International Business Cycle Accounting

In this paper, I extend the business cycle accounting method a la Chari, Kehoe and McGrattan (2007) to a two-country international business cycle model and quantify the effect of the disturbances in relevant markets on the business cycle correlation between Japan and the US over the 1980-2008 period. I find that disturbances in the labor market and production efficiency are important in accounting for the recent increase in the cross-country output correlation. Financial globalization can be the cause of the recent increase in cross-country output correlation if it operated through an increase in the cross-country correlation of disturbances in the labor market and production efficiency, not in the domestic or international capital markets

Adaptive threshold for moving objects detection using gaussian mixture model

Moving object detection becomes the important task in the video surveilance system. Defining the threshold automatically is challenging to differentiate the moving object from the background within a video. This study proposes gaussian mixture model (GMM) as a threshold strategy in moving object detection. The performance of the proposed method is compared to the Otsu algorithm and gray threshold as the baseline method using mean square error (MSE) and Peak Signal Noise Ratio (PSNR). The performance comparison of the methods is evaluated on human video dataset. The average result of MSE value GMM is 257.18, Otsu is 595.36 and Gray is 645.39, so the MSE value is lower than Otsu and Gray threshold. The average result of PSNR value GMM is 24.71, Otsu is 20.66 and Gray is 19.35, so the PSNR value is higher than Otsu and Gray threshold. The performance of the proposed method outperforms the baseline method in term of error detection

Approximate Lesion Localization in Dermoscopy Images

Background: Dermoscopy is one of the major imaging modalities used in the diagnosis of melanoma and other pigmented skin lesions. Due to the difficulty and subjectivity of human interpretation, automated analysis of dermoscopy images has become an important research area. Border detection is often the first step in this analysis. Methods: In this article, we present an approximate lesion localization method that serves as a preprocessing step for detecting borders in dermoscopy images. In this method, first the black frame around the image is removed using an iterative algorithm. The approximate location of the lesion is then determined using an ensemble of thresholding algorithms. Results: The method is tested on a set of 428 dermoscopy images. The localization error is quantified by a metric that uses dermatologist determined borders as the ground truth. Conclusion: The results demonstrate that the method presented here achieves both fast and accurate localization of lesions in dermoscopy images