The synthetic aperture radar (SAR) onboard Earth observing satellites has been acknowledged as an integral tool for many applications in monitoring the marine environment. Some of these applications include regional sea-ice monitoring and detection of illegal or accidental oil discharges from ships. Nonetheless, a practicality of the usage of SAR images is greatly hindered by the presence of speckle noises. Such noise must be eliminated or reduced to be utilized in real-world applications to ensure the safety of the marine environment. Thus this thesis presents a novel two-phase total variation optimization segmentation approach to tackle such a challenging task. In the total variation optimization phase, the Rudin-Osher-Fatemi total variation model was modified and implemented iteratively to estimate the piecewise smooth state by minimizing the total variation constraints. In the finite mixture model classification phase, an expectation-maximization method was performed to estimate the final class likelihoods using a Gaussian mixture model. Then a maximum likelihood classification technique was utilized to obtain the final segmented result. For its evaluation, a synthetic image was used to test its effectiveness. Then it was further applied to two distinct real SAR images, X-band COSMO-SkyMed imagery containing verified oil-spills and C-band RADARSAT-2 imagery mainly containing two different sea-ice types to confirm its robustness. Furthermore, other well-established methods were compared with the proposed method to ensure its performance. With the advantage of a short processing time, the visual inspection and quantitative analysis including kappa coefficients and F1 scores of segmentation results confirm the superiority of the proposed method over other existing methods.

In this dissertation, not only the antenna and antenna array design techniques for fourth-generation mobile communication system are proposed, but also the specifications related to antenna bio-compatibility are studied. At first, two dual-wideband design techniques suitable to be applied for laptop computer applications for LTE/WWAN and LTE MIMO operations are proposed. The techniques can also be applied to internal tablet computer antennas. The isolation issues of MIMO antenna array of different mobile communication devices, such as laptop computer, tablet computer, and mobile phone, are then discussed. Finally, an analysis of body SAR for tablet computer applications are given and discussed.

In this thesis, an LTE/WWAN planar loop antenna for tablet computer with a compact size of 75 ¡Ñ 12 mm2 is presented. The planar loop antenna comprises a printed loop strip and a patch monopole encircled therein. By embedding a printed distributed inductor in the loop strip, whose effect is similar to a chip inductor, a parallel resonant mode is generated owing to the contributed inductance of the distributed inductor and the contributed capacitance of the coupling between the loop strip and the patch monopole. The parallel resonant mode leads to increase input resistance of the 0.5-wavelength loop mode at the high-frequency tail and a zero reactance nearby the original resonance of the 0.5-wavelength loop mode, thereby resulting in a dual-resonance excitation to greatly enhance the bandwidth of the antenna¡¦s lower band for the LTE700/GSM850/900 operation. In addition, the patch monopole, which performs not only as a coupling feed but also an efficient radiator, provides a 0.25-wavelength resonant mode to combine with a higher-order resonant mode contributed by the printed loop strip to form the antenna¡¦s upper band to cover the GSM1800/1900/UMTS/LTE2300/2500 operation. Further, the required distance between the antenna and the testing flat phantom to meet the 1-g body SAR requirement of 1.6 W/kg is discussed. A comparison of the body SAR value of the planar loop antenna and the bent loop antenna is also discussed.

