Gender Classification from Facial Images using PCA and SVM

Biometrics is the use of physical characteristics like face, fingerprints, iris etc. of an individual for personal identification. Some of the challenging problems of face biometrics are face detection, face recognition, and face identification. These problems are being researched by the computer vision community for the last few decades. Considering the large population, the authentication process of an individual usually consumes a significant amount of time. One of the possible solutions is to divide the population into two halves based on gender. This will help to reduce the search space of authentication to almost half of the existing data and save substantial amount of time. Gender identification through face demands use of strong discriminative features and robust classifiers to separate the female and male faces without any ambiguity. In this thesis, an investigation has been made on gender classification through facial images using principal component analysis (PCA), and support vector machine (SVM). PCA is a dimensionality reduction technique, which is used to represent each image as a feature vector in a low dimensional subspace. SVM is a binary classifier for which PCA is the input in the form of features and predicts which of the two possible classes forms the output. Initially face region is extracted using a proposed skin colour segmentation approach. The face region is then subjected to PCA for feature extraction, which encodes second order statistics of data. These principal components are fed as input to SVM for classification

On the Development of Impulsive Noise Removal Schemes

Noise Suppression from images is one of the most important concens in digital image porcessing. Impulsive noise is one such noise, which may corrupt images during their acquisitioni or transmission or storage etc.A variety of techniques are reported to remove this type of noise.It is observed that techniques which follow the two satage process of detection of noise and filtering of noisy pixels achieve better performance than others. In this thesis such schemes of impulsive noise detection and filtering thereof are proposed

Set Down Study of Projectile in Flight Through Imaging

Deformation study of projectile immediately after firing is essential for its successful impact. A projectile that undergoes more than the tolerated amount of deformation in the barrel may not produce the requisite results. The study of projectile deformation before its impact requires it to be imaged in flight and perform some computation on the acquired image. Often the deformation tolerance is of the order of tens of micrometer and the acquired image cannot produce image with such accuracy because of photographic limitations. Therefore, it demands sub-pixel manipulation of the captured projectile image. In this work the diameter of a projectile is estimated from its image which became blur because of slow shutter speed. First the blurred image is restored and then various interpolation methods are used for sub-pixel measurement. Two adaptive geometrical texture based interpolation schemes are also proposed in this research. The proposed methods produce very good results as compared to the existing methods.Science Journal, Vol. 64, No. 6, November 2014, pp.530-535, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.64.811

Introduction to special issue on intelligent computing and adaptive systems

This special issue of Innovations in Systems and Software Engineering: A NASA Journal is devoted to selected contributions from the 4th International Conference on Advanced Computing, Networking and Informatics (ICACNI 2016

What is the relevance of the tip-apex distance as a predictor of lag screw cut-out?

Using a simple mathematical formulation, the relationship between the position of the lag screw tip (relevant to both intramedullary and extramedullary devices) and the concept of tip-apex distance (TAD) was derived. TAD is widely used in operating theaters as a surgical guideline in relation to the fixation of trochanteric fractures, and in clinical studies as a predictor of lag screw cut-out. In order to visualize better this concept, the locus of points having the same TAD was plotted and the dependence of TAD on the location of the lag screw tip was also reported. It was shown that TAD should be adjusted for the size of the femoral head (a variable which varies a lot according to the sex of the patient) while no correlation was found between TAD and bone morphometry indices obtained from micro-CT data (BV/TV and Tb.Th). Therefore, these results seem to suggest that TAD lacks mechanical justification and that predictors which are based on mechanical properties, such as bone density, should be investigated further

Global, regional, and national age-sex-specific mortality for 282 causes of death in 195 countries and territories, 1980-2017 : a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017

