The purpose of this study is to determine the scientific and technological, economic, social and organizational impacts of the European Framework Programmes (FPs) on Turkish universities by focusing on the projects in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Energy, Food, Agriculture and Fisheries and Biotechnology (KBBE) themes in order to understand, monitor and evaluate outcomes and impacts of FPs as well as to help decision makers and policy makers to develop strategies for maximizing benefits of participation. Data/document review and survey methods were used as evaluation methods. T&Uuml / BITAK and EC&rsquo / s data and document were reviewed. An online survey was sent to the academicians who have Seventh Framework Projects (FP7) projects in these themes in Turkey. Data that were gathered by survey were analyzed by using Mann-Whitney U Test Method. We concluded that the impacts of these four categories of FP7 projects were high on the universities. Value additions of scientific and technological impacts are relatively high compared to other impacts. Universities whose roles were coordinator or WP leader have higher impacts in all factors. Turkey&#039 / s participation and success in the FP7 are growing thanks to T&Uuml / BITAK&rsquo / s effort, but further efforts are needed for meeting competitive participation within a defined strategy. Bearing in mind the results of the impact analyses, the study supports Turkey&rsquo / s continuity to forthcoming FPs but there is need for developing national strategies to maximize benefits of participation and to integrate the outcomes with the national innovation strategy.

An RF switch in substrate integrated waveguide (SIW) technology for X-band is designed and demonstrated. Design is based on embedding shunt pin diodes of the switch in an evanescent mode waveguide filter. At reverse bias, pin diodes formed a part of filter&#039 / s capacitances. Thus switch also functions as a filter when it is in &ldquo / on&rdquo / state. At forward bias of diodes, capacitances of the filter are short circuited to obtain a good isolation. The same circuit structure is used to design a tunable filter and an RF power limiter which also functions as a filter. Several RF functions usually used in RF frontends (power limiting, filtering, switching) are combined in a single circuit which helps miniaturization of the frontend. The circuit can be produced with standard PCB and chip&amp / wire technology. The circuits developed have comparable performances with microstrip counterparts and they are advantageous to use in microwave systems using SIW as the basic transmission medium and need filtering functionality.

In this thesis study, single target tracking algorithms including IMM-PDA and IMM-IPDA algorithms / Optimal approaches in multitarget tracking including IMM-JPDA, IMM-IJPDA and IMM-JIPDA algorithms and an example of Linear Multi-target approaches in multitarget tracking including IMM-LMIPDA algorithm have been studied and implemented in MATLAB for comparison. Simulations were carried out in various realistic test scenarios including single target tracking, tracking of multiple targets moving in convoy fashion, two targets merging in a junction, two targets merging-departing in junctions and multitarget tracking under isolated tracks situations. RMSE performance, track loss and computational load evaluations were done for these algorithms under the test scenarios dealing with these situations. Benchmarkings are presented relying on these outcomes.

In this thesis, a maximum likelihood receiver to obtain the target range profile that uses the clutter prediction derived from the target-free previous observations is suggested as a fast time processor for pulse compression radar systems. The maximum likelihood receiver is proposed to overcome the range sidelobe problem, which is introduced by the pulse compression method. Conventional methods, such as the matched filter receiver, as fast time processor result in the targets with high radar cross sec- tion masking the low radar cross section targets at the neighboring range cells / since sidelobes of the matched filter is determined by the autocorrelation of the spreading code and linearly proportional to target signal power. An unbiased estimator, like the maximum likelihood receiver in this thesis work does not su&crarr / er from such issues. In addition to that, to suppress the signal dependent interference, namely the clutter, at the output of fast time processor / the previous target-free observations are col- lected and utilized to predict the clutter signal for next time instant. This prediction is used in the maximum likelihood receiver. The clutter prediction is done for the stationary case and the internal clutter motion case, and their SINR performances with the maximum likelihood receiver are evaluated. In conclusion, such an approach managed to have an unbiased estimation of target range profile and the clutter suppression advantage in the fast time.

The proliferation of embedded systems, mobile devices, wireless sensor applications and in- creasing global demand for energy directed research attention toward self-sustainable and environmentally friendly systems. In the field of communications, this new trend pointed out the need for study of energy constrained communication and networking. Particularly, in the literature, energy efficient transmission schemes have been well studied for various cases. However, fundamental results have been obtained mostly for offline problems which are not applicable to practical implementations. In contrast, this thesis focuses on online counterparts of offline transmission scheduling problems and provides a theoretical background for energy efficient online transmission schemes. The proposed heuristics, Expected Threshold and Expected Water Level policies, promise an adequate solution which can adapt to short-time-scale dynamics while being computationally efficient.

In this study, we study the dynamics of network adaptive video streaming and propose novel algorithms for rate distortion control in video streaming. While doing so, we maintain inter-protocol fairness with TCP (Transmission Control Protocol) that is the dominant transport protocol in the current Internet. The proposed algorithms are retransmission-based and necessitate the use of playback buffers in order to tolerate the extra latency introduced by retransmissions. In the first part, we propose a practical network-adaptive streaming scheme based on TCP transport and the idea of Selective Frame Discarding (SFD) that makes use of two-layer temporally scalable video. The efficacy of the SFD scheme is validated for playout buffer times in the order of seconds and therefore makes it suitable more for delay tolerant streaming applications. In the second part of the thesis, we propose an application layer rate-distortion control algorithm which provides Optimal Scheduling and Rate Control (OSRC) policies in the average reward sense in order to achieve efficient streaming of video. The Optimal Scheduling (OS) we propose maximizes the probability of successfully on time delivery according to a prespecified set of rate constraints, and different channel conditions by using Markov Decision Process (MDP) models. On the other hand optimal rate control (RC) is achieved by calculating the optimal rate constraint which minimizes the average distortion of a video streaming session by making use of the video distortion model derived for lossy channels and achievable success probabilities provided by the set of optimal schedules. For numerical examples, we focus on an equation-based TCP friendly rate control (TFRC) protocol where transport layer retransmissions are disabled and Fine Granular Scalable (FGS) coded video is used for improved rate adaptation capabilities but with an additional rate distortion penalty. The efficacy of the proposed OSRC algorithm is demonstrated by means of both analytical results and ns-2 simulations.

