Thesis (M.ED.) --University of Limpopo, 2009. / This study focuses on the morpheme le in Northern Sotho. It is sometimes confusing to establish the correct semantic function which the morpheme le expresses; and also to classify it into a certain word category. This study suggests the morphological features which the morpheme le bears in terms of its word categorization. The morpheme le in Northern Sotho can be used as a conjunction, a demonstrative pronoun, an agreement, a preposition, a copulative, an adverb and a complement as well. It is suggested in this study, ways of identifying the semantic function of the morpheme le in various contexts. This study reflects that the morpheme le in Northern Sotho can be used to denote: possession, accompaniment, location, additive focus, existentialism and honorifics.

This thesis investigates the potential application of a two-dimensional depth-averaged sediment transport and morphological model on a large braided river system and examines its capability to build a computational gravel budget and predict the morphological changes. The Lower Fraser River gravel reach is characterized by an irregularly sinuous single-thread channel split around large gravel bars and vegetated islands, and riverbed aggradation because of gradual gravel deposition over the years, bank hardening and channel confinement. Gravel removal from selected locations is considered as one of the viable management options to maintain the safety and integrity of the existing flood protection system along the reach. Therefore, any gravel removal plan in this reach requires a reliable sediment budget estimation and identification of deposition zones. It is also required to examine the possible future morphological changes with and without gravel removal and to assess its impact on design flood level. The main objective of this study is to build a computational sediment (gravel) budget for the 33 km long gravel reach that extends from Agassiz-Rosedale Bridge to Sumas Mountain near Chilliwack. In this study, a two-dimensional depth-averaged curvilinear mathematical model MIKE 21C was modified and applied to predict the gravel bedload transport and detect the change of morphology for the next 10 years period. A gravel transport formula was coded and added into the MIKE 21C model. Sediment transport code modification and application has been done side by side in a trial and error fashion. This is the first use of a conventional two-dimensional depth-averaged model for the entire gravel reach of the Lower Fraser River within affordable computational effort. The model application was successful in term of gravel budgeting, aggradation and degradation zones identification and long-term morphological change prediction, with some limitations and drawbacks. Further modification and model testing with recent bedload data is recommended.

The purpose of Morphology is to capture features and attributes of image, such as boundaries and contours. It has been widely applied to computer vision, the analysis and processing of image and even industry examinations and medical image processing. The reason why the Morphology is widely applied is that we can use its simple structure elements to process images, and get up to our requirements. Therefore, it¡¦s become our primary study to find out those suitable structure elements. In this paper, we used the laws of judging the multiple mask relationship to find out filters which came up to the condition that we set, and also came up with an efficient way to find out filters that we want to get.

The morphological phenotypic characters involving sexual selection but with highly individual variability are likely to challenge the prezygotic isolating mechanism driven by differentiation of mechanical structures. This kind of characters may also puzzle species identification and taxonomy. Therefore clarifying the correlation between the phenotypic variability and biological/non-biological factors becomes necessary in order to understand the role of this phenomenon under natural selection and sexual selection. The Syntomini represents one of the few lepidopterous groups that exhibit highly individual variability in both wing pattern and reproductive structures. The evolutionary and taxonomic significance of this phenomenon, however, has never been studied using modern methods although it has been documented for long. In order to test several hypotheses relevant to phenotypic variability, the present study focuses the phylogenetic relationship of Amata wilemani Rothschild, 1914, a subalpine moth species with extremely high variability in wing coloration and genitalia. The phylogenetic relationship between the three color morphs of A. wilemani and 38 Syntomini species plus 2 Lithosiinae outgroups was reconstructed using fragments of COI, EF1a and 28S. All color morphs of A. wilemani were recovered to form a monophyletic group under all data partitioning strategies with Amata formosensis (Wileman, 1928) or its closely related species in China as the potential sister group. The result of gene network analysis suggests low divergence between haplotypes of A. wilemani. Because no correlation between color morphs, phenology, geographical distribution, altitudinal gradient, and genitalic morphlogy was detected, it is concluded that A. wilemani should be regarded as a single species with high phenotypic variability, and this may suggest existence of intraspecific competition. The present study also found that Amata karapinensis (Strand, 1915), which was synonymized with A. wilemani by previous authors, should be revived. The incongruence between the phylogenetic relationships based on morphological and molecular characters shows a need of a comprehensive phylogenetic study of this highly diverse group.

The topic of stereo video is getting more attention among these days due to its high quality of visual effect. However, the large volume of data is the problem of its application. There is much similarity between the parallax videos. This similarity is obtained by a shape compensation technique. The topic of this thesis is to investigate a compression technique by on the shape compensation stereo video data. The shape transformation in this paper is coded by the kinds of morphological operations to be applied. This processing is a type of operation by which the spatial form or structure of objects within an image are modified. Morphological operation is usually applied to the binary images. There are two problems for the selection of the optimal morphological filter: the collection of the candidate filters and the sources of the voters. For the gray level images the mask operation is changed to be the more complex window weighting operation. By a strategy of slicing the image umbrella, our masked gray morphological operation is also more computation-efficient than the regular gray morphological operation. Experimental results in this thesis have demonstrated that shape compensation is more efficient than motion compensation for the secondary (right) video sequence.

