Abstract:Face spoofing is considered to be one of the prominent threats to face recognition systems. However, in order to improve the security measures of such biometric systems against deliberate spoof attacks, liveness detection has received significant recent attention from researchers. For this purpose, analysis of facial skin texture properties becomes more popular because of its limited resource requirement and lower processing cost. The traditional method of skin analysis for liveness detection was to use Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and its variants. LBP descriptors are effective, but they may exhibit certain limitations in near uniform patterns. Thus, in this paper, we demonstrate the effectiveness of Local Ternary Pattern (LTP) as an alternative to LBP. In addition, we adopted Dynamic Local Ternary Pattern (DLTP), which eliminates the manual threshold setting in LTP by using Weber's law. The proposed method was tested rigorously on four facial spoof databases: three are public domain databases and the other is the Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM) face spoof database, which was compiled through this study. The results obtained from the proposed DLTP texture descriptor attained optimum accuracy and clearly outperformed the reported LBP and LTP texture descriptors.
This paper investigates the communication apprehension (CA) and a form of anxiety which affects the engineering undergraduates’ oral communicative skills in English and particularly in oral presentations. However, this study was mainly based on the research question to be investigated: What barriers prevail among undergraduates that handicap their successful language learning and oral communicative skills in English? This study used qualitative instruments for collecting data; the instruments used were included as semi-structured interviews with eight participants and two focus group discussion to explore the barriers among Pakistani undergraduates. The data were analyzed using content analysis of the gathered data. The results revealed that communication apprehension can cause the variety of barriers among undergraduates during oral presentation. The results provided positive insights to communication practitioners and language educators on the issues related to communication apprehension; therefore, certain measures need to be taken to surmount the identified barriers.
In recent years, the upturn demand of electricity and the generation of electrical power demand from fossil fuels are increasing day by day which results in environmental impacts on the atmosphere by greenhouse gases, and a high cost of electric power from these sources makes it unaffordable. The use of renewable energy sources can overcome this problem. Therefore, in this work, we present a solution by implementing the solar car parking lots. A detailed work has been done for solar car parking site selection and maximum solar electric power generation and its capacity effects with the shading of nearby trees and buildings by using the HelioScope online software developed by Folsom Labs. A detailed optimization and selection of car parking canopies are performed at different standard tilt angles to produce maximum solar photovoltaic energy, and it is analyzed that the monopitch canopy is the best to mount at solar car parking lots at a tilt angle of 10°. We have done a detailed economic analysis which shows that 14% electricity cost was offset by the installation of a solar car parking lot with 17% reduction in annual energy consumption from the grid at the proposed site. The total investment cost of the parking structure and the photovoltaic (PV) system can be paid back in 6-7 years.
This study reports new shape of meta-material array structures having electric and magnetic resonances designed for terahertz (THz) frequency band. The proposed structures exhibit left handed meta-material propertiesin THz frequency band. The introduced meta-material split ring resonators in this paper are constructed using a single loop of conducting wire strip printed over a very thin low permittivity polyimide dielectric substrate. The effective parameters like permeability and negative index are extracted from the simulated complex scattering parameters using direct retrieval method. Unloaded Qfactor is calculated for proposed terahertz metamaterial resonators. The proposed arrays are tested by loading different dielectric samples in order to confirm the testing capability. Significant shift in the transmission is observed. The reported array structures are novel in terms of their left handed behavior in THz frequencies. High values of Q-factor reported here, are suitable for near field sensing applications.
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