Search

The study is devoted to the problem of a quantitative assessment of the proximity of the colors of objects by their spectra. In such a formulation, four measures of color proximity (criteria) are proposed. Two of them compare the spectra directly, and two others use a representation of colors in different color spaces. An original approach to comparing their effectiveness, based on expert assessments, is developed. The results of the considered criteria effectiveness comparison are presented. It is shown that the mean-square difference of spectra provides the best results. Possible options for constructing more effective complex criteria are formulated.

In order to have greater clinical prediction during the early stage of drug development process, tumor spheroid culture model is generally used to investigate the drug response. Since the tumor spheroids are cultured in three-dimensional environment, quantification under optical microscope may not be objective and the process is labor intensive. As such, we developed an inverted swept-source optical coherence tomography (OCT) system to quantitatively monitor the response of tumor spheroids under tested condition. The tumor spheroids were cultured in standard 96-well microplates mounted on a special-designed platform of the system. A 3 × 3 × 3 mm3 OCT reconstructed image could be captured within 5 seconds to enable high throughput assay. The tumor spheroids exposed to anti-cancer drug and modified by gene silencing were respectively monitored by the OCT system. Dynamic response of the tumor spheroids could be quantitatively analyzed to study the efficiency of anti-cancer drug and gene therapy during tumor development. The proposed OCT system has the compatibility of conventional cell culture consumables and practicability of drug development process. Non-invasive and quantitative assessment could be realized for the routine analysis in biological laboratories.

Regarding changes of subjective and objective parameters of comfort during short and long-term driving, the arbitrariness of traditional subjective evaluation methods, as well as the defects of objective method where issues can be qualitatively but not quantitatively analyzed. By measuring pressure distribution and electromyography during short and long-term driving respectively, the article obtained pressure indicators, electromyography characteristic parameters and the corresponding subjective evaluations of drivers. The variation of subjective and objective parameters of comfort, the difference in terms of comfort and the fatigable body parts were tested. By means of correlation analysis completed the indicators screen. Proposed a new comprehensive weighting method-AHP to limit entropy method, established the mapping relations between subjective comfort and objective indicators, which based on pressure distribution and physiological information during short-term and long-term driving. Obtained a quantitative evaluation method that applies pressure distribution, physiological information and subjective evaluation to effectively evaluate driving comfort, and thus provided a theoretical basis for evaluating driving comfort.

Non-photosynthetic vegetation (NPV) in croplands is receiving a growing interest for its relevance in the field of sustainable agriculture. Previous studies have demonstrated the suitability of hyperspectral remote sensing in detection and classification of NPV. This study is an early assessment of the PRISMA mission capability to provide quantitative estimates of NPV, through exploiting PRISMA imagery and reference field data collected on summer 2020. We investigate the cellulose absorption region (2.0-2.2 µm) applying a technique of feature reduction (Exponential Gaussian Optimization - EGO) able to retrieve spectral parameters which can be used for qualitative and quantitative assessment of NPV in croplands. In particular, a significant non-linear relationship has been found between EGO-derived band depth and dry matter abundance (g/m2). The results are very encouraging toward a robust and quantitative estimation of NPV from space and worthy of further investigations.

Ideas, methods and devices of electronics are widely spread in various fields of science, technology and telecommunications. It is a result of significant development of the electronic component base. One of directions of the development of the electronic component base is improving of overall dimensions and electrical characteristics of passive microwave devices. This article presents a brief overview of features of application of the volume-modular technology in the design of passive microwave devices for modern electronic equipment. The volume-modular way of implementing of microwave devices allows for improve their weight and dimensions characteristics while maintaining and increasing their functionality and electrical properties. It is also a way that leads to a technologically easy replacement of individual functional parts of microwave devices. Basic principles of the design of volume-modular passive microwave devices are presented and examples are given. Main advantages and disadvantages of the volume-modular technology are listed. There is presented an approximate method for quantitative assessment of the influence of the shape of a microwave device on its overall dimensions when using the volume-modular technology in its design.

