Comparative physicochemical analysis of galvanic sludge wastes Stojković, Ana S.; Krstić, Nenad S.; Đorđević, Dragan M. ...
Journal of environmental science and health. Part A, Toxic/hazardous substances & environmental engineering,
2023, Volume:
58, Issue:
5
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The paper provides the physicochemical analysis of galvanic sludge to determine the presence and concentration of toxic metals. Two sludges sampled from the same factory, but from different ...technological processes, alkaline galvanic sludge obtained from galvanizing process and acidic sludge generated from the chromium plating process were analyzed. Inductively Coupled Plasma - Optical Emission Spectrometry (ICP-OES) revealed increased concentrations of toxic heavy metal ions Zn
2+
, Cr
3+
, Ni
2+
and Pb
2+
in the sludge from the galvanizing process and Cr
3+
, Cu
2+
, Ni
2+
, Pb
2+
, Cd
2+
and Zn
2+
from the chroming process. Moreover, the sludges were further physicochemically characterized by Reflectance Fourier Transform InfraRed Spectrometry (FTIR), Scanning Electron Microscopy with Energy-dispersive X-ray Spectroscopy Analysis (SEM-EDX) and X-ray diffraction (XRD). The results of ICP-OES were corroborated by FTIR. Analysis of FTIR spectra revealed the specific bands indicating the existence of metal oxides in the analyzed sludges, as well as the presence of organic substances, i.e. solvents and surfactants, used in the electroplating process. The analysis was accomplished following international norms and confirmed the increased concentrations of heavy metal ions from both sludges. In line with the regulations of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the results proved the hypothesis that galvanic sludge is hazardous waste.
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HEXACO personality framework represents one of the most prominent models of human personality traits. Despite of this, there are no empirical studies that estimate the fitness outcomes of HEXACO ...traits, although this topic represents a basic foundation for the study of the contemporary evolution of personality. In the present research we explored the relations between HEXACO personality traits, and three fitness indicators: the number of children, the number of grandchildren and the age at first birth. Participants were selected from the community population of individuals in a post-reproductive stage (N = 255; Mage = 64.9 years). Results from the regression analyses showed that the number of children was associated with lower scores on Honesty and Openness and higher scores on Emotionality; Agreeableness was positively associated with this criterion but only in males. The number of grandchildren was predicted by low Openness and marginally by high Conscientiousness, while Honesty had positive zero-order correlation with the criterion measure. Individuals with higher Extraversion tended to reproduce earlier in their lifetime. Findings contribute to the empirical data which suggest that personality is related to biological fitness in contemporary human populations: this means that personality is likely under natural selection and hence, it continues to evolve.
•We explored the relations between HEXACO personality traits and evolutionary fitness.•Low Honesty and Openness and high Emotionality predicted the number of children.•Low Openness and high Conscientiousness predicted the number of grandchildren.•Extraversion was negatively related to the age at first birth.•Findings suggest that HEXACO traits are likely under current natural selection.
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Intelligent driver assistance systems are becoming increasingly popular in modern passenger vehicles. A crucial component of intelligent vehicles is the ability to detect vulnerable road users (VRUs) ...for an early and safe response. However, standard imaging sensors perform poorly in conditions of strong illumination contrast, such as approaching a tunnel or at night, due to their dynamic range limitations. In this paper, we focus on the use of high-dynamic-range (HDR) imaging sensors in vehicle perception systems and the subsequent need for tone mapping of the acquired data into a standard 8-bit representation. To our knowledge, no previous studies have evaluated the impact of tone mapping on object detection performance. We investigate the potential for optimizing HDR tone mapping to achieve a natural image appearance while facilitating object detection of state-of-the-art detectors designed for standard dynamic range (SDR) images. Our proposed approach relies on a lightweight convolutional neural network (CNN) that tone maps HDR video frames into a standard 8-bit representation. We introduce a novel training approach called detection-informed tone mapping (DI-TM) and evaluate its performance with respect to its effectiveness and robustness in various scene conditions, as well as its performance relative to an existing state-of-the-art tone mapping method. The results show that the proposed DI-TM method achieves the best results in terms of detection performance metrics in challenging dynamic range conditions, while both methods perform well in typical, non-challenging conditions. In challenging conditions, our method improves the detection F2 score by 13%. Compared to SDR images, the increase in F2 score is 49%.
