Hyperspectral Empirical Absolute Calibration Model Using Libya 4 Pseudo-Invariant Calibration Site

The objective of this paper is to find an empirical hyperspectral absolute calibration model using Libya 4 pseudo-invariant calibration site (PICS). The approach involves using the Landsat 8 (L8) Operational Land Imager (OLI) as the reference radiometer and using Earth Observing One (EO-1) Hyperion, with a spectral resolution of 10 nm as a hyperspectral source. This model utilizes data from a region of interest (ROI) in an “optimal region” of 3% temporal, spatial, and spectral stability within the Libya 4 PICS. It uses an improved, simple, empirical, hyperspectral Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution function (BRDF) model accounting for four angles: solar zenith and azimuth, and view zenith and azimuth angles. This model can perform absolute calibration in 1 nm spectral resolution by predicting TOA reflectance in all existing spectral bands of the sensors. The resultant model was validated with image data acquired from satellite sensors such as Landsat 7, Sentinel 2A, and Sentinel 2B, Terra MODIS, Aqua MODIS, from their launch date to 2020. These satellite sensors differ in terms of the width of their spectral band-pass, overpass time, off-nadir viewing capabilities, spatial resolution, and temporal revisit time, etc. The result demonstrates the efficacy of the proposed model has an accuracy of the order of 3% with a precision of about 3% for the nadir viewing sensors (with view zenith angle up to 5°) used in the study. For the off-nadir viewing satellites with view zenith angle up to 20°, it can have an estimated accuracy of 6% and precision of 4%

DISPARITY IN CREATIVE ABILITIES AMONG RURAL AND URBAN SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN DIBRUGARH DISTRICT OF ASSAM

Purpose of the Study: This study investigated the creative abilities of students from rural and urban secondary schools in terms of their fluency, flexibility, originality, inquisitiveness, and persistency. Methodology: The research design used here is quantitative with the type of descriptive survey method. The research subjects were 720 secondary school students selected through disproportionate stratified random sampling. The research instrument used is the Passi Test of Creativity (verbal & non-verbal). The analysis techniques employed are descriptive statistics and inferential statistics in the form of independent means t-test. Main Findings: The study revealed that rural and urban Secondary level school students have significant differences in their creativity. However, concerning the inquisitiveness dimension of creativity, the study reported no significant difference between the rural and urban Secondary level school students. Applications of this Study: This research can be used as input for the schools and teachers at the secondary level to consider the practice of offering a more stimulating environment to students hailing from rural backgrounds. This research can also be used as input in the facilitation of students’ creative abilities. Novelty/Originality of this Study: The teachers, educators, and school authorities, especially at Secondary level of Education; are suggested to offer more exposures and stimulating environments to students belonging to the rural backgrounds. The study examined for the first time the rural-urban disparity among secondary level school students on the dimensions of creativity such as inquisitiveness and persistence, especially in north-east India

Performance Characteristics of Multilevel Converter in Grid Connected System with Renewable Energy Resources

The multi-stage cascade converter structure can be fascinating for high-performance solar photovoltaic (PV) systems due to its interchangeability, expansion, and MPPT (Maximum Power Point Tracking) exception. However, power discrepancies in cascaded uniform PV converter modules can cause unstable voltages and system operation. This article highlights the problem, examines the effects of reactive power compensation and optimization on the safety and performance characteristics of the system and proposes a synchronized distribution of active and reactive power in the network in order to reduce this instability. Furthermore, a wind turbine is connected in parallel to the photovoltaic system to increase the reliability of the system. This document presents the standards and specifications of grid-connected photovoltaic inverters and the different topologies of grid-connected photovoltaic inverters. And he also discussed monitoring maximum credit points

A study evaluating third trimester haemoglobin level as a predictor of feto-maternal outcome in pregnancy induced hypertension cases

