Blind Restoration of Motion Blurred Barcode Images using Ridgelet Transform and Radial Basis Function Neural Network

The aim of any image restoration techniques is recovering the original image from a degraded observation. One of the most common degradation phenomena in images is motion blur. In case of blind image restoration accurate estimation of motion blur parameters is required for deblurring of such images. This paper proposed a novel technique for estimating the parameters of motion blur using ridgelet transform. Initially, the energy of ridgelet coefficients is used to estimate the blur angle and then blur length is estimated using a radial biases function neural network. This work is tested on different barcode images with varying parameters of blur. The simulation results show that the proposed method improves the restoration performance

Uneven Ground: Figurations Of The Rural Modern In The U.S. South, 1890-1945

New modernist studies has opened wide the discussion about what modernism means, when it begins, and, compellingly for the purposes of this project, where it occurs. Exploring intersections between modernization, modernism, labor, and segregation in the agricultural South, this dissertation demonstrates how the effects of nascent industrialization, emergent technologies, and modern thought are animated by figures and spaces associated with--or performing--versions of rurality. The project is divided into three major sections. In the first, I suggest that the contradictions of African American life in the post-Reconstruction world are parsed in the period\u27s literature through the presence of a veiled georgic mode, a tendency I explore in the writing of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Frances F. W. Harper. In the second section, I propose two categories of agrarians: leisure agrarians such as the Twelve Southerners and Helen and Scott Nearing, figures who stage their protests of industrialized capitalism in writing from positions of relative privilege, and labor agrarians, who come from an agricultural underclass of sharecroppers and tenant farmers. These latter form a more diverse group--including women, people of color, and children--and their protests of the capitalist status quo take the form of uniquely embodied discourse. In the final section, I propose a category called migratory modernism, and use it to theorize narratives of movement and migration in the early twentieth century. Throughout this section, I read work by Charlie Poole, Zora Neale Hurston, Rudolph Fisher, William Faulkner, and Ellen Glasgow in order to evaluate the migrant\u27s role as a useful metaphor for the modernist condition of the self-divided-against-the-self

Hypnagogia: The nature and function of the hypnagogic state

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.An analysis of the hypnagogic state (hypnagogia) leads to the conclusion that, far from being a simple phase of sleep, this state or process is a central phenomenon characterized by a constellation of psychological features which emerge as a function of the hypnagogic subject's loosening of ego boundaries (LEB) and are correlated with activities of subcortical structures. This analysis both facilitates the relating of hypnagogia to other states/ processes of the human organism, such as hypnosis, meditation, dreams, psi, schizophrenia, and creativity, and helps shed light on their nature. Further, hypnagogia is viewed as a circadian phenomenon. related to the basic restactivity cycle wherein it represents the cycle's dream component. As such it encompasses a variety of types of dream, the nocturnal or REM kind being only one of them. It, thus, constitutes the exemplification of a basic and pervading phenomenon herein termed Oneirosis, i.e. the need and readiness to have dreams and dreamlike experiences, such as hallucinations and quasi-hallucinations, throughout the 24 hour cycle independently of sleep and wakefulness. It is further proposed, on neurophysiological, developmental and psychological grounds, that this phenomenon is evolutionally older than sleep and wakefulness, that it has a hypometabolic and anxiety-reducing function, and that, by dint of its character of LEB, it enables the individual to slacken his ego strictness and become more tolerant as well as providing him with opportunities for more holistic experiences and continually renewed psychological orientations. Moreover, due to its unique character of riding between wakefulness and sleep, hypnagogia points to new evolutional possibilities, namely, to the establishment of a new psychological state serving collectively the functions of wakefulness, sleep, and dreaming.This work is funded by the Social Science Research Council (No. 79/20805/PSY

An Introduction to Zooarchaeology

zooarchaeology is a self-reproducing field taught in many university departments of anthropology or archaeology. As archaeologists have literally taken faunal analysis into their own hands, they have debated how best to use animal remains to study everything from early hominin hunting or scavenging to animal production in ancient market economies. Animal remains from archaeological sites have been used to infer three kinds of information: the age of deposits (chronology); paleoenvironment and paleoecological relations among humans and other species; human choices and actions related to use of animals as food and raw materials. Methods for reconstructing human diet and behavior have undergone the greatest growth over the last four decades, and most of this book addresses the second and third areas. This book deals with what I know best: vertebrate zooarchaeology, and within that, analysis of mammalian bones and teeth