Increasing human activities have brought about a global warming trend, and cause global sea level rise. Investigations of variations in coastal margins of Antarctica and in the glacial dynamics of the Antarctic Ice Sheet provide useful diagnostic information for understanding and predicting sea level changes. This research investigates the coastal dynamics of the Antarctic Ice Sheet in terms of changes in the coastal margin and ice flow velocities. The primary methods used in this research include image segmentation based coastline extraction and image matching based velocity derivation. The image segmentation based coastline extraction method uses a modified adaptive thresholding algorithm to derive a high-resolution, complete coastline of Antarctica from 2000 orthorectified SAR images at the continental scale. This new coastline is compared with the 1997 coastline also derived from orthorectified Radarsat SAR images, and the 1963 coastline derived from Argon Declassified Intelligence Satellite Photographs for change detection analysis of the ice margins. The analysis results indicate, in the past four decades, the Antarctic ice sheet experienced net retreat and its areal extent has been reduced significantly. Especially, the ice shelves and glaciers on the Antarctic Peninsula reveal a sustained retreating trend. In addition, the advance, retreat, and net change rates have been measured and inventoried for 200 ice shelves and glaciers. A multi-scale image matching algorithm is developed to track ice motion and to measure ice velocity for a number of sectors of the Antarctic coast based on 1997 and 2000 SAR image pairs. The results demonstrate that a multi-scale image matching algorithm is much more efficient and accurate compared with the conventional algorithm. The velocity measurements from the image matching method have been compared with those derived from InSAR techniques and those observed from conventional ground surveys during 1970-1971. The comparison reveals that the ice velocity in the front part of the Amery Ice Shelf has increased by about 50-200 m/a. The rates of ice calving and temporal variation of ice flow pattern have been also analyzed by integrating the ice margin change measurement with the ice flow velocity at the terminus of the outlet glacier.

In recent years, the wireless communication operators use more and more systems based on the transmission and reception of EM waves. As a result, more and more base stations are being installed on the rooftop of existing buildings in densely populated areas. The prevailing of wireless communications has prompted the public¡¦s concern of the health issue. To date, the most prominent and scientifically verifiable biological effect of EM waves is the heating effect. In order to maintain the users¡¦ health from the over-heating due to excessive use, analysis of the temperature distribution inside the human body is also very critical as well as the SAR guidelines. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the SAR values and temperature distribution inside the human head, under the EM exposure of mobile communication base station and handset based on the use of finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method. In general, we assumed that the far-field exposure of base station are uniform plane-wave exposures. The total-field / scattered-field (TF/SF) formulation implements a compact uniform plane-wave source permitting FDTD simulations to accurately predict the SAR distribution in the human head due to uniform plane-wave exposures. Furthermore, this thesis investigates the effects of the rectangular frames of the metallic spectacles at 900MHz and 1.8 GHz for the uniform plane wave.

Wavelet methods for image denoising have became widespread for the last decade. The effectiveness of this denoising scheme is influenced by many factors. Highlights can be listed as choosing of wavelet used, the threshold determination and transform level selection for thresholding. For threshold calculation one of the classical solutions is Wiener filter as a linear estimator. Another one is VisuShrink using global thresholding for nonlinear area. The purpose of this work is to develop a Java toolbox which is used to find best denoising schemes for distinct image types particularly Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. This can be accomplished by comparing these basic methods with well known data adaptive thresholding methods such as SureShrink, BayeShrink, Generalized Cross Validation and Hypothesis Testing. Some nonwavelet denoising process are also introduced. Along with simple mean and median filters, more statistically adaptive median, Lee, Kuan and Frost filtering techniques are also tested to assist wavelet based denoising scheme. All of these methods on the basis of wavelet models and some traditional methods will be implemented in pure java code using plug-in concept of ImageJ which is a popular image processing tool written in Java.

In this thesis, an ultrasound testbed is designed in order to practice the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) techniques. The thesis work is built on the fundamentals of SAR theory. In this respect, four different methods for the reconstruction of SAR image are considered. The ultrasonic testbed is composed of a mobile vehicle where the ultrasound transmitter and receiver are mounted. An analog circuit is designed in order to condition the transmitted and received signals. The receiving signal is processed in a personal computer using MATLAB routines. A GUI is designed for user friendly operation. Different experiments are done with the designed system. The theoretical and practical results for SAR imaging are compared. It is shown that the designed system functions properly with a good approximation to the theoretical results. The deviations from the theoretical results are caused by the idealistic assumptions as well as the distortions introduced by the practical system. More specifically, some of the distortions are generated by the nonuniform velocity of the moving platform, the phase distortion due to the analog filters and imperfect filtering during down-conversion. While the sources of distortions certainly affect the SAR system response, the implemented system is valuable for the practical analysis of SAR system performance.

