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This article presents an application of wavelet packet analysis to the features extraction part of an iris recognition system. An energy measure is used to identify the particular packets that carries discriminating information about the iris texture. Several different orthogonal wavelets are tested and a comparison to nonorthogonal analysis using Gabor wavelets is done. The experimental results show 100% correct classifications when applying the algorithm on an iris image database and the new algorithm is therefore an interesting alternative to Gabor based methods.

Background: Despite the increasing number of people requiring palliative care at home, there is limited evidence on how home-based palliative care is best practised. Aim: The aim of this participatory qualitative study is to determine the characteristics that contribute to brilliant home-based palliative care. Design: This study was inspired by the brilliance project – an initiative to explore how positive organisational scholarship in healthcare can be used to study brilliant health service management from the viewpoint of patients, families, and clinicians. The methodology of positive organisational scholarship in healthcare was combined with video-reflexive ethnography. Setting/participants: Home-based specialist palliative care services across two Australian states participated in the study. Clinicians were able to take part in the study at different levels. Pending their preference, this could involve video-recording of palliative care, facilitating and/or participating in reflexive sessions to analyse and critique the recordings, identifying the characteristics that contribute to brilliant home-based palliative care, and/or sharing the findings with others. Results: Brilliance in home-based palliative care is contingent on context and is conceptualised as a variety of actions, people, and processes. Care is more likely to be framed as brilliant when it is epitomised: anticipatory aptitude and action; a weave of commitment; flexible adaptability; and/or team capacity-building. Conclusion: This study is important because it verifies the characteristics of brilliant home-based palliative care. Furthermore, these characteristics can be adapted for use within other services.

Geodesic covering problems form a widely researched topic in graph theory. One such problem is geodetic problem introduced by Harary et al. [Math. Comput. Modelling, 1993, 17, 89-95]. Here we introduce a variation of the geodetic problem and call it strong edge geodetic problem. We illustrate how this problem is evolved from social transport networks. It is shown that the strong edge geodetic problem is NP-complete. We derive lower and upper bounds for the strong edge geodetic number and demonstrate that these bounds are sharp. We produce exact solutions for trees, block graphs, silicate networks and glued binary trees without randomization.

This paper presents an iris recognition system, based on a wavelet packet analysis using orthogonal wavelets. The identification of the different packets that carry discriminating information about the iris texture is carried out through an energy measure. Tests, conducted on a database of 149 high quality iris images show good robustness in relation to changes in illumination, blurring, optical axis deviation or local defects in the images.