This paper describes the design and delivery of a postgraduate course on “Design and Evaluation of Interactive Systems”, part of an M.Sc. program on Human-Computer Interaction jointly offered by the Computer Engineering and Informatics Department and the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. This course was initially intended to use the flipped classroom model but was shifted online due to the COVID-19 lockdown imposed during the Spring 2020 semester. The paper discusses student attitudes towards the online flipped classroom model and draws preliminary conclusions on the advantages and limitations of the approach. Qualitative and quantitative assessment data indicate a positive overall students’ perception of the online flipped classroom model.

The purpose of this study is to study the kinematics of the road accidents movement and the factors influencing the degree of injury from collisions of a two-wheeled vehicle with a car by modeling a road traffic accident. The analysis of the effect of vehicle speed on the degree of injury for a certain moment of collision has been carried out. A quantitative assessment is given to the factors influencing the degree of injury from road accidents. Depending on the vehicle speed, collision time, graphs were built and regression equations were obtained.

In view of the influence of the differences between Chinese and western mainstream culture on the risk assessment of College Students' mainstream culture identity, in order to improve the feasibility of risk assessment of College Students' mainstream cultural identity, this paper puts forward the design of risk assessment system of College Students' mainstream cultural identity in the era of micro communication. By extracting the risk characteristics of College Students' mainstream cultural identity, this paper constructs the risk assessment model of College Students' mainstream cultural identity, and adopts the method of minimum mean square error compensation to carry out adaptive quantitative evaluation, so as to realize the quantitative assessment of College Students' mainstream cultural identity risk. The test results show that the risk assessment system of College Students' mainstream culture identity in the era of micro communication is feasible and accurate.

A comprehensive assessment of the state of various tissues and their monitoring is essential for decision-making by the surgeon during surgery or the doctor during a diagnostic examination. Laser spectroscopic methods, instruments and tools are among the most promising for non-invasive precision monitoring of vital parameters of biological tissue with a quantitative assessment. They are in particular demand when creating new clinical technologies for the removal and postoperative prevention of relapses of malignant tumors and the identification of affected regional lymph nodes with a personalized assessment of the characteristic immunological status. This technology is important for the treatment of long-term non-healing wounds, the treatment and prevention of chronic arthrosis, the assessment of the degree of inflammation of arterial plaques, periodontitis, etc.

Operating temperature, which depends on the load of transformers, was analysed as a factor affecting the intensity of aging oils. The analysis results provided a quantitative assessment of the impact of transformer load on the drift intensity of oil indicators. In particular, the dependencies of the induction period duration (time during which the values of indicators do not change) and the values of oil indicators increments after 25 years of operation on the average transformer load for a given period were obtained. It has been established that formation of water-soluble acids (the most dangerous oxidation products) in oil occurs only in transformers whose average load has exceeded 50% during the last 13 years. Increase of transformer load from 10 to 50% leads to 3.5 times increase of organic acids content after 25 years of operation (from 0.029 to 0.102 mg KOH per 1 g of oil). The obtained results allow using more advanced methods of transformer oils condition assessment (for example, trajectory method or methods based on regression models), but also forecasting their values.

in this paper, some concepts of game theory are considered from the point of view of the synergetic effects of players ' participation in these games and a quantitative assessment of these synergetic effects is given on the example of cooperative games, which are a mathematical model describing various processes related to the distribution of monetary amounts between participants according to their position and the strength of participation in these processes.

The paper presents a method for the quantitative assessment of choroidal blood flow using an OCT-A system. The developed technique for processing of OCT-A scans is divided into two stages. At the first stage, the identification of the boundaries in the selected portion was performed. At the second stage, each pixel mark on the selected layer was represented as a volume unit, a voxel, which characterizes the region of moving blood. Three geometric shapes were considered to represent the voxel. On the example of one OCT-A scan, this work presents a quantitative assessment of the blood flow index. A possible modification of two-stage algorithm based on voxel scan processing is presented.

