The aim of this thesis is to investigate the general design and analysis principles of sabots and to develop a sabot design tool. Structures which support and align the models in gun bore, and separate without disturbing the flight path of models are called sabots. In the scope of this study, structurally critical regions and loads acting on sabots due to acceleration in the gun are determined. To calculate the loads acting and to size the sabots, approximate relations are derived by the help of strength of materials approach and finite element solutions. Conventional sabots are investigated and new sabot geometries are designed to resist high accelerations. To achieve the desired test velocity without affecting the stability of the model is the main objective. Sabots should be as light as possible, to reach the desired velocity with minimum inertial load, in other words minimum gun chamber pressure. To obtain the less weight sabot geometry with enough strength to resist the loads acting, a computer tool is developed. Structural analyses are automatically performed by the help of the sabot design tool. The advantage of the design tool is to reduce the design engineer&amp / #8217 / s work time spent for routine analyses processes. The output of the tool, which is sabot geometry, should be evaluated as a result of preliminary design process, and can be used as an input for detailed design process. Detailed geometric modifications required for production can be applied on the tool output, and final product can be manufactured reliably and in the shortest possible time.

As applications like IPTV and VoD (Video on demand) are gaining popularity, it is becoming more important to study the behavior of video signals in the Internet access infrastructures such as ADSL and cable networks. Average delay, average jitter and packet loss in these networks affect the quality of service, hence transmission and access speeds need to be determined such that these parameters are minimized. In this study the behavior of the above mentioned IP networks under variable bit rate (VBR) video traffic is investigated. ns-2 simulator is used for this purpose and actual as well as artificially generated signals are applied to the networks under test. Variable bit rate (VBR) traffic is generated synthetically using ON/OFF sources with ON/OFF times taken from exponential or Pareto distributions. As VBR video shows long range dependence with a Hurst parameter between 0.5 and 1, this parameter was used as a metric to measure the accuracy of the synthetic sources. Two different topologies were simulated in this study: one similar to ADSL access networks and the other behaving like cable distribution network. The performance of the networks (delay, jitter and packet loss) under VBR video traffic and different access speeds were measured. According to the obtained results, minimum access speeds in order achieve acceptable quality video delivery to the customers were suggested.

Range and Doppler measurement of targets for medium PRF radars is handicapped by folding and blind regions. This requires use of multiple PRFs and a resolver algorithm. The aim of the thesis is to develop various algorithms for the task and estimate their performance. Four different range and Doppler resolver algorithms and a test software is developed by using Matlab &reg / GUI and their performances due to the selected radar parameters in a multi- target environment are examined.

Goitered gazelle is one of the threatened species of Turkey living in only &amp / #289 / anliurfa region. In this study, goitered gazelles have been released to their previous habitat in Sanliurfa-Suru&ccedil / region and seven of females were collared with GPS collars. These individuals were monitored for a year and their seasonal habitat selection and home range sizes are determined by using location data recorded on the collars. In addition to 4 seasons of the year, home range and habitat selection are estimated for mating and calving periods. Also, summer period is divided to two as summer1 and summer 2 because of changing availability of water resources in study area. Seasonal home range sizes of GPS collared gazelles are estimated as average 3.61 &plusmn / 0.47 km2 for winter, 3.96 &plusmn / 0.44 km2 for spring, 4.55 &plusmn / 1.35 km2 for summer1, 2.26 &plusmn / 0.20 km2 for summer2, 3.38 &plusmn / 0.44 km2 for autumn, 1.37 &plusmn / 0.50 km2 for mating season, and 1.66 &plusmn / 0.50 km2 for calving season.Seven habitat variable layers were prepared for the evaluation of seasonal habitat selection of GPS collared female gazelles. Gazelles were selected east aspects in summer and west aspects in winter seasons and, north and flat aspects were avoided in all seasons for a year. Water can be considered the key habitat variable for the goitered gazelles. The results show that some home ranges are outside of the protected area and gazelles do not use large areas in the protected area. In order to improve conservation of gazelles, protected area should be re-arranged and shifted to more intensely used areas by gazelles.

