Impact of Microfinance on Poverty Reduction: A Case Study of District Faisalabad

The micro - finance program extends small loans to very poor people for self-employment projects that generate income, allowing them to care for themselves and for their families. Micro-finance enables an entrepreneur to build a business or expand the existing business and create a better change in their lives. The micro-financing institutions (MFIs) provide the opportunity for the people who are living under the poverty lines by investing the affordable funds/capital and somehow by providing their management expertise. This study shows the effect of micro-financing of small business and the implications for poverty reduction. The respondents are the clients of Khushhali Bank Ltd, District Faisalabad. The data were collected with the help of well-designed and structured questionnaire, which will be analyzed by applying FGT techniques. The results showed that the poverty has been reduced by financing the peoples. Keywords:Micro finance, poverty, FG

A Novel Image Retrieval Based on a Combination of Local and Global Histograms of Visual Words

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) provides a sustainable solution to retrieve similar images from an image archive. In the last few years, the Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) model gained attention and significantly improved the performance of image retrieval. In the standard BoVW model, an image is represented as an orderless global histogram of visual words by ignoring the spatial layout. The spatial layout of an image carries significant information that can enhance the performance of CBIR. In this paper, we are presenting a novel image representation that is based on a combination of local and global histograms of visual words. The global histogram of visual words is constructed over the whole image, while the local histogram of visual words is constructed over the local rectangular region of the image. The local histogram contains the spatial information about the salient objects. Extensive experiments and comparisons conducted on Corel-A, Caltech-256, and Ground Truth image datasets demonstrate that the proposed image representation increases the performance of image retrieval

Review of some Technical issues related to the Quranic Text published in Pakistan

Error-free printing of Qur’ānic Text is a collective duty of all Muslims. The fact remains that Muslims have performed this duty with devotion and rightly. They also arranged sittings to discuss "Rasm" and " Ḍabt"(رسم اور ضبط) to understand the crux of matter and provide an expression to the most authentic text. No Muslim can intentionally commit any kind of mistake in the text of Qur’ān. However, such possibilities of error cannot be denied due to negligence and inadvertency. The Ministry for Religious Affairs has made it obligatory for all the printing institutions of Qur’ānic text to follow the model of the Qur’ānic manuscript, produced by Anjman Ḥimāyat-e-Islām, yet many Qur’ānic manuscripts with errors are present in the market. Such manuscripts are not only present in some mosques, but also recited. It causes problems in recitation of those verses and might changing the meaning of them. This article points out such scriptures and errors, so it can be identified and to take steps for preventive measures for such errors in future. This article also suggests some policies and strategies for publishing of Qur’ān for avoiding misprints errors

Review of some technical issues in the publication of Qur’ān in Pakistan= مطبوعہ پاکستانی مصاحف سے متعلق چند فنّی مسائل کا جائزہ

Error-free printing of Qur’ānic Text is a collective duty of all Muslims. The fact remains that Muslims have performed this duty with devotion and rightly. They also arranged sittings to discuss "Rasm" and " Ḍabt"(رسم اور ضبط) to understand the crux of matter and provide an expression to the most authentic text. No Muslim can intentionally commit any kind of mistake in the text of Qur’ān. However, such possibilities of error cannot be denied due to negligence and inadvertency. There are some technical errors in printed copies of the Qur’ān, published by some Pakistani printing companies. Such manuscripts are not only present in some mosques, but also recited. It causes problems in recitation of those verses and might changing the meaning of them. This article points out such scriptures and errors, so it can be identified and to take steps for preventive measures for such errors in future. This article also suggests some policies and strategies for publishing of Qur’ān for avoiding misprints errors

A Novel Technique Based on Visual Words Fusion Analysis of Sparse Features for Effective Content-Based Image Retrieval

Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) is a mechanism that is used to retrieve similar images from an image collection. In this paper, an effective novel technique is introduced to improve the performance of CBIR on the basis of visual words fusion of scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) and local intensity order pattern (LIOP) descriptors. SIFT performs better on scale changes and on invariant rotations. However, SIFT does not perform better in the case of low contrast and illumination changes within an image, while LIOP performs better in such circumstances. SIFT performs better even at large rotation and scale changes, while LIOP does not perform well in such circumstances. Moreover, SIFT features are invariant to slight distortion as compared to LIOP. The proposed technique is based on the visual words fusion of SIFT and LIOP descriptors which overcomes the aforementioned issues and significantly improves the performance of CBIR. The experimental results of the proposed technique are compared with another proposed novel features fusion technique based on SIFT-LIOP descriptors as well as with the state-of-the-art CBIR techniques. The qualitative and quantitative analysis carried out on three image collections, namely, Corel-A, Corel-B, and Caltech-256, demonstrate the robustness of the proposed technique based on visual words fusion as compared to features fusion and the state-of-the-art CBIR techniques

Dictionary-based fisher algorithm.

<p>Dictionary-based fisher algorithm.</p

Performance comparison of TIMIT and MusicBrainz datasets with respect to STOI and PESQ for noisy signal and proposed algorithm.

<p>Performance comparison of TIMIT and MusicBrainz datasets with respect to STOI and PESQ for noisy signal and proposed algorithm.</p

Descriptive statistics for paired samples test.

<p>Descriptive statistics for paired samples test.</p

Proposed architecture of speech/music segregation for an audio sample having background noise.

<p>Proposed architecture of speech/music segregation for an audio sample having background noise.</p