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The Royal New Zealand Navy (RNZN) and the Royal Australian Navy (RAN) have been stopping and boarding vessels in the Arabian Gulf intermittently since 1990 to enforce United Nations (UN) Security Council resolutions. 1 Such operations are a type of naval constabulary operation. Naval constabulary operations are coercive operations for a national or international law enforcement purpose and are a significant part of each navy's contribution to New Zealand and Australian maritime security." They are quite distinct from the conduct of naval warfare. In the international law of the sea, the right of a state to enforce UN Security Council resolutions, or national laws, balances against the rights afforded to states by the 1982 'United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea' (LOSC) to have their vessels exercise innocent passage in territorial seas and freedom of navigation" in international waters.

Having been in the catafalque party when I was at school here, I know how much meaning is placed in this ceremony, and it means a great deal to me to address you this morning at this ANZAC service. I have not served in any of the conflicts remembered on the Honour Rolls here, or seen warlike service. I have, however, recently served in the Australian Defence Force. It is with this perspective that I hope to convey what a commemoration of a battle so long ago, and so far away, should mean to us here today. The first thing to say is that ANZAC Day means different things to different people - for some it is a fond reunion with mates whose bonds were formed by war, while others not so closely involved are struck by the enormous sacrifices made by earlier generations. It almost never fails to evoke a deep emotional response in Australians and New Zealanders. The response is increasing as years go by. Yet, to put into words why this day moves us so much is very difficult.

In this paper we examine the stability of a total of 40 different structural features extracted from four different letters ("y", "d", "f" and "t" ). The one-way analysis of variance (Anova) was used to examine the stability of these features on 3077 samples of letters from 30 different writers. It is concluded that a number of these features exhibit sufficient stability to be useful for handwriting style extraction. With further analysis of features from other letters. and improvement in the measure of such features as loops, it is likely that the features can provide some quantitative measure of the likely authorship of a questioned document.

The Australian Defence Force has considerable power at its disposal. It is physically more powerful than any other organisation in Australia. This is hardly surprising when it has the task of defending the country, conducting warlike and peace building operations overseas, enforcing maritime legislation and providing a degree of internal security. Yet only a minor proportion of this activity is authorised by an Act of Parliament. To state the executive power as the legal basis for an ADF operation does little to explain the limits on that power, or even its character. It does not necessarily identify who may exercise the power, where an action is beyond power, whether such an action prevails over an Act of Parliament or whether the exercise of the power is reviewable by a court. Despite this, it is possible to identify some limits to the exercise of executive power by the ADF, although they cannot be precise limits because executive power is meant to deal with the unpredictable and the external.

The Australian Defence Force continues to remain engaged in a range of operations from the Middle East to the Pacific. This paper will give an overview of ADF operations for the period between July 2008 and October 2009 and mention some of the salient legal issues arising from these operations. At the time of writing there are approximately 3300 ADF personnel deployed overseas on operations with a further 500 involved in domestic maritime security operations. This represents a slight decrease from the 3850 deployed overseas at the time of writing the 2008 edition of the review of ADF operations. This is primarily due to the decrease in troop numbers in Iraq from 1575 to 823 following the expiry of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1790 on 31 December 2008 which authorised much of the operation.4 However, there are 1550 ADF personnel in Afghanistan; up from 1000 last year. Operation SLIPPER has expanded to incorporate anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia as well. There have also been a number of disaster relief operations in response to the Victorian bushfires and the earthquakes and tsunamis in Samoa and Indonesia. Some other operations have concluded since the last edition of this review. These are Operation TESTAMENT, in support of World Youth Day, and Operation OUTREACH, the Northern Territory Indigenous Intervention. Domestic security generally, and the ADF's own base security in particular, have increased in prominence following the disruption by police on 4 August 2009 of an alleged plot to attack Holsworthy Army Base.

This dataset contains audio recordings of interviews conducted in the three countries Fiji, Maldives and Seychelles, as part of the primary data for this PhD thesis. The interviewees comprise of government leaders, politicians, senior officials, academics, as well as prominent persons and officials from the civil society and the private sector. The audio recordings are in the .mp3 format. This is a closed dataset. It is not available for viewing to anyone. Only the creator of the dataset has permission to use this dataset.

