Abstract

Walking considered as one of the safest modes of

travel available, sustainable to human society as well as

environmentally beneficial. In this context, the aim of this

research is to investigate pedestrians’ traffic gap acceptance

and crossing decision for Mid-block Street crossing in urban

areas in Malaysia. Pedestrian crossing behaviour at

Rughaya Street has been examined in terms of the decision

to cross or not the street and size of traffic gaps accepted by

pedestrian, as well as the related contributing factors. A

field study was conducted to collect the data of pedestrians’

decisions under real mix traffic Condition using video

camera on a typical unsignalized urban street section. JPEG

files were obtained from video recording by using Snapshot

Wizard software. The data extracted included traffic

characteristics such as traffic size, traffic speed, etc.

pedestrian individual characteristics such as gender, in

addition to individual behavior such as waiting, frequency

of attempt, etc.). Furthermore, The extracted data were

used to develop and examine a pedestrian gap acceptance

model based on A lognormal regression model and binary

logistic model by SPSS (22) in order to validate the impact

of various parameters on the size of traffic gaps accepted by

pedestrians as well as the effect on the decision of

pedestrians to cross the street or not. So that the effect of

the gap accepted available and of other factors on the

decision of pedestrians to cross the street or not is examined.

These results indicate that the data set for this particular

location has a majority of male pedestrians which were

insignificant variables in both models moreover a lognormal

regression results shows that accepted gaps size depend on

traffic size, crossing distance, speed of approaching vehicle

and time spent by pedestrian at the curb waiting for a

suitable gap size to start crossing. The BL model performs

well for the reason that it captures the pedestrian decision

making process with traffic taking the relevant attributes

into consideration. According to the coefficients of BL

regression analysis equation we noticed that the illegal

parking, traffic size, traffic waiting time and gap size are the

vital attributes for the Pedestrian gap acceptance model..

Index Terms: Pedestrian crossing, gap acceptance, crossing

decision, multiple linear regression, binary logistic

regression.

This paper presents a computational model for measuring diversity in terms of variety, balance and disparity. This model is informed by the Stirling’s framework for understanding diversity from social science and underpinned by semantic techniques from computer science. A case study in learning is used to illustrate the application of the model. It is driven by the desire to broaden learners’ perspectives in an increasingly diverse and inclusive society. For example, interpreting body language in a job interview may be influenced by the different background of observers. With the explosion of digital objects on social platforms, selecting the appropriate ones for learning can be challenging and time consuming. The case study uses over 2000 annotated comments from 51 YouTube videos on job interviews. Diversity indicators are produced based on the comments for each video, which in turn facilitate the ranking of the videos according to the degree of diversity in the comments for the selected domain.

The development of accounting profession and auditing in developed

countries have received considerable attention in the accounting literature.

However, the accounting profession and auditing in developing countries have

been neglected. Therefore, this study critically evaluates the development of the

accounting profession in the developing country context, specifically in Libya.

This paper sheds light on the phases of accounting development in Libya, taking

into account some factors that affect the accounting practice in the country. These

factors include: the Libyan economy; Libyan culture; foreign investment; Big 4

auditors in the country; compliance to the Global Accounting Standards (e.g.

IASs, ISA and IFRS) and Libya’s application to WTO.

Abstract—With a rapidly increasing incidence of melanoma

skin cancer, there is a need for decision support systems to

detect it in its early stages, which would lead to better decisions

in treating it successfully. However, developing such systems is

still a challenging task for researchers. Several Computer Aided-

Diagnosis (CAD) systems have been proposed in the last two

decades to increase the accuracy of melanoma detection. Image

feature extraction is a critical step in differentiating between

melanoma and normal skin lesions. In this paper, we propose

to improve a bag-of-words approach by combining features

consisting of the color histogram and first order moments with the

Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG). Experimental results

show that the proposed technique significantly improves the

detection accuracy, with an average sensitivity of 91% and

specificity of 85%. The proposed system was validated on a

dataset of 200 medically annotated images (40 melanomas and

160 non-melanomas) obtained from the database of the Hospital

Pedro Hispano. 

This paper presents a novel secure and robust steganographic technique in the compressed video domain namely embedding-based byte differencing (EBBD). Unlike most of the current video steganographic techniques which take into account only the intra frames for data embedding, the proposed EBBD technique aims to hide information in both intra and inter frames. The information is embedded into a compressed video by simultaneously manipulating the quantized AC coefficients (AC-QTCs) of luminance components of the frames during MPEG-2 encoding process. Later, during the decoding process, the embedded information can be detected and extracted completely. Furthermore, the EBBD basically deals with two security concepts: data encryption and data concealing. Hence, during the embedding process, secret data is encrypted using the simplified data encryption standard (S-DES) algorithm to provide better security to the implemented system. The security of the method lies in selecting candidate AC-QTCs within each non-overlapping 8 × 8 sub-block using a pseudo random key. Basic performance of this steganographic technique verified through experiments on various existing MPEG-2 encoded videos over a wide range of embedded payload rates. Overall, the experimental results verify the excellent performance of the proposed EBBD with a better trade-off in terms of imperceptibility and payload, as compared with previous techniques while at the same time ensuring minimal bitrate increase and negligible degradation of PSNR values.

This chapter aims, to highlight a review of IAS history, followed by approaches of accounting regulations. The development of accounting regulation within developing countries is also highlighted and discussed in the context of cultural diversity. It also aims to shed light into the motives that drive the adoption and implementation of IASs/IFRS. The political nature of lobbying and accounting standards setting process is also discussed in this chapter. In addition, the chapter discusses those factors that may be perceived as challenges which may delay or even block the convergence into the IASs/IFRS. Finally the authors provide key remarks about the IASs and venues for future research