Background: The aim of this study is to assess whether third trimester haemoglobin level can be used as a predictor of feto-maternal adverse outcomes in pregnancies complicated with PIH.Methods: This is an observational study in the Obstetrics and Gynaecology Department of IMS and SUM hospital, SOA university from July 2015 to December 2017. Institutional ethical committee permission obtained. All singleton pregnancies delivered during this period with PIH were included in the study. PIH and eclampsia was diagnosed as per ISSHP criteria. All chronic hypertension cases excluded. All were evaluated with haemoglobin level. They were divided into 3 groups depending upon haemoglobin level; low ( 13gm%) considering the WHO standard. Maternal complications observed were incidence of eclampsia, abruptio placentae, HELLP syndrome, PPH, neurological complications, ICU admissions and death. Fetal outcomes studied were NICU admission, stillbirth, incidence of prematurity and low birth weight. All these parameters were compared among 3 groups. Statistical analysis was done with SPSS 20 software using Yate’s corrected chi square test.Results: Incidence of eclampsia was significantly greater with both high (p13gm% in third trimester is associated with worst feto-maternal outcome whereas normal haemoglobin level (11-13gm%) is associated with least feto-maternal complications

A randomized controlled open label comparative clinical study of cephalexin versus doxycycline in patients with acne vulgaris in a hospital based population of South India

Background: Oral antibiotics are frequently used for acne vulgaris. Cephalexin has documented some success against acne vulgaris in earlier studies. Here the efficacy and safety of Cephalexin have been compared against the standard therapy of Doxycyline.Methods: From September 2010 to June 2011, 100 patients of moderate Acne vulgaris were randomized into two groups to receive oral Doxycyline (100mg once daily) or Cephalexin (500mg thrice daily) in an open label manner for eight weeks. All participants were allowed to use topical 5%Benzoyl peroxide gel twice daily. Efficacy was measured in terms of reduction in the number of facial comedones and inflammatory lesions from baseline after eight weeks.Results: 44 patients from Cephalexin group and48 patients from Doxycyline group completed the study. Both drugs have significantly decreased comedone count as well as the inflammatory lesion count after eight weeks. However, Doxycycline appeared better in terms of Comedone count (14.5±3.07 versus 12.9±4.31, p=0.045) as well as inflammatory lesion count (8.64.1±2.14 versus 7.67±2.46, p=0.047) at the end. The total adverse event was slightly more with Cephalexin (6.81% versus 6.25%, p= 0.912), where Diarrhoea remained the commonest adverse effect (4.54%).Conclusions: Although for the first time oral Cephalexin has displayed efficacy against moderate acne vulgaris in a prospective clinical study, it appeared inferior to Doxycycline over eight weeks. Therefore, it becomes an option only when other oral antibiotics are contraindicated or not tolerated

Decay2Distill: Leveraging spatial perturbation and regularization for self-supervised image denoising

Unpaired image denoising has achieved promising development over the last few years. Regardless of the performance, methods tend to heavily rely on underlying noise properties or any assumption which is not always practical. Alternatively, if we can ground the problem from a structural perspective rather than noise statistics, we can achieve a more robust solution. with such motivation, we propose a self-supervised denoising scheme that is unpaired and relies on spatial degradation followed by a regularized refinement. Our method shows considerable improvement over previous methods and exhibited consistent performance over different data domains

Multi-modal Medical Neurological Image Fusion using Wavelet Pooled Edge Preserving Autoencoder

Medical image fusion integrates the complementary diagnostic information of the source image modalities for improved visualization and analysis of underlying anomalies. Recently, deep learning-based models have excelled the conventional fusion methods by executing feature extraction, feature selection, and feature fusion tasks, simultaneously. However, most of the existing convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures use conventional pooling or strided convolutional strategies to downsample the feature maps. It causes the blurring or loss of important diagnostic information and edge details available in the source images and dilutes the efficacy of the feature extraction process. Therefore, this paper presents an end-to-end unsupervised fusion model for multimodal medical images based on an edge-preserving dense autoencoder network. In the proposed model, feature extraction is improved by using wavelet decomposition-based attention pooling of feature maps. This helps in preserving the fine edge detail information present in both the source images and enhances the visual perception of fused images. Further, the proposed model is trained on a variety of medical image pairs which helps in capturing the intensity distributions of the source images and preserves the diagnostic information effectively. Substantial experiments are conducted which demonstrate that the proposed method provides improved visual and quantitative results as compared to the other state-of-the-art fusion methods.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 6 table