To document trends in land use and herbaceous production, 71 field sites sampled among cropped fields, fallow fields and rangelands in the Fakara region (Niger) were monitored from 1994 to 2006. The overall trend in land use confirmed the historical increase of the cropped areas since mid 20th century, at an annual rate of 2% from 1994 to 2006. This trend is the result of changes in the relativ...

R.Grimberg , M.L.Craus , A.Savin , R.Steigmann , M.Ruch 3 1 National Institute of Research and Development for Technical Physics, Iasi, Romania 2 Joint Institute for Nuclear Research, Dubna, Russia 3 CNEA, Buenos Aires, Argentina Abstract Zr 2.5%Nb alloys have wide utilization in nuclear energy engineering, being used at the fabrication of pressure tubes from Pressurized Heavy Water Reactors (P...

Standard OCR is a well-researched topic of computer vision and can be considered solved for machine-printed text. However, when applied to unconstrained images, the recognition rates drop drastically. Therefore, the employment of object recognition-based techniques has become state of the art in scene text recognition applications. This paper presents a scene text recognition method tailored to...

Facial attribute analysis in the real world scenario is very challenging mainly because of complex face variations. Existing works of analyzing face attributes are mostly based on the cropped and aligned face images. However, this result in the capability of attribute prediction heavily relies on the preprocessing of face detector. To address this problem, we present a novel jointly learned dee...

Sampling of the Fourier transforms of fingerprints is studied with neural networks to detect regions useful for their classification. Ring-wedge detector (RWD) is modified and simulated to sample such regions. The output of the detector is propagated through a three-layer feedforward-backpropagation neural network for checking the classification performance. Modified detector's performance is a...

An image and object search and retrieval algorithm is devised that combines colour and spatial information. Spatial characteristics are described in terms of Wiskott’s jets formulation, based on a set of Gabor wavelet functions at varying scales, orientations and locations. Colour information is first converted to a form more impervious to illumination colour change, reduced to 2D, and encoded ...

Land cover dynamic has to be taken into account to analyze changes in water resources, especially in vulnerable environment such as the Bani catchment in Mali. To study the land cover changes, we used NDVI AVHRR time series (1982-2006, 8 km spatial resolution), and monthly rainfall data from 65 stations. To interpret the NDVI trends in terms of land cover changes, we had to eliminate the inter-...