This book comprehensively covers the important efforts in improving the quality of images in visual cryptography (VC), with a focus on cases with gray scale images. It not only covers schemes in traditional VC and extended VC for binary secret images, but also the latest development in the analysis-by-synthesis approach. This book distinguishes itself from the existing literature in three ways. First, it not only reviews traditional VC for binary secret images, but also covers recent efforts in improving visual quality for gray scale secret images. Second, not only traditional quality measures are reviewed, but also measures that were not used for measuring perceptual quality of decrypted secret images, such as Radially Averaged Power Spectrum Density (RAPSD) and residual variance, are employed for evaluating and guiding the design of VC algorithms. Third, unlike most VC books following a mathematical formal style, this book tries to make a balance between engineering intuition and mathematical reasoning. All the targeted problems and corresponding solutions are fully motivated by practical applications and evaluated by experimental tests, while important security issues are presented as mathematical proof. Furthermore, important algorithms are summarized as pseudocodes, thus enabling the readers to reproduce the results in the book. Therefore, this book serves as a tutorial for readers with an engineering background as well as for experts in related areas to understand the basics and research frontiers in visual cryptography.

Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics, Volume 206, merges two long-running serials, Advances in Electronics and Electron Physics and Advances in Optical and Electron Microscopy. The series features extended articles on the physics of electron devices (especially semiconductor devices), particle optics at high and low energies, microlithography, image science, digital image processing, electromagnetic wave propagation, electron microscopy, and the computing methods used in all these domains.

This book focuses on non-GNSS positioning systems and approaches. Although it addresses both theoretical and practical aspects, the primary focus is on engineering practice. This is achieved by providing in-depth studies on a number of major topics such as tracking system architecture, link budget, system design, implementation, testing, and performance evaluation. It studies four positioning application cases in detail: covert vehicle tracking, horse racing, rowing, and tracking for field sports. Its comprehensive and systematic treatment of practical issues in wireless positioning makes the book particularly suitable for readers who are interested in learning about practical wireless positioning solutions. It will also benefit researchers, engineers and graduate students in fields such as positioning and navigation, geospatial engineering and telecommunications.

This book covers the state of the art in learning algorithms with an inclusion of semi-supervised methods to provide a broad scope of clustering and classification solutions for big data applications. Case studies and best practices are included along with theoretical models of learning for a comprehensive reference to the field. The book is organized into eight chapters that cover the following topics: discretization, feature extraction and selection, classification, clustering, topic modeling, graph analysis and applications. Practitioners and graduate students can use the volume as an important reference for their current and future research and faculty will find the volume useful for assignments in presenting current approaches to unsupervised and semi-supervised learning in graduate-level seminar courses. The book is based on selected, expanded papers from the Fourth International Conference on Soft Computing in Data Science (2018). Includes new advances in clustering and classification using semi-supervised and unsupervised learning; Address new challenges arising in feature extraction and selection using semi-supervised and unsupervised learning; Features applications from healthcare, engineering, and text/social media mining that exploit techniques from semi-supervised and unsupervised learning.

Elastomeric optics exploit light transparent, variable translucent, and reflective stretchable polymers to create novel strain-tunable optical elements and flexible multifunctional optical sheets. Optical sheets are thin, large-area polymer light guide structures that can be used to create a wide variety of passive light harvesting and illumination systems. The book introduces the theoretical principles of elastomeric optics and explores how simple and complex mechanically deformable optical devices can be designed and fabricated. The transmission of light through these optical components or waveguides depends on the selected materials, surface interface, geometric design, optical coupling of embedded micro-structures, and degree of device deformation. In addition to providing a technical foundation for building adaptable optics, the book seeks to inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers to develop innovative solutions far beyond anything imagined today.