Background Global development goals increasingly rely on country-specific estimates for benchmarking a nation's progress. To meet this need, the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study (GBD) 2016 estimated global, regional, national, and, for selected locations, subnational cause-specific mortality beginning in the year 1980. Here we report an update to that study, making use of newly available data and improved methods. GBD 2017 provides a comprehensive assessment of cause-specific mortality for 282 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2017. Methods The causes of death database is composed of vital registration (VR), verbal autopsy (VA), registry, survey, police, and surveillance data. GBD 2017 added ten VA studies, 127 country-years of VR data, 502 cancer-registry country-years, and an additional surveillance country-year. Expansions of the GBD cause of death hierarchy resulted in 18 additional causes estimated for GBD 2017. Newly available data led to subnational estimates for five additional countries Ethiopia, Iran, New Zealand, Norway, and Russia. Deaths assigned International Classification of Diseases (ICD) codes for non-specific, implausible, or intermediate causes of death were reassigned to underlying causes by redistribution algorithms that were incorporated into uncertainty estimation. We used statistical modelling tools developed for GBD, including the Cause of Death Ensemble model (CODErn), to generate cause fractions and cause specific death rates for each location, year, age, and sex. Instead of using UN estimates as in previous versions, GBD 2017 independently estimated population size and fertility rate for all locations. Years of life lost (YLLs) were then calculated as the sum of each death multiplied by the standard life expectancy at each age. All rates reported here are age-standardised. Findings At the broadest grouping of causes of death (Level 1), non-communicable diseases (NC Ds) comprised the greatest fraction of deaths, contributing to 73.4% (95% uncertainty interval [UI] 72.5-74.1) of total deaths in 2017, while communicable, maternal, neonatal, and nutritional (CMNN) causes accounted for 186% (17.9-19.6), and injuries 8.0% (7.7-8.2). Total numbers of deaths from NCD causes increased from 2007 to 2017 by 22.7% (21.5-23.9), representing an additional 7.61 million (7. 20-8.01) deaths estimated in 2017 versus 2007. The death rate from NCDs decreased globally by 7.9% (7.08.8). The number of deaths for CMNN causes decreased by 222% (20.0-24.0) and the death rate by 31.8% (30.1-33.3). Total deaths from injuries increased by 2.3% (0-5-4-0) between 2007 and 2017, and the death rate from injuries decreased by 13.7% (12.2-15.1) to 57.9 deaths (55.9-59.2) per 100 000 in 2017. Deaths from substance use disorders also increased, rising from 284 000 deaths (268 000-289 000) globally in 2007 to 352 000 (334 000-363 000) in 2017. Between 2007 and 2017, total deaths from conflict and terrorism increased by 118.0% (88.8-148.6). A greater reduction in total deaths and death rates was observed for some CMNN causes among children younger than 5 years than for older adults, such as a 36.4% (32.2-40.6) reduction in deaths from lower respiratory infections for children younger than 5 years compared with a 33.6% (31.2-36.1) increase in adults older than 70 years. Globally, the number of deaths was greater for men than for women at most ages in 2017, except at ages older than 85 years. Trends in global YLLs reflect an epidemiological transition, with decreases in total YLLs from enteric infections, respirator}, infections and tuberculosis, and maternal and neonatal disorders between 1990 and 2017; these were generally greater in magnitude at the lowest levels of the Socio-demographic Index (SDI). At the same time, there were large increases in YLLs from neoplasms and cardiovascular diseases. YLL rates decreased across the five leading Level 2 causes in all SDI quintiles. The leading causes of YLLs in 1990 neonatal disorders, lower respiratory infections, and diarrhoeal diseases were ranked second, fourth, and fifth, in 2017. Meanwhile, estimated YLLs increased for ischaemic heart disease (ranked first in 2017) and stroke (ranked third), even though YLL rates decreased. Population growth contributed to increased total deaths across the 20 leading Level 2 causes of mortality between 2007 and 2017. Decreases in the cause-specific mortality rate reduced the effect of population growth for all but three causes: substance use disorders, neurological disorders, and skin and subcutaneous diseases. Interpretation Improvements in global health have been unevenly distributed among populations. Deaths due to injuries, substance use disorders, armed conflict and terrorism, neoplasms, and cardiovascular disease are expanding threats to global health. For causes of death such as lower respiratory and enteric infections, more rapid progress occurred for children than for the oldest adults, and there is continuing disparity in mortality rates by sex across age groups. Reductions in the death rate of some common diseases are themselves slowing or have ceased, primarily for NCDs, and the death rate for selected causes has increased in the past decade. Copyright (C) 2018 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.Peer reviewe