Real-Time Hand Gesture Recognition Based on the Depth Map for Human Robot Interaction

In this paper, we propose and implement a novel and real-time method for recognizing hand gestures using depth map. The depth map contains information relating to the distance of objects from a viewpoint. Microsoft’s Kinect sensor is used as input device to capture both the color image and its corresponding depth map. We first detect bare hand in cluttered background using distinct gray-level of the hand which is located near to the sensor. Then, scale invariance feature transform (SIFT) algorithm is used to extract feature vectors. Lastly, vocabulary tree along with K-means clustering method are used to partition the hand postures to ten simple sets as: "one", "two", "three", "four", "five", "six", "seven", "eight", "nine" and "ten" numbers based on the number of extended fingers. The vocabulary tree allows a larger and more discriminatory vocabulary to be used efficiently. Consequently, it leads to an improvement in accuracy of the clustering. The experimental results show superiority of the proposed method over other available approaches. With this approach, we are able to recognize 'numbers' gestures with over 90% accuracy.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v3i6.395

A New Nonlinear Control Design Strategy for Fixed Wing Aircrafts Piloting

This paper proposes a novel nonlinear feedback control strategy for velocity and attitude control of fixed wing aircrafts. The key feature of the control design strategy is the introduction of a virtual control input in order to deal with the underactuation property of such vehicles and to indirectly control the orientation of the aircraft. As such, the proposed strategy consists of three control loops each realizing a specific task. Simulations are carried out by using the jetstream-3102 aircraft in a real-time virtual Simulation Platform for the development of Aircraft Control Systems (SP-ACS). The proposed approach of control is model-based for which we have introduces an identification part before test and validation. We use the Total Least Squares Estimation (TLSE) technique to identify the aerodynamic parameters, which are unknown, variable and classified. Each aerodynamic coefficient is defined as the mean of its numerical values. All other variations are considered as modeling uncertainties that will be compensated by the robustness of the piloting law. Simulation results on Jetstream-3102 aircraft show very good performance in terms of convergence towards the desired reference trajectories and in terms of robustness with respect to modeling uncertainties

Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of Nurses Regarding Organ Donation

Introduction: Treatment team charged to help patients and their family making decision about donate organs in the final stage of life. Hence, their knowledge and attitude is important to plan of increasing the rate of organ donation. Materials and Methods: About 150 nurses recruited in this cross-sectional study randomly. After taking informed consent, questionnaires were filled. The data collection tool was a multipart questionnaire includin