Conference Publications

Mosquitoes are the vectors for the dreadful diseases of mankind. In this study, laboratory experimentation of assessing the mosquito larvicidal potentiality of Moringa oleifera plant extract was carried out. Extracting solvents such as hexane, ethyl acetate and methanol were used and the larvicidal activity was assessed against Culex gelidus mosquito larvae under laboratory conditions. The effective larval mortality was found in the methanol extract at concentrations of 500 ?g/mL. The study thus provides evidence on the potential of indigenous plant extracts to serve as mosquito larvicides

European tourist markets have continuously played a significant role in generating revenue for the Thai economy. However, the penetration of this tourism market segment is not so easy because Thailand has faced both direct and indirect rivals and neighboring and overseas rivals. Tourism market segmentation is considered an effective and important marketing tool to promote marketing strategies to meet the more specific needs of tourists. The objectives of this study were to segment European tourists visiting Phuket Province, and to compare these segments according to demographic variables and the level of destination satisfaction and loyalty. The hierarchical cluster analysis was utilized to segment tourists based on activities and clusters/segments and was compared in terms of demographic characteristics using Ch-Square statistic and destination satisfaction and loyalty using one-way ANOVA. The findings revealed that five segments of tourists were identified: ‘recreational tourist?, „fuzzy tourist?, „sports tourist?, „cultural tourist? and „leisure tourist?. According to the Chi-Square statistic, no significant differences in terms of demographic variables were found across the five segments. In addition, the result of ANOVA revealed that no statistical differences were found among segments across all items of destination satisfaction except for worthwhile experiences.For destination loyalty, significant differences in the intention and willingness to pay to revisit Phuket were found among these segments.

In today’s era manipulation of image has become a simple task because of advanced photo editing software packages as well as the capturing devices having high resolution. Verification of the truthfulness of images as well as detection of tampering without having the extra prior knowledge of image content is a significant research field. An attempt is made to review the recent developments in digital image forgery detection. Passive methods do not require prior information about the image. In this paper first various image forgery detection techniques are classified and then its general structure is developed. Passive image authentication overview is presented and the existing passive forgery detection techniques are reviewed. The present status of image forgery detection technique is discussed along with a recommendation for future research. In this paper the effort has been made for finding the best forgery detection algorithm such as SIFT for identifying the manipulated region. The common scenario has been considered where the goal is to remove the features. The attacks conceived so far against SIFT-based forensic techniques implicitly assume that all SIFT keypoints have similar properties. It is better to use SIFT classification scheme based on the gray scale histogram of the neighborhood of SIFT keypoints.

Mercury is a hazardous element and hence its removal from the eco system is essential to prevent the associated environmental health risk. There are many techniques available for the removal of Mercury (II) ions from the effluent stream; most of them are costly. By using a low cost and easily available adsorbent - a tamarind bark powder, the removal of Mercury (II) ions was carried out in this project work. The scope of this project work is to study of adsorption of Mercury (II) from effluent by varying the amount of adsorbent, size of adsorbent, concentration of Mercury (II) solution, contact time and nature of tamarind bark powder. The removal of Mercury (II) was studied in the laboratory shaker by batch process. The mercury concentration in the effluent was determined using spectrophotometric method, before and after adsorption. The adsorption of Mercury (II) using the tamarind powder is found to have an efficiency of around 40%. The efficiency increases up to 50 % for the reduced size adsorbent and it improves further up to 60% for the chemically activated wood powder.

In recent years, marine oil pollution resulting from exploitation spills and accidents during oil transportation and use has affected the marine ecosystem safety, and oil polluted sea water remediation becomes a global problem. Peanut shell possesses a good property of adsorption pollutants and it can be easily obtained from the abundant produce of peanut all around the world. This experiment used carbonized peanut shell (CPS) as adsorbent; aiming to purify oil polluted sea water and explore optimal adsorption conditions and effects. Six sets of experiments were done under the initial oil concentration of 1.35 mg/L and CPS dosages of 0, 6.67, 13.33, 20, 26.67, 33.33 g/l, separately. Seventy percent of oil was removed under the ideal dosage of 13.33 g/l, getting the minimum oil concentration of 0.39 mg/l. Another six sets of experiments were also done under the adsorption time of 0 h, 1 h, 2 h, 3 h, 4 h, 5 hand the same CPS dosage of 13.33 mg/l. The ideal removals of Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) (35.5%) and oil (71%) were obtained after 3 hours adsorption, while the highest COD removal gets to 47.5%.

