BACKGROUND Case reports of human rights violations have focused on individuals' experiences. Population-based quantification of associations between rights indicators and health outcomes is rare and has not been documented in eastern Burma. OBJECTIVE We describe the association between mortality and morbidity and the household-level experience of human rights violations among internally displ...

Acoustic-to-seismic (A/S) coupling–based mine detection is based on the ability of sound to penetrate the ground and excite resonances in buried compliant objects [1]. Sound produced in the air efficiently couples into the first 0.5 m of the soil because of the porous nature of weathered ground resulting in acoustic vibrations that are sensitive to the presence of buried mines. This phenomenon ...

This paper introduces a cepstral approach for the automatic detection of landmines and underground utilities from acoustic and ground penetrating radar (GPR) images. This approach is based on treating the problem as a pattern recognition problem. Cepstral features are extracted from a group of images, which are transformed first to 1-D signals by lexicographic ordering. Mel-frequency cepstral c...

Vertebrates aim their noses at regions of interest and sniff in order to acquire olfactory trace signals that carry information on food, reproduction, kinship, danger, etc. Invertebrates likewise position antennae in the surrounding fluid to acquire such signals. Some of the fluid dynamics of these natural sensing processes has been examined piecemeal, but the overall topic of sniffing is not w...

Antipersonnel mines infest fields all over the world. According to recent estimates, landmines are killing and maiming more than 2,000 innocent civilians per month. The problem of landmine detection and removal requires the cooperation of a number of engineering fields, which in turn poses a need for new technologies, such as improved sensors, efficient manipulators and mobile robots. This pape...

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 Article history: Received 16 January 2008 Received in revised form 1 October 2008 Accepted 30 October 2009 Available online xxxx

Feature-level sensor fusion is the process where specific information (i.e. features) from objects detected by different sensors are combined and classified. This paper focuses on the feature-level fusion procedure for a sensor combination consisting of a polarimetric infrared (IR) imaging sensor and a GPR: a video impulse radar (VIR). The single sensor detection methods and the featurelevel se...