A review of three-dimensional imaging technologies for pavement distress detection and measurements

With the ever-increasing emphasis on maintaining road assets to a high standard, the need for fast accurate inspection for road distresses is becoming extremely important. Surface distresses on roads are essentially three dimensional (3-D) in nature. Automated visual surveys are the best option available. However, the imaging conditions, in terms of lighting, etc., are very random. For example, the challenge of measuring the volume of the pothole requires a large field of view with a reasonable spatial resolution, whereas microtexture evaluation requires very accurate imaging. Within the two extremes, there is a range of situations that require 3-D imaging. Three-dimensional imaging consists of a number of techniques such as interferometry and depth from focus. Out of these, laser imagers are mainly used for road surface distress inspection. Many other techniques are relatively unknown among the transportation community, and industrial products are rare. The main impetus for this paper is derived from the rarity of 3-D industrial imagers that employ alternative techniques for use in transportation. In addition, the need for this work is also highlighted by a lack of literature that evaluates the relative merits/demerits of various imaging methods for different distress measurement situations in relation to pavements. This overview will create awareness of available 3-D imaging methods in order to help make a fast initial technology selection and deployment. The review is expected to be helpful for researchers, practicing engineers, and decision makers in transportation engineering

Ball positioning in robotic billiards: a nonprehensile manipulation-based solution

The development and testing of a robotic system to play billiards is described in this paper. The last two decades have seen a number of developments in creating robots to play billiards. Although the designed systems have uccessfully incorporated the kinematics required for gameplay, a system level approach needed for accurate shot- making has not been realized. The current work considers the different aspects, like machine vision, dynamics, robot design and computational intelligence, and proposes, for the first time, a method based on robotic non-prehensile manipulation. High-speed video tracking is employed to determine the parameters of balls dynamics. Furthermore, three-dimensional impact models, involving ball spin and friction, are developed for different collisions. A three degree of freedom manipulator is designed and fabricated to execute shots. The design enables the manipulator to position the cue on the ball accurately and strike with controlled speeds. The manipulator is controlled from a PC via a microcontroller board. For a given table scenario, optimization is used to search the inverse dynamics space to find best parameters for the robotic shot maker. Experimental results show that a 90% potting accuracy and a 100–200 mm post-shot cue ball positioning accuracy has been achieved by the autonomous system

Food utilization in the fish Tilapia mossambica fed on plant and animal foods

Only a few publications are available concerning food utilization in herbivorous fishes (see PANDIAN, 1975). MENZEL (1959) found that angelfish Holacanthus bermudi? nsis, fed on epizoan-free filamentous algae, failed to deposit protein ; he concluded that, though the utilized algae were sufficient to meet the metabolic energy requirements, the animal matter ingested intentionally or accidentally by the angelfish was essential to insure "true growth" (GERKING, 1952)

Molecular cloning of growth hormone encoding cDNA of Indian major carps by a modified rapid amplification of cDNA ends strategy

A modified rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE) strategy has been developed for cloning highly conserved cDNA sequences. Using this modified method, the growth hormone (GH) encoding cDNA sequences of Labeo rohita, Cirrhina mrigala and Catla catla have been cloned, characterized and overexpressed in Escherichia coli. These sequences show 96-98% homology to each other and are about 85% homologous to that of common carp. Besides, an attempt has been made for the first time to describe a 3-D model of the fish GH protein

Traveling-wave deceleration of SrF molecules

We report on the production, deceleration and detection of a SrF molecular beam. The molecules are captured from a supersonic expansion and are decelerated in the X$^2\Sigma^+ (v=0, N=1)$ state. We demonstrate the removal of up to 40% of the kinetic energy with a 2 meter long modular traveling-wave decelerator. Our results demonstrate a crucial step towards the preparation of ultracold gases of heavy diatomic molecules for precision spectroscopy

Construction, electroporatic transfer and expression of ZpβypGH and ZpβrtGH in zebrafish

Recombinant transformation vectors (ZPβypGH and ZpβrtGH) consisting of fish growth hormone cDNA, and a reporter gene β-galactosidase driven by fish promoter (Zp) were constructed. Freshly fertilized eggs of zebrafish (Brachydanio rerio) were electroporated at optimum conditions (0.07 kV voltage; 25 μF capacitance; ∞ ohm resistance and 2 pulses) in the presence of one of these transformation vectors (100 μg circular DNA/ml). In either cases 72% of the electroporated eggs successfully hatched, in comparison to the 85% hatchability of the control eggs. Genomic DNA extracted from fins of randomly chosen F0 individuals was screened (by Southern blot hybridization); the transgenes were retained in the host genome of all the randomly chosen adult transformants. Fin-positive presumptive founder parents were crossed with control counterparts and the DNA of randomly chosen F1 progenies was screened for germline transformation. Southern analysis of chosen F1 progenies revealed the persistence of ZPβypGH or ZpβrtGH in 53% of the F1 progenies. Southern analyses of chosen F1 progenies and the frequency (53% of F1 ZpβrtGH and 53% of F1 ZP{β}ypGH) of transmission revealed the degree of mosaicism in F0 transformants. Expression was confirmed from the 3-4 times elevated levels of activity of the reporter gene and 30-40% accelerated growth of transgenic F0 and F1 progenies

