Iris Feature Extraction and Recognition Based on Wavelet-Based Contourlet Transform

AbstractIn view of the limitation of poor direction selectivity about 2-D wavelet transform and the problem of redundancy on contourlet transform, an iris texture feature extraction method based on wavelet-based contourlet transform (WBCT)for obtaining high quality features is proposed in the paper. Firstly, the preprocessed iris image is decomposed by WBCT, then calculating its energy, mean, standard deviation and Hu invariant moments of each subband of different scales and different directions, and taking them as the eigenvalues of iris image, finally, it tests on four iris image databases by using Euclidean distance. Experimental results show that the algorithm is simple and effective, and obtain better recognition performance

Clinical Assistant Diagnosis for Electronic Medical Record Based on Convolutional Neural Network

Automatically extracting useful information from electronic medical records along with conducting disease diagnoses is a promising task for both clinical decision support(CDS) and neural language processing(NLP). Most of the existing systems are based on artificially constructed knowledge bases, and then auxiliary diagnosis is done by rule matching. In this study, we present a clinical intelligent decision approach based on Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN), which can automatically extract high-level semantic information of electronic medical records and then perform automatic diagnosis without artificial construction of rules or knowledge bases. We use collected 18,590 copies of the real-world clinical electronic medical records to train and test the proposed model. Experimental results show that the proposed model can achieve 98.67\% accuracy and 96.02\% recall, which strongly supports that using convolutional neural network to automatically learn high-level semantic features of electronic medical records and then conduct assist diagnosis is feasible and effective.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, Accepted by Scientific Report

Huizhou resident population, Guangdong resident population and elderly population forecast based on the NAR neural network Markov model

We propose a nonlinear auto regressive neural network Markov model (NARMKM) to predict the annual Huizhou resident population, Guangdong resident population and elderly population in China, and improve the accuracy of population forecasting. The new model is built upon the traditional neural network model and utilized matrix perturbation theory to study the natural and response characteristics of a system when the structural parameters change slightly. The delay order and hidden layer number of neurons has a greater effect the prediction result of NAR neural network model. Therefore, we make full use of prior information to constrain and test when making predictions. We choose reasonable parameter settings to obtain more reliable prediction results. Three experiments are conducted to validate the high prediction accuracy of the NARMKM model, with mean absolute percentage error (MAPE), root mean square error (RMSE), STD and R2. These results demonstrate the superior fitting performance of the NARMKM model when compared to other six competitive models, including GM (1, 1), ARIMA, Multiple regression, FGM (1, 1), FANGBM and NAR. Our study provides a scientific basis and technical references for further research in the finance as well as population fields

An Improved Bovine Iris Segmentation Method

In order to improve the performance of bovine iris image segmentation, an improved iris image segmentation algorithm is proposed according to the characteristics of bovine iris image. Firstly, based on mathematical morphology and noise suppression template, the inner and outer edges of bovine iris are detected by dynamic contour tracking and least squares fitting ellipse respectively. Then, the annular iris region is normalized. Finally, the normalized iris image is enhanced with adaptive image enhancement method. The experimental results show that the algorithm can effectively segment iris region, it has good performance of speed and accuracy for iris segmentation, and can eliminate the effects of uneven illumination, iris shrinkage and rotation, it promotes iris feature extraction and matching, which has certain reference significance for iris recognition research and meat food safety management of large livestock

An optimal fractional-order accumulative Grey Markov model with variable parameters and its application in total energy consumption

In this paper, we propose an optimal fractional-order accumulative Grey Markov model with variable parameters (FOGMKM (1, 1)) to predict the annual total energy consumption in China and improve the accuracy of energy consumption forecasting. The new model is built upon the traditional Grey model and utilized matrix perturbation theory to study the natural and response characteristics of a system when the structural parameters change slightly. The particle swarm optimization algorithm (PSO) is used to determine the number of optimal fractional order and nonlinear parameters. An experiment is conducted to validate the high prediction accuracy of the FOGMKM (1, 1) model, with mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) and root mean square error (RMSE) values of 0.51% and 1886.6, respectively, and corresponding fitting values of 0.92% and 6108.8. These results demonstrate the superior fitting performance of the FOGMKM (1, 1) model when compared to other six competitive models, including GM (1, 1), ARIMA, Linear, FAONGBM (1, 1), FGM (1, 1) and FOGM (1, 1). Our study provides a scientific basis and technical references for further research in the finance as well as energy fields and can serve well for energy market benchmark research

Comparison of Depressive Symptoms and Its Influencing Factors among the Elderly in Urban and Rural Areas: Evidence from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS)

