3D hand tracking.

The hand is often considered as one of the most natural and intuitive interaction modalities for human-to-human interaction. In human-computer interaction (HCI), proper 3D hand tracking is the first step in developing a more intuitive HCI system which can be used in applications such as gesture recognition, virtual object manipulation and gaming. However, accurate 3D hand tracking, remains a challenging problem due to the hand’s deformation, appearance similarity, high inter-finger occlusion and complex articulated motion. Further, 3D hand tracking is also interesting from a theoretical point of view as it deals with three major areas of computer vision- segmentation (of hand), detection (of hand parts), and tracking (of hand). This thesis proposes a region-based skin color detection technique, a model-based and an appearance-based 3D hand tracking techniques to bring the human-computer interaction applications one step closer. All techniques are briefly described below. Skin color provides a powerful cue for complex computer vision applications. Although skin color detection has been an active research area for decades, the mainstream technology is based on individual pixels. This thesis presents a new region-based technique for skin color detection which outperforms the current state-of-the-art pixel-based skin color detection technique on the popular Compaq dataset (Jones & Rehg 2002). The proposed technique achieves 91.17% true positive rate with 13.12% false negative rate on the Compaq dataset tested over approximately 14,000 web images. Hand tracking is not a trivial task as it requires tracking of 27 degreesof- freedom of hand. Hand deformation, self occlusion, appearance similarity and irregular motion are major problems that make 3D hand tracking a very challenging task. This thesis proposes a model-based 3D hand tracking technique, which is improved by using proposed depth-foreground-background ii feature, palm deformation module and context cue. However, the major problem of model-based techniques is, they are computationally expensive. This can be overcome by discriminative techniques as described below. Discriminative techniques (for example random forest) are good for hand part detection, however they fail due to sensor noise and high interfinger occlusion. Additionally, these techniques have difficulties in modelling kinematic or temporal constraints. Although model-based descriptive (for example Markov Random Field) or generative (for example Hidden Markov Model) techniques utilize kinematic and temporal constraints well, they are computationally expensive and hardly recover from tracking failure. This thesis presents a unified framework for 3D hand tracking, using the best of both methodologies, which out performs the current state-of-the-art 3D hand tracking techniques. The proposed 3D hand tracking techniques in this thesis can be used to extract accurate hand movement features and enable complex human machine interaction such as gaming and virtual object manipulation

Agro-morphological Diversity of High Altitude Bean Landraces in the Kailash Sacred Landscape of Nepal

Many varieties of bean are widely grown across diverse agro-ecological zones in Nepal. And opportunities exist for improving the crops and enhancing their resilience to various biotic and abiotic stressors. In this context, an experiment was conducted from June to October 2016 in Khar VDC of Darchula district to study the phenotypic traits of nine landraces of bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.). The bean landraces were planted using randomized complete block design in three sites (Dhamidera, Dallekh and Sundamunda villages), with three replications in each site for their comparative analysis. The study considered the following phenotypic traits: days to emergence, days to 50% flowering, days to 90% pod maturity, number of nodes, pod length, pod width, number of pods, number of seeds per pod and weight and grain yield for 100 seeds. Kruskal-Wallis test showed significant differences in the landraces both within and among locations. KA-17-08-FB and KA-17-04-FB were late  flowering (63 and 65 days respectively) compared to other landraces whereas KA-17-07-FB flowered earliest (within 42 days). In all three sites, three landraces namely KA-17-07-FB, KA-17-04-FB and KA-17-06-FB were found to be relatively more resistant to pest and diseases than other landraces. Eight out of nine landraces in Dhamidera and Dallekh villages and seven out of nine in Sundamunda village produced seeds greater than 1.0 t/ha. Among the nine varieties KA-17-02-FB was the highest yielding variety, with an average yield of 3.8 t/ha. This study is useful for identifying suitable landraces for future promotion based on their maturity, grain yield, diseases resistance and other qualitative and quantitative characteristics