This book highlights practical solutions for flight safety improvement techniques, which are currently the focus of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). It has become clear that, in order to rapidly and significantly improve flight safety, the integrated use of new aeronautical technologies is called for. Considering the size of the aviation fleet, its constant growth and the long service lives of aircraft, new technologies should be adapted both to cutting-edge air navigation systems and to those that have been used for over a decade. Concretely, the book discusses methodological approaches to the construction of ground and on-board avionics that make it possible to achieve improved flight safety using innovative new methods. The proposed approaches are illustrated with real-world examples of e.g. satellite-based navigation systems and enhanced ground proximity warning systems. The book is written for professionals involved in the development of avionics systems, as well as students, researchers and experts in the field of radiolocation, radio navigation and air traffic control, the book will support the development and modeling of radio technical complexes, as well as the analysis of complex radio technical systems.

This book fills in details that are often left out of modern books on the theory of antennas. The starting point is a discussion of some general principles that apply to all electronic systems and to antennas in particular. Just as time domain functions can be expanded in terms of sine waves using Fourier transforms, spatial domain functions can be expanded in terms of plane waves also using Fourier transforms, and K-space gain is the spatial Fourier transform of the aperture weighting function. Other topics discussed include the Discrete Fourier Transform (DFT) formulation of antenna gain and what is missing in this formulation, the effect of sky temperature on the often specified G/T ratio of antennas, sidelobe control using conventional and novel techniques, and ESA digital beamforming versus adaptive processing to limit interference. Presents content the author derived when first asked to evaluate the performance of an electronically scanned array under design with manufacturing imperfections and design limitations; Enables readers to understand the firm theoretical foundation of antenna gain even when they must start from well-known formulations rather than first principles; Explains in a straightforward manner the relationship between antenna gain and aperture area; Discusses the relationship between sidelobe control algorithms and aperture shape, how to take advantage of it, and what the penalties are; Shows the equivalence of Minimum-Variance, Distortionless Response (MVDR) and Space-Time Adaptive Processing (STAP) and how these algorithms can be used with ESA subarrays to mitigate interference.

An indispensable resource for the use of infrared thermography in industrial nondestructive testing

Machine vision, especially infrared thermography, provides industries with a more efficient and cost-effective method of detecting production flaws than traditional means of human inspection. The trend in industry today is toward inspecting and evaluating products in a nondestructive manner. For that purpose, infrared thermography has become a prime means of ensuring quality without damaging product. This comprehensive reference for professionals provides total coverage of infrared thermography inspection, theory, and practice in nondestructive testing (NDT).

Xavier Maldague provides a comprehensive introduction to Thermographic Nondestructive Testing (TNDT) and its current applications, followed by major sections on the fundamental concepts, passive and active thermography, and case studies in industry. A complementary package called IRNDT is available on the Internet for use with problems at the end of each chapter or as a tool for image processing. Detailed coverage includes:

• Introduction to thermal emission and heat transfer
• Infrared sensors and optics fundamentals
• Images and image analysis
• Experimental concepts
• Active thermography and quantitative analysis: pulsed, step, lockin, and vibrothermography
• Case studies in passive and active thermography

The book presents innovative scientific research works by academics, research scholars and students, presented at the 2017 International Conference on Energy, Materials and Information Technology at Amity University Jharkhand, India. It includes contributions on system solutions based on soft computing techniques, and covers innovative soft computing techniques and tools with advanced applications. A major focus of the book is on presenting interdisciplinary problems and how they can be solved using information technology, together with innovative connections to other disciplines. It also includes papers on cloud computing and WSN-related real-time research.

This book offers a detailed description of the histogram probabilistic multi-hypothesis tracker (H-PMHT), providing an accessible and intuitive introduction to the mathematical mechanics of H-PMHT as well as a definitive reference source for the existing literature on the method. Beginning with basic concepts, the authors then move on to address extensions of the method to a broad class of tracking problems. The latter chapters present applications using recorded data from experimental radar, sonar and video sensor systems. The book is supplemented with software that both furthers readers' understanding and acts as a toolkit for those who wish to apply the methods to their own problems.

This book highlights the latest research presented at the International Conference on Translational Medicine and Imaging (ICTMI) 2017. This event brought together the world's leading scientists, engineers and clinicians from a wide range of disciplines in the field of medical imaging. Bioimaging has continued to evolve across a wide spectrum of applications from diagnostics and personalized therapy to the mechanistic understanding of biological processes, and as a result there is ever-increasing demand for more robust methods and their integration with clinical and molecular data. This book presents a number of these methods.

