INTERMEDIATE VIEW RECONSTRUCTION FOR MULTISCOPIC 3D DISPLAY

This thesis focuses on Intermediate View Reconstruction (IVR) which generates additional images from the available stereo images. The main application of IVR is to generate the content of multiscopic 3D displays, and it can be applied to generate different viewpoints to Free-viewpoint TV (FTV). Although IVR is considered a good approach to generate additional images, there are some problems with the reconstruction process, such as detecting and handling the occlusion areas, preserving the discontinuity at edges, and reducing image artifices through formation of the texture of the intermediate image. The occlusion area is defined as the visibility of such an area in one image and its disappearance in the other one. Solving IVR problems is considered a significant challenge for researchers. In this thesis, several novel algorithms have been specifically designed to solve IVR challenges by employing them in a highly robust intermediate view reconstruction algorithm. Computer simulation and experimental results confirm the importance of occluded areas in IVR. Therefore, we propose a novel occlusion detection algorithm and another novel algorithm to Inpaint those areas. Then, these proposed algorithms are employed in a novel occlusion-aware intermediate view reconstruction that finds an intermediate image with a given disparity between two input images. This novelty is addressed by adding occlusion awareness to the reconstruction algorithm and proposing three quality improvement techniques to reduce image artifices: filling the re-sampling holes, removing ghost contours, and handling the disocclusion area. We compared the proposed algorithms to the previously well-known algorithms on each field qualitatively and quantitatively. The obtained results show that our algorithms are superior to the previous well-known algorithms. The performance of the proposed reconstruction algorithm is tested under 13 real images and 13 synthetic images. Moreover, analysis of a human-trial experiment conducted with 21 participants confirmed that the reconstructed images from our proposed algorithm have very high quality compared with the reconstructed images from the other existing algorithms

Seed Transmission of Verticillum dahlia in Olive as Detected by a Highly Sensitive Nested PCR-Based Assay

To determine whether the spread of Verticillium dahliae to new olive growing areas can be seed-borne, fruit samples of V. dahliae-infected symptomatic and asymptomatic trees of two olive cultivars (Shimlali and Nabali) were randomly collected in November and December 2003 from two olive-growing areas in Jordan. Seeds were excised from the fruits and some of the seeds were sown to produce progeny seedlings. Both seeds and the seedlings were tested for V. dahliae infection using standard plating and a nested polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based assay that used primers from the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions of nuclear ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes. The sensitivity of the nested PCR-based assay was investigated by amplifying the crude DNA of conidia. The incidence of V. dahliae infection in seeds and seedlings was significantly higher with the nested PCR-based assay than with the plating procedure in both symptomatic and asymptomatic trees of both olive cultivars. Infection rates were significantly higher in symptomatic than in asymptomatic trees and, in general, higher for the cv. Shimlali than the cv. Nabali. The incidence of V. dahliae infection in the seedlings was significantly higher than that in the seeds. The expected DNA fragments were amplified from all the concentrations of V. dahliae conidial suspensions used (2 104; 2 103; 2 102; 20 and 2 conidia µl-1) indicating that the assay was highly sensitive. Olive seeds of the two cultivars transmitted V. dahliae to the progeny seedlings in different percentages up to a maximum of 35%. Infected olive seed contributes significantly to pathogen dissemination

California Drought, An Update April 2008

TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. RECENT HYDROLOGIC CONDITIONS AND IMPACTS Introduction....................................................... 1 Water Year 2007 .................................................. 1 Drought in the Colorado River Basin ..................................................... 5 Drought and Dry Conditions in the Early 2000s .................................... 7 The 2001 Klamath Basin Drought Emergency ............................... 11 CHAPTER 2. PROGRAMMATIC AND INSTITUTIONAL UPDATES The San Francisco Bay-Sacramento/San Joaquin River Delta.................................................................. 15 The Colorado River .................................................................... 16 State Financial Assistance to Local Agencies.................................... 17 Urban Water Management Planning ................................................... 20 Water Transfers .............................................................................. 20 Small Water Systems and Drought Preparedness ................................. 2