Fast Segmentation of Industrial Quality Pavement Images using Laws Texture Energy Measures and k-Means Clustering

Thousands of pavement images are collected by road authorities daily for condition monitoring surveys. These images typically have intensity variations and texture non-uniformities making their segmentation challenging. The automated segmentation of such pavement images is crucial for accurate, thorough and expedited health monitoring of roads. In the pavement monitoring area, well known texture descriptors such as gray-level co-occurrence matrices and local binary patterns are often used for surface segmentation and identification. These, despite being the established methods for texture discrimination, are inherently slow. This work evaluates Laws texture energy measures as a viable alternative for pavement images for the first time. k-means clustering is used to partition the feature space, limiting the human subjectivity in the process. Data classification, hence image segmentation, is performed by the k-nearest neighbor method. Laws texture energy masks are shown to perform well with resulting accuracy and precision values of more than 80%. The implementations of the algorithm, in both MATLAB and OpenCV/C++, are extensively compared against the state of the art for execution speed, clearly showing the advantages of the proposed method. Furthermore, the OpenCV based segmentation shows a 100% increase in processing speed when compared to the fastest algorithm available in literature

Cloning of partial putative gonadotropin hormone receptor sequence from fish

A search for the presence of mariner-like elements in the Labeo rohita genome by polymerase chain reaction led to the amplification of a partial DNA sequence coding for a putative transmembrane domain of gonadotropin hormone receptor. The amplified DNA sequence shows a high degree of homology to the available turkey and human luteinizing and follicle stimulating hormone receptor coding sequences. This is the first report on cloning such sequences of piscine origin

Tiled fuzzy Hough transform for crack detection

Surface cracks can be the bellwether of the failure of any component under loading as it indicates the component's fracture due to stresses and usage. For this reason, crack detection is indispensable for the condition monitoring and quality control of road surfaces. Pavement images have high levels of intensity variation and texture content, hence the crack detection is difficult. Moreover, shallow cracks result in very low contrast image pixels making their detection difficult. For these reasons, studies on pavement crack detection is active even after years of research. In this paper, the fuzzy Hough transform is employed, for the first time to detect cracks on any surface. The contribution of texture pixels to the accumulator array is reduced by using the tiled version of the Hough transform. Precision values of 78% and a recall of 72% are obtaining for an image set obtained from an industrial imaging system containing very low contrast cracking. When only high contrast crack segments are considered the values move to mid to high 90%

Intramammary immunization of pregnant mice with staphylococcal protein a reduces the post-challenge mammary gland bacterial load but not pathology

Protein A, encoded by the spa gene, is one of the major immune evading MSCRAMM of S. aureus, demonstrated to be prevalent in a significant percentage of clinical bovine mastitis isolates in Australia. Given its' reported significance in biofilm formation and the superior performance of S. aureus biofilm versus planktonic vaccine in the mouse mastitis model, it was of interest to determine the immunogenicity and protective potential of Protein A as a potential vaccine candidate against bovine mastitis using the mouse mastitis model. Pregnant Balb/c mice were immunised with Protein A emulsified in an alum-based adjuvant by subcutaneous (s/c) or intramammary (i/mam) routes. While humoral immune response of mice post-immunization were determined using indirect ELISA, cell-mediated immune response was assessed by estimation of interferon-gamma (IFN-γ) produced by protein A-stimulated splenocyte supernatants. Protective potential of Protein A against experimental mastitis was determined by challenge of immunized versus sham-vaccinated mice by i/mam route, based upon manifestation of clinical symptoms, total bacterial load and histopathological damage to mammary glands. Significantly (p<0.05) higher levels of IgG1 isotype were produced in mice immunized by the s/c route. In contrast, significantly higher levels of the antibody isotype IgG2a were produced in mice immunized by the i/mam route (p<0.05). There was significant reduction (p<0.05) in bacterial loads of the mammary glands of mice immunized by Protein A regardless of the route of immunization, with medium level of clinical symptoms observed up to day 3 post-challenge. However, Protein A vaccine failed to protect immunized mice post-challenge with biofilm producing encapsulated S. aureus via i/mam route, regardless of the route of immunization, as measured by the level of mammary tissue damage. It was concluded that, Protein A in its' native state was apparently not a suitable candidate for inclusion in a cell-free vaccine formulation against mastitis