An off-grid hybrid energy system consisting of SPV - diesel generator – converter – battery is considered with zero percent loss of load for different electrical loads at a particular location of Jaipur, Rajasthan. Electrical loads of 1 kW, 2 kW, 3 kW, 5 kW, 8 kW, 10 kW, 20 kW and 50 kW are considered to analyze the system economically, electrically and emission point of view and optimized using HOMER software. LCOE decreases with increase in load up to 5 kW and it is almost constant between 5 kW to 20 kW and increases sharply beyond 20 kW electrical load

Microalgae are considered as raw materials for biodiesel production as a part-substitute for diesel. Eight microalgal strains such as, Tetraselmis sp., Dunaliella sp., Chlorella sp., Synechocystis sp., Nannochloropsis sp., Gloeocapsa sp., Synechococcus sp. and Oscillatoria sp. having lipid accumulation potential were used in the present study. Estimation of Chlorophyll a and carotenoid contents in algal strains grown under red fluorescent light revealed that there was an increase in biomass and oil yield respectively. Dunaliella sp. and Tetraselmis sp. cultured in tubular photobioreactor showed a maximum biomass of 1.38 g/l and higher percentage (72.6 %) of lipid accumulation respectively. Fatty Acid Methyl Ester (FAME) analysis of algal biodiesel showed the presence of saturated fattyacids peaks. AO10D was found as best algal biodiesel blend among algal biodiesel blends tested for their fuel properties, performance in engine and emission characteristics.

An Integration of video pre-processing and the improvement of frames plays a significant role in the field of image processing. Image segmentation is one of the most important in image analysis. This paper presents a Watershed based image segmentation technique with k-means bunch method and some enhancement design method for improvement of overall performance. Though the HSV color area was found to convey higher results compared to the RGB color area, in our experiments the RGB and HSV color areas were found to convey virtually equivalent results. Eventually, it had been set to use the HSV color area as a result of it gave higher results than the RGB color area just in case of “difficult Queries”. K-MEAN primarily based bunch rule has been projected and also the iterations taken was abundant less than that of K-MEAN and ANN based schemes. Moreover, K-MEAN based mostly schemes might discover all the peaks and hence, the categories accurately. The impact of the configuration, migration policy, rate of migration, and kind of migration on the speed convergence has been studied and it had been discovered that the migration policy and rate of migration greatly influence the convergence rate

The human face has been serving as an identity since the beginning of mankind but it has more to offer than a recognition key of an individual. Facial features helps define the gender, expression, reactions and age of that individual. The objective of this paper is to take in consideration the ability of facial features to determine the age of an individual. This is done by taking in regard certain geometrical factors like distinguishable landmarks, the different valleys and peaks that contribute for facial features termed as nodal points. Each human face has approximately 80 nodal points i.e. just 80 pixels out of thousands of them are to be segregated for further use. Some of these are distance between the eyes, jaw line length, eye sockets depth, nose width, cheekbones shape, wrinkle topography etc. Taking into account the surface and age data we propose Histogram of Gradient algorithm along with Back Propagation Neural Network for the age and gender classification. The proposed algorithm do the classification in three different age group(child, adult and old) in addition to this we approach for gender classification in the age group child, adult and old with the same technique. The acquired results for the age classification gives an accuracy of around 92%. For the gender classification it works well for the old age group.

Synthetic dyes are indispensable to the textile and dyeing industries. Among all synthetic dyes, azo dyes are the most common, being used up to 90 percent of the tonnage, as they are versatile and easy to synthesize. Yet many azo dyes are toxic and cause genetic mutations. Even a very low concentration of these dyes in industrial effluents is enough to do great damage to the environment. Textile effluent is known to contain strong color, large amount of suspended and dissolved solids, and high BOD and COD concentration. Because of these characteristics, treatment of textile effluent has been a rather difficult task. Several processes have been attempted and reported in literature for removal of dyes present in the textile effluents such as adsorption, membrane separation and biological treatment etc. Among this biological treatment method are found to be cost effective and gives high efficiency over other methods for the removal of dye compounds present in the textile effluent and hence in this present work an attempt is made to reduce the BOD, COD, TDS and TSS using biological method.