We propose orthogonal Fourier-Mellin moments, which are more suitable than Zernike moments, for scaleand rotation-invariant pattern recognition. The new orthogonal radial polynomials have more zeros than do the Zernike radial polynomials in the region of small radial distance. The orthogonal Fourier-Mellin moments may be thought of as generalized Zernike moments and orthogonalized complex moments. For small images, the description by the orthogonal Fourier-Mellin moments is better than that by the Zernike moments in terms of image-reconstruction errors and signal-to-noise ratio. Experimental results are shown.

"Serious Games" is a unique industry that is concerned with the training/ learning performance assessment of its clients. It is one of three digital technology industries (along with digital games, and online learning) that are rapidly advancing into the arena of analytics. The analytics from these industries all came from the tracing of user-generated data as they interacted with the systems, but differed from one another in the primary purposes for such analytics. For example, the purpose of game analytics is to support the growth of digital (entertainment) games, while that of learning analytics is to support the online learning industries. Although some game and learning analytics can indeed be used in serious games, they lack specifi c metrics and methods that outline the effectiveness of serious games-an important feature to stakeholders. Serious Games Analytics need to provide ( actionable ) insights that are of values to the stakeholders-specifi c strategies/policies to improve the serious games, and to (re)train or remediate play-learners for performance improvement. Since the performance metrics from one industry are unlikely to transfer well into another industry, those that are optimal for use in the Serious Games industry must be properly identifi ed as Serious Games Analytics -to properly measure, assess, and improve performance with serious games.

We present the results of a study on the application of registration and pixel-level fusion techniques to retinal images. The images are of different modalities (color, fluorescein angiogram), different resolutions, and taken at different times (from a few minutes during an angiography examination to several years between two examinations). We propose a new registration method based on global point mapping with blood vessel bifurcations as control points and a search for control point matches that uses local structural information of the retinal network. Three transformation types (similarity, affine, and second-order polynomial) are evaluated on each image pair. Fourteen pixel-level fusion techniques have been tested and classified according to their qualitative and quantitative performance. Four quantitative fusion performance criteria are used to evaluate the gain obtained with the grayscale fusion.

Coefficient alpha has been a widely used measure by which internal consistency reliability is assessed. In addition to essential tau-equivalence and uncorrelated errors, normality has been noted as another important assumption for alpha. Earlier work on evaluating this assumption considered either exclusively non-normal error score distributions, or limited conditions. In view of this and the availability of advanced methods for generating univariate non-normal data, Monte Carlo simulations were conducted to show that non-normal distributions for true or error scores do create problems for using alpha to estimate the internal consistency reliability. The sample coefficient alpha is affected by leptokurtic true score distributions, or skewed and/or kurtotic error score distributions. Increased sample sizes, not test lengths, help improve the accuracy, bias, or precision of using it with non-normal data.

We investigate the interference of the surface plasmon polariton (SPP) with an incident beam on a metallic slit using the FDTD. We find that the bulk waves radiated at the slit edge by scattering of the SPP leak into the slit and induce accumulated charges within the skin depth, which excite new SPPs on the slit side-walls. The SPP on the top surface of aperture is coupled into the slit and induces the 2D asymmetric field distributions, including the horizontal and vertical Fabry-Perot multi-reflection resonator modes. We show that the addition of these modes with the slit waveguide modes induced by a normally incident beam is the interference between the SPP and the incident beam, which enhances or suppresses the slit transmission, depending on their relative phase.