Improvement of PolSAR Decomposition Scattering Powers Using a Relative Decorrelation Measure

In this letter, a methodology is proposed to improve the scattering powers obtained from model-based decomposition using Polarimetric Synthetic Aperture Radar (PolSAR) data. The novelty of this approach lies in utilizing the intrinsic information in the off-diagonal elements of the 3$\times$3 coherency matrix $\mathbf{T}$ represented in the form of complex correlation coefficients. Two complex correlation coefficients are computed between co-polarization and cross-polarization components of the Pauli scattering vector. The difference between modulus of complex correlation coefficients corresponding to $\mathbf{T}^{\mathrm{opt}}$ (i.e. the degree of polarization (DOP) optimized coherency matrix), and $\mathbf{T}$ (original) matrices is obtained. Then a suitable scaling is performed using fractions \emph{i.e.,} $(T_{ii}^{\mathrm{opt}}/\sum\limits_{i=1}^{3}T_{ii}^{\mathrm{opt}})$ obtained from the diagonal elements of the $\mathbf{T}^{\mathrm{opt}}$ matrix. Thereafter, these new quantities are used in modifying the Yamaguchi 4-component scattering powers obtained from $\mathbf{T}^{\mathrm{opt}}$. To corroborate the fact that these quantities have physical relevance, a quantitative analysis of these for the L-band AIRSAR San Francisco and the L-band Kyoto images is illustrated. Finally, the scattering powers obtained from the proposed methodology are compared with the corresponding powers obtained from the Yamaguchi \emph{et. al.,} 4-component (Y4O) decomposition and the Yamaguchi \emph{et. al.,} 4-component Rotated (Y4R) decomposition for the same data sets. The proportion of negative power pixels is also computed. The results show an improvement on all these attributes by using the proposed methodology.Comment: Accepted for publication in Remote Sensing Letter

Allogenic Decal-Bone Grafts: A Viable Option in Clinical Orthopedics

One has to resort to allogenic source of bone grafts especially in filling up of large or multiple containable cavitary lesions, structural reconstruction of large circumferential osteoperiosteal defects, extensive spinal fusions for gross deformities, or extensive operative reconstruction after total joint replacements. These procedures demand an abundant quantity of bone material in which a patient’s (recipient’s) body cannot supply without significant morbidity and risks. At present most of the allogenic bone banks use deep-freezing or freeze-drying or radiation for long-term preservation. The techniques maintain sterility, reduce immunogenicity, and provide adequate structural integrity; however, such procedures reduce the bone-forming biological activity and are expensive. We have worked for clinical translation of the basic research performed by Marshal Urist (1965–1994). After extensive experimental observations, we have been using partially decalcified allogenic bone as grafts in clinical cases since 1978. Favorable outcome has been observed in benign cystic lesions, wide-gap grafting, and spinal fusions. Minimum follow-up for declaring “success” or “failure” of the procedure was 2 years after implantation

Efficient convolvers using the Polynomial Residue Number System technique

The problem of computing linear convolution is a very important one because with linear convolution we can mechanize digital filtering. The linear convolution of two N-point sequences can be computed by the cyclic convolution of the following 2N-point sequences. The original sequence padded with N zero’s each. The cyclic convolution of two N-point sequences requires multiplications and additions for its computation. A very efficient way of computing cyclic convolution of two sequences is by using the Polynomial Residue Number System (PRNS) technique. Using this technique the cyclic convolution of two N-point sequences can be computed using only N multiplications instead of N2 multiplications. This can be achieved based on some forward and inverse PRNS transformation mappings. These mappings rely on additions, subtractions and many scaling operations (multiplications by constants). The PRNS technique would lose a lot in value if these many scaling operations were difficultly implemented. In this thesis we will show how to calculate cyclic convolution of two sequences using the PRNS technique based on forward and inverse transformation mapping which rely on complement operations (negations), additions and rotation operations. These rotation operations do not require any computational hardware. Therefore the complicated hardware required for the scaling operations has now been substituted by rotators, which do not require any computational hardware

Molecular engineering design of the SAPO-34 and ZIF-8 membranes for CO2 separation from CH4 and N2.