Using transmission ultrasound (TU) tomography for quantification of fibroglandular tissue in the breast is a relatively new mechanism to determine breast density. In this research determine breast density from both TU images and the respective magnetic resonance images (MRI) of whole breasts. The MRI-based breast density is used as ground-truth to validate TU-based breast density, termed as quantitative breast density (QBD). The comparison between the two breast density assessments was done by calculating the Pearson correlation coefficient and results showed a strong correlation of 0.90, indicating that TU-based measurements provide a valid way to assess breast density.

The paper investigates a novel modeling and quantitative assessment approach for environment complexity of autonomous vehicles (AVs), whose purpose is to establish a systematic, logical and quantitative framework for evaluating the intelligence of AVs in complex scenarios. By reducing features of AVs’ driving environment, analyzing the properties and relations of environment factors, a topology structure and scheme of fundamental and additional factors is established. Based on an integrated evaluation way of expert evaluation and the analytic hierarchy process (AHP), fundamental and additional environment complexity models are established to realize the subjective and objective evaluation of AVs. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is testified by experimental data and tests.

Large-core polymethyl-methacrylate (PMMA) graded-index plastic optical fibers (OI-POFs) share the advantages of standard step-index PMMA fibers (SI-POFs) but permit higher transmission rates at longer link distances. However, the precise determination of their capacity limits has been prevented by the lack of optoelectronic devices with the required characteristics. In this work, we carry out an experimental characterization of the transmission properties of PMMA GI-POF, using a high bandwidth photo detector to measure the frequency response of the fiber as a function of its length. Measurements of intensity distribution, frequency response and Bit-Error-Rate (BER) for different fiber lengths provide a quantitative assessment of the potential of large-core OI-POFs. Moreover, these measurements are indispensable to understand their behavior in order to postulate realistic models and to make accurate assessments of their applicability in different scenarios.

The progression of neurodegenerative conditions can be effectively monitored and improved by using objective assessments. The conditions such as Friedreich Ataxia (FA) are clinically assessed by means of subjective measures commonly practised in clinics. Here, we propose a device capable of measuring ataxia, in the form of a `cup' capable of sensing certain kinematic parameters of interest while engaging in an activity that is closely related to daily living. In this study, the functional task of 'drinking' was utilised to diagnose participants with FA and capture features in terms of diagnosis (separation) and correlation with the clinical scales. Frequency domain analysis was incorporated enabling the classification of control subjects and FA patients to an accuracy of 88% with a correlation of 90% with the clinical scores.

Security risk assessment is an important part of network security operation. The existing risk assessment methods are mainly divided into qualitative assessment, quantitative assessment and comprehensive assessment. This paper summarizes the advantages and disadvantages of related methods through analyzing, and provides certain assistance for the assessors to choose methods when implementing assessment.

In the presented work the author wants to show some connections of human impact as a subject of the control process of active dynamic systems in the landing an aircraft. In the introduction there are brief definitions of concepts such as active system, entropy, preference, subjective analysis and dynamic system. Some literature items on theoretical considerations on the problem of quantitative assessment of human traits influencing the control of an active dynamic system were also cited. Based on the maximum entropy principle of Edwin Thompson JAYNES, the interpretation of this principle by Vladimir KASYANOV is used to assess the safety of an active dynamic system. Man as an active and essential element of the decision making system in the control process has a major impact on the proper and safe operation of the operational task. Using some of the principles of statistical mechanics, also using the concept of entropy function formulated by Josiah Willard GIBBS, shows the possibility of assessing the influence of the subject on the control process. The final chapter gives an example of one possible interpretation of a catastrophic air incident using subjective analysis. Finally, conclusions were drawn from the modeling of the influence of the human factor in the process of landing of an aircraft including the drone.