In this paper we examine tile automatic extraction of visual or structural features as used by document examiners in the comparison of handwriting samples. We have extracted between 7 and 14 different features from four letters ("y", "d", "f" and "t"). This analysis was earned out on a total of 3077 letters from 30 different writers. On average these features are extracted with about 88% accuracy and can be used to assess the similarity of different writing samples.

The thought of a civilian passenger jet full of ordinary people flying over Australia being hijacked and then shot down is quite horrific. The shock and horror would most likely amplify if the missile that struck the aircraft launched from an Australian fighter jet or warship. So too, armed troops using lethal force to defend infrastructure such as a power station would be an alien experience for Australia. Amendments to part IIIAAA of the 'Defence Act 1903' (Cth) in 2006 provided these powers to the Australian Defence Force (ADF). There has been some academic debate about this, but not much. Furthermore, there is little to suggest any general public awareness that the Commonwealth Parliament has legislated for the significant destructive power now available to the ADF to be directed at non-military threats. This is the great value of Michael Head's book, 'Calling Out the Troops - The Australian Military and Civil Unrest: The Legal and Constitutional Issues' ('Calling Out the Troops'). Restraining the use of force by the state within its own borders has been a legal issue since the 'Magna Carta', and any development of the legal power for the state to use force should be the subject of debate and scrutiny. It is therefore timely and important that 'Calling Out the Troops' subjects the new statutory powers to critical scrutiny and opens the debate to a potentially wider audience than a journal article might reach. A particularly welcome aspect of 'Calling Out the Troops' is that public debate on military legal issues in Australia is quite limited and many, though not all, of the contributors to this debate have a background in the ADF. This institutional perspective does not appear at all in Head's work and this can only strengthen and deepen debate in this area. While the conclusions that Head draws do not entirely convince this author, the observations that he makes and the questions that he asks in response to them are compelling. This book review will first give a general description of 'Calling Out the Troops' and deal with some of the book's perceived limitations before addressing its conclusion and its main strengths.

This paper is concerned with the accurate detection of collision and the resulting impact force between the model of a person's hand and a static or moving object. The objective is to provide accurate feedback of touch in virtual reality applications. The methods described and evaluated use a combination of bounding sphere and recursive subdivision of the bounding box techniques to detect accurately when and where a collision occurs on the hand. The impact force of the collision is calculated using the geometry of the impact area and application of Newton's law. The methods are verified using a novel prototype of a hand controlled by a six degrees of freedom tracker glove and ball. The ball and hand can collide either by the ball hitting the hand, the hand hitting the ball or both. When inexpensive accurate touch transducers become available to complement the 3D body position input devices, many innovative applications can be realized by applying these methods.

Automatic speaker change point detection segments different speakers from continuous speech according to speaker characteristics. This is often a necessary step before applying speaker verification or identification systems. Among the features to represent a speaker in the speaker change point detection systems acoustic features are commonly used. Commonly used features are Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficients (MFCC) and Linear Prediction Cepstral Coefficients (LPCC). However, the features are affected by speech content, environment, type of recording device, etc. So far, no features have been discovered, which values depend only on the speaker. In this paper four novel feature types proposed in recent major journals and conference papers for speaker verification problem, are applied to the problem of speaker change point detection. The features are also used to form a combination scheme via SVM classifier. The results shows that the proposed scheme improves the performance of speaker changing point detection as compared to the system that uses MFCC features. It was also found that some of the novel features of low dimensionality give comparable speaker change point detection accuracy to the high-dimensional MFCC features.

Finding good features that represent speaker identity is an important problem in speaker recognition area. Recently a number of new and novel acoustic features have been proposed for speaker recognition. The researchers use different data sets and sometimes different classifiers to evaluate the features and compare them to the baselines such as MFCC or LPCC. However, due to different experimental conditions direct comparison of those features to each other is difficult or impossible. This paper presents a study of five new acoustic features recently proposed. The feature extraction has been performed on the same data (NIST~2001~SRE), and the same UBM-GMM classifier has been used. The results are presented as DET curves with equal error ratios indicated. Also, an SVM-based combination of GMM scores produced on different features has been made in hope that classifier fusion can result in higher speaker recognition accuracy. The results for different features as well as for their combinations are directly comparable to each other and to those obtained with the baseline MFCC features.