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High dynamic range (HDR) imaging technology is increasingly being used in automated driving systems (ADS) for improving the safety of traffic participants in scenes with strong differences in ...illumination. Therefore, a combination of HDR video, that is video with details in all illumination regimes, and (HDR) object perception techniques that can deal with this variety in illumination is highly desirable. Although progress has been made in both HDR imaging solutions and object detection algorithms in the recent years, they have progressed independently of each other. This has led to a situation in which object detection algorithms are typically designed and constantly improved to operate on 8 bit per channel content. This makes these algorithms not ideally suited for use in HDR data processing, which natively encodes to a higher bit-depth (12 bits/16 bits per channel). In this paper, we present and evaluate two novel convolutional neural network (CNN) architectures that intelligently convert high bit depth HDR images into 8-bit images. We attempt to optimize reconstruction quality by focusing on ADS object detection quality. The first research novelty is to jointly perform tone-mapping with demosaicing by additionally successfully suppressing noise and demosaicing artifacts. The first CNN performs tone-mapping with noise suppression on a full-color HDR input, while the second performs joint demosaicing and tone-mapping with noise suppression on a raw HDR input. The focus is to increase the detectability of traffic-related objects in the reconstructed 8-bit content, while ensuring that the realism of the standard dynamic range (SDR) content in diverse conditions is preserved. The second research novelty is that for the first time, to the best of our knowledge, a thorough comparative analysis against the state-of-the-art tone-mapping and demosaicing methods is performed with respect to ADS object detection accuracy on traffic-related content that abounds with diverse challenging (i.e., boundary cases) scenes. The evaluation results show that the two proposed networks have better performance in object detection accuracy and image quality, than both SDR content and content obtained with the state-of-the-art tone-mapping and demosaicing algorithms.
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Interpolation from a Color Filter Array (CFA) is the most common method for obtaining full color image data. Its success relies on the smart combination of a CFA and a demosaicing algorithm. ...Demosaicing on the one hand has been extensively studied. Algorithmic development in the past 20 years ranges from simple linear interpolation to modern neural-network-based (NN) approaches that encode the prior knowledge of millions of training images to fill in missing data in an inconspicious way. CFA design, on the other hand, is less well studied, although still recognized to strongly impact demosaicing performance. This is because demosaicing algorithms are typically limited to one particular CFA pattern, impeding straightforward CFA comparison. This is starting to change with newer classes of demosaicing that may be considered generic or CFA-agnostic. In this study, by comparing performance of two state-of-the-art generic algorithms, we evaluate the potential of modern CFA-demosaicing. We test the hypothesis that, with the increasing power of NN-based demosaicing, the influence of optimal CFA design on system performance decreases. This hypothesis is supported with the experimental results. Such a finding would herald the possibility of relaxing CFA requirements, providing more freedom in the CFA design choice and producing high-quality cameras.
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Global cities are becoming increasingly influential actors in international relations in the 21st century. That is why this work uses a city as the primary unit of analysis, which, although ...traditionally considered a state actor, currently develops autonomous initiatives that go beyond internal borders and have a global reach. The goal is to examine the potential and resources of global cities for independent participation in international relations and thereby evaluate their role in foreign policy. To explain this process, the concept of actorness is used. Actorness as a character of the city was discussed in more detail in the example of Sao Paolo by applying Duran?s four-dimensional model, whose criteria are authority, opportunities, autonomy, and presence. This model was applied in search of an answer to the main research question: Can we talk about Sao Paolo as an actor in international relations? The analysis of the case study will be based on an extensive review of primary and secondary data sources, including official documents of the city municipality and the city office for external affairs, media reports, scientific publications, and works on the topic of the city?s international engagements. Based on the analysis of the mentioned data, each of these characteristics has been met in the international activity of Sao Paulo. The intention is to contribute to the existing literature by expanding the geographical scope of the study of international urban activism and shifting the academic focus away from the Eurocentric discourse. The paper adopts a multilingual approach in search of relevant information on the role of cities in international relations in Spanish and Portuguese in order to enrich the debate and fill the gaps found in the literature in English.
