Flexible pavements are subjected to three main distress types: fatigue crack, thermal crack, and permanent deformation. Under severe climate conditions, thermal cracking particularly contributes largely to a considerable scale of premature deterioration of pavement infrastructure worldwide. This challenge is especially relevant for Europe, as weather conditions vary significantly throughout the year. Hydrated lime (HL) has been recognized as an effective additive to improve the mechanical properties of asphalt concrete for pavement applications. Previous research has found that a replacement of conventional limestone dust filler using hydrated lime at 2.5% of the total weight of aggregates generated an optimum improvement in the mec

In recent years, the performance of Spatial Data Infrastructures for governments and companies is a task that has gained ample attention. Different categories of geospatial data such as digital maps, coordinates, web maps, aerial and satellite images, etc., are required to realize the geospatial data components of Spatial Data Infrastructures. In general, there are two distinct types of geospatial data sources exist over the Internet: formal and informal data sources. Despite the growth of informal geospatial data sources, the integration between different free sources is not being achieved effectively. The adoption of this task can be considered the main advantage of this research. This article addresses the research question of ho

Biometrics represent the most practical method for swiftly and reliably verifying and identifying individuals based on their unique biological traits. This study addresses the increasing demand for dependable biometric identification systems by introducing an efficient approach to automatically recognize ear patterns using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Despite the widespread adoption of facial recognition technologies, the distinct features and consistency inherent in ear patterns provide a compelling alternative for biometric applications. Employing CNNs in our research automates the identification process, enhancing accuracy and adaptability across various ear shapes and orientations. The ear, being visible and easily captured in

Estimating the semantic similarity between short texts plays an increasingly prominent role in many fields related to text mining and natural language processing applications, especially with the large increase in the volume of textual data that is produced daily. Traditional approaches for calculating the degree of similarity between two texts, based on the words they share, do not perform well with short texts because two similar texts may be written in different terms by employing synonyms. As a result, short texts should be semantically compared. In this paper, a semantic similarity measurement method between texts is presented which combines knowledge-based and corpus-based semantic information to build a semantic network that repre

<p>In this paper, a simple color image compression system has been proposed using image signal decomposition. Where, the RGB image color band is converted to the less correlated YUV color model and the pixel value (magnitude) in each band is decomposed into 2-values; most and least significant. According to the importance of the most significant value (MSV) that influenced by any simply modification happened, an adaptive lossless image compression system is proposed using bit plane (BP) slicing, delta pulse code modulation (Delta PCM), adaptive quadtree (QT) partitioning followed by an adaptive shift encoder. On the other hand, a lossy compression system is introduced to handle the least significant value (LSV), it is based on

Fractal geometry is receiving increase attention as a quantitative and qualitative model for natural phenomena description, which can establish an active classification technique when applied on satellite images. In this paper, a satellite image is used which was taken by Quick Bird that contains different visible classes. After pre-processing, this image passes through two stages: segmentation and classification. The segmentation carried out by hybrid two methods used to produce effective results; the two methods are Quadtree method that operated inside Horizontal-Vertical method. The hybrid method is segmented the image into two rectangular blocks, either horizontally or vertically depending on spectral uniformity crit

Facial emotion recognition finds many real applications in the daily life like human robot interaction, eLearning, healthcare, customer services etc. The task of facial emotion recognition is not easy due to the difficulty in determining the effective feature set that can recognize the emotion conveyed within the facial expression accurately. Graph mining techniques are exploited in this paper to solve facial emotion recognition problem. After determining positions of facial landmarks in face region, twelve different graphs are constructed using four facial components to serve as a source for sub-graphs mining stage using gSpan algorithm. In each group, the discriminative set of sub-graphs are selected and fed to Deep Belief Network (DBN) f

Computer systems and networks are being used in almost every aspect of our daily life, the security threats to computers and networks have increased significantly. Usually, password-based user authentication is used to authenticate the legitimate user. However, this method has many gaps such as password sharing, brute force attack, dictionary attack and guessing. Keystroke dynamics is one of the famous and inexpensive behavioral biometric technologies, which authenticate a user based on the analysis of his/her typing rhythm. In this way, intrusion becomes more difficult because the password as well as the typing speed must match with the correct keystroke patterns. This thesis considers static keystroke dynamics as a transparent layer of t