A Noise-Aware Coding Scheme for Texture Classification

Texture-based analysis of images is a very common and much discussed issue in the fields of computer vision and image processing. Several methods have already been proposed to codify texture micro-patterns (texlets) in images. Most of these methods perform well when a given image is noise-free, but real world images contain different types of signal-independent as well as signal-dependent noises originated from different sources, even from the camera sensor itself. Hence, it is necessary to differentiate false textures appearing due to the noises, and thus, to achieve a reliable representation of texlets. In this proposal, we define an adaptive noise band (ANB) to approximate the amount of noise contamination around a pixel up to a certain extent. Based on this ANB, we generate reliable codes named noise tolerant ternary pattern (NTTP) to represent the texlets in an image. Extensive experiments on several datasets from renowned texture databases, such as the Outex and the Brodatz database, show that NTTP performs much better than the state-of-the-art methods

An Energy Efficient MAC Protocol for QoS Provisioning in Cognitive Radio Ad Hoc Networks

The explosive growth in the use of real-time applications on mobile devices has resulted in new challenges to the design of medium access control (MAC) protocols for ad hoc networks. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient cognitive radio (CR) MAC protocol for QoS provisioning called ECRQ-MAC, which integrate the spectrum sensing at physical (PHY) layer and the channel-timeslots allocation at MAC layer. We consider the problem of providing QoS guarantee to CR users as well as to maintain the most efficient use of scarce bandwidth resources. The ECRQ-MAC protocol exploits the advantage of both multiple channels and TDMA, and achieves aggressive power savings by allowing CR users that are not involved in communication to go into sleep mode. The proposed ECRQ-MAC protocol allows CR users to identify and use the unused frequency spectrum of licensed band in a way that constrains the level of interference to the primary users (PUs). Our scheme improves network throughput significantly, especially when the network is highly congested. The simulation results show that our proposed protocol successfully exploits multiple channels and significantly improves network performance by using the licensed spectrum opportunistically and protects QoS provisioning over cognitive radio ad hoc networks

Effect of Tree Litter Application on Lowland Rice Yield in Bangladesh

The effect of tree litters on rice yield (cv. BR11) was evaluated in the study. Four kinds of tree litter, i.e., ipil-ipil or lamtoro (Leucaena leucocephala (Lamk) De Witt), sissoo (Dalbergia sissoo), akashmoni (Acacia auriculiformis) and mander (Erythrina orientalis) were incorporated into the soil 15 days before transplanting at rate of 5 ton/ha supplemented with inorganic fertilizers (83 kg N, 48 kg P205­, 42 kg K20, 10 kg S and 3.6 kg Zn/ha). In the control plots only recommended inorganic fertilizer were applied. Results showed that tree litter application had a significantly positive effect on the yield parameters such as plant height, panicle length, tillers per hill, filled grain and index of 1000-grain weight. Grain yield of plots treated with ipil-ipil, sissoo, akashmoni and mander was 5.61, 4.49, 4.95 and 5.36 ton/ha, and the yield increased over control plots 39.6, 11.7, 23.1 and 33.3%, respectively. It is worthy to note that addition of tree litter to inorganic fertilizer produced significantly higher yield than inorganic fertilizers solely. Among the tree litter, ipil-ipil and mander had the greatest increase in rice yield, while akashmoni was intermediate and sissoo was the least

Emission Dispatch Problem with Cubic Function Considering Transmission Loss using Particle Swarm Optimization

In this research, authors have exploited particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique for solving the emission dispatch problem. Authors have used cubic function, instead of quadratic function, to solve emission dispatch problem to make the system more robust against nonlinearities of actual power generator. PSO with cubic function reveals better results by optimizing less emission of hazardous gases, transmission losses and showing robustness against nonlinearities than simplified direct search method (SDSM)

Fog based Secure Framework for Personal Health Records Systems

The rapid development of personal health records (PHR) systems enables an individual to collect, create, store and share his PHR to authorized entities. Health care systems within the smart city environment require a patient to share his PRH data with a multitude of institutions' repositories located in the cloud. The cloud computing paradigm cannot meet such a massive transformative healthcare systems due to drawbacks including network latency, scalability and bandwidth. Fog computing relieves the burden of conventional cloud computing by availing intermediate fog nodes between the end users and the remote servers. Aiming at a massive demand of PHR data within a ubiquitous smart city, we propose a secure and fog assisted framework for PHR systems to address security, access control and privacy concerns. Built under a fog-based architecture, the proposed framework makes use of efficient key exchange protocol coupled with ciphertext attribute based encryption (CP-ABE) to guarantee confidentiality and fine-grained access control within the system respectively. We also make use of digital signature combined with CP-ABE to ensure the system authentication and users privacy. We provide the analysis of the proposed framework in terms of security and performance.Comment: 12 pages (CMC Journal, Tech Science Press