The separation of C02 from light gases is a very important environmental and energy issue. The state-of-the-art process for the purification of C02 uses amine adsorption, which is a complex, and costly. Membrane technology is far less expensive and requires less energy consumption. Although polymeric membranes can separate CO2, high pressures plasticize them and decrease their separation ability considerably. Zeolite membranes have significant advantages over traditional polymeric membranes, such as high thermal, mechanical, and chemical stability. Furthermore, the development of superior performance membranes for gas mixture separations requires novel materials with fundamentally different structural, adsorption and transport properties than those of polymers and zeolites. In this respect, zeolitic imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) a subclass of metal organic frameworks, have emerged as a novel crystalline porous materials which combine highly desirable properties, such as uniform pores and exceptional thermal and chemical stability, making them ideal candidates for molecular separations. This work demonstrates the development of continuous zeolite (SAPO-34) and metal organic framework (ZIF-8) membranes able to separate C02 from CH4 and N2. The membranes were prepared on tubular porous supports by secondary seeded growth. Therefore, first we focused on the synthesis of small homogeneous crystals (both SAPO-34 and ZIF -8) with high surface area and used as “seeds for membrane nucleation and growth. Crystal growth inhibitors, and microwave heating were used to prepare SAPO-34 seeds (~ 0.5 µm). Solvothermal synthesis was employed to prepare ZIF-8 seeds displaying (~ 50 µm). The entire process from gel formation, nucleation, crystallization and growth of ZIF -8 at room temperature was followed. The resultant SAPO-34 membranes were functionalized with organic amino cations to promote CO2 preferential adsorption and evaluated for the separation of Co2/CH4 and Co2/N2 gas mixtures. CO2/CH4 selectivities as high as 245 with CO2 permeances of ~5 x10-7 mol/m2 s Pa at 295K and 138 KPa were observed. To our best knowledge, our SAPO-34 membranes display one of the best (if not the best) overall separation performance for the separation of CO2/CH4 gas mixtures. Moreover, we demonstrate the successful synthesis of novel ZIF-8 membranes for CO2/CH4 gas separation. This work represents one of the first examples (and the only example on CO2/CH4 separation) of the successful preparation of continuous, thin, and reproducible zeolitic imidazolate framework membranes for a functional gas mixture separation. Our ZIF-8 membranes displayed unprecedented high CO2 permeances up to ~ 2.4 X 10-5 mol/m2·s·Pa and CO2/CH4 selectivities from ~4 to 7. The central intellectual thrust of this work is the rational design of SAPO-34 and ZIF-8 membranes, which offer the possibility of demonstrating high separation performance for CO2 purification from light gases, and other functional gas separations. The specific research objectives are: 1. Rational design of small SAPO-34 and ZIF-8 crystals, displaying narrow size distribution and enhanced CO2 sorption properties. 2. Development of continuous SAPO-34 and ZIF-8 membranes for CO2/ CH4 and CO2/N2 gas separations. 3. Elucidate and understand the basic information mechanisms governing the transformation of precursor solutions into ZIF phases. 4. Establish the fundamental structure/separation relationships of SAPO-34 and ZIF-8 membranes in relevant functional gas separations such as CO2/ CH4 and CO2/N2. This work represents an important advance in the rational design of zeolite and metal organic framework membranes and in basic fundamental understanding of its structure/separation relationships. In particular, the proposed research has practical implications in energy and environmental issues, which are areas of great societal importance. For the targeted applications of carbon dioxide purification from methane and nitrogen, the proposed work may have an important economic impact in reducing considerably the separation costs associated to natural gas pretreatment, and reduction of greenhouse gases emissions respectively. It is anticipated that this work could serve as a model for the rational design of zeolitic imidazolate framework membranes for other important relevant molecular gas separations, such as hydrogen purification from synthesis gas

