This volume comprises of 21 selected chapters, including two overview chapters devoted to abdominal imaging in clinical applications supported computer aided diagnosis approaches as well as different techniques for solving the pectoral muscle extraction problem in the preprocessing part of the CAD systems for detecting breast cancer in its early stage using digital mammograms. The aim of this book is to stimulate further research in medical imaging applications based algorithmic and computer based approaches and utilize them in real-world clinical applications. The book is divided into four parts, Part-I: Clinical Applications of Medical Imaging, Part-II: Classification and clustering, Part-III: Computer Aided Diagnosis (CAD) Tools and Case Studies and Part-IV: Bio-inspiring based Computer Aided diagnosis techniques.

Optical communications involves the transmission of information via optical fibres. Since the use of optical fibres for information transmission became widespread during the 1980s, the pace of technological advances in this area has been astounding. This second edition has been completely updated and revised throughout to reduce much of the mathematics, and to focus on those specific optical technologies that have emerged since the first edition. It presents new material on critical topics in the field, such as digital communications, fibre optics and lightwave networks. The text also integrates both fibre and space optics and emphasizes the systems aspects of optical communications.

This book shows how to develop efficient quantitative methods to characterize neural data and extra information that reveals underlying dynamics and neurophysiological mechanisms. Written by active experts in the field, it contains an exchange of innovative ideas among researchers at both computational and experimental ends, as well as those at the interface. Authors discuss research challenges and new directions in emerging areas with two goals in mind: to collect recent advances in statistics, signal processing, modeling, and control methods in neuroscience; and to welcome and foster innovative or cross-disciplinary ideas along this line of research and discuss important research issues in neural data analysis. Making use of both tutorial and review materials, this book is written for neural, electrical, and biomedical engineers; computational neuroscientists; statisticians; computer scientists; and clinical engineers.

This book introduces low-noise and low-power design techniques for phase-locked loops and their building blocks. It summarizes the noise reduction techniques for fractional-N PLL design and introduces a novel capacitive-quadrature coupling technique for multi-phase signal generation. The capacitive-coupling technique has been validated through silicon implementation and can provide low phase-noise and accurate I-Q phase matching, with low power consumption from a super low supply voltage. Readers will be enabled to pick one of the most suitable QVCO circuit structures for their own designs, without additional effort to look for the optimal circuit structure and device parameters.

* Focuses only on elastic lidars and directly related topics.
* Evaluates all of the major inversion and analysis methods.
* Covers an emerging field that is generating a lot of interest.

A comprehensive examination of free electron lasers, designed to serve both as a tutorial text and a reference work to the field. Coverage includes incoherent undulator radiation, coherent emission sideband instabilities, coherent harmonic radiation and optical guiding.

The book, 'Laser Physics and Technology', addresses fundamentals of laser physics, representative laser systems and techniques, and some important applications of lasers. The present volume is a collection of articles based on some of the lectures delivered at the School on 'Laser Physics and Technology' organized at Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology during March, 12-30, 2012. The objective of the School was to provide an in-depth knowledge of the important aspects of laser physics and technology to doctoral students and young researchers and motivate them for further work in this area. In keeping with this objective, the fourteen chapters, written by leading Indian experts, based on the lectures delivered by them at the School, provide along with class room type coverage of the fundamentals of the field, a brief review of the current status of the field. The book will be useful for doctoral students and young scientists who are embarking on a research in this area as well as to professionals who would be interested in knowing the current state of the field particularly in Indian context.

Infrared Thermography in the Evaluation of Aerospace Composite Materials: Infrared Thermography to Composites provides an update on infrared thermography, a fast and reliable method for non-destructive evaluation of composite materials used in the aerospace field. The book describes composites and the main problems that can arise both during manufacturing and when in service, and then covers different thermographic non-destructive testing and evaluation techniques, including pulse thermography, lock-in thermography, and pulse phase. Each technique includes key examples and relevant references, with sections devoted to the usefulness of an infrared imaging device to monitor the behavior of a material under load, such as impact and bending. The book also includes discussions on standards, personnel certification, and training.

This book describes grouping detection and initiation; group initiation algorithm based on geometry center; data association and track continuity; as well as separate-detection and situation cognition for group-target. It specifies the tracking of the target in different quantities and densities. At the same time, it integrates cognition into the application. Group-target Tracking is designed as a book for advanced-level students and researchers in the area of radar systems, information fusion of multi-sensors and electronic countermeasures. It is also a valuable reference resource for professionals working in this field.

