Earticle

The majority of the iris recognition algorithms available in the literature were developed to operate on near infrared images. A desirable feature of iris recognition systems with reduced constraints such as potential operability on commonly available hardware is to work with images acquired under visible wavelength. Unlike in near infrared images, in colour iris images the pigment melanin present in the iris tissue causes the appearance of reflections, which are one of the major noise factors present in colour iris images. In this paper we present an iris recognition system which is able to cope with noisy colour iris images by employing score level fusion between different channels of the iris image. The robustness of the proposed approach is tested on three colour iris images datasets, ranging from images captured with professional cameras in both constrained environment and less cooperative scenario, and finally to iris images acquired with a mobile phone.

The Harmony Search is a relatively new meta-heuristic algorithm for continuous optimization, in which its concept imitates the process of music improvisation. This paper proposes an improved harmony search algorithm called Harmony Search with Adaptive Pitch Adjustment (HSAPA). The adaptive pitch adjustment scheme during a search period is inspired from the velocity clamping in particle swarm optimizations. The pitch adjustment rate is also dynamically adapted. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using thirteen well-known benchmark functions of various characteristics. The experiment is performed using both 30 and 100 dimensions to investigate its performance at both medium and high number of decision variables. The experimental results demonstrate that HSAPA is reliably superior to all prior well-known harmony search variants and a recent widely-accepted variant of Differential Evolution algorithm. Furthermore, performance of HSAPA is shown not to be sensitive to its new parameter, which regulates the size of pitch adjustment.

The paper presents successful experiments on combining two speaker recognition methods into a hybrid system. The rst branch of recognition is an innovative approach based on discrete wavelet-Fourier transform. The second one is classic, based on HTK and classication into voice and unvoice segments. The hybrid solution outperforms both on a small test set. Further tests of this soultion will be conducted and reported.

Dynamicity in the data sharing has resulted in resource usage being more and more distributed and more open in nature. The need for problem solving and the distributed nature of data has resulted in the development of grid environment. Authentication is the first step of security requirement for any grid environment to validate the user. This paper proposes an authentication method which is depends on the password and the user ID along with the biometric data of the user and the geographic position of the user. The same biometric and position data used for authentication can be used for authorization purposes so as to reduce the cost and time of storing different data for different purposes. A Four-Factor based Privacy Preserving Biometric (4F2PB) authentication scheme for a grid environment is proposed which can work on the existing Network Framework. The proposed authentication scheme optimises the security required for the entry level user and prevents malicious user from entering into the grid environment.

Current knowledge management focus on knowledge acquisition, storage, retrieval and maintenance. E-Learning systems technology today is used primarily to handcraft training courses about carefully selected topics for delivery to employees registered for those courses. Knowledge management is used to rapidly capture, organize and deliver large amounts of corporate knowledge. This paper investigates the integration of e-Learning systems and Knowledge Management technology to improve the capture, organization and delivery of both traditional training courses and large amounts of corporate knowledge. First, a model is proposed for the phases of knowledge management. That model is then enhanced with concepts and technology from e-Learning. The model is then used to illustrate real world scenarios that add increasing amounts of knowledge management to an e-Learning environment. Analysis of these four scenarios will help to better understand the practical relationship between knowledge management and e-Learning systems.

Floating Point (FP) arithmetic is widely used in large set of scientific and signal processing computation. Adder/subtractor is one of the common arithmetic operation in these computation. The design of FP adder/subtractor is relatively complex than other FP arithmetic operations. This paper has shown an efficient implementation of adder/subtractor module on a reconfigurable plat-form, which is both area as well as performance optimal. The proposed design has optimized the individual complex components of adder module (like dynamic shifter, leading one detector (LOD), priority encoder), to achieve the better overall implementation. Comparison with the best reported work has been shown in the paper, which proves the merits of proposed design.