Autism is a challenging brain disorder affecting children at global and national scales. Applied behavior analysis is commonly conducted as an efficient medical therapy for children. This paper focused on one paradigm of applied behavior analysis, imitation, where children mimic certain lessons to enhance children’s social behavior and play skills. This paper introduces IMITASD, a practical monitoring assessment model designed to evaluate autistic children’s behaviors efficiently. The proposed model provides an efficient solution for clinics and homes equipped with mid-specification computers attached to webcams. IMITASD automates the scoring of autistic children’s videos while they imitate a series of lessons. The model integrates two core modules: attention estimation and imitation assessment. The attention module monitors the child’s position by tracking the child’s face and determining the head pose. The imitation module extracts a set of crucial key points from both the child’s head and arms to measure the similarity with a reference imitation lesson using dynamic time warping. The model was validated using a refined dataset of 268 videos collected from 11 Egyptian autistic children during conducting six imitation lessons. The analysis demonstrated that IMITASD provides fast scoring, takes less than three seconds, and shows a robust measure as it has a high correlation with scores given by medical therapists, about 0.9, highlighting its effectiveness for children’s training applications.

This paper aims to develop a GIS-based decision support system to help in improving the police personnel response to crimes. The system aids the police personnel to get critical spatial and non-spatial information. The system can identify the nearest police stations to the crime location, and also determine the shortest route from the selected police station to the crime location. Moreover, in case of the criminal escape, the system identifies the escape area and possible escape routes of the criminal, and the nearest police stations within the escape area. A geodatabase is designed to include data layers of major and minor roads, police stations and security centers. The development of the system is carried out using ArcGIS 10 with network analyst and spatial analyst extensions. ArcGIS provides its own application programming in the form of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) to build the user interface. Results show that the proposed system is useful in rapid response and criminal tracking.

Cyclical activities are basic characteristics of all living organisms. Neurobiologists have discovered that a single neuron often possesses membrane properties that are responsible for the generation of oscillations. When coupled with other neurons, oscillations with varying properties depending on the type of interconnection can be generated. Using synchronization and temporal correlation of these oscillations can cany out the tasks of pattern recognition of different objects. The speed of recognition depends on the speed of synchronization. In this paper, we propose evolutionary coupled neural oscillators to minimize the time of synchronization through the optimization of the neuron parameters by means of a genetic algorithm. The genetic algorithm, with its global search capability, finds the optimum neuron parameters through a fitness measure that reflects the correlation strength between oscillators. Thus avoiding the trial-and-error process of estimating the neuron parameters. The superiority of the method is demonstrated through an application of character recognition process.

This paper exploits the characteristics of both wavelet packet transform and singular values decomposition to propose a high capacity and robust watermarking technique. From the wavelet packets, the best wavelet sub-band, in the sense of evaluation metric, is found by using the particle swarm optimization algorithm to meet the requirements of imperceptibility and robustness of the watermarking algorithm. After the operation of particle swarm optimization, the watermark image can be embedded into the cover image, and the watermarked image is obtained. Intentional signal processing or malicious attacks are expected, and the watermarking algorithm is considered to keep the integrity for the media file. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can increase the capability to resist such attacks. Moreover, the watermarked image quality can be guaranteed based on the inherent characteristics of the singular values decomposition concept.