Iris Recognition: The Consequences of Image Compression

Iris recognition for human identification is one of the most accurate biometrics, and its employment is expanding globally. The use of portable iris systems, particularly in law enforcement applications, is growing. In many of these applications, the portable device may be required to transmit an iris image or template over a narrow-bandwidth communication channel. Typically, a full resolution image (e.g., VGA) is desired to ensure sufficient pixels across the iris to be confident of accurate recognition results. To minimize the time to transmit a large amount of data over a narrow-bandwidth communication channel, image compression can be used to reduce the file size of the iris image. In other applications, such as the Registered Traveler program, an entire iris image is stored on a smart card, but only 4 kB is allowed for the iris image. For this type of application, image compression is also the solution. This paper investigates the effects of image compression on recognition system performance using a commercial version of the Daugman iris2pi algorithm along with JPEG-2000 compression, and links these to image quality. Using the ICE 2005 iris database, we find that even in the face of significant compression, recognition performance is minimally affected

iGeneration: The Social Cognitive Effects of Digital Technology on Teenagers

Into today’s world, digital technology changes so rapidly and integrates into our society at such an accelerated rate, it is hard to keep up with it, let alone reflect on the effects it has on our lives. Although Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, did not exist a mere decade ago, they are now ubiquitous forms of media and communication in our culture. Today’s generation of teenagers, born in the 1990s, aptly labeled the “iGeneration”, are the most connected generation ever. These iGen teens are digital natives growing up in an era of a massive influx of technology. They do not know of a world that does not include the Internet and easy access to technology. Parents of iGen youth, however, are “digital immigrants”. As immigrants, they struggle with a learning curve and lack the innate knowledge and ease with digital technology as that of their native offspring. There is little historical data or longitudinal studies of the social cognitive effects of digital media consumption to help inform and guide digital immigrants and natives alike in making choices about digital practices. Statistics change so quickly, it makes for an ongoing challenge to understand how to structure or regulate digital consumption. The intention of this research is to better understand how digital consumption effects teenager’s cognitive abilities and socialization processes, with the goal of discovering best practices and guidelines for educators and parents to implement with regard to their teenagers’ digital consumption, as we spin faster and faster into this digital era

Lake Michigan Salmonid Stocking Costs in Wisconsin

The costs of stocking salmonids in the Wisconsin waters of Lake Michigan are estimated for 1985. Estimation procedures and costs per stocked and captured fish are presented. Fingerlings of a species were found in most cases to cost more per captured fish than yearlings. However chinook salmon fingerlings were least expensive at an average cost of only $0.35 per captured fish. Most expensive were brook yearlings and fingerlings at$12.67 and $10.14 respectively. While a full policy evaluation awaits additional research on species specific benefits, three tentative conclusions can be drawn for the Wisconsin fishery. First, the role of brook trout in the fishery should be reviewed. Second, despite difficulties with lake trout rehabilitation, the role of lake trout in the sport fishery is encouraging and may justify continued stocking. Finally, increased stocking of the popular chinook salmon may be justified if the recent problems of low capture-per-release rates can be solved.restocking costs, benefit-cost methodology, sport fisheries, salmonids, Lake Michigan, Environmental Economics and Policy, Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Caregivers' experiences with the new family‐centred paediatric physiotherapy programme COPCA : a qualitative study

Caregivers' experiences during early intervention of their infant with special needs have consequences for their participation in the intervention. Hence, it is vital to understand caregivers' view. This study explored caregivers' experiences with the family-centred early intervention programme "COPing with and CAring for infants with special needs" (COPCA)

Evoking the Mechanoreflex Using Static and Dynamic Approaches: The Influence of Free Radicals and Sex

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Designing adaptive coded modulation for optical networks via achievable information rates

© 2017 IEEE. Achievable information rates are discussed as a tool to analyse and design optical networks. It is shown that the maximum throughput of the network and its dependency of different network parameters can be predicted with such a tool

New two-sided bound on the isotropic Lorentz-violating parameter of modified Maxwell theory

There is a unique Lorentz-violating modification of the Maxwell theory of photons, which maintains gauge invariance, CPT, and renormalizability. Restricting the modified-Maxwell theory to the isotropic sector and adding a standard spin-one-half Dirac particle p^\pm with minimal coupling to the nonstandard photon \widetilde{\gamma}, the resulting modified-quantum-electrodynamics model involves a single dimensionless "deformation parameter," \widetilde{\kappa}_{tr}. The exact tree-level decay rates for two processes have been calculated: vacuum Cherenkov radiation p^\pm \to p^\pm \widetilde{\gamma} for the case of positive \widetilde{\kappa}_{tr} and photon decay \widetilde{\gamma} \to p^+ p^- for the case of negative \widetilde{\kappa}_{tr}. From the inferred absence of these decays for a particular high-quality ultrahigh-energy-cosmic-ray event detected at the Pierre Auger Observatory and an excess of TeV gamma-ray events observed by the High Energy Stereoscopic System telescopes, a two-sided bound on \widetilde{\kappa}_{tr} is obtained, which improves by eight orders of magnitude upon the best direct laboratory bound. The implications of this result are briefly discussed.Comment: 18 pages, v5: published version in preprint styl