This book provides a single-source reference to the state-of-the-art in logic synthesis. Readers will benefit from the authors' expert perspectives on new technologies and logic synthesis, new data structures, big data and logic synthesis, and convergent logic synthesis. The authors describe techniques that will enable readers to take advantage of recent advances in big data techniques and frameworks in order to have better logic synthesis algorithms.

This book presents novel research ideas and offers insights into radar system design, artificial intelligence and signal processing applications. Further, it proposes a new concept of antenna spatial polarization characteristics (SPC), suggesting that the antenna polarization is a function of the spatial direction and providing new ideas for radar signal processing (RSP) and anti-jamming. It also discusses the design of an advanced signal-processing algorithm, and proposes new polarimetric and anti-jamming methods using antenna inherent properties. The book helps readers discover the potential of radar information processing and improve its anti-interference and target identification ability. It is of interest to university researchers, radar engineers and graduate students in computer science and electronics who wish to learn the core principles, methods, algorithms, and applications of RSP.

This book discusses some research results for CMOS-compatible silicon-based optical devices and interconnections. With accurate simulation and experimental demonstration, it provides insights on silicon-based modulation, advanced multiplexing, polarization and efficient coupling controlling technologies, which are widely used in silicon photonics. Researchers, scientists, engineers and especially students in the field of silicon photonics can benefit from the book. This book provides valuable knowledge, useful methods and practical design that can be considered in emerging silicon-based optical interconnections and communications. And it also give some guidance to student how to organize and complete an good dissertation.

This book presents cutting-edge research on various ways to bridge the semantic gap in image and video analysis. The respective chapters address different stages of image processing, revealing that the first step is a future extraction, the second is a segmentation process, the third is object recognition, and the fourth and last involve the semantic interpretation of the image. The semantic gap is a challenging area of research, and describes the difference between low-level features extracted from the image and the high-level semantic meanings that people can derive from the image. The result greatly depends on lower level vision techniques, such as feature selection, segmentation, object recognition, and so on. The use of deep models has freed humans from manually selecting and extracting the set of features. Deep learning does this automatically, developing more abstract features at the successive levels. The book offers a valuable resource for researchers, practitioners, students and professors in Computer Engineering, Computer Science and related fields whose work involves images, video analysis, image interpretation and so on.

This book presents recent research on the hybridization of intelligent methods, which refers to combining methods to solve complex problems. It discusses hybrid approaches covering different areas of intelligent methods and technologies, such as neural networks, swarm intelligence, machine learning, reinforcement learning, deep learning, agent-based approaches, knowledge-based system and image processing. The book includes extended and revised versions of invited papers presented at the 6th International Workshop on Combinations of Intelligent Methods and Applications (CIMA 2016), held in The Hague, Holland, in August 2016. The book is intended for researchers and practitioners from academia and industry interested in using hybrid methods for solving complex problems.

Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics, Volume 204, merges two long-running serials, Advances in Electronics and Electron Physics and Advances in Optical and Electron Microscopy. The series features extended articles on the physics of electron devices (especially semiconductor devices), particle optics at high and low energies, microlithography, image science, and digital image processing, electromagnetic wave propagation, electron microscopy, and the computing methods used in all these domains.