This book discusses efficient prediction techniques for the current state-of-the-art High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, focusing on the compression of a wide range of video signals, such as 3D video, Light Fields and natural images. The authors begin with a review of the state-of-the-art predictive coding methods and compression technologies for both 2D and 3D multimedia contents, which provides a good starting point for new researchers in the field of image and video compression. New prediction techniques that go beyond the standardized compression technologies are then presented and discussed. In the context of 3D video, the authors describe a new predictive algorithm for the compression of depth maps, which combines intra-directional prediction, with flexible block partitioning and linear residue fitting. New approaches are described for the compression of Light Field and still images, which enforce sparsity constraints on linear models. The Locally Linear Embedding-based prediction method is investigated for compression of Light Field images based on the HEVC technology. A new linear prediction method using sparse constraints is also described, enabling improved coding performance of the HEVC standard, particularly for images with complex textures based on repeated structures. Finally, the authors present a new, generalized intra-prediction framework for the HEVC standard, which unifies the directional prediction methods used in the current video compression standards, with linear prediction methods using sparse constraints. Experimental results for the compression of natural images are provided, demonstrating the advantage of the unified prediction framework over the traditional directional prediction modes used in HEVC standard.

This book introduces a completely novel architecture that can relax the trade-off existing today between noise, power and area consumption in a very suitable solution for advanced wireless communication systems. Through the combination of charge-domain operation with incremental signaling, this architecture gives the best of both worlds, providing the reduced area and high portability of digital-intensive architectures with an improved out-of-band noise performance given by intrinsic noise filtering capabilities. Readers will be enabled to design higher performance radio front-ends that consume less power and area, especially with respect to the transmitter and power amplifier designs, considered by many the "battery killers" on most mobile devices.

This book presents vehicular ad-hoc networks (VANETs) from the their onset, gradually going into technical details, providing a clear understanding of both theoretical foundations and more practical investigation. The editors gathered top-ranking authors to provide comprehensiveness and timely content; the invited authors were carefully selected from a list of who's who in the respective field of interest: there are as many from Academia as from Standardization and Industry sectors from around the world. The covered topics are organized around five Parts starting from an historical overview of vehicular communications and standardization/harmonization activities (Part I), then progressing to the theoretical foundations of VANETs and a description of the day-one standard-compliant solutions (Part II), hence going into details of vehicular networking and security (Part III) and to the tools to study VANETs, from mobility and channel models, to network simulators and field trial methodologies (Part IV), and finally looking into the future of VANETs by investigating alternative, complementary communication technologies, innovative networking paradigms and visionary applications (Part V). The way the content is organized, with a differentiated level of technical details, makes the book a valuable reference for a large pool of target readers ranging from undergraduate, graduate and PhD students, to wireless scientists and engineers, to service providers and stakeholders in the automotive, ITS, ICT sectors.

This book covers various algorithmic developments in the perfect reconstruction cosine/sine-modulated filter banks (TDAC-MDCT/MDST or MLT, MCLT, low delay MDCT, complex exponential/cosine/sine-modulated QMF filter banks), and near-perfect reconstruction QMF banks (pseudo-QMF banks) in detail, including their general mathematical properties, matrix representations, fast algorithms and various methods to integer approximations being recently a new transform technology for lossless audio coding. Each chapter will contain a number of examples and will conclude with problems and exercises. The book reflects the research efforts/activities and achieved results of the authors in the time period over the last 20 years.

A textbook for elementary optical design that treats lasers, modulators, and scanners as part of the design process. Moves from the simplest concepts in optics to a basic understanding of ray tracing in optical systems, the components of those systems, and the process by which a design is produced. Features numerous problems, examples, and figures.

This book focuses on optical fiber sensing and structural health monitoring technologies. It provides detailed information on the basic theory of F-P optical fiber sensors, fiber Bragg grating sensors, fiber laser grating sensors and fully distributed optical fiber sensors. Drawing on the authors' research achievements and many years of practical experience in the field of engineering structure health monitoring, the book elaborates on the structural principle, design and manufacture of optical fiber sensors and monitoring technologies, and briefly describes advances made with regard to multiple engineering structures.

The propagation of light in 'dense media' where dipole-dipole interactions play a role is a fundamental topic that was first studied in the work of Clausius, Mossotti, Lorenz and Lorentz in the latter half of the nineteenth century. However, until recently there remained some areas of controversy: for example, whereas the Lorentz model for a gas predicts a resonance shift, a discrete dipole model does not. This thesis makes the first combined measurement of both the Lorentz shift and the associated collective Lamb shift. This clear experimental result stimulated new theoretical work that has significantly advanced our understanding of light propagation in interacting media.