Today&amp / #8217 / s analog modulators and upconverters are inadequate to synthesize and modulate signals with high &amp / #8216 / Spurious Free Dynamic Range&amp / #8217 / (SFDR). Thus, the main objective of this thesis is to design and implement a &amp / #8216 / Digital Signal Synthesizer&amp / #8217 / (DSS) that is capable of synthesizing signals between 50-100 MHz with 60dB SFDR and to modulate them variable symbol rates and modulation techniques with very high phase/frequency resolution and switching speed while keeping the amplitude modulation occurring during a modulated symbol duration as small as possible. In this thesis, digital words of the desired signals are first synthesized in a &amp / #8216 / Field Programmable Gate Array&amp / #8217 / (FPGA) using &amp / #8216 / Direct Digital Synthesizer&amp / #8217 / (DDS) fundamentals and then converted to analog signals with a high speed &amp / #8216 / Digital to Analog Converter&amp / #8217 / (DAC). In order to attain the analog requirements, the system variables such as DAC analog performance, nonlinearities, sample and hold affects, DDS parameters, system clock, bandwidth requirements of analog filters and how they effect the output performance are studied. FPGA blocks that are capable of modulating and synthesizing desired signals are designed and programmed on a FPGA. Finally, single tone and modulated signals are synthesized with this DSS implementation and measured in order to verify this system&amp / #8217 / s performance and capabilities.

The multimedia watermarking techniques are evolved very quickly in the last years with the increase in the use of internet. The evolution of the internet makes the copyright issues very important and many different approaches are appeared to protect the digital content. On the other hand, holography is the method to store the 3-D information of an object but it is very applicable to use as a watermark because of the nature of the holographic data. The 3-D object can be reconstructed from the hologram even if the hologram is cropped or occluded. However, watermarking of an image with a hologram is a very novel approach and there are only a few works in the literature which are not very robust against the attacks like filtering or compression. In this thesis, we propose to embed the phase of the hologram to an image using quantization index modulation (QIM). QIM is utilized to make the watermarking scheme blind and degrade the host image as low as possible. The robustness of the proposed technique is also tested against several attacks such as filtering, compression, etc. The evaluated performance of this system is compared with the existing methods in the literature which uses either holograms or logos as the secret mark. Furthermore, the characteristics of the holograms are investigated and the findings about the hologram compression are reported in this work.

Emerging 3-D applications and 3-D display technologies raise some transmission problems of the next-generation multimedia data. Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) is one of the challenging topics in this area, that is on its road for standardization via ISO MPEG. In this thesis, a 3-D geometry-based MVC approach is proposed and analyzed in terms of its compression performance. For this purpose, the overall study is partitioned into three preceding parts. The first step is dense depth estimation of a view from a fully calibrated multi-view set. The calibration information and smoothness assumptions are utilized for determining dense correspondences via a Markov Random Field (MRF) model, which is solved by Belief Propagation (BP) method. In the second part, the estimated dense depth maps are utilized for generating (predicting) arbitrary (other camera) views of a scene, that is known as novel view generation. A 3-D warping algorithm, which is followed by an occlusion-compatible hole-filling process, is implemented for this aim. In order to suppress the occlusion artifacts, an intermediate novel view generation method, which fuses two novel views generated from different source views, is developed. Finally, for the last part, dense depth estimation and intermediate novel view generation tools are utilized in the proposed H.264-based MVC scheme for the removal of the spatial redundancies between different views. The performance of the proposed approach is compared against the simulcast coding and a recent MVC proposal, which is expected to be the standard recommendation for MPEG in the near future. These results show that the geometric approaches in MVC can still be utilized, especially in certain 3-D applications, in addition to conventional temporal motion compensation techniques, although the rate-distortion performances of geometry-free approaches are quite superior.

In this thesis study, a new method for automatic recognition of intrapulse modulations has been proposed. This new method deals the problem of modulation recognition with a feature-based approach. The features used to recognize the modulation type are Instantaneous Frequency, Instantaneous Bandwidth, Amplitude Modulation Depth, Box Dimension and Information Dimension. Instantaneous Bandwidth and Instantaneous Frequency features are extracted via Autoregressive Spectrum Modeling. Amplitude Modulation Depth is used to express the depth of amplitude change on the signal. The other features, Box Dimension and Information Dimension, are extracted using Fractal Theory in order to classify the modulations on signals depending on their shapes. A modulation database is used in association with Fractal Theory to decide on the modulation type of the analyzed signal, by means of a distance metric among fractal dimensions. Utilizing these features in a hierarchical flow, the new modulation recognition method is achieved. The proposed method has been tested for various intrapulse modulation types. It has been observed that the method has acceptably good performance even for low SNR cases and for signals with small PW.