background: this cross sectional study was carried out to determine the relationship between metal dust exposure and respiratory health in male steel workers in terengganu, malaysia. methods: subjects were interviewed using a structured questionnaire from british medical research council (bmrc) questionnaire regarding respiratory symptoms and were examined their lung function using spirometer. ...

Variational method is regarded as one of the best performing optical flow techniques, which determine the optical flow field by minimizing a suitable energy function consisting of a data term and a regularization term. The brightness constancy assumption has widely been used in the data term, which is obviously violated to the real case. To improve the ability of optical flow’s application in o...

The JPEG baseline standard for image compression employs a block Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and uniform quantization. For a monochrome image, a single quantization matrix is allowed, while for a color image, distinct matrices are allowed for each color channel.. Here we describe a method, called DCTune, for design of color quantization matrices that is based on a model of the visibility of...

We present measurements of focal spot size and brightness in a focused ion beam system utilizing a laser-cooled atomic beam source of Cs ions. Spot sizes as small as (2.1 ± 0.2) nm (one standard deviation) and reduced brightness values as high as (2.4 ± 0.1) × 107 A m-2 Sr-1 eV-1 are observed with a 10 keV beam. This measured brightness is over 24 times higher than the highest brightness observ...

The processing and analysis of colour images has become an important area of study and application. The representation of the RGB colour space in 3D-polar coordinates (hue, saturation and brightness) can sometimes simplify this task by revealing characteristics not visible in the rectangular coordinate representation. The literature describes many such spaces (HLS, HSV, etc.), but many of them,...

This paper presents a new method for isolated Farsi/Arabic characters and digits recognition. Fractal codes which are determined by a fractal encoding method are used as feature in this system. Fractal image compression is a relatively recent technique based on the representation of an image by a contractive transform for which the fixed point is close to the original image. Each fractal code c...