With the recent expansion of the geriatric population, caregivers and therapists have become increasingly important for improving the quality of life of elderly persons; therefore, having properly trained professionals in these fields is critical. To ensure accurate and efficient elderly care training, this study focuses on the development of an automated care training assessment method based on fuzzy-logic for calculating care training quantitative score (CTQS) for improving care skill of caregivers or therapists. Five elderly care experts and three trainees performed the exercise in flexion and extension using the elbow part of care training assistant robot (CaTARo). We obtained quantitative data from the CaTARo, such as elbow external angle, angular velocity, torque, pressure, for all participants and evaluated performance by combining four key parameters using fuzzy-logic method. As a result, we found that the result of trainees had showed a significant difference between pre-test and post-test, and the CTQS of trainees in post-test could be improved by training with CaTARo than that of pre-test.

The rigorous test and evaluation of autonomous systems is often a challenging process. Specifically, the transformation of qualitative assessments often used in the development phase to unbiased quantitative assessment can be difficult. Additionally, few standardized metrics exist for the test and evaluation of autonomous systems, as applications/approaches vary so widely that specialized metrics must be developed in the majority of cases. This paper presents a case study for this process, describing a multi-year, iterative test and evaluation effort undertaken by the authors in support of the development of an autonomous surface vehicle system. The case study details the development of quantitative performance metrics (including the rationale behind each one), revisions/additions that were made to the metrics between testing and evaluation events, impacts the metrics had on the autonomy development process observed through successive tests, and lessons learned throughout the process.

The article discusses the arising requirement towards engineering graduates to be able to follow Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) and principles in their professional activity. The paper underlines the importance of fostering the Sustainable Development (SD) mindset of engineering students, as well as the need for formation and development of a specific SD environment at universities. The article summarizes the results of expert research on engineering students’ SD mindset, including a set of quantitative assessment criteria and evaluation scales for the assessment of SD mindset, rating of restraints on the way of fostering future engineers’ SD mindset, and a set of recommendations for training socially responsible students with Sustainable Development mindset.

There are novel structures of society such as Industry 4.0 and Connected Industries. Under the structures, a novel safety management system considering man-machine interaction is very important topic. Safety 2.0, a new safety control, is proposed from Japan. It seems that direct and quantitative validity of risk assessment and risk reduction measure such as reinforcement of safety behavior and/or reduction of unsafe behavior is now not sufficiently accomplished. Some quantitative assessment for residual risks focusing on worker's behavior is necessary to make Vision Zero function better. We introduce to a principle of Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) which might be applicable to reduce residual risk for safety of workers. BBS, focused on behavioral modification using principle of reinforcement, is one group of Behavior Analysis of Psychology. Goals of BBS is prediction, control and quantitative measurement of target behavior.

In a grid, electrical installations operate under strict conditions to power quality, such as low harmonic emission, a balanced three-phase voltage, stable frequency, and a voltage level at consumer buses. Harmonic emission, mostly caused by non-linear loads, may lead to different well-known negative effects. However, some consumers are not able to operate with zero-emission, which leads to some consensus when a part of this emission to the grid is allowed. In order to compare the normalized and actual emission levels, and for quantitative assessment, in IEEE's and different national standards (in Russian Federation, USA, and EU countries, etc.), it has been introduced a factor named total harmonic distortion factor (THD). This paper outlines an approach for THD calculation, based on the operator-matrix state variable method (OMSV method).