Functional analysis of rice bidirectional promoters

Bidirectional promoters regulate adjacent genes organized in a divergent fashion (head to head orientation). Several Reports pertaining to bidirectional promoters on a genomic scale exists in mammals. This work provides the essential background on theoretical and experimental work to carry out a genomic scale analysis of bidirectional promoters in plants. A computational study was performed to identify putative bidirectional promoters and the over-represented cis-regulatory motifs from three sequenced plant genomes: rice (Oryza sativa), Arabidopsis thaliana, and Populus trichocarpa using the Plant Cis-acting Regulatory DNA Elements (PLACE) and PLANT CARE databases. Over-represented motifs along with their possible function were described with the help of a few conserved representative putative bidirectional promoters from the three model plants. By doing so a foundation was laid for the experimental evaluation of bidirectional promoters in plants. A novel Agrobacterium tumefaciens mediated transient expression assay (AmTEA) was developed for young plants of different cereal species and the model dicot Arabidopsis thaliana. AmTEA was evaluated using five promoters (six constructs) and two reporter genes, gus and egfp. Efficacy and stability of AmTEA was compared with stable transgenics using the Arabidopsis DEAD-box RNA helicase family gene promoter. AmTEA was primarily developed to overcome the many problems associated with the development of transgenics and expression studies in plants. Finally a possible mechanism for the bidirectional activity of bidirectional promoters was highlighted. Deletion analysis using promoter-reporter gene constructs identified three rice promoters to be bidirectional. Regulatory elements located in the 5’- untranslated regions (UTR) of one of the genes of the divergent gene pair were found to be responsible for their bidirectional ctivit

Modifying the Yamaguchi Four-Component Decomposition Scattering Powers Using a Stochastic Distance

Model-based decompositions have gained considerable attention after the initial work of Freeman and Durden. This decomposition which assumes the target to be reflection symmetric was later relaxed in the Yamaguchi et al. decomposition with the addition of the helix parameter. Since then many decomposition have been proposed where either the scattering model was modified to fit the data or the coherency matrix representing the second order statistics of the full polarimetric data is rotated to fit the scattering model. In this paper we propose to modify the Yamaguchi four-component decomposition (Y4O) scattering powers using the concept of statistical information theory for matrices. In order to achieve this modification we propose a method to estimate the polarization orientation angle (OA) from full-polarimetric SAR images using the Hellinger distance. In this method, the OA is estimated by maximizing the Hellinger distance between the un-rotated and the rotated $T_{33}$ and the $T_{22}$ components of the coherency matrix $\mathbf{[T]}$. Then, the powers of the Yamaguchi four-component model-based decomposition (Y4O) are modified using the maximum relative stochastic distance between the $T_{33}$ and the $T_{22}$ components of the coherency matrix at the estimated OA. The results show that the overall double-bounce powers over rotated urban areas have significantly improved with the reduction of volume powers. The percentage of pixels with negative powers have also decreased from the Y4O decomposition. The proposed method is both qualitatively and quantitatively compared with the results obtained from the Y4O and the Y4R decompositions for a Radarsat-2 C-band San-Francisco dataset and an UAVSAR L-band Hayward dataset.Comment: Accepted for publication in IEEE J-STARS (IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Applied Earth Observations and Remote Sensing

State level attribute compliance measure based efficient access restriction improved security in cloud environment

In this paper, Advanced Encryption Standard was modified to address the low diffusion rate at the early rounds by adding additional primitive operations such as exclusive OR and modulo arithmetic in the cipher round. Furthermore, byte substitution and round constant addition were appended to the key schedule algorithm. The modified AES was tested against the standard AES by means of avalanche effect and frequency test to measure the diffusion and confusion characteristics respectively. The results of the avalanche effect evaluation show that there was an average increase in diffusion of 61.98% in round 1, 14.79% in round 2 and 13.87% in round 3. Consequently, the results of the frequency test demonstrated an improvement in the randomness of the ciphertext since the average difference between the number of ones to zeros is reduced from 11.6 to 6.4 along with better-computed p-values. The results clearly show that the modified AES has improved diffusion and confusion properties and the ciphertext can still be successfully decrypted and recover back the original plaintext

