Urdu text in natural scene images: a new dataset and preliminary text detection

Text detection in natural scene images for content analysis is an interesting task. The research community has seen some great developments for English/Mandarin text detection. However, Urdu text extraction in natural scene images is a task not well addressed. In this work, firstly, a new dataset is introduced for Urdu text in natural scene images. The dataset comprises of 500 standalone images acquired from real scenes. Secondly, the channel enhanced Maximally Stable Extremal Region (MSER) method is applied to extract Urdu text regions as candidates in an image. Two-stage filtering mechanism is applied to eliminate non-candidate regions. In the first stage, text and noise are classified based on their geometric properties. In the second stage, a support vector machine classifier is trained to discard non-text candidate regions. After this, text candidate regions are linked using centroid-based vertical and horizontal distances. Text lines are further analyzed by a different classifier based on HOG features to remove non-text regions. Extensive experimentation is performed on the locally developed dataset to evaluate the performance. The experimental results show good performance on test set images. The dataset will be made available for research use. To the best of our knowledge, the work is the first of its kind for the Urdu language and would provide a good dataset for free research use and serve as a baseline performance on the task of Urdu text extraction.

Improving Euclidean’s Consensus Degrees in Group Decision Making Problems Through a Uniform Extension

In a Group Decision Making problem, several people try to reach a single common decision by selecting one of the possible alternatives according to their respective preferences. So, a consensus process is performed in order to increase the level of accord amongst people, called experts, before obtaining the final solution. Improving the consensus degree as much as possible is a very interesting task in the process. In the evaluation of the consensus degree, the measurement of the distance representing disagreement among the experts’ preferences should be considered. Different distance functions have been proposed to implement in consensus models. The Euclidean distance function is one of the most commonly used. This paper analyzes how to improve the consensus degrees, obtained through the Euclidean distance function, when the preferences of the experts are slightly modified by using one of the properties of the Uniform distribution. We fulfil an experimental study that shows the betterment in the consensus degrees when the Uniform extension is applied, taking into account different number of experts and alternatives.

A new affinity matrix weighted k-nearest neighbors graph to improve spectral clustering accuracy

Researchers have thought about clustering approaches that incorporate traditional clustering methods and deep learning techniques. These approaches normally boost the performance of clustering. Getting knowledge from large data-sets is quite an interesting task. In this case, we use some dimensionality reduction and clustering techniques. Spectral clustering is gaining popularity recently because of its performance. Lately, numerous techniques have been introduced to boost spectral clustering performance. One of the most significant part of these techniques is to construct a similarity graph. We introduced weighted k-nearest neighbors technique for the construction of similarity graph. Using this new metric for the construction of affinity matrix, we achieved good results as we tested it both on real and artificial data-sets.

CATALYTIC TREATMENT OF SALINE EFFLUENTS

Процессы окисления органических и неорганических веществ занимают важное место в современной химии и технологии. Представляется естественным, что подобные процессы должны быть полифункциональными и высокоэффективными. Кроме того, весьма желательно, чтобы они происходили в достаточно мягких условиях – идеальными условиями (пока в большинстве случаев труднодостижимыми) являются атмосферное давление и комнатная температура. В настоящее время большинство процессов, используемых в промышленности, идут с достаточно высокой селективностью, и требуют для своего осуществления соответственно жестких условий (температура выше 100°С и повышенное давление). Более селективными и менее энергоемкими во многих случаях оказываются процессы, использующие в качестве окислителей связанный кислород (перманганаты, бихроматы, гипохлориты, различные пероксиды). Однако такие окислители находят применение только для малотоннажных продуктов, поскольку, как правило, достаточно дороги и дефицитны. Кроме того, их использование часто приводит к образованию не утилизируемых отходов. Поэтому реально в качестве окислителя для обезвреживания НДМГ, ДМА, метанола мы можем рассматривать только молекулярный кислород. Этот окислитель дешев, а единственными отходами процесса являются продукты окисления это вода, азот и СО2. Поэтому, поиск новых каталитических систем в этой области представляет собой важную и интересную задачу. Перспективным классом соединений, среди которых уже найдены подобные катализаторы, являются соединения переходных металлов, в частности, кобальта, никеля, меди, палладия и др. The processes of oxidation of organic and inorganic substances occupy an important place in modern chemistry and technology. It seems natural that such processes should be multifunctional and highly efficient. In addition, it is highly desirable that they occur in fairly mild conditions – the ideal conditions (while in most cases difficult to achieve) are atmospheric pressure and room temperature. Currently, most of the processes used in industry are carried out with a sufficiently high selectivity, and require correspondingly harsh conditions for their implementation (temperature above 100°C and increased pressure). In many cases, processes using bound oxygen as oxidants (permanganates, bichromates, hypochlorites, various peroxides) are more selective and less energy-intensive. However, such oxidizing agents are used only for low-tonnage products, since, as a rule, they are quite expensive and scarce. In addition, their use often leads to the formation of non-recyclable waste. Therefore, we can really consider only molecular oxygen as an oxidizer for the neutralization of NDMG, DMA, and methanol. This oxidizer is cheap, and the only waste products of the process are the oxidation products of water, nitrogen and CO2. Therefore, the search for new catalytic systems in this area is an important and interesting task. A promising class of compounds, among which similar catalysts have already been found, are compounds of transition metals, in particular, cobalt, nickel, copper, palladium, etc.