Quantitative assessment of movement impairment in Huntington’s disease (HD) is essential to monitoring of disease progression. This study aimed to develop and validate a novel low cost, objective automated system for the evaluation of upper limb movement impairment in HD in order to eliminate the inconsistency of the assessor and offer a more sensitive, continuous assessment scale. Patients with genetically confirmed HD and healthy controls were recruited to this observational study. Demographic data including age (years), gender and Unified Huntington’s Disease Rating Scale Total Motor Score (UHDRS-TMS) were recorded. For the purposes of this study a modified upper limb motor impairment score (mULMS) was generated from the UHDRS-TMS. All participants completed a brief, standardized clinical assessment of upper limb dexterity whilst wearing a tri-axial accelerometer on each wrist and on the sternum. The captured acceleration data were used to develop an automatic classification system for discriminating between healthy and HD participants and to automatically generate a continuous Movement Impairment Score (MIS) that reflected the degree of the movement impairment. Data from 48 healthy and 44 HD participants was used to validate the developed system, which achieved 98.78% accuracy in discriminating between healthy and HD participants. The Pearson correlation coefficient between the automatic MIS and the clinician rated mULMS was 0.77 with a p-value < 0.01. The approach presented in this study demonstrates the possibility of an automated objective, consistent and sensitive assessment of the HD movement impairment.

Electromagnetic (EM) side-channel attacks aim at extracting secret information from cryptographic hardware implementations. Countermeasures have been proposed at device level, register-transfer level (RTL) and layout level, though efficient, there are still requirements for quantitative assessment of the hardware implementations’ resistance against EM side-channel attacks. In this paper, we propose a design for EM side-channel security evaluation and optimization framework based on the t-test evaluation results derived from RTL hardware implementations. Different implementations of the same cryptographic algorithm are evaluated under different hypothesis leakage models considering the driven capabilities of logic components, and the evaluation results are validated with side-channel attacks on FPGA platform. Experimental results prove the feasibility of the proposed side-channel leakage evaluation method at pre-silicon stage. The remedies and suggested security design rules are also discussed.

A number of jurisdictions across the world are committed to reducing their carbon emissions. A key route to decarbonisation is by raising the share of renewable generation. However, this will result in reduction of the system inertia and consequently deterioration of frequency stability. Fast acting reserve (FAR) is seen as a possible solution. Various approaches concerning the control of FAR (e.g. frequency gradient and frequency deviation based triggering) have previously been proposed. There is however a lack of clarity regarding the volume of FAR that can potentially compensates for reduction in system inertia. This paper carries out a quantitative assessment of FAR to limit the rate of change of frequency. All island power system of Ireland is adopted as a test case for analysis. The study concludes that FAR can mitigate the RoCoF and it presents also the quantitative relationship between FAR and conventional inertia which depends on system conditions.

Time-of-flight (TOF) Magnetic Resonance Angiography (MRA) and MR-T1 are the most commonly used imaging modalities in clinical diagnosis. Vascular extraction is of great significance for the computer-assisted diagnosis and treatment, where completeness, accuracy, and computation speed are the focused issues of vascular segmentation. Besides, it is very concerned that the lack of prior knowledge impacts the effectiveness of cerebral artery-vein (CA/CV) separation. In this paper, a high-efficient statistical method is proposed to cope with the challenges, where the aforementioned image modalities provide important functional and structural information. Our work contributes on following aspects: (1) For cerebrovascular segmentation, the Markov random field (MRF) of vascular direction vector is first employed for the statistical model to segment TOF-MRA, which greatly improves traditional MRF model with optimal space restraints and well avoids structure confusion in region of low contrast and weak vessel illuminance. (2) The cerebral priori knowledge (w.r.t. vessel and tissues) is explored via TOF-MRA and MR-T1 data, then a morphological algorithm is proposed to automate CA/CV separation. We employ public datasets from MIDAS for qualitative and quantitative assessment. The Dice similarity coefficient of cerebrovascular segmentation is 0.928, as well as the agreement of CA/CV separation results is 0.972.

This paper develops an approach based on deep learning for the classifications of a common critical type of bone fractures, namely proximal femur. The performance of the state-of-the-art deep learning architecture, DenseNet, is investigated along with a recently introduced loss function, focal loss, to address the problem of imbalanced classes. Quantitative assessment is carried out on a real dataset consisting of 1347 X-ray images. Results demonstrate that the proposed deep learning approach utilizing focal loss show better performance for the fracture detection case and comparable results for the classification scenarios.

