Multimodal biometric authentication (BA) has shown perennial successes both in research and applications. This paper casts a light on why BA systems can be improved by fusing opinions of different experts, principally due to diversity of biometric modalities, features, classifiers and samples. These techniques are collectively called variance reduction (VR) techniques. A thorough survey was car...

This correspondence presents a scheme for artifact reduction of low bit rate discrete-cosine-transform-compressed (DCT-compressed) images. First, the DC coefficients are calibrated using gradient continuity constraints. Then, an improved Huber-Markov-random-field-based (HMRF-based) smoothing is applied. The constrained optimization is implemented by the iterative conditional mode (ICM). Final r...

Objective: To study the success rate of ultrasound guided hydrostatic reduction for childhood intussusceptions. Material and Methods: This study was conducted at the Paediatric Surgery and Radiology units of PGMI Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar from November 2007 to November 2010. All patients with abdominal pain, per rectal bleeding, bilious vomiting and a palpable abdominal mass were subjecte...

Background: Global physical inactivity pandemic is responsible for more than 5 million deaths annually through its effects on non-communicable diseases. This requires urgent intervention. Objective: To investigate associations of physical activity with cardiovascular fitness in a cross-sectional retrospective observational study. Data were collected for 21 years from 2530 healthy volunteers and...

We tested whether the reduction of metabolic rate (MR) in hibernating Cercartetus nanus (Marsupialia, 36 g) is better explained by the reduction of body temperature (Tb), the differential (ΔT) between Tb and air temperature (Ta), or thermal conductance (C). Above the critical Ta during torpor (Ttc) of 4.8 ± 0.7°C, where the Tb was not regulated, the steady-state MR was an exponential function o...

This paper presents two types of techniques suitable for rate reduction transcoding for wireless video streaming applications. We begin this paper by reviewing existing approaches and addressing several issues related to transcoding. Next, we describe the first type of transcoding based on intra refresh architecture for spatial resolution reduction. Then, we present the second type of transcodi...

In a binaural hearing aid system, output signals for the left and the right ear are generated by exchanging information between the two hearing aids. A significant noise reduction can be achieved using the binaural multi-channel Wiener filter (MWF), which requires all microphone signals from both hearing aids. However, the limited bandwidth of the binaural link typically does not allow to trans...

The collapse-driven supernova is supposed to be an outcome of gravitational collapse of a massive star ∼ 8M at the end of its evolution. Although more than 60 years have passed since the original idea by Baade and Zwicky [1,2], and the detection of neutrinos from SN1987A [3,4] confirmed that our scenario is correct on the whole, we have not yet figured out how this phenomenon occurs. These days...