Depression amongst the elderly population is a worldwide public health problem, especially in China. Affected by the urban–rural dual structure, depressive symptoms of the elderly in urban and rural areas are significantly different. In order to compare depressive symptoms and its influencing factors among the elderly in urban and rural areas, we used the data from the fourth wave of the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study (CHARLS). A total of 7690 participants at age 60 or older were included in this study. The results showed that there was a significant difference in the prevalence estimate of depression between urban and rural elderly (χ2 = 10.9.76, p 0.001). The prevalence of depression among rural elderly was significantly higher than that of urban elderly (OR-unadjusted = 1.88, 95% CI: 1.67 to 2.12). After adjusting for gender, age, marital status, education level, minorities, religious belief, self-reported health, duration of sleep, life satisfaction, chronic disease, social activities and having income or not, the prevalence of depression in rural elderly is 1.52 times (OR = 1.52, 95% CI: 1.32 to 1.76) than that of urban elderly. Gender, education level, self-reported health, duration of sleep, chronic diseases were associated with depression in both urban and rural areas. In addition, social activities were connected with depression in urban areas, while minorities, marital status and having income or not were influencing factors of depression among the rural elderly. The interaction analysis showed that the interaction between marital status, social activities and urban and rural sources was statistically significant (divorced: coefficient was 1.567, p 0.05; social activities: coefficient was 0.340, p 0.05), while gender, education level, minorities, self-reported health, duration of sleep, life satisfaction, chronic disease, social activities having income or not and urban and rural sources have no interaction (p > 0.05). Thus, it is necessary to propose targeted and precise intervention strategies to prevent depression after accurately identifying the factors’ effects

Experimental Study on Catalytic Combustion of Methane in a Microcombustor with Metal Foam Monolithic Catalyst

Utilizing catalysts in microcombustors is probably an excellent practical solution to stabilize fuel combustion because of the relatively fast reaction speed. In the present work, the monolithic catalyst Pd/A2O3/Fe-Ni with metal foam as matrix was used inside a 5 mm in diameter microcombustor. Then the effects of inlet velocity and equivalent ratio on catalytic combustion characteristics of methane were studied experimentally. The results showed that the methane and air mixture with the stoichiometric ratio Φ = 1.0 could be ignited at v = 0.2⁻0.6 m/s. The velocity of premixed mixture had a great influence on the catalytic combustion of methane. The larger the inlet velocity, the higher the temperature and the brighter the flame were. The experiment results also showed that the equivalence ratio had a large essential impact on the catalytic combustion, especially for the lean mixture of methane and air. It seemed the addition of the porous matrix with catalysts could significantly extend the limits of stable combustion. In the detection of exhaust gas, CO selectivity increased and CO2 selectivity decreased with the equivalence ratio. When Φ was between 0.94 and 1.0 m/s, a little amount of hydrogen was produced due to the lack of oxygen. The measured conversion of methane to CO and CO2 was very high, usually greater than 99%, which indicated the excellent performance of the catalyst

Image Denoising Using Nonlocal Regularized Deep Image Prior

Deep neural networks have shown great potential in various low-level vision tasks, leading to several state-of-the-art image denoising techniques. Training a deep neural network in a supervised fashion usually requires the collection of a great number of examples and the consumption of a significant amount of time. However, the collection of training samples is very difficult for some application scenarios, such as the full-sampled data of magnetic resonance imaging and the data of satellite remote sensing imaging. In this paper, we overcome the problem of a lack of training data by using an unsupervised deep-learning-based method. Specifically, we propose a deep-learning-based method based on the deep image prior (DIP) method, which only requires a noisy image as training data, without any clean data. It infers the natural images with random inputs and the corrupted observation with the help of performing correction via a convolutional network. We improve the original DIP method as follows: Firstly, the original optimization objective function is modified by adding nonlocal regularizers, consisting of a spatial filter and a frequency domain filter, to promote the gradient sparsity of the solution. Secondly, we solve the optimization problem with the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM) framework, resulting in two separate optimization problems, including a symmetric U-Net training step and a plug-and-play proximal denoising step. As such, the proposed method exploits the powerful denoising ability of both deep neural networks and nonlocal regularizations. Experiments validate the effectiveness of leveraging a combination of DIP and nonlocal regularizers, and demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method both quantitatively and visually compared with the original DIP method

Strategic Analysis of Participants in the Provision of Elderly Care Services—An Evolutionary Game Perspective

Population aging poses challenges to the immature elderly care service system in many countries. The strategic behaviors of different participants in the provision of elderly care services in a long-term and dynamic situation have not been well studied. In this paper, an evolutionary game model is developed to analyze the strategic behaviors of two types of participants—the government sectors and the private sectors in provision of elderly care services. Firstly, eight scenarios are analyzed, and the evolutionary process and stable strategies are identified. Then, the behavioral strategies of the two types of participants under demand disturbance and dynamic subsidy strategy are analyzed. Simulation experiments are conducted to explore the influence of different initial conditions and parameter changes on the evolutionary process and results. The obtained observations are not only conducive to a systematic understanding of the long-term dynamic provision of elderly care services but also to the policymaking of the government