The morphological image processing can modify the shapes of objects very efficiently by structure elements. Thus, the morphology processing has recently been applied to industry auto-inspection and medical image processing successfully. In this thesis, we incestigate the efficient processing of morphological image processing by two approaches: quadtree approach and paralell approach. By the quadtree decomposition, any binary image can be decomposed into black and white square blocks with some fixed size of power of 2. Thus, dilation of the whole image can be accomplished by dilating individual decomposed square blocks. On the other hand, any binary image can be presented by bit per pixel basis. Thus, we can exploit the parallel on a personal computer to speed up the set oriented morphological image processing. Experiments have revealed that both approach are much faster than the direct method. The quadtree approach are most advantageous for large structure elements. Whereas, the parralel approach are the fastest for the usual applications.

¡@¡@Morphological image processing technique has been well applied to many image processing areas. However, its long computation time usually can¡¦t be accepted when run on a general purpose sequential computer. Instead of conventional image data representation, some special data structures have led to the development of efficient algorithms. ¡@¡@The quadtree data structure has been well applied to the field of computer vision such as image segmentation and compression. The quadtree with its hierarchical data structure are advantageous due to its ability to focus on the interesting subsets of the data. Thus, the quadtree data structure are particularly convenient for set operations. Therefore, the computation for morphology processing will be facilitated by using the quadtree data structure since the set operations are the basics of the morphology processing. ¡@¡@Although many fast morphological image processing methods have been presented, there is still a need for developing a distributed computing architecture for morphological processing. We propose a scheme direct connection for client to client to improve the data transfer efficiency. Also, the image data is compressed by the quadtree for the transmission efficiency. Due to the efficiency of the network connection and data compression, we have established an efficient web-based distributed work station for morphological image processing.

Morphological image processing is especially useful in the applications of medical image processing, pattern recognition, and industry auto-inspection. Special hardware for morphological image processing are very expensive. On the other hand, the speed of software are too slow. The purpose of this paper is to speed up the software computations of morphological image processing by parallel processing on Pentium machine. The morphological operation is similar to digital convolution. We can realize our parallel morphological operation on the Pentium machine by two different methods. They are output-decomposition and input-decomposition methods, similar to the procedure of overlap-and-save and overlap-and-add respectively. The above methods implemented on Pentium machine are proved very efficient with 64-bits parallelism. Our experimental results demonstrated they are twice faster than the 32-bits parallelism method. In addition to the simulation and the real time experiments, a set of theoretical formulas are derived to analyze our methods and are checking the actual measured time quite well.

The taxonmic study of Spirobolida in Taiwan can be traced to the works done by Takakuwa and Wang from the 1940s, with most specimens collected from the plain. After their works, no other studies were done for the Taiwan millipede ever since. According to Korsós (2004) and unpublished information, there are 10 species in 7 genera and 6 families of spirobolids from Taiwan. However descriptions and illustrations of these species are insufficient and specimens are lacking for comparison. This study of Spirobolida is based on specimens collected from Taiwan recently and adjacent islands recorded color photos, and allocated in museums. Diagnostic Morphological characters include collum, coxae of legs, position of ozopore and gonopod. Four new species and 1 new subspecies of Spirobolus were designated in this study, S. panmaus sp. nov., S. taimalius sp. nov., S. redpodus sp. nov., S. lienhuachihus sp. nov. and S. formosae semiflavus subsp. nov.; a species revived and reassigned to other genus: Leptogoniulus takahasii (Takakuwa, 1940) stat. rev., comb. nov.; and 3 species reported earlier were not found, Salpidobolus oceanicus, Spirobolus walkeri and Spirobolus bungii. So far, there are 12 species, 5 genera, 4 family of Spirobolida in Taiwan.

A knowledge of morphology can be useful for many natural language processing systems. Thus, much effort has been expended in developing accurate computational tools for morphology that lemmatize, segment and generate new forms. The most powerful and accurate of these have been manually encoded, such endeavors being without exception expensive and time-consuming. There have been consequently many attempts to reduce this cost in the development of morphological systems through the development of unsupervised or minimally supervised algorithms and learning methods for acquisition of morphology. These efforts have yet to produce a tool that approaches the performance of manually encoded systems. Here, I present a strategy for dealing with morphological clustering and segmentation in a minimally supervised manner but one that will be more linguistically informed than previous unsupervised approaches. That is, this study will attempt to induce clusters of words from an unannotated text that are inflectional variants of each other. Then a set of inflectional suffixes by part-of-speech will be induced from these clusters. This level of detail is made possible by a method known as alignment and transfer (AT), among other names, an approach that uses aligned bitexts to transfer linguistic resources developed for one language–the source language–to another language–the target. This approach has a further advantage in that it allows a reduction in the amount of training data without a significant degradation in performance making it useful in applications targeted at data collected from endangered languages. In the current study, however, I use English as the source and German as the target for ease of evaluation and for certain typlogical properties of German. The two main tasks, that of clustering and segmentation, are approached as sequential tasks with the clustering informing the segmentation to allow for greater accuracy in morphological analysis. While the performance of these methods does not exceed the current roster of unsupervised or minimally supervised approaches to morphology acquisition, it attempts to integrate more learning methods than previous studies. Furthermore, it attempts to learn inflectional morphology as opposed to derivational morphology, which is a crucial distinction in linguistics. / text