A number of techniques have previously been proposed for effective thresholding of document images. In this paper two new thresholding techniques are proposed and compared against some existing algorithms. The algorithms were evaluated on four types of difficult document images where considerable background noise or variation in contrast and illumination exists. The quality of the thresholding was assessed using the Precision and Recall analysis of the resultant words in the foreground.The conclusion is that no single algorithm works well for all types of image but some work better than others for particular types of images suggesting that improved performance can be obtained by automatic selection or combination of appropriate algorithm(s) for the type of document image under investigation.

Numerous techniques have previously been proposed for single-stage thresholding of document images to separate the written or printed information from the background. Although these global or local thresholding techniques have proven effective on particular subclasses of documents, none is able to produce consistently good results on the wide range of document image qualities that exist in general or the image qualities encountered in degraded historical documents. A new thresholding structure called the decompose algorithm is proposed and compared against some existing single-stage algorithms. The decompose algorithm uses local feature vectors to analyse and find the best approach to threshold a local area. Instead of employing a single thresholding algorithm, automatic selection of an appropriate algorithm for specific types of subregions of the document is performed. The original image is recursively broken down into subregions using quad-tree decomposition until a suitable thresholding method can be applied to each subregion. The algorithm has been trained using 300 historical images obtained from the Library of Congress and evaluated on 300 'difficult' document images, also extracted from the Library of Congress, in which considerable background noise or variation in contrast and illumination exists. Quantitative analysis of the results by measuring text recall, and qualitative assessment of processed document image quality is reported. The decompose algorithm is demonstrated to be effective at resolving the problem in varying quality historical images.

This paper presents a novel technique to derive the filter parameters for removing signal dependent noise (SDN) in the image. In order to remove SDN, many de-noising algorithms rely on a priori knowledge of noise parameters, especially the variance sigman², and the gamma value gamma of the specific imaging technique. This paper proposes a technique to automatically derive the signal variance sigmaf² and use this parameter to construct the 'Local Linear Minimum Mean Square Error' (LLMMSE) filter without the need to know the values of sigman² and gamma. Two image instances of the same noisy scene are used to calculate the signal variance which is then used to construct the LLMMSE filter. Experiments with both the "Lena" image and real-life far-infrared (FIR) vein pattern images showed that the proposed technique can predict the signal variance consistently, and the constructed LLMMSE filter performs well in removing the signal dependent noise.

In this paper we present a study of structural features of handwriting extracted from three characters "d", "y", and "f" and grapheme "th". The features used are based on the standard features used by forensic document examiners. The process of feature extraction is presented along with the results. Analysis of the usefulness of features was conducted via searching the optimal feature sets using the wrapper method. A neural network was used as a classifier and a genetic algorithm was used to search for optimal feature sets. It is shown that most of the structural micro features studied, do possess discriminative power, which justifies their use in forensic analysis of handwriting. The results also show that the grapheme possessed significantly higher discriminating power than any of the three single characters studied, which supports the opinion that a character form is affected by its adjacent characters.

The Act emerged as a consequence of the Review of Defence Support to National Counter Terrorism Arrangements announced in July 2017, reviewing, inter alia, the Part II A of the Defence Act 1903 (Cth) call out powers. The Review was initiated in response to the changing nature of overseas terrorist threat examples. It coincided with the conduct and reporting by the NSE Coroner inquiry into the tragic Lindt Cafe siege, which provided context to the Review. The Coronial report concluded that the call out preconditions under the existing legislation had not been met; acknowledged that the Commonwealth had commenced a review of ADF support to domestic counter-terrorism operations, providing an opportunity to review the call out threshold; and it was necessary to confer with state and territory governments about the call out criteria.

In this paper, we propose a new high-speed computation algorithm for solving a large N x N matrix system using the MIMD–SIMD Hybrid System. The MIMD–SIMD Hybrid System (also denoted as Hybrid System in this paper) is a new parallel architecture consisting of a combination of Cluster of Workstations (COWs) and SIMD systems working concurrently to produce an optimal parallel computation. We first introduce our prototype SIMD system and our Hybrid System setup before presenting how it can be implemented to find the unknowns in a large N x N linear matrix equation system using the 'Gauss–LU' algorithm. This algorithm basically performs the 'Divide and Conquer' approach by breaking down the large N x N matrix system into a manageable 32 x 32 matrix for fast computation.