We propose a novel and efficient algorithm for detection of specular reflections and light sources (highlights) in cinematic content. The detection of highlights is important for reconstructing them ...properly in the conversion of the low dynamic range (LDR) to high dynamic range (HDR) content. Highlights are often difficult to be distinguished from bright diffuse surfaces, due to their brightness being reduced in the conventional LDR content production. Moreover, the cinematic LDR content is subject to the artistic use of effects that change the apparent brightness of certain image regions (e.g. limiting depth of field, grading, complex multi-lighting setup, etc.). To ensure the robustness of highlights detection to these effects, the proposed algorithm goes beyond considering only absolute brightness and considers five different features. These features are: the size of the highlight relative to the size of the surrounding image structures, the relative contrast in the surrounding of the highlight, its absolute brightness expressed through the luminance (luma feature), through the saturation in the color space (maxRGB feature) and through the saturation in white (minRGB feature). We evaluate the algorithm on two different image data-sets. The first one is a publicly available LDR image data-set without cinematic content, which allows comparison to the broader State of the art. Additionally, for the evaluation on cinematic content, we create an image data-set consisted of manually annotated cinematic frames and real-world images. For the purpose of demonstrating the proposed highlights detection algorithm in a complete LDR-to-HDR conversion pipeline, we additionally propose a simple inverse-tone-mapping algorithm. The experimental analysis shows that the proposed approach outperforms conventional highlights detection algorithms on both image data-sets, achieves high quality reconstruction of the HDR content and is suited for use in LDR-to-HDR conversion.
Intense development of information technology which marked last decades of 20th century and especially the beginning of a new millennium, has brought significant changes in every aspect of human ...existance. These changes have brought intense development also to marketing, which gained new, sophisticated instruments for achieving its goals through IT solutions. Traditional marketing mix and especially promotion got an efective tool in Internet, one of the most imortant phenomenons of modern living, and web sites elevated marketing communications on a much higher level, giving it a completely new dimension. All this has brought a new, higher quality to all aspects of human life, which would be unthinkable without the achievements of modern technologies in a contemporary world.
A number of periodontal changes have been associated with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection, however our knowledge of the epidemiology, microbiology, host response and natural history of ...these conditions remains limited. Therefore, the aim of our study was the assessment of possible differences in periodontal status of HIV infected subjects when compared with healthy controls matched for age, gender and smoking habit in Croatian population. Assessment included measurement of plaque accumulation using approximal plaque index, measurement of gingival inflammation by use of sulcus bleeding index, pocket depth, gingival recession as well as the number of decayed, missing and filled teeth in 25 HIV infected subjects (age range 22-61, X = 40.8 years) in comparison with 25 healthy controls (age range 20-62, X = 40.9 years). Statistical analysis was performed by use of descriptive statistics and Mann-Whitney U test showed significantly increased level of inflammation of the marginal gingiva in HIV infected subjects when compared to the controls (p < 0.002). Significantly increased mean values of periodontal pockets (p < 0.002) and the deepest periodontal pocket (p < 0.003) were also observed when HIV infected subjects were compared to the healthy controls. In HIV infected subjects there was significant increase in the number of decayed, missing and decrease in the number of filled teeth (p < 0.002; p < 0.002; p < 0.009, respectively). The results of this study once again highlight the need for more prevalent periodontal check-ups and treatments in HIV infected subjects.
The union of the most developed European countries and their heavy industry based economies after the World War II, seemed like the only answer to USA’s and Japan’s powerful economies. At the same ...time, it was the only chance for Europe to become competitive in the global market. That was achieved through various forms of economic communities, formed in Europe in the second half of XX century. Since the 1992. Maastricht Treaty, they are known as the European Union. European Union industrial policy had the same priorities since the very beginning – to make Europe the leader of global economy, through investments in knowledge and high-tech inovation. However, that still hasn’t happened and considering all the economical and political crisis shaking the Union lately, chances are it can hardly happen at all. Reasons are numerous and different, both inside and outside the Union. The implicit question being posed here is have the most developed world countries and their economies reached their peak and can the EU achieve further growth on the supersaturated global market? This paper investigates the role of industrial policy as one of the key factors for solution to many problems in the past as well as in the future of the EU, which would make this economic and political community of European countries much more competitive on the global market.
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