A classifier to detect informational vs. non-informational heart attack tweets

Social media sites are considered one of the most important sources of data in many fields, such as health, education, and politics. While surveys provide explicit answers to specific questions, posts in social media have the same answers implicitly occurring in the text. This research aims to develop a method for extracting implicit answers from large tweet collections, and to demonstrate this method for an important concern: the problem of heart attacks. The approach is to collect tweets containing “heart attack” and then select from those the ones with useful information. Informational tweets are those which express real heart attack issues, e.g., “Yesterday morning, my grandfather had a heart attack while he was walking around the garden.” On the other hand, there are non-informational tweets such as “Dropped my iPhone for the first time and almost had a heart attack.” The starting point was to manually classify around 7000 tweets as either informational (11%) or non-informational (89%), thus yielding a labeled dataset to use in devising a machine learning classifier that can be applied to our large collection of over 20 million tweets. Tweets were cleaned and converted to a vector representation, suitable to be fed into different machine-learning algorithms: Deep neural networks, support vector machine (SVM), J48 decision tree and naïve Bayes. Our experimentation aimed to find the best algorithm to use to build a high-quality classifier. This involved splitting the labeled dataset, with 2/3 used to train the classifier and 1/3 used for evaluation besides cross-validation methods. The deep neural network (DNN) classifier obtained the highest accuracy (95.2%). In addition, it obtained the highest F1-scores with (73.6%) and (97.4%) for informational and non-informational classes, respectively

Impact of Audit Committee on the Association Between Financial Reporting Quality and Shareholder Value

Regulatory and governmental authorities in Malaysia provide substantial financial planning to help attract potential investors and improve value for shareholders. Companies are always encouraged to improve the quality of financial reporting. However, some managers tend to manipulate earnings' data to make it appear more attractive. Stakeholders rely on the audit committee to motivate managerial provision of accurate data for accounting processes. Hence, this study examines the impact of financial reporting quality on shareholder value and assesses impacts from the audit committee's influence and its relationship to financial reporting. The proposed study will use modified Jones Model to evaluate the financial reporting quality. Also, the study proposes ordinary least square (OLS) for identifying the impact of (i) independent audit committee; (ii) financial and accounting expertise; and (iii) audit committee size as proxies to investigate the effect of the audit committee on the relationship between financial reporting quality and shareholder value. Keywords: Financial Reporting Quality, Shareholders' Value, Audit Committee. JEL Classifications: M41, M42, G

Resistance of barley landraces and wild barley populations to powdery mildew in Jordan

Eleven barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) landraces and 12 wild barley (H. spontaneum) populations, collected from diverse eco-geographical regions of Jordan, were screened for resistance to powdery mildew. The average powdery mildew disease score (based on a 0 to 4 severity scale) wa

Report on needs and priorities in the field of international cooperation agreements on water management in the target MACs

This report aims to provide a revision of the water related goals within the international agreements joined by the three case study countries,Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia, while emphasizing the critical points that should be developed and reinforced in the near future through an integrated approach for water policies, initiatives and management

What are the risk factors of colonoscopic perforation?

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Knowledge of the factors influencing colonoscopic perforation (CP) is of decisive importance, especially with regard to the avoidance or minimization of the perforations. The aim of this study was to determine the incidence and risk factors of CP in one of the endoscopic training centers accredited by the World Gastroenterology Organization.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>The prospectively collected data were reviewed of all patients undergoing either colonoscopy or flexible sigmoidoscopy at the Faculty of Medicine Siriraj Hospital, Bangkok, Thailand between January 2005 and July 2008. The incidence of CP was evaluated. Eight independent patient-, endoscopist- and endoscopy-related variables were analyzed by a multivariate model to determine their association with CP.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Over a 3.5-year period, 10,124 endoscopic procedures of the colon (8,987 colonoscopies and 1,137 flexible sigmoidoscopies) were performed. There were 15 colonic perforations (0.15%). Colonoscopy had a slightly higher risk of CP than flexible sigmoidoscopy (OR 1.77, 95%CI 0.23-13.51; p = 1.0). Patient gender, emergency endoscopy, anesthetic method, and the specialty or experience of the endoscopist were not significantly predictive of CP rate. In multivariate analysis, patient age of over 75 years (OR = 6.24, 95%CI 2.26-17.26; p < 0.001) and therapeutic endoscopy (OR = 2.98, 95%CI 1.08-8.23; p = 0.036) were the only two independent risk factors for CP.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>The incidence of CP in this study was 0.15%. Patient age of over 75 years and therapeutic colonoscopy were two important risk factors for CP.</p