Kunapipi 18 (2 & 3) 1996 Full Version

Kunapipi 18 (2 & 3) 1996 Full Version

Fransesco Rosi: An auteur? The cinema of Francesco Rosi

Auteurist approaches developed in the 1950s studied films as a means of personal expression, valuing those directors who could bring an individual quality to their films as 'auteurs'. More recent theories of subjectivity and textuality have displaced the centrality of the director as author of meanings in the film texts, but have had difficulty in explaining the continued importance accorded to directors in interviews and writing about their films. The interaction of directorial intention, film industry, and the use of other media to communicate the director's ideas to audiences is an area of continued theoretical concern. It is the aim of this work firstly to examine how Francesco Rosi has managed to constitute himself as an 'auteur' within the institutional structures of the Italian film industry, and the constraints which these impose. Between 1958 and today Rosi has made fifteen films, the majority of which to a greater or lesser extent engage with the reality of contemporary Italy. He works within the mainstream of the Italian film industry. His work can, however, be located within that narrow band of 1 - 2% of films produced each season which can be designated 'art' or 'quality' cinema, as opposed to more or less formulaic genre products. This study aims to show that the institutional structures of the Italian film - and latterly media industries have a primary influence both on the particular narrative patterns Rosi has at his disposal, and on the particular types of films which Rosi as director is financed to make. Secondly, I examine elements of Rosi's films which mark him out as an 'auteur'. Through close textual analysis, I identify recurring visual, rhetorical and narrative choices which can be shown to signal the presence of the 'auteur', Rosi, in the film texts, and to constitute his style

Critical Folkdance Pedagogy: Women's Folkdancing as Feminist Practice

258 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2009.A folkfeminist methodology meshes qualitative/interpretive analysis, "near native" reflexive ethnography and participatory dimensions throughout the research process. Barranquilla, Colombia South America, an Atlantic coast is the primary location for the study. Cross referencing a variety of textual literary sources provides evidence that validates women's voices as feminist practices.Ope

"Datum for its own annihilation" : feedback, control, and computing, 1916-1945

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Science, Technology, and Society, 1996.Includes bibliographical references.by David A. Mindell.Ph.D

Francesco Rosi: an auteur? the cinema of Francesco Rosi

Auteurist approaches developed in the 1950s studied films as a means of personal expression, valuing those directors who could bring an individual quality to their films as 'auteurs' . More recent theories of subjectivity and textuality have displaced the centrality of the director as author of meanings in the film texts, but have had difficulty in explaining the continued importance accorded to directors in interviews and writing about their films. The interaction of directorial intention, film industry, and the use of other media to communicate the director's ideas to audiences is an area of continued theoretical concern. It is the aim of this work firstly to examine how Francesco Rosi has managed to constitute himself as an 'auteur' within the institutional structures of the Italian film industry, and the constraints which these impose. Between 1958 and today Rosi has made fifteen films, the majority of which to a greater or lesser extent engage with the reality of contemporary Italy. He works within the mainstream of the Italian film industry. His work can, however, be located within that narrow band of 1- 2% of films produced each season which can be designated 'art' or 'quality' cinema, as opposed to more or less formulaic genre products. This study aims to show that the institutional structures of the Italian film - and latterly media - industries have a primary influence both on the particular narrative patterns Rosi has at his disposal, and on the particular types of films which Rosi as director is financed to make. Secondly, I examine elements of Rosi's films which mark him out as an 'auteur'. Through close textual analysis, I identify recurring visual, rhetorical and narrative choices which can be shown to signal the presence of the 'auteur', Rosi, in the film texts, and to constitute his style

Viet Nam Generation, Volume 6, Number 3-4

Edited by Dan Duffy and Kali Tal. Contributing editors: Renny Christopher. David DeRose, Alan Farrell. Cynthia Fuchs, William M. King. Bill Shields, Tony Williams, and David Willson