This work is motivated by the ongoing open question of how information in the outside world is represented and processed by the brain. Consequently, several novel methods are developed. A new mathematical formulation is proposed for the encoding and decoding of analog signals using integrate-and-fire neuron models. Based on this formulation, a novel algorithm, significantly faster than the state-of-the-art method, is proposed for reconstructing the input of the neuron. Two new identification methods are proposed for neural circuits comprising a filter in series with a spiking neuron model. These methods reduce the number of assumptions made by the state-of-the-art identification framework, allowing for a wider range of models of sensory processing circuits to be inferred directly from input-output observations. A third contribution is an algorithm that computes the spike time sequence generated by an integrate-and-fire neuron model in response to the output of a linear filter, given the input of the filter encoded with the same neuron model.

This book provides fresh insights into the cutting edge of multimedia data mining, reflecting how the research focus has shifted towards networked social communities, mobile devices and sensors. The work describes how the history of multimedia data processing can be viewed as a sequence of disruptive innovations. Across the chapters, the discussion covers the practical frameworks, libraries, and open source software that enable the development of ground-breaking research into practical applications. Features: reviews how innovations in mobile, social, cognitive, cloud and organic based computing impacts upon the development of multimedia data mining; provides practical details on implementing the technology for solving real-world problems; includes chapters devoted to privacy issues in multimedia social environments and large-scale biometric data processing; covers content and concept based multimedia search and advanced algorithms for multimedia data representation, processing and visualization.

This book highlights recent research advances in unsupervised learning using natural computing techniques such as artificial neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, swarm intelligence, artificial immune systems, artificial life, quantum computing, DNA computing, and others. The book also includes information on the use of natural computing techniques for unsupervised learning tasks. It features several trending topics, such as big data scalability, wireless network analysis, engineering optimization, social media, and complex network analytics. It shows how these applications have triggered a number of new natural computing techniques to improve the performance of unsupervised learning methods. With this book, the readers can easily capture new advances in this area with systematic understanding of the scope in depth. Readers can rapidly explore new methods and new applications at the junction between natural computing and unsupervised learning. Includes advances on unsupervised learning using natural computing techniques Reports on topics in emerging areas such as evolutionary multi-objective unsupervised learning Features natural computing techniques such as evolutionary multi-objective algorithms and many-objective swarm intelligence algorithms

X-ray computed tomography has been used for several decades as a tool for measuring the three-dimensional geometry of the internal organs in medicine. However, in recent years, we have seen a move in manufacturing industries for the use of X-ray computed tomography; first to give qualitative information about the internal geometry and defects in a component, and more recently, as a fully-quantitative technique for dimensional and materials analysis. This trend is primarily due to the ability of X-ray computed tomography to give a high-density and multi-scale representation of both the external and internal geometry of a component, in a non-destructive, non-contact and relatively fast way. But, due to the complexity of X-ray computed tomography, there are remaining metrological issues to solve and the specification standards are still under development. This book will act as a one-stop-shop resource for students and users of X-ray computed tomography in both academia and industry. It presents the fundamental principles of the technique, detailed descriptions of the various components (hardware and software), current developments in calibration and performance verification and a wealth of example applications. The book will also highlight where there is still work to do, in the perspective that X-ray computed tomography will be an essential part of Industry 4.0.

This book investigates the functional adequacy as well as the affective impression made by feedback messages on mobile devices. It presents an easily adoptable experimental setup to examine context effects on various feedback messages and applies it to auditory, tactile and auditory-tactile feedback messages. This approach provides insights into the relationship between the affective impression and functional applicability of these messages as well as an understanding of the influence of unimodal components on the perception of multimodal feedback messages. The developed paradigm can also be extended to investigate other aspects of context and used to investigate feedback messages in modalities other than those presented. The book uses questionnaires implemented on a Smartphone, which can easily be adopted for field studies to broaden the scope even wider. Finally, the book offers guidelines for the design of system feedback.

The Proceedings of The Third International Conference on Communications, Signal Processing and Systems provides the state-of-art developments of Communications, Signal Processing and Systems. The conference covered such topics as wireless communications, networks, systems, signal processing for communications. This book is a collection of contributions coming out of Third International Conference on Communications, Signal Processing and Systems held on July 2014 in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China.

This book focuses on a research field that is rapidly emerging as one of the most promising ones for the global optics and photonics community: the "lab-on-fiber" technology. Inspired by the well-established "lab on-a-chip" concept, this new technology essentially envisages novel and highly functionalized devices completely integrated into a single optical fiber for both communication and sensing applications. Based on the R&D experience of some of the world's leading authorities in the fields of optics, photonics, nanotechnology, and material science, this book provides a broad and accurate description of the main developments and achievements in the lab-on-fiber technology roadmap, also highlighting the new perspectives and challenges to be faced. This book is essential for scientists interested in the cutting-edge fiber optic technology, but also for graduate students.