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This thesis describes research in the area of automated industrial inspection using machine vision systems. It is anticipated that the algorithms described will contribute to the design of a machine vision system for the automatic surface inspection of cylindrical pellets. Firstly, the acquisition and segmentation of pellet tray images using area capture is described. Individual pellets are segmented from a pellet tray image by a novel system using the Radon transform coupled with data clustering. Subsequent to the segmentation, the linking of four pellet views depicting the entire circumferential area of the pellet is described along with a simple technique to compensate for intensity variations brought about by imaging the three-dimensional cylindrical surface of the pellet. The image processing techniques of filtering, edge detection, thresholding and morphology are used in the segmentation of grey level pellet defect images. The grey level pellet images are low-pass filtered and binary images formed using edge detection with thresholding. Binary morphology operators are then used in conjunction with a termination condition based on the number of objects in the image to ensure homogenous defect representations. The problem of overlapping defects is addressed, resulting in a second algorithm using the Radon transform coupled with data clustering. Prior to classification salient features are extracted from a set of synthetic binary defect images to form feature vectors. The novel idea of image object classification using 100% fuzzy inference is described, and results are shown to be superior to results obtained by feature space classifiers. The sub-classification of crack defects is carried out using a heuristic classifier, and the parameterisation of pellet defects is described.

The relationship between Congress and the Constitution and more specifically, constitutional deliberation within Congress, has been the focus of important scholarship (Pickerill, 2004; Devins & Whittington, 2005). This research furthers that enterprise through a comparative case study striving to understand the nature, content, and character of constitutional deliberation in the modern Congress. I examined a series of contemporaneous cases of constitutional interaction between Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Constitution itself, with particular emphasis on the content of congressional discourse. The cumulative evidence from the Civil Rights Act of 1991, the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act of 2003, and the Habeas Corpus Restoration Act of 2007 suggest that constitutional deliberation in Congress can best be understood through a "political regime" analysis (Dahl, 1957; Clayton & May, 1999; Pickerill & Clayton, 2004; Keck, 2007). More specifically, these cases, falling within reasonably the same "affiliated" era (Skowronek, 1997), demonstrate and illustrate the importance, and effects, of regime contestation: the normative engagement and debate between competing national governing coalitions. Operating as a part of this affiliated regime, Congress is a predictably highly partisan institution functioning within a highly political environment encompassing both fundamental "settled" values and secondary "unsettled" values. Its deliberation is for the most part symbolic and derivative in nature, acting under an umbrella of judicial supremacy and attempting to exert influence primarily on unsettled values, by which fundamental regime shifts are desired. These cases belie the notion of "settled" law and a "settled" regime, yet, despite these deviations from an undiluted "republic of reasons," Congress plays an important representational role by acting, and, further still, continues and perpetuates an ongoing dialogue (Fisher, 1988) with the other branches which would not arguably take place otherwise.