The enforcement of shipping standards under UNCLOS

This article discusses the enforcement of shipping standards, with a particular focus on Part XII of UNCLOS. Section 6 of Part XII contains the only comprehensive set of vessel-related enforcement provisions in the Convention, but the Part’s scope is limited to “the preservation and protection of the marine environment.” Therefore, not all shipping standards fall clearly within Part XII’s ambit, including those centered on safety, security, and crewing considerations. The enforcement provisions of Section 6 are favorable to flag states and their vessels, and Section 7 contains a number of safeguards for their benefit, so it is in the interests of these parties to have coastal state enforcement governed by Part XII. However, the ability of coastal states to establish and enforce shipping standards that apply within the territorial sea extends to more than just environmental matters. The result is that different standards give rise to different enforcement powers, depending on the maritime zone in which a vessel is located, even if those standards arise from the same international agreement. It is suggested that to remedy these problems, UNCLOS would need to be amended in order to provide a comprehensive enforcement regime for the enforcement of shipping standards.     

Color image segmentation by edge linking and region grouping

A novel method toward color image segmentation is proposed based on edge linking and region grouping. Firstly, the edges extracted by the Canny detector are linked to form regions. Each of the end points of edges is connected by a direct line to the nearest pixel on another edge segment within a sub-window. A new distance is defined based on the feature that the edge tends to preserve its original direction. By sampling the lines to the image, the image is over-segmented to labeled regions. Secondly, the labeled regions are grouped both locally and globally. A decision tree is constructed to decide the importance of properties that affect the merging procedure. Finally, the result is refined by user’s selection of regions that compose the desired object. Experiments show that the method can effectively segment the object and is much faster than the state-of-the-art color image segmentation methods.     

Efficient democratic group signatures with threshold traceability

Democratic group signature (DGS) is a group-oriented primitive with great flexibilities, i.e., no group manager, anonymity, and traceability. In a DGS scheme with (t, n)-threshold traceability, any subset of not less than t members can jointly reveal the identity of the signer while preserving security even in the presence of an active adversary can corrupt up to t − 1 group members. This paper proposes an efficient DGS scheme. We use publicly verifiable secret sharing (PVSS) to distribute the trapdoor via which the real signer is revealed. The computation cost and communication overhead of our DGS signatures are greatly reduced, compared with the existing work. For example, the size of the resulting signature contains only 2n + 1 elements of Z _q , except the PVSS output.     

An analysis of the determinants of children’s weekend physical activity participation

This paper examines the out-of-home, weekend, time-use patterns of children aged 5–17 years, with a specific emphasis on their physical activity participation. The impact of several types of factors, including individual and household demographics, neighborhood demographics, built environment characteristics, and activity day variables, on physical activity participation is analyzed using a joint nested multiple discrete–continuous extreme value-binary choice model. The sample for analysis is drawn from the 2000 San Francisco Bay Area Travel Survey. The model developed in the paper can be used to assess the impacts of changing demographics and built environment characteristics on children’s physical activity levels.     

Seabed scene simulation and its realization in extending Vega

Realistic simulation of underwater scene is always difficult because of the special and complex vision effects in underwater space. Seabed is an important part of underwater environment. This paper describes the methods for seabed scene simulation based on OpenGL. It includes construction of fluetuant terrain based on the random sinusoidal algorithm, simulation of seabed flicker effect by means of circular texture mapping and generation of turbidity effect by using fog techniques. For the application based on the leading high level 3D development environment-Vega, underwater scene simulation is still a difficulty since there is no module for it. Based on the analysis of Vega software and the research on seabed scene simulation methods, a Vega extending module named “Underwater Space” was created through developing module class and extending lynx interface. The module class was designed through developing DLL written in C . The Lynx was extended through developing keyword configure file, GUI configure file and lynx plug-in DLL. The problem that Vega can‘t simulate underwater space, is elementarily resolved. The results show that this module is efficient, easy using, and the seabed scene images am vivid.     

Identity-based threshold decryption on access structure

For the applied limitation of the existing threshold decryption schemes based on the (t, n) structure, an identity-based threshold decryption scheme which can be applied on the access structure is proposed through designing a special distribution algorithm of the private key shares. The generation and distribution of private key shares, the encryption, the decryption and the combination are introduced in detail. The validity and security of the scheme are proved and analyzed. Comparisons with the existing schemes show that the proposed scheme is more flexible.     

Tool sequence optimization based on three logical modes of robot control via CPLEX optimization

Cluster tools have advantages of shorter cycle times, faster process development, and better yield for less contamination. The sequence of dual-arm cluster tools is a complex logistics process during the semiconductor production. Efficient use of cluster tools is naturally very significant to competitive fab operations. Generating an optimized sequence in a computationally efficient manner and assessing the quality of the requirements to improve the fab production are the key factors for semiconductor manufacturing productivity. The Petri net modeling is introduced to minimize the makespan of the process for the three different logical modes and select a better mode after comparing the makespan among the three logical modes. The tool sequence optimization problem is formulated as optimization firing transition sequences based on the Petri net and then the formulation is converted to be linearly solved by the branch-and-cut method in the standard commercial solver CPLEX. Special methods for the linear conversion are highlighted. Due to the limited calculation time requirement for the real production and the large scale of the problem, special methods for the efficiency tuning are applied according to the characteristics of the problem. Numerical testing is supported by one of the most advanced semiconductor enterprises and the computational results show significant improvement compared with the traditional manual sequence results.     

Poisson noise removal based on nonlocal total variation with Euler’s elastica pre-processing

An enhancement-based Poisson denoising method for photon-limited images is presented. The noisy image is firstly pre-processed for enhancing incomplete object information, and then it is denoised while preserving the restored structural details. A variational regularization model based on Euler’s elastica (EE) is proposed for image enhancement pre-processing. A nonlocal total variation (NLTV) regularization model is then employed in the second stage of image denoising. The above two optimization problems are solved by the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). For Poissonian images with low image peak values, experiments demonstrate the validity and efficiency of the proposed method for both restoring geometric structure and removing noise.     

Semiparametric specification of the utility function in a travel mode choice model

We propose a semiparametric approach that can capture the nonlinearity of deterministic components of the utility functions in discrete choice models and demonstrate it by analyzing travel mode choice behaviour for an interregional trip. The proposed smoothing spline-based specification method can be used to make ex ante evaluations regarding the parametric specifications of the deterministic utility functions in discrete choice models.