In this paper, we present the quantitative results of a spectrum measurement campaign for the UHF TV band (470 -698 MHz) in the western segment of the Philippine Nautical Highway System (PNHS). The PNHS, also known as the Road Roll-On/Roll-Off Terminal System (RRTS) or Ro-Ro System, is an integrated linkage of inland highways and ferry routes forming a nationwide vehicle transport system in the Philippines that served approximately 77 million passengers in 2018. We used a portable spectrum measurement equipment to gather data in fixed inland, mobile inland, and mobile maritime environments of the Western Philippine Nautical Highway (W-PNH). To characterize and quantify white space, we adopted calculated thresholding using the 80% method (ITU-R SM.1753). We compare the results obtained from the field measurements to that of using the geo-location database approach (FCC method). A discussion on the implication of the available TV spectrum to maritime vehicular communication and pertinent supporting policy formulation in the Philippine settings is also provided.

An improved fuzzy synthetic evaluation(FSE) method is presented for quantitative assessment of health state of satellites' attitude control system(ACS), including dimensionless handling of specified characteristic parameters(CPs), the assessment based on rules and common fuzzy synthetic evaluation. The calculation example shows the improved FSE is reasonable and has practical value for satellite health management.

Metal artifact reduction (MAR) methods are continuously used for minimizing artifacts in Computed Tomography (CT/CAT scans) and although they are largely used, there is a lack of suggestions to evaluate such methods (especially the interpolation-based ones). In this paper, we propose an approach for assessment of a MAR method based on interpolation techniques. We have used four interpolation techniques, evaluating their performances in two different scenarios: an artificial image simulation for quantitative assessment, and one real image for qualitative assessment. We have adopted the Sinogram Completion method, widely used for metal artifact reduction. The linear interpolation had presented better results in comparison to other interpolation techniques in both scenarios. The MAR method (Sinogram Completion) associated to the linear interpolation technique presents the most efficient results, which justifies the current researchers' interest in this particular technique.

In order to explore and promote the ability of self-supplied power plant to inteact with the power grid, this paper proposes a quantitative assessment method for the flexibility adjustment of self-provided power plants on the premise of considering energy efficiency and environmental protection. According to the power consumption of transferable load in each process, the production process of the enterprise to which the self-supplied power plant belongs is classified into multiple operating modes, and each mode corresponds to a source-load conversion matrix for characterizing the power flow relationship. Under the premise of considering energy efficiency and environmental protection, the adjustable load permeability and energy consumption function are used to construct a characteristic function describing each operating mode, so each mode tends to switch to a high-permeability and low-energy consumption operating mode. Furthermore, the state transition matrix is formed by solving the switching probability of the operating mode through the softmax algorithm. Taking the lowest cost of electricity as the goal, the optimal operating mode switching process is selected according to the state transition matrix. The flexibility evaluation index called integrated climbing rate in the switching process is solved by source-load conversion matrix, and the index changes in the same time scale are compared to conduct a flexibility assessment. The simulations done in Matlab verify that the flexibility assessment method based on state transition matrix can effectively explore the adjustment potential of multi-type self-supplied power plants.

Electric scooters are becoming a common form of transportation in large cities and on college campuses. These shared dockless scooters are seen as a sustainable and environmentally friendly mode of transportation for commute and recreational trips. As these scooters are gaining popularity, rider comfort will be an important performance measure for scooter companies. This research uses data from a three-axis accelerometer mounted on two scooter models - the MI M365 and Segway ES2 - to compare ride quality on a series of multi-use paths with a variety of pavement. The test route was comprised of four pavement types - asphalt, concrete, brick pavers, and permeable pavement. Results indicate that the MI M365 with pneumatic tires provided superior ride quality on all pavement types than the Segway ES2 with solid tires. A t-test conducted to test this hypothesis also revealed that the results were significant. For the MI M365, the ride quality on the four pavement types was noticeably indifferent for 20% of the time. For the remaining time, the permeable pavement provided slightly better ride quality than other surfaces.