Leaf Disease Detection by Using Convolutional Pretrained Model

Although agriculture plays an important role in developing countries such as India, food security remains a major concern. Due to a shortage of storage space, transportation, and plant diseases, the majority of crops are squandered. In India, infections cause more than 15% of crops to be wasted, making it one of the most pressing issues to be addressed. There is a need for an autonomous system that can detect these illnesses and assist farmers in taking the necessary procedures to avoid crop loss. Farmers have used the traditional approach of recognizing plant illnesses with their naked eyes. However, not all farmers can recognize these diseases in the same way. With the advancement of Artificial Intelligence, there is a need to apply computer vision capabilities to the agricultural area. Deep Learning's comprehensive libraries, as well as the user and developer-friendly environment in which to work, all combine to make Deep Learning the best way to get started with this topic. Taking leaves from diseased crops and identifying them according to the disease pattern is part of the process. Images of diseased leaves are processed using pixel-based procedures to improve the informational content of the images. The next step is feature extraction, image segmentation, and finally, classification of crop diseases based on patterns recovered from diseased leaves. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) are used to classify diseases. Some of the deep learning pre-trained models have got more accuracy here. The comparison of two pre-trained models was shown

Top-down etd-ms provides unreliable quantitation of methionine oxidation

© 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. The aim of this study was to evaluate the total phenolic and flavonoid content, and the in vitro antioxidant, anti-inflammatory, antibacterial, antifungal, antimalarial, cytotoxicity, and antiprotozoal activities of the Algerian plant Cytisus villosus Pourr. (Syn. Cytisus triflorus L’Hérit.). Additionally, the radioligand displacement affinity on opioid and cannabinoid receptors was assessed for the extracts and isolated pure compounds. The hydro alcoholic extract of the aerial part of C. villosus was partitioned with chloroform (CHCl3), ethyl acetate (EtOAc), and n-butanol (n-BuOH). The phenolic content of the C. villosus extracts was evaluated using a modified Folin–Ciocalteau method. The total flavonoid content was measured spectrometrically using the aluminum chloride colorimetric assay. The known flavonoids genistein (1), chrysin (2), chrysin-7-O-β-d-glucopyranoside (3), and 2”-O-α-l-rhamnosylorientin (4) were isolated. The antioxidant activities of the extracts and isolated compounds were evaluated using 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DDPH) and cellular antioxidant activity (CAA) assays. The plant extracts showed moderate antioxidant activity. EtOAc and n-BuOH extracts showed moderate anti-inflammatory activity through the inhibition of induced nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) with IC50 values of 48 and 90 µg/mL, respectively. The isolated pure compounds 1 and 3 showed good inhibition of Inducible nitric oxide synthase (iNOS) with IC50 values of 9 and 20 µg/mL, respectively. Compounds 1 and 2 exhibited lower inhibition of Nuclear Factor kappa-light-chain-enhancer of activated B cells (NF-κB) with IC50 values of 28 and 38 µg/mL, respectively. Furthermore, the extracts and isolated pure compounds have been shown to exhibit low affinity for cannabinoid and opioid receptors. Finally, n-BuOH extract was a potent inhibitor of Trypanosoma brucei with IC50 value of 7.99 µg/mL and IC90 value of 12.61 µg/mL. The extracts and isolated compounds showed no antimicrobial, antimalarial nor antileishmanial activities. No cytotoxic effect was observed on cancer cell lines. The results highlight this species as a promising source of anti-inflammatory and antitrypanosomal agents

Decline of Professional Ethics in Indian Education System

Recently there is an increasing awareness and more importantly, an increasing interest in the field of professional ethics. In fact, perhaps there has not been any time in the history of education development where the concepts and an understanding of the nature of professional ethics have been so urgently needed. The popular concept that if it is education then it will be ethical and if it is ethical, it can be only education and this concept has been declined in last few decades. In higher and technical education the ethical consideration has lost its value and place, in real life ethics cannot be learned by books or by any other source of information, therefore it is really difficult to find ethical people around us, whereas it is very easy to find large number of unethical managers, bureaucrats, educationalist, corporate heads, politicians and elected representatives. This paper describes about ethics, professional ethics and its importance, professional code of ethics for teachers, factors affecting ethical standards in education, lack of ethical education in teachers training programmes and need to re-introduce value based education, spiritual education, ethical education and need based education in the curriculum which should deal with increase in human values, ethical values, rational thinking, learning, research and moral development in education system. DOI: 10.17762/ijritcc2321-8169.15078