In this thesis the demography, home range and habitat selection of a reintroduced population of Anatolian mouflon (Ovis gmelinii anatolica), which had a single remaining population, was studied to evaluate the reintroduction success and determine the conservation management interventions. For this purpose among 104 individuals reintroduced in Sariyar Wildlife Protection Area (Ankara, Turkey), 40 adults were radio-collared and 28 juvenile were ear-tagged and monitored from 2005 to 2009. The survival of the population according to the age groups (females, 0: 0.5423, 1: 0.60, 2: 0.5316, 3: 0.6637, 3+: 0.6728) and the fecundity of adult females (2: 0.2260, 3: 0.2034, 3+: 0.2034) are estimated. A population viability analysis was performed and the persistence of the population within the next 20 years was estimated. Increasing the survival rate of adult female through conservation or restocking the population with at least six adult females every year decreased the risk of extinction in the near future considerably. The year-round home ranges of the individuals ranged between 805 &ndash / 3435 ha. (Mean &plusmn / SE: 1934 &plusmn / 140 ha). The movements of the tracked individuals followed seasonal patterns: centers of activities changed according to seasons in 80% of the adult mouflon. Reintroduced mouflon selected southern aspects (p=0.001), increasing slopes &ndash / especially medium to high slope terrain &ndash / (slope &gt / 30&deg / , p=0.002), and distant locations to villages and roads. Results indicate that appropriate protective measures should be implemented immediately to mitigate the causes of juvenile mortality. Restocking the population for the next 10 years with adult females would have a stabilizing effect on the declining population and will act as a buffering mechanism during the adaptation period to the new area.

Traditional financial modeling is based on semimartingale processes with stationary and independent increments. However, empirical investigations on financial data does not always support these assumptions. This contradiction showed that there is a need for new stochastic models. Fractional Brownian motion (fBm) was proposed as one of these models by Benoit Mandelbrot. FBm is the only continuous Gaussian process with dependent increments. Correlation between increments of a fBm changes according to its self-similarity parameter H. This property of fBm helps to capture the correlation dynamics of the data and consequently obtain better forecast results. But for values of H different than 1/2, fBm is not a semimartingale and classical Ito formula does not exist in that case. This gives rise to need for using the white noise theory to construct integrals with respect to fBm and obtain fractional Ito formulas. In this thesis, the representation of fBm and its fundamental properties are examined. Construction of Wick-Ito-Skorohod (WIS) and fractional WIS integrals are investigated. An Ito type formula and Girsanov type theorems are stated. The financial applications of fBm are mentioned and the Black&amp / Scholes price of a European call option on an asset which is assumed to follow a geometric fBm is derived. The statistical aspects of fBm are investigated. Estimators for the self-similarity parameter H and simulation methods of fBm are summarized. Using the R/S methodology of Hurst, the estimations of the parameter H are obtained and these values are used to evaluate the fractional Black&amp / Scholes prices of a European call option with different maturities. Afterwards, these values are compared to Black&amp / Scholes price of the same option to demonstrate the effect of long-range dependence on the option prices. Also, estimations of H at different time scales are obtained to investigate the multiscaling in financial data. An outlook of the future work is given.

Today, infrared cameras are used especially for target tracking and surveillance operations. However, they have a high dynamic range output, and the standard display devices cannot handle them. In order to show them on common devices, the dynamic range is cropped. Thus, the contrast of the image is reduced. This is called as the High Dynamic Range (HDR) Compression. Although several algorithms have been proposed for preserving details during the HDR compression process, it cannot be used to enhance the local contrasts of image contents. In this thesis, we compare the performances of contrast enhancement techniques, which are suitable for real time applications. The methods experimented are generally histogram based methods. Some modifications are also proposed in order to reduce computational complexity of the process. Performances of these methods are compared with common objective quality metrics on different image sets.

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Range finding are widely used in various industrial applications, such as machine vision, collision avoidance, and robotics. Presently most range finders either rely on active transmitters or sophisticated mechanical controllers and powerful processors to extract range information, which make the range finders costly, bulky, or slowly, and limit their applications. This dissertation is a detailed description of a real-time vision-based range sensing technique and its single-chip CMOS implementation. To the best of our knowledge, this system is the first single chip vision-based range finder that doesn't need any mechanical position adjustment, memory or digital processor. The entire signal processing on the chip is purely analog and occurs in parallel. The chip captures the image of an object and extracts the depth and range information from just a single picture. The on-chip, continuous-time, logarithmic photoreceptor circuits are used to couple spatial image signals into the range-extracting processing network. The photoreceptor pixels can adjust their operating regions, simultaneously achieving high sensitivity and wide dynamic range. The image sharpness processor and Winner-Take-All circuits are characterized and analyzed carefully for their temporal bandwidth and detection performance. The mathematical and optical models of the system are built and carefully verified. A prototype based on this technique has been fabricated and tested. The experimental results prove that the range finder can achieve acceptable range sensing precision with low cost and excellent speed performance in short-to-medium range coverage. Therefore, it is particularly useful for collision avoidance.