The level of women's participation in armed violence in Africa is determined by the nature and typology of conflict. Using prior research as a data source, the article examines the nature of women's participation in ongoing and recently-concluded armed conflicts in 15 countries in Africa. Based upon data that show variations, and similarities in the contextual conditions under which women become war participants, this article presents three kinds of wars, and the conditions that distinguish them from one another, as a theoretical framework in analysing women's involvement in Africa's armed conflicts. The findings show that in 'resources/opportunistic' driven wars, women's participation is higher and more complex when compared to 'ethno-religious' and 'secessionist/autonomy' driven wars. Moreover, this paper finds that women’s participation can be active and passive; coerced and voluntary.

In vein pattern biometrics, analysis of the shape of the vein pattern is the most critical task for person identification. One of best representations of the shape of vein patterns is the skeleton of the pattern. Many traditional skeletonization algorithms are based on binary images. In this paper, we propose a novel technique that utilizes the watershed algorithm to extract the skeletons of vein patterns directly from gray-scale images. This approach eliminates the segmentation stage, and hence prevents any error occurring during this process from propagating to the skeletonization stage. Experiments are carried out on a thermal vein pattern images database. Results show that watershed algorithm is capable of extracting the skeletons of the veins effectively, and also avoids any artifacts introduced by the binarization stage.

Handwritten shorthand systems were devised to enable writers to record information on paper at fast speeds, ideally at the speed of speech. While they have been in existence for many years it is only since the 17th Century that widespread usage appeared. Several shorthand systems flourished in the first half of the 20th century until the introduction and widespread use of electronic recording and dictation machines in the 1970's. Since then, shorthand usage has been in rapid decline, but has not yet become a lost skill. Pitman shorthand has been shown to possess unique advantages as a means of fast text entry which is particularly applicable to hand-held devices in mobile environments. This paper presents progress and critical research issues for a Pitman/Renqun Shorthand Online Recognition System. Recognition and transcription experiments are reported which indicate that a correct recognition and transcription rate of around 90% is currently possible.

The ADF has often been literally at the sharp end of seeking to uphold human rights around the world, and it has also been accused of not meeting human rights standards at various times. The implications of enhanced human rights protections in Australia are potentially of profound significance to the ADF and its operations. The ADF is used to having to meet the standards of international humanitarian law (the law of armed conflict) and would adapt to any new human rights laws. The difference between international humanitarian law though and human rights law is that humanitarian law developed to cover military operations whereas with human rights law, military issues are usually an afterthought. As an academic who writes on the Australian Defence Force and the law, and as a reservist and former permanent naval officer, I would like to see the National Human Rights Consultation consider military issues from the outset. Discussions with academic and military colleagues have brought to my attention the experience of the UK, Canada and Germany. It illustrates that human rights laws developed for civilian society can have unexpected consequences for the military and its operations. Australia would do well to learn from these experiences so that any new enhanced human rights laws work in the unique context of the ADF and its operations.

In vein pattern biometrics, analysis of the shape of the vein pattern is the most critical task for person identification. One of best representations of the shape of vein patterns is the skeleton of the pattern. Many traditional skeletonization algorithms are based on binary images. In this paper, we propose a novel technique that utilizes the watershed algorithm to extract the skeletons of vein patterns directly from gray-scale images. It also utilizes a polynomial curve fitting technique to produce smooth skeletons. This approach eliminates the segmentation stage, and hence prevents any error occurring during this process from propagating to the skeletonization stage. Experiments were carried out on a thermal vein pattern images database. Results show that the watershed algorithm is capable of extracting the smooth skeletons of the veins effectively, and also avoids any artifacts introduced by the binarization stage.

In this paper we propose and investigate a new segmentation algorithm called the ICA (independent component analysis) segmentation algorithm and compare it against other existing overlapping strokes segmentation algorithms. The ICA segmentation algorithm converts the original touching or overlapping word components into a blind source matrix and then calculates the weighted value matrix before the values are re-evaluated using a fast ICA model. The readjusted weighted value matrix is applied to the blind source matrix to separate the word components. The algorithm has been evaluated on 30 overlapped document images from the CEDAR letter database and another 30 degraded historical document images, which containing many different kinds of overlapping and touching words in adjacent lines. Quantitative analysis of the results by measuring text recall, and qualitative assessment of processed document image quality is reported. The ICA segmentation algorithm is demonstrated to be effective at resolving the problem in varying forms of overlapping or touching text lines.

