Rocket borne instrumentation for the measurement of electron density—height profile in the ionosphere

The present paper describes the construction and working of a high frequency capacitance rocket payload for the measurement of electron concentration in the ionosphere, designed and fabricated mostly with indigenous components. This payload was flight-tested in the first and second Indian Centaure test rocket launched on 26-2-1969 and 7-12-1969 from Thumba Equatorial Rocket Launching Station. The paper also presents the calibration procedures and some of the preliminary results obtained from the first flight to show the capabilities of the instrument.     

Motion blur parameters estimation for image restoration

This paper deals with estimation of parameters for motion blurred images. The objectives are to estimate the length (L) and the blur angle (θ) of the given degraded image as accurately as possible so that the restoration performance can be optimised. Gabor filter is utilized to estimate the blur angle whereas a trained radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) estimates the blur length. Once these parameters are estimated the conventional restoration is performed. To validate the proposed scheme, simulation has been carried out on standard images as well as in real images subjected to different blur angles and lengths. The robustness of the scheme is also validated in noise situations of different strengths. In all situations, the results have been compared with standard schemes. It is in general observed that the proposed scheme outperforms its counterparts in terms of restoration parameters and visual quality.     

A mixed framework for transform domain Wyner–Ziv video coding

This paper presents a mixed framework based on an efficient intra key frame coding and an improved side information (SI) generation scheme in transform domain Wyner–Ziv (WZ) video coding. The performance of the WZ video coding strongly depends on the quality of the SI. The SI can be generated from the decoded key frames resulted from intra key frame video coding. The better the decoded key frames are the better would be the SI generation. In this paper, a Burrows–Wheeler transform (BWT) based intra-frame video coding is proposed to generate improved decoded key frames. Furthermore, an improved SI generation scheme with multilayer perceptron (MLP) is proposed. Comparative analysis with other standard techniques of WZ video coding reveals that the proposed scheme has better standing as compared to its counterparts in terms of both coding efficiency and improved perceptual quality.     

Disease control in a food chain model supplying alternative food

Necessity to find a non-chemical method of disease control is being increasingly felt due to its eco-friendly nature. In this paper the role of alternative food as a disease controller in a disease induced predator–prey system is studied. Stability criteria and the persistence conditions for the system are derived. Bifurcation analysis is done with respect to rate of infection. The main goal of this study is to show the non-trivial consequences of providing alternative food in a disease induced predator–prey system. Numerical simulation results illustrate that there exists a critical infection rate above which disease free system cannot be reached in absence of alternative food whereas supply of suitable alternative food makes the system disease free up to certain infection level. We have computed the disease free regions in various parametric planes. This study is aimed to introduce a new non-chemical method for controlling disease in a predator–prey system.