compactness, and has a maximum of 1 for a perfect circle. It decreases as the object boundary becomes irregular. Computation on hierarchical image representation structures relies on five auxiliary data members and is rapid. Contour smoothness is a suitable descriptor for detecting and discriminating man-made structures from other image features. An example is demonstrated on a very-high-resolution satellite image using connected pattern spectra and the switchboard platform

An Exploration of the Relationship between the Partisan-Business Cycle and Economic Inequality within Developed Economies

Recent contributions to the study of inequality have provided strong evidence towards the presence of an established trend, over several decades, of growing economic inequality (with a particular focus on distribution within their tails; i.e. top 10%, 1%) across countries with developed economies and indications of similar trends across developing economies. While the causality and influencing factors to these trends has widely been discussed, and has range from declining domestic growth rates as economies move towards high mass consumption states to globalisation, political decision making and policy application been referred to as both contributory or an instrument for dampening such trends, through the application of Partisan Business Cycles. However contemporary studies have indicated a declining correlation between political orientation of national legislatures or executive branches and domestic economic and financial performance (which by extension, through it strong correlation with growth, inequality). However little exploratory research has been done on the deviation between the observed indicators of inequality and its trend line (residual). As such this paper has explored the relationships between the components of the Partisan Business Cycles and this deviation across a set of advanced economies of a time period between 1975 to 2010. The paper additionally considered political structural and situational constrains, such as governmental systems, minority governments, etc... , on their decision making as variables for consideration. The analysis was performed using Auto-regression Integrated Moving Average and Multi-Linear Regression modelling. Which strongly indicates that neither the Partisan Business Cycle nor the political situational and structures are explanatory indicators of the variations in inequality from the trend. Nor can previous observed deviations provide strong indication of a future patterns in the deviations from the trend. As such this paper finds no distinguished pattern within these residuals suggesting that such observations can be categorised as white noise around these trends lines or inequality