This book investigates the physical layer aspects of high-speed transmission on twisted-pair copper wires, where the most performance-critical components are multi-input multi-output (MIMO) precoding and multi-line spectrum optimization as well as optimized scheduling of the transmission time slots on the fiber to the distribution point (FTTdp) copper link. The book brings theoretical results into the implementation, which requires the introduction of realistic channel models and more practical implementation constraints as found in the copper access network. A good understanding of the transmission medium, twisted-pair telephone cable bundles is the basis for this work. Starting from the analysis of measurement data from twisted-pair cable bundles at high frequencies, it presents a MIMO channel model for the FTTdp network, which allows the characteristic effects of high-frequency transmission on copper cable bundles in simulation to be reproduced and the physical layer transmission methods on the copper channels to be analyzed and optimize. The book also presents precoding optimization for more general power constraints and implementation constraints. The maximization of data rate in a transmission system such as G.fast or VDSL is a combinatorial problem, as the rate is a discrete function of the number of modulated bits. Applying convex optimization methods to the problem offers an efficient and effective solution approach that is proven to operate close to the capacity of the FTTdp channel. In addition to higher data rates, low power consumption is another important aspect of the FTTdp network, as it requires many access nodes that are supplied with power from the subscriber side over the twisted- pair copper wires. Discontinuous operation is a method of quickly adding and removing lines from the precoding group. To implement this, the system switches between different link configurations over time at a high frequency. The transmission times of all lines are jointly optimized with respect to the current rate requirements. Discontinuous operation is used to save power, but also makes it possible to further increase the data rates, taking the current subscriber traffic requirements into account. These methods are compared with theoretical upper bounds, using realistic channel models and conditions of a system implementation. The performance analysis provides deeper insights into implementation complexity trade-offs and the resulting gap to channel capacity.

This book provides information regarding spectrum sharing between wireless systems, motivated by emerging new technologies. Readers will benefit from information about how to conduct research on the interference mitigation between IMT-Advanced and FSS. The author presents a deterministic analysis for interference to noise ratio (I/N), adjacent channel interference ratio (ACIR), field strength, and path loss propagation, in order to determine the separation distances in the co-channel interference (CCI) and adjacent channel Interference (ACI) scenarios. An analytical model is discussed, for the shielding mitigation technique based on the deterministic analysis of the propagation model. The shielding technique has been developed based on test bed measurements for evaluating the attenuation of the proposed materials. Matlab (TM) and Transfinite Visualyse Pro (TM) have been used as simulation tools for the verification of the obtained results, whereas the IMT-Advanced parameters have been represented by Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) 802.16e.

This thesis reports on sparsity-based multipath exploitation methods for through-the-wall radar imaging. Multipath creates ambiguities in the measurements provoking unwanted ghost targets in the image. This book describes sparse reconstruction methods that are not only suppressing the ghost targets, but using multipath to one's advantage. With adopting the compressive sensing principle, fewer measurements are required for image reconstruction as compared to conventional techniques. The book describes the development of a comprehensive signal model and some associated reconstruction methods that can deal with many relevant scenarios, such as clutter from building structures, secondary reflections from interior walls, as well as stationary and moving targets, in urban radar imaging. The described methods are evaluated here using simulated as well as measured data from semi-controlled laboratory experiments.

The scope of image processing and recognition has broadened due to the gap in scientific visualization. Thus, new imaging techniques have developed, and it is imperative to study this progression for optimal utilization. Big Data Analytics for Satellite Image Processing and Remote Sensing is a critical scholarly resource that examines the challenges and difficulties of implementing big data in image processing for remote sensing and related areas. Featuring coverage on a broad range of topics, such as distributed computing, parallel processing, and spatial data, this book is geared towards scientists, professionals, researchers, and academicians seeking current research on the use of big data analytics in satellite image processing and remote sensing.

This clearly written thesis discusses the development of a highly innovative single-photon source that uses active optical switching, known as multiplexing, to increase the probability of delivering photons into a single mode. Improving single-photon sources is critical in advancing the state of the art in photonic quantum technologies for information processing and communications.

Advances in Imaging and Electron Physics, Volume 200, the latest release in a series that merges two long-running serials, Advances in Electronics and Electron Physics and Advances in Optical and Electron Microscopy features extended articles on the physics of electron devices (especially semiconductor devices), particle optics at high and low energies, microlithography, image science, digital image processing, electromagnetic wave propagation, electron microscopy, and computing methods. Topics in this latest release include Past and Present Attempts to Attain the Resolution Limit of the Transmission Electron Microscope, Phase Plates for Transmission Electron Microscopy, and X-Ray Lasers in Biology: Structure and Dynamics.