Abstract. This study explored the burden of household out-of-pocket health expenditure on urban inhabitants with different socio-economic status and health insurance schemes in Nakhon Sawan Municipality. This study employed a cross sectional survey by using a structured questionnaire. Health personnel from six primary care units interviewed a representative of the sampled households. Sampled ho...

In this brief, we introduce a priority encoder that uses a novel priority lookahead (PL) scheme to reduce delays associated with priority propagation. Two priority encoder approaches are presented, one without and the other with a PL scheme. For an -bit encoder, the circuit with the PL scheme requires about 0.1 more transistors than the circuit without the scheme. However, a 32-bit very large s...

In this paper we propose a generic framework for the optimization of image feature encoders for image retrieval. Our approach uses a triplet-based objective that compares, for a given query image, the similarity scores of an image with a matching and a non-matching image, penalizing triplets that give a higher score to the non-matching image. We use stochastic gradient descent to address the re...

This paper characterizes the second-order coding rates for lossy source coding with side information available at both the encoder and the decoder. We first provide non-asymptotic bounds for this problem and then specialize the non-asymptotic bounds for three different scenarios: discrete memoryless sources, Gaussian sources, and Markov sources. We obtain the second-order coding rates for these...

A generic CPM scheme can be decomposed into a continuous-phase encoder (CPE) and a memoryless modulator (MM). The CPE can be combined with a channel encoder (CE). This creates an extended CE, as the CPE is now an extension of the CE. In this paper, a 1⁄2 rate quaternary CE is combined with a quaternary CPE. The CE used here is a convolutional encoder, thus, the extended CE is also a convolution...

This paper presents the design of a hardware architecture for the Entropy Encoder of H.264/AVC video compression standard, considering the baseline profile. The entropy encoder is composed by two main blocks: Exp-Golomb encoder and CAVLC encoder. This paper presents the architectural design of these two blocks. The synthesis results targeting Xilinx FPGAs showed that the Exp-Golomb and CAVLC en...