Natural hydrocarbon seeps harbor distinctive geological, chemical, and biological features in the marine environment. This thesis verified remote sensing signatures of seeps using in-situ observation and repeated collections of satellite imagery. Bubble streams in the Gulf of Mexico water column from four natural seep sites on the upper continental slope were imaged by a side-scan sonar, which was operated from a submarine near the seafloor, and by acoustic profilers, which were operated from surface ships. These data were correlated with sea surface slicks imaged by Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) on the RADARSAT satellite. Comparing non-oily bubble streams from rapidly venting mud volcanoes with oily bubble streams from shallow deposits of gas hydrate showed that they produced notably different signatures. Non-oily bubbles produced high backscatter on the side-scan sonar records, but were difficult to detect with the acoustic profilers. Oily bubbles from hydrate deposits produced acoustic shadows on the side-scan sonar records. The oily bubbles generated clear signatures extending from the seafloor to the near surface on the acoustic profile records. RADARSAT SAR images verified the presence of surface oil slicks over the hydrate deposits, but not over the mud volcanoes. This indicates that SAR imagery will not be able to capture every oil and gas seep in a region because non-oily bubble streams do not create surface oil slicks. A total of 113 natural oily seep sources were identified based on surface slicks in eleven SAR images collected over the northern continental slope. A persistence analysis verified that SAR is a dependable tool for capturing oil slicks because 93.5% of the slick sources identified in the 2001 images were corroborated with slicks in the 2002 images. The sources ranged in depth from 100 to 2000 m and 79% of the sources were in 900 meters or greater of water. Seventy-six percent of the seep sources were associated with salt less than 1500 m below the seafloor and none of the sources were located in the bottom of salt withdrawal basins. Geographical Information Systems (GIS) proved to be a useful tool in these analyses.

In this work, a 3.5 GHz RF Transmitter and Successive Approximation ADC design has been presented. The transmitter serves as an intermediate block which translates 350 MHz signal into 3.5 GHz signal. This signal is applied to 6-40 GHz wideband transmitter. The emphasis is on the design of Up conversion Mixer with high linearity, low noise and moderate image rejection performance. The successive approximation analog to digital converter was designed as a part of feedback loop control, which consists of a sensor circuit to detect the temperature changes in a power amplifier and the ADC to convert the sensor output to digital data. The data is used to determine the necessary control signals to restore the performance of the power amplifier. The circuits have been designed and implemented in ST Microelectronics CMOS 90nm process.

Includes vita. / Title from PDF of title page. / Document formatted into pages; contains 173 pages. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of South Florida, 2003. / Includes bibliographical references. / Text (Electronic thesis) in PDF format. / ABSTRACT: N-Methylthio beta-lactams represent a promising new family of antibacterial agents whose in vitro activity is confined largely to Staphylococcus species, including multidrug-resistant forms of S. aureus. Originally developed in the 1980's for use as synthetic intermediates, N-methylthio beta-lactams have recently been shown in these laboratories to possess intriguing biological properties which are addressed in Chapters I-IV. In terms of the antibacterial activities, the structural features and species specificities exhibited by these compounds are unlike those of any existing family of beta-lactam drugs. The lactams seem to exert their effects intracellularly, requiring passage of the bioactive species through the cellular membrane, rather than acting extracellularly on cell wall components in the manner of penicillin and related antibiotics. / ABSTRACT: The lipophilic nature of these molecules, which lack the polar side chain functionality of all other microbially-active Beta-lactams, suggests the compounds do not target the penicillin binding proteins within bacterial membranes. The most active members of this Beta-lactam class appear to be those bearing an aryl (Ar) substituent at C4 of the ring. The synthesis and structure-activity relationship of these analogues is discussed in Chapter III. Moreover, microscopy and 3H pulse-labeling studies, which are described in Chapter IV, demonstrate that N-methylthio beta-lactams appear to be inhibitors of protein biosynthesis. / System requirements: World Wide Web browser and PDF reader. / Mode of access: World Wide Web.