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In this paper, a texture feature extraction method using local energy and local correlation of Gabor transformed images is proposed and applied to an image retrieval system. The Gabor wavelet is known to be similar to the response of the human visual system. The outputs of the Gabor transformation are robust to variants of object size and illumination. Due to such advantages, it has been actively studied in various fields such as image retrieval, classification, analysis, etc. In this paper, in order to fully exploit the superior aspects of Gabor wavelet, local energy and local correlation features are extracted from Gabor transformed images and then applied to an image retrieval system. Some experiments are conducted to compare the performance of the proposed method with those of the conventional Gabor method and the popular rotation-invariant uniform local binary pattern (RULBP) method in terms of precision vs recall. The Mahalanobis distance is used to measure the similarity between a query image and a database (DB) image. Experimental results for Corel DB and VisTex DB show that the proposed method is superior to the conventional Gabor method. The proposed method also yields precision and recall 6.58% and 3.66% higher on average in Corel DB, respectively, and 4.87% and 3.37% higher on average in VisTex DB, respectively, than the popular RULBP method.

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This study was designed to develop a microencapsulated, water-soluble isoflavone for application into milk and to examine the hypocholesterolemic effect of such a milk product in a rat diet. The coating material was medium-chain triglyceride (MCT) and the core material was water-soluble isoflavone. The microencapsulation efficiency was 70.2% when the ratio (w/w) of coating material to core material was 15:1. The isoflavone release from the microcapsules was 8% after 3-day storage at 40 degrees C. In in vitro study, 4.0-9.3% of water-soluble isoflavone in simulated gastric fluid was released in the pH range of 2 to 5 after 60 min incubation; however, in simulated intestinal fluid at pH 8, 87.6% of isoflavone was released from the capsules after 40 min incubation time. In sensory analysis, the scores of bitterness, astringency, and off-taste in the encapsulated isoflavone-added milk were slightly, but not significantly, different from those in uncapsulated, isoflavone-added milk. In blood analysis, total cholesterol was significantly decreased in the isoflavone-added group compared with that in the control after 6-week feeding. Therefore, this study confirmed the acceptability of MCT as a coating material in the microencapsulation of water-soluble isoflavone for application into milk, although a slight adverse effect was found in terms of sensory attributes. In addition, blood total cholesterol was lowered in rats which had been fed a cholesterol-reduced and microencapsulated, isoflavone-added milk for 6 weeks.

Green water load is an important parameter to be considered in designing a modern ship or offshore structures like FPSO and FSRU. In this research, a numerical simulation method for green water phenomenon is introduced. The Navier-Stokes equations and the continuity equation are used as governing equations. The equations are calculated using Finite Difference Method(FDM) in rectangular staggered grid system. To increase the numerical accuracy near the body, the Cartesian cut cell method is employed. The nonlinear free-surface during green water incident is defined by Marker-density method. The green waters on a box in regular waves are simulated. The simulation results are compared with other experimental and computational results for verification. To check the applicability to moving ship, the green water of the ship which is towed by uniform force in regular wave, is simulated. The ship is set free to heave and to surge.