A novel non-invasive imaging technique to image the vein patterns in various parts of the hand for biometric purposes is evaluated. Two imaging methods are investigated: far-infrared (FIR) thermography and near-infrared (NIR) imaging. Experiments involving data acquisition from various parts of the hand, including the back of the hand, palm and wrist, were carried out using both imaging techniques. Analysis of the data collected shows that FIR thermography is less successful at capturing veins in the palm and wrist. FIR thermography can capture the large veins in the back of the hand, but it is sensitive to ambient temperature and humidity conditions as well as human body temperature. NIR imaging produces good quality images when capturing veins in the back of the hand, palm and wrist. NIR imaging is also more tolerant to changes in the environment and body condition but faces the problem of pattern corruption because of visible skin features being mistaken for veins. This corruption is not present in FIR imaging. An initial biometric system is investigated to test both FIR and NIR images for biometric purposes. The results show all the subjects were correctly identified, which indicates vein pattern biometrics with infrared imaging is a potentially useful biometric.

Background: The basic recognition engine of a handwritten address interpretation system, for use in postal sorting automation, is an OCR algorithm that recognises a numeric or alphanumeric string, such as a postcode, and matches it against a set of valid postal delivery points. However, the OCR system is highly vulnerable to errors due to the uncertainty that arises when the imperfect OCR result of the alphanumerics are combined. These errors result in wrongly sorted mail which costs postal organizations throughout the world a significant amount of money to resolve after the error is detected by the postal delivery man and also delays the delivery of the wrongly-sorted item. A generic expert system model that forms part of a handwritten address interpretation system for conflict resolution in unconstrained handwritten address recognition is presented in this paper, to reduce this error. Method: The proposed expert system resolves the conflicts and reduces the error rates by fusing a holistic pattern recognition method with expert knowledge based on a posterior information. The system was evaluated using 1,071 handwritten Singapore addresses. Results: Experimental results show that the expert system achieved a significant reduction in error rates. Performance was improved from 71.2% correctly sorted, 4.8% reject (cannot sort) and 24.0% error (wrongly sorted) rates using OCR only to 63.7% correctly sorted, 35.7% reject (cannot sort) and 0.6% error (wrongly sorted) rates using the proposed approach. Conclusions: The error rate (proportion of wrongly sorted mail) can be significantly reduced using this method and significantly alleviate the need to carry out expensive resorting.

The political and legal dynamics surrounding the conflict in Darfur, Sudan threaten the entire structure of the international Responsibility to Protect (RtoP). General concern in the west and Africa has been expressed in different clusters of principles and policy directives. Collectively, they maintain that the primary responsibility of a state is to protect its citizens. Such protection should include prevention, reaction and rebuilding. In this chapter, I examine the origin and characteristics of the conflict and the nature of alternative dispute resolution and peacekeeping in Darfur. I argue that, political considerations in this conflict, as well as the competing interests of those interested in the conflict-i.e. the United Nations (UN), the African Union (AU), the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the United States (US) government-have led to (political and legal) tensions, especially with regards to the questions of genocide, Sudan's sovereignty and peacekeeping in the troubled region of Darfur.

Handwritten shorthand systems were devised to enable writers to record information temporarily at fast speeds. While they have been in existence for many years it is only since the 17th Century that widespread usage appeared. Several shorthand systems flourished until the introduction and widespread use of electronic recording and dictation machines in the 1970's. Since then, shorthand usage has been in rapid decline, but has not yet become a lost skill. Pitman shorthand has been shown to possess unique advantages as a means of fast text entry which is particularly applicable to hand-held devices in mobile environments. This paper discusses critical issues for the commercialization of a Pitman/Renqun Shorthand Online Recognition System and the future usage of handwritten shorthand.

