Effect of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS) on companies: Interviews with European companies

We visited Belgian and Dutch companies that are covered by EU ETS in November 2007, in order to conduct interviews regarding the impact of the scheme and the resultant performance of these companies. The problems of the EU ETS that emerge from this interview are as follows: (1) the redundancy of emission allowance dampens the incentive to reduce the emission of CO2, (2) the allocation scheme fails to consider inter-industrial and/or inter-district fairness, and (3) since the duration of the National Allocation Plan is too short and highly uncertain, it is difficult to implement a long-term reduction investment plan. As European company officers pointed out, the current EU ETS has several problems. However, the recent political debate on the EU ETS seems to have entered a new dimension toward the second period of the National Allocation Plan. For instance, the cap of CO2 emission in the second period has tightened in comparison with the case in the first period, when the allowance excessive. Furthermore, in January 2008, the European Union set the goal of reducing emission by 20% from the 1990 level, by the year 2020. Moreover, the EU intends to introduce the complete auction of emission allowance after the year 2013 excluding the sector that is expected to experience serious leakage problems. The current EU ETS can be regarded as a CO2 reduction scheme in transition. The policy makers of the Japanese government should behold and draw upon the experiences of the European Union in order to implement appropriate policy measures against global warming in Japan.

The Effects of the EU ETS on Companies: Research by Conducting Interviews in European Companies

We study the effects of the European Union Emission Trading Scheme (EU ETS)?which was introduced in January 2005?on companies by conducting interviews in some German and UK firms. In this paper, we demonstrate that although the introduction of the EU ETS has increased awareness of the importance of efforts to reduce global warming and emission costs, it has had little influence on the companies CO2 abatement efforts during the first period.

A human-machine interface for manipulating a virtual 3-D object using natural hand gestures

In this paper, we propose a new human-machine interface for manipulating 3-D contents in a display. Motions of a hand or both hands of a user are taken images by a simple USB camera. The motions are recognized by a PC and transformed into corresponding instructions such as translation, rotation and scaling. In addition, unintentional movement and unconscious movement are eliminated in the method and smoother operation is realized. The result of the manipulation is displayed in the screen. Experiments were performed using Google Earth and 3-D CG contents, and the proposed system successfully manipulated its rotation and scaling by some hand motions of the user.本文データは学協会の許諾に基づきCiNiiから複製したものであ

High-Speed Human Motion Recognition Based on a Motion History Image and an Eigenspace

This paper proposes an efficient technique for human motion recognition based on motion history images and an eigenspace technique. In recent years, human motion recognition has become one of the most popular research fields. It is expected to be applied in a security system, man-machine communication, and so on. In the proposed technique, we use two feature images and the eigenspace technique to realize high-speed recognition. An experiment was performed on recognizing six human motions and the results showed satisfactory performance of the technique

A COLOR FEATURES-BASED METHOD FOR OBJECT TRACKING EMPLOYING A PARTICLE FILTER ALGORITHM

We proposed a method for object tracking employing a particle filter based on color feature method. A histogram‐based framework is used to describe the features. Histograms are useful because they have property that they allow changes in the object appearance while the histograms remain the same. Particle filtering is used because it is very robust for non‐linear and non‐Gaussian dynamic state estimation problems and performs well when clutter and occlusions are present on the image. Bhattacharyya distance is used to weight the samples in the particle filter by comparing each sample’s histogram with a specified target model and it makes the measurement matching and sample’s weight updating more reasonable. The method is capable to track successfully the moving object in different outdoor environment with and without initial positions information, and also, capable to track the moving object in the presence of occlusion using an appearance condition. In this paper, we propose a color features‐based method for object tracking based on the particle filters. The experimental results and data show the feasibility and the effectiveness of our method.International Conference on Power Control and Optimization, 1-3, June 2009, Bali, Indonesi

Detecting a Taxi from a Video for Visually Handicapped People

This paper proposes a method of detecting a specific moving object, a taxi in particular, on a road from a video provided from a camera attached to a user. In order to raise the quality of life of visually handicapped people, a computer vision system which works in place of their eyes and a brain may be useful. As one of such systems, this study focuses its attention on finding a taxi on a road which is a convenient vehicle to such people as a means of transfer outdoors. The novel idea of this study is that a camera and a PC system for finding a taxi is carried by a user, a visually handicapped person, for example. The proposed method employs the HOG features to represent a vehicle, and finds a taxi by Real AdaBoost and color information with the detected vehicle. The performance of the proposed method is shown experimentally.The 34th Chinese Control Conference and SICE Annual Conference 2015, July 28-30, 2015, Hangzhou, Chin

Head Detection and Tracking for an Intelligent Room

We present a novel feature extraction method, which employs a histogram of transition feature, as an input to a SVM classifier. This feature relies on foreground extraction. We also evaluate some foreground extraction method. To evaluate the performance of this feature, we use it for head detection. Then, by applying a combination of the Harris corner detector and Lucas-Kanade tracker and motion pattern, we track the head position. The performance of the proposed method is experimentally shown.SICE Annual Conference 2014 - International conference on Instrumentation, Control, Information Technology and System Integration, September 9-12, 2014, Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japa

A Visualization System of Scaler Stroke Motion

Periodontitis is a dental disease from which many people suffer. The most effective treatment with it is to remove dental plaque and scale periodically by a scaler. For this purpose, those who wish to be a dentist or a hygienist must take training of scaling and root planing using a jaw model and a scaler. It is, however, difficult for a trainer to evaluate the scaler stroke motion of a trainee, since the end of the scaler in a mouth cannot be observed directly from out of the mouth. This paper proposes a novel method of visualizing the scaler stroke motion in the mouth three-dimensionally by the employment of a camera and a computer. The system is described and an experimental result is shown

A pedestrian detection method using the extension of the HOG feature

Development of an ITS (Intelligent Transport System) has drawn much attention from computer vision community in recent years. In particular, various techniques for detecting pedestrians automatically have been proposed by many researchers. Among them, the HOG feature proposed by Dalai & Triggs has gained much interest in the pedestrian detection. However, previous methods including the original HOG feature have not achieved satisfactory detection rates. In this paper, we propose an extension of the HOG feature, i.e., flexible choice of the number of bins and automatic definition of a cell size and a block size by parameterizing their scales. By comparative experiments, it was confirmed that the proposed method outperforms the previous methods in the performance of pedestrian detection.SCIS & ISIS 2014, December 3-6, 2014, Kitakyushu International Conference Cente