Abstract
The preservation of musical works produced in the past requires their digitalization and transformation into a machine-readable format. The processing of handwritten musical scores by computers remains far from ideal. One of the fundamental stages to carry out this task is the staff line detection. We investigate a general-purpose, knowledge-free method for the automatic detection of music staff lines based on a stable path approach. Lines affected by curvature, discontinuities, and inclination are robustly detected. Experimental results show that the proposed technique consistently outperforms well-established algorithms.

Abstract

Abstract

Abstract
Automatic biometric identification based on fingerprints is still one of the most reliable identification method in criminal and forensic applications. A critical step in fingerprint analysis without human intervention is to automatically and reliably extract singular points from the input fingerprint images. These singular points (cores and deltas) not only represent the characteristics of local ridge patterns but also determine the topological structure (i.e., fingerprint type) and largely influence the orientation field. Poincaré Index-based methods are one of the most common for singular points detection. However, these methods usually result in many spurious detections. Therefore, we propose an enhanced version of the method presented by Zhou et al. [13] that introduced a feature called DORIC to improve the detection. Our principal contribution lies in the adoption of a smoothed orientation field and in the formulation of a new algorithm to analyze the DORIC feature. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is accurate and robust, giving better results than the best reported results so far, with improvements in the range of 5% to 7%. © 2009 IEEE.

Abstract
Biased photorefractive media are known to admit bright and dark solitons. The bright solitons in these media are always stable, but their dark counterparts are unstable above a certain background intensity and below a critical velocity. We use the stability criterion and the Vakhitov-Kolokolov function to precisely determine the unstable-parameter region. We also predict the strength of the instability by determining the unstable eigenvalues and eigenmodes using the Evans function method. Numerical simulation of the full evolution equation confirms the results.

Abstract
The propagation of bound soliton pairs in nonlinear photonic crystal fibers has recently been experimentally observed. The system may be modeled by a generalized nonlinear Schrodinger equation (GNLSE) which includes higher intrapulse Raman Scattering, self-steepening and higher order dispersion. Here, we find multihumped pulses as result of an accelerating similarity reduction of a GNLSE containing the intrapulse Raman scattering. Numerical simulations of the suitable GNLSE using these solutions as input showed that they are not stable, however, they may be related with the experimentally observed bound pairs since they propagate steadily for distances compared to the ones observed.