All of Islam, despite its complexity as a world religion, is being vilified and construed as militant today, particularly in the West. This raises the question, "Is a nonkilling relationship at all possible between Islam and the West?" The irony is that it is the homogenising spread of Western Civilization across the globe that is confronting all other cultures and thriving at their expense. This unrelenting hegemony is increasingly provoking angry and violent responses as more cultures become alienated and homogenised under what are the end results of rampant globalisation: consumerism and capitalism on a global scale. The forces of unrestrained free trade, deregulation and privatisation have created "The Market", a powerful entity whose laws seem to go too easily unquestioned by its corporate servants. Globalisation is creating, across the broad sweep of nations, an ever-deepening rift between the rich and the poor not only in terms of wealth but also in terms of human rights (George, 2003; Stiglitz, 2002; Oxfam, 2004). In so many societies the spread of globalisation is consequently resulting in the social exclusion of the 'Other', those who are poor, marginalised or who do not conform. We seek to explain in this paper how this process of exclusion is taking place. As Galtung (2002: 51) says, 'we cannot globalise the marketplace 'ad infinitum' without also, sooner or later, globalising our souls ...'.In this respect,Islam is of great significance in the world today because it stands at the cutting edge of new thinking: Through its gathering resurgence, it is levelling a challenge at the moral integrity of globalisation. How is it doing this? While nonkilling principles can be found in all world religious faiths, Islamic Civilization actively embraces diversity and rejects discrimination based on race, ethnicity and colour.

The paper proposes the computer transcription of handwritten Pitman shorthand as a mean of rapid text entry to handheld devices. Handwritten outlines are bound to be variation from writers to writers and it causes pattern recognition to be prone to errors, however these imperfections can be restored by the use of heuristic approach in the interpretation stage. The transcription accuracy can be improved by the combination of three factors: firstly, incorporating contextual knowledge as used by human readers; secondly, applying knowledge of the most frequent words of Pitman shorthand; and finally, adding knowledge of collocation. Statistical analysis of a Shorthand lexicon is presented and distribution of transcription accuracy based on accuracy of segmentation is discussed in the paper. Experiments using a phonetic Lexicon with 5000 entries show that the approach is efficient and produces a satisfactory transcription accuracy of 94%.

This book is the first in a series to be published in relation to research about the experiences of military families being undertaken by researchers at the University of New England, NSW This research was initially prompted when Madeline Fussell, a Primary Social Science Lecturer, was approached by military families who expressed their frustration at the lack of culturally authentic and age-appropriate illustrated storybooks for their young children. They asked for books that supported the experiences of young children who had a parent deploying or absent for extended periods during training. They identified common related issues encountered by military families. Teaming up with Marg Baber, an Early Childhood Lecturer, they met with two military families and discussed some of these issues. This resulted in several research-based illustrated storybooks being written as a community project for the charity organisation, Soldier On. Further background research revealed there was almost no Australian and little international research working directly with young children to explore their experiences and understandings of their lives in military families; nor was there research that allowed young military children's voices to be heard. Marg's research aims to address this gap. Her doctoral thesis is titled 'Young children's experiences and understanding of military deployment within an Australian Defence Force family'.

This paper describes an implementation of a novel major line removal hough transform on a new parallel architectural system, Hybrid System. A Hybrid System is a combination of single instruction multiple data (SIMD) and multiple instruction multiple data (MIMD) systems processing at the same time. The line removal algorithm, which is used for detecting lines in an image, strips away major lines so that minor lines can become more easily detectable. The algorithm is implemented and evaluated on the hybrid system. Being a new extended architecture, we also established the derivation for the hybrid system speedup. We were able to obtain speedup that surpasses that of MIMD systems with the same number of pes. In the paper, we also introduce a new SIMD concept.

The powers of various law enforcement agencies to respond to any incident off Australia's coast are highly complex and varied. An incident could be one for State or Northern Territory police or other maritime officials or the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Customs and Border Protection Service (Customs) or the Australian Defence Force (ADF). Whatever the actual response is, it is made more complicated because it is in the maritime environment. State, Commonwealth and international law interact in a unique way to affect the role of regulatory and law enforcement agencies. The purpose of this chapter is to make some sense of the role of Commonwealth, State and Territory law enforcement agencies in Australia's offshore areas.

This paper describes a new parallel architectural system which we have called an 'MIMD-SIMD hybrid system'. As the name implies, 'MIMD-SIMD hybrid system' (also denoted as hybrid system in this paper) is a combination of both SIMD and MIMD systems working concurrently to produce an optimal architecture. This new parallel architecture has the capability of achieving speedup rates more than its corresponding MIMD architecture can achieve alone. We introduce our new SIMD concept and also show the contribution of the SIMD on this hybrid system. We have also developed a general formula for determining the speedup of the hybrid system so that accurate predictions can be made on the performance of the hybrid system. A MIMD-SIMD hybrid system was constructed and was used to implement on a visualization algorithm.