Property Rights to Land Plots in the Russian Federation and Great Britain: Dogmatic Approach against Pragmatism

Comparison of the phenomenon of property rights in two unrelated legal systems is an interesting task from the point of view of methodology. A simplifying factor is that English law in its origins was strongly influenced by Roman law, but developed apart from continental legal systems. As a result, using the same terminology in the field of property rights in the Russian Federation and Great Britain, different views have been formed on the nature of property rights to land plots. The paper analyzes the legal structures of real law in both countries and achieves the goal of clarifying the content of controversial terms and classifications existing in the real law of the Russian Federation; taking into account foreign experience the author determines the prospects for the development of domestic concepts of real and absolute rights. The admissibility of comparing property rights to land plots is predetermined by the use of similar legal techniques in both countries, as well as terminology borrowed from Roman law. The paper substantiates the thesis on the admissibility of using the analytical concept of law of W. N. Hochfeld as a comparative legal method of research. Fundamental differences in both legal systems will be in the idea of the object of property rights to land plots, the place of property rights in the classification of rights, in the structure and content of the corresponding legal relationship. Taking into account the analysis of the legal regulation of property rights to land plots in the two countries, theoretical provisions substantiate the conclusion about the need to preserve the idea of the absolute nature of property rights in domestic law.

Ways to improve procurement procedures through compliance

Compliance control is successfully applied in the practice of risk management and procurement activities of many global and some Russian companies, often working with foreign investments. This tool has demonstrated high results in the system of internal control of contract performers when conducting purchases for state and municipal needs. Taking into account that compliance control is a fairly new area of research in Russia, an urgent and interesting task is to study the theoretical aspects and mechanisms of this type of control by Russian companies on a par with other traditional forms of control and audit of public procurement at the level of organizations.

An Advanced Image Captioning using combination of CNN and LSTM

The Captioning of Image now a days is gaining a lot of interest which generates an automated simple and short sentence describing the image content. Machines indeed are trained in a way that they can understand the Image content and generate captions which are almost accurate at a human level of knowledge is a very tedious and interesting task. There are various solutions used to solve this tedious task and generate simple sentences known as captions using neural network which still comes with problems such as inaccurate captions, generating captions only for the seen images, etc. In this paper, the proposed system model was able to generate more precise captions using a two staged model which consists of a combination of Deep Neural Network algorithms (Convolutional and Long Short-Term Memory). The proposed model was able to overcome the problems arise using Traditional CNN and RNN algorithms. The model is trained and tested using the Flicker8k Data set.

INFLUENCE OF MAGNETIC CHARGE ON THE SAGNAC EFFECT IN THE BARDEEN SPACETIME

This paper investigates one of the most interesting effects associated with the rotation of astrophysical objects (the Sagnac effect). The effect was first confirmed in laboratory experiments by Georges Sagnac with a rotating ring interferometer in 1913. Later, the effect was also confirmed within the framework of the Earth in the "Around-the-World" experiment conducted by J. Hafele and R. Kitting, in which they twice circled the Earth with an atomic cesium clock on board and compared the "flying" clock with those remaining static on the Earth. As a result, a non-zero difference in the clock rate was found as a confirmation of the Sagnac effect. Subsequently, more precise satellite experiments have been carried out to measure the Sagnac effect within the Earth. The effect was also considered in general relativity and modified theories of gravity, where many works were carried out to study the influence of such parameters as angular momentum, cosmological constant, Ricci scalar, etc. on the Sagnac effect. An interesting task is to study the influence of a magnetic charge on the effect, since the solution with rotation described by a black hole with mass M and magnetic charge g is the Bardeen nonsingular black hole. The work will calculate the Sagnac effect in the space-time of the rotating Bardeen black hole for both geodesic and non-geodesic circular orbits of the light source / receiver (assuming that the light source and receiver are defined at the same point). Two types of circular orbits describe the opposing influence on the Sagnac effect: the Sagnac delay increases with an increase in the magnetic charge in the case of non-geodesic circular orbits and decreases in the case of geodesic circular orbits. However, the farther is the orbit of the light source / receiver, the less the magnetic charge affects the Sagnac delay. It is also assumed that the gravity of the Earth and the Sun near the surface is well described by the Bardeen metric.

Effect of Temperature and Flow Rate on the Cell-Free Area in the Microfluidic Channel

Blood cell manipulation in microdevices is an interesting task for the separation of particles, by their size, density, or to remove them from the buffer, in which they are suspended, for further analysis, and more. This study highlights the cell-free area (CFA) widening based on experimental results of red blood cell (RBC) flow, suspended in a microfluidic device, while temperature and flow rate incrementally modify RBC response within the microflow. Studies of human red blood cell flow, at a concentration of 20%, suspended in its autologous plasma and phosphate-buffered saline (PBS) buffer, were carried out at a wide flow rate, varying between 10 and 230 μL/min and a temperature range of 23 °C to 50 °C. The plotted measures show an increment in a CFA near the channel wall due to cell flow inertia after a constricted channel, which becomes more significant as temperature and flow rate increase. The temperature increment widened the CFA up to three times. In comparison, flow rate increment increased the CFA up to 20 times in PBS and 11 times in plasma.

Non-classical symmetry and analytic self-similar solutions for a non-homogenous time-fractional vector NLS system

The complex PDEs are a very important and interesting task in nonlinear quantum science. Although there have been extensive studies on the classical complex models, solving the fractional complex models still has a lot of shortcomings, especially for the non-homogenous ones. Therefore, the present study focuses on solving the two-component non-homogenous time-fractional NLS system, our method is to solve a prolonged fractional system derived from the governed model. We first establish non-classical symmetries of this new enlarged system by using the fractional Lie group method. Then, with the help of fractional Erdélyi–Kober operator, we reduce this new system into fractional ODEs, the self-similar solutions are obtained via the power series expansion. The convergence of these solutions are proven as all the variable coefficients are analytic. Finally, we generalize our methods to handle the multi-component case. We conclude that this way may also bring some convenience for solving other complex systems.