LanGWM: Language Grounded World Model

Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning have showcased its potential in tackling complex tasks. However, experiments on visual control tasks have revealed that state-of-the-art reinforcement learning models struggle with out-of-distribution generalization. Conversely, expressing higher-level concepts and global contexts is relatively easy using language. Building upon recent success of the large language models, our main objective is to improve the state abstraction technique in reinforcement learning by leveraging language for robust action selection. Specifically, we focus on learning language-grounded visual features to enhance the world model learning, a model-based reinforcement learning technique. To enforce our hypothesis explicitly, we mask out the bounding boxes of a few objects in the image observation and provide the text prompt as descriptions for these masked objects. Subsequently, we predict the masked objects along with the surrounding regions as pixel reconstruction, similar to the transformer-based masked autoencoder approach. Our proposed LanGWM: Language Grounded World Model achieves state-of-the-art performance in out-of-distribution test at the 100K interaction steps benchmarks of iGibson point navigation tasks. Furthermore, our proposed technique of explicit language-grounded visual representation learning has the potential to improve models for human-robot interaction because our extracted visual features are language grounded

Decision to use herbicide in wheat production by the farm households in Nepal: A probit regression analysis

The use of herbicides in wheat production is increasing in Nepal mainly due to labor shortage and higher wage rates, even if available. However, little information is available on what factors determine the use of herbicides. This study explored the major factors that affect the decision to use herbicide by the wheat farmers. The semi-structured interview schedule was administered to 343 farmers from four major wheat-growing districts. The study employed a probit regression model to identify the factors that influenced the decision to use herbicides. Educations, membership, migration, wheat cultivated area, amount of urea use were identified as the significant factors influencing the decision of farmers to use herbicides. Herbicides user farmers produced 220 kg more wheat grain yield from one hectare of land compared to non-users. This study suggests that the wheat yield of Nepal could be increased through adopting better weed management techniques

Sequence Analysis of Rifampicin Resistance Determining Region (RRDR) of Mycobacterium Tuberculosis

Mycobacterium tuberculosis has become the cause for one of the most dreadful disease which the mankind has ever known i.e. Tuberculosis. The organism holds the ability to infect multiple organs at a time resulting in multiple symptomatic presentations in pathogenic condition while in non-pathogenic condition, it can lay dormant and remain asymptomatic. The research work presented here aimed at sequencing of Rifampicin Resistance Determining Region (RRDR) of the rpoB gene present in phenotypically multidrug resistant M. tuberculosis. The findings showed that the major point of mutations to be present within this region was at codon 516, 526, and 531. Early diagnosis of multidrug resistance in any pathogen has become a pre – requisite for proper treatment and efficient elimination of pathogenic organisms from the host with minimal toxicity. Similarly, understanding the mutation dynamics of target genes also help in novel drug design and discovery

Clinical profile and drug utilization pattern in an intensive care unit of a teaching hospital in western Nepal

To analyze the clinical profile of patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU) of Manipal Teaching Hospital (MTH) at Pokhara, Nepal, identify the commonly prescribed drugs, drug categories, dosage forms, antimicrobials, sensitivity pattern of antimicrobials and the treatment outcomes. A cross sectional, descriptive study in which he case records of all the patients admitted in the ICU during 1st August to 30th September, 2007 were collected and the details were entered in the patient profile form. The filled patient profile forms were retrospectively analyzed as per the study objectives. Altogether, 201 patients [males 101 (50.25%)] were admitted. Most common diagnosis was 'Myocardial Infarction /Ischemic heart disease' [13.96 % (n=62)]. The median (interquartile range) of the ICU stay was 3 (2-4) days. Cardiovascular drugs [31.7% (n=761) were the most commonly prescribed. Among the antimicrobials, metronidazole was most commonly prescribed followed by ceftriaxone. The morality rate in the ICU was 17.41 % and the major causes of mortality were cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Antimicrobials was the most common drug category used in the ICU and 'pantoprazole' was the most commonly prescribed individual drug. Cardiovascular and respiratory diseases were major causes of death in the ICU