This paper proposes a novel technique to analyze the infrared vein patterns in the back of the hand for biometric purposes. The technique utilizes the minutiae features extracted from the vein patterns for recognition, which include bifurcation points and ending points. Similar to fingerprints, these feature points are used as a geometric representation of the shape of vein patterns. Analysis of a database of infrared vein patterns shows a trend that for each hand vein pattern image, there are, on average, 13 minutiae points in each vein pattern image, including 7 bifurcation and 6 ending points. The modified Hausdorff distance algorithm is proposed to evaluate the discriminating power of these minutiae for person verification purposes. Experimental results show the algorithm reaches 0% of equal error rate (EER) on the database of 47 distinct subjects, which indicates the minutiae features of the vein pattern can be used to perform personal verification tasks. The paper also presents the preprocessing techniques to obtain the minutiae points as well as in-depth study on their tolerance to processing errors, such as loss of features and geometrical displacement.

Military deployment is typically considered a stressful period for families, generally lasting between 3 to 6 months for Australian Defence Force (ADF) personnel. To date, insufficient research has been conducted concerning children and families who experience deployment within an Australian context. This study seeks to provide valuable insight into families with young children and explore their experiences of military deployment in an Australian context. Using a socio-constructivist approach, where truth is socially constructed both individually and culturally, ADF parents' perceptions of their experiences are examined. Using Narrative Research, multiple methods of data collection are combined to gather various insights into families' experiences. Data analysis was conducted using thematic verification identifying two main themes. Embracing an interpretivist epistemology, the researcher aims to create a shared knowledge around families' understanding and experiences of deployment. Such knowledge will be helpful for effective support of parents, educators and professionals in their role with these children in the community.

The use of optical character recognition (OCR) has achieved considerable success in the sorting of machine-printed mail. The automatic reading of unconstrained handwritten addresses however, is less successful. This is due to the high error rate caused by the wide variability of handwriting styles and writing implements. This paper describes a strategy for automatic handwritten address reading which integrates a postcode recognition system with a hybrid verification stage. The hybrid verification system seeks to reduce the error rate by correlating the postcode against features extracted and words recognised from the remainder of the handwritten address. Novel use of syntactic features extracted from words has resulted in a significant reduction in the error rate while keeping the recognition rate high. Experimental results on a testset of 1,071 typical Singapore addresses showed a significant improvements from 24.0% error rate, 71.2% correct recognition rate, and 4.8% rejection rate using "raw" OCR postcode recognition to 0.4% error rate, 65.1% correct recognition rate, and 34.5% rejection rate using the hybrid verification approach. The performance of the approach compares favourably with the currently installed commercial system at Singapore Post, which achieved 0.7% error rate, 47.8% correct recognition rate, and 51.5% rejection rate for 6-digit postcode using the same test data.

As a biometric, signatures have been widely used to identify people. In the context of static image processing, the lack of dynamic information such as velocity, pressure and the direction and sequence of strokes has made the realization of accurate off-line signature verification systems more challenging as compared to their on-line counterparts. In this paper, we propose an effective method to perform off-line signature verification based on intelligent techniques. Structural features are extracted from the signature's contour using the Modified Direction Feature (MDF) and its extended version: the Enhanced MDF (EMDF). Two neural network-based techniques and Support Vector Machines (SVMs) were investigated and compared for the process of signature verification. The classifiers were trained using genuine specimens and other randomly selected signatures taken from a publicly available of 3840 genuine signatures from 160 volunteers and 4800 targeted forged signatures. A distinguishing error rate (DER) of 17.78% was obtained with the SVM whilst keeping the false acceptance rate for random forgeries (FARR) below 0.16%

There is a wish to be able to enter Chinese text into mobile computing devices in real-time at the speed of speech. Handwritten shorthand schemes offer the potential to achieve this data recording rate. A new overall solution to the segmentation and classification of phonetic features in Renqun shorthand, which records Chinese characters phonetically, is proposed in this paper. A new writing rule is introduced to improve the machine readability of Renqun shorthand. Evaluation results show that the introduction of the new rule has a positive effect on the recognition performance. The recognition accuracies for vocalized outlines and shortforms following the new rule achieve 83% and 84.07%, respectively.