Returns to Potato Research Investment in Nepal

Agricultural research plays a significant role in increment in productivity and contributes to food security. Very few studies on the impact of public research spending on different sectors and commodities in Nepal has been documented. This study was designed to estimate the adoption lags of improved potato varieties and benefits generated by potato improvement research in Nepal. More specifically, the study answers two basic questions: (i) whether investment in potato research is justifiable? and (ii) how long is it taking to replace old improved varieties? We took public annual potato research investments of Nepal from the Fiscal year 2001 to 2017 from Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC). The household survey was carried out to estimate the potato varieties coverage in Nepal in 2017. Other secondary data were sourced from the Ministry of Finance, Ministry of Agricultural and Livestock Development, FAO stat, Nepal Rastra Bank and NARC to complement the analysis. We have used a simple economic framework to estimate the benefits generated from agricultural research. The estimated benefit and cost streams were used to calculate Benefit-Cost Ratio (BCR) and Net Present Value (NPV).  Results showed that the majority of the potato researchers had done research related to crop husbandry (seed production and crop managements); while the limited number of researchers had specialized in breeding activities. The annual growth rate of potato productivity was 214.49 kg per annum per ha which had increased at the rate of 1.76 percent per annum compound growth rate. The results revealed that the average weighted age of improved potato varieties was 21.83 years and each NPR. investment on potato research has given 508 NPR. and NPR. 13760 million NPV at a 12 percent discount factor during the last 17 years. Similarly, the contribution of potato research to GDP and AGDP was found 0.323% and 0.989% respectively. Therefore, future investment and focus should be concentrated on potato research and scaling up activities, and reducing variety adoption lag to obtain additional benefits from potato research investment

A prospective cross-sectional study on prescribing pattern of antibiotics on patients suffering from ENT infections in tertiary care hospital, Pokhara, Nepal

Background: This survey was designed to assess and evaluate the prescribing pattern of antibiotics used in patients suffering from ENT (Eye, Nose, and Throat) infections in ENT outpatient departments (OPD) at Manipal Teaching Hospital (MTH), Phulbari, Pokhara, Nepal.Methods: A prospective cross-sectional study was conducted in out-patients of ENT department at MTH for 6 month in which a total of 216 prescriptions were observed randomly and data filled patient profile forms were collected and analyzed.Results: Out of 216 patients, 126(58.33%) were male and 90 (41.67%) were female. Patients of age group 21-30 were maximum (29.16%) followed by age group of 11-20 (22.22%). Only 6.7% of drugs were prescribed from their generic names. Data analysis revealed that about 72.24%, 24.53% and 3.23% of prescription contained one, two and three antibiotic drugs respectively. All together 970 drugs were prescribed in 216 prescriptions out of which 251 (25.87%) were antibiotics drugs. This suggested that the average no. of antibiotics per prescription was 1.16. Among prescribed antibiotics, Amoxicillin (7.56%) of penicillin group, Azithromycin (8.36%) of macrolides, Cefuroxime (9.56%) of 2nd generation cephalosporin followed by Cefpodoxime (32.27%) of 3rd generation cephalosporin and Ofloxacin (6.37%) of quinolones group were frequently prescribed. From analysis, we found that other concomitant medications were also prescribed such analgesics, antihistamines, PPI (Proton Pump Inhibitors) and vitamins, minerals and dietary enzymes. The prescribed antibiotics accounted for large percentage of oral dosage forms (89.90%) followed parental injection dosage forms 5.05%.Conclusions: Prescribing more than one antibiotics was commonly encountered indicating the occurrence of polypharmacy which were based on empirical therapy without any culture and sensitivity test report. Therefore, local hospital culture sensitivity database for ENT infections has to be developed and prescribing with generic name from existing essential drug list or formulary should be encouraged for rational drug therapy