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Toxic heavy metal lead enters in the environment due to industrial and anthropogenic activity threatens ecosystems and public health. Natural garlic extract (GE) exhibits antioxidant properties and various applications against several ailments. Therefore, this study scrutinized the protective effects of tocopherol polyethylene glycol succinate-coated garlic selenium (TPGS-GSNP) against lead acetate (LA) toxicity in rabbits. Sixty-four mature male rabbits were involved and divided into 8 equal groups. They received distilled water (negative control; T1), 30 mg/kg bw of LA (positive control; T2), 800 mg/kg bw of GE (T3), GE + LA (T4), 1 mg/kg bw of TPGS-Selenium (T5), TPGS-S + LA (T6), 1 mg/kg bw of TPGS-GSNP (T7), and TPGS-GSNP + LA (T8). Consequently, treatments were administered three times a week for 12 weeks. Following the treatment period, serum oxidant-antioxidant, protein, and lipid profiles, liver and kidney function, histopathological findings of the adrenal, liver, and kidneys, femur bone marrow chromosomal aberrations, and mitotic activity were collected and analysed. LA exposure showed significant reductions in antioxidant levels, organ weights, and mitotic activity while increasing oxidative stress, corticosteroid levels, and chromosomal aberrations. Importantly, TPGS-GSNP administration significantly improved these markers compared to the LA group. In addition, histological analysis revealed structural improvements of the studied organs in the TPGS-GSNP group compared to the LA group, which displayed high cellular necrotic and degenerative changes. In conclusion, synthetic TPGS-GSNP demonstrated higher protective efficacy against LA-induced toxicity compared to natural GE or selenium alone. However, more future studies could be conducted to explore the potential of TPGS-GSNP as an anticancer or immunomodulatory agent.

In this paper, a novel face recognition approach based on strings of successive values (SSV) is presented. In contrast to most of the existing local descriptors which encode only a limited number of pixels included in a mask, the strings extract more discriminative information over the whole face region, by moving from the current pixel to the next one, and to the other next, and so on, according to the variations of their intensities. Therefore, the SSV can be stopped in any place of the face area, which allows us to encode more edge information and texture information than the existing methods. The proposed face recognition scheme requires several steps. Firstly, the images are divided into non-overlapping sub-regions from which the strings are extracted since each pixel produces two different strings. Thereafter, the dictionary of visual words is created to reduce the number of strings obtained from each patch of the image. Therefore, the face image is described only by visual words, because each string is replaced by its nearest dictionary word. As a result, the occurrence of visual words is computed in a histogram as a face descriptor. Finally, the recognition is performed by using the nearest neighbor classifier with the Hellinger distance. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is evaluated on three different databases, and the experimental results show that the recognition performances achieved are competitive or even outperform the literature state of the art methods.

Eyes detection is a very interesting field of research that verifies the presence of eyes and locates their positions in an image. Similarly, it is often the first step in such applications such as face recognition, human machine interaction systems, facial expression recognition, and driver fatigue monitoring systems. In this paper, we proposed a robust eye detection method based on the Viola and Jones method and corner points. Firstly, faces are detected by a system composed of two detectors of Viola-Jones (one for the frontal faces and the other for the profile faces). Secondly, we used the Shi-Tomasi detector (to detect corner points) and K-means (for clustering the neighbor corner points) to determine eye candidate regions. Thirdly, the localization of eyes is achieved by matching of these regions with an eye template. The results obtained show that our method is robust and provides superior performance compared to other recently published methods.

Mosaic reconstruction is a stitching process of multiple images, of a particular scene, in a single frame that provides a larger amount of information compared to the separate images. Nowadays, image mosaic is a key tool that has invaded different fields and disciplines such as photography, virtual environment, medicine, etc. In this work, we propose a new pre-processing approach of multi-scale images we have named MSIP (Multi-Scale Image Pre-processing), invariant to scale changes and based on the distance between the matched points detected by SIFT. Its main purpose is to correct the scale difference between images to reduce outliers and alignment errors. The experimentation and statistical analysis, on a real database, show the robustness of our approach by improving the quality of mosaic results.

Designing virtual clothing has received much attention recently due to the increasing need for synthesizing realistically dressed digital humans for various applications. Wrinkles are an important appearance feature of the garment in virtual environments. Generating such wrinkles currently requires a computationally expensive simulation or specialized design skills. We present a new geometric method for adding believable wrinkles to existing virtual clothing. The key novelty of our work is to use Hermite Radial Based Functions (HRBF) to reconstruct an approximation of the clothing mesh. Our method takes advantage of angles between gradients of adjacent HRBF scalar fields to trace spatially and temporally coherent wrinkle curves on a cloth mesh. We generate plausible wrinkle geometry using implicit deformers following the wrinkle curves. Our method can be used as a post-processing step on any garment simulation system. The results obtained demonstrate that our approach produces believable wrinkles and it is very satisfactory in terms of performance. The method is fully automatic and provides a large set of parameters that can be modified by the user in order to control the appearance of the resulting wrinkles in real-time and thus obtain the desired result.

In this article, we propose a new method of image stitching that computes, in a robust manner, the transformation model applied to creating a panorama that is close to reality. The random selection of matching points used in existing methods, using Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) or the threshold of the execution process (iteration number) cannot generally provide sufficient precision. Our approach, in this regard, comes to solve this problem. The calculation of the transformation model is based on the VORONOI diagram that divides images into regions to be used in the matching instead of control points. In this case, the transformation estimation will be based on the regions seeds that provide the best correlation score. Among the advantages of our method is solving problems related to outliers that can, in existing methods, affect the reliability of the mosaic. The results obtained are satisfactory in terms of stability, quality, execution time and reduction of the computational complexity.

The goal of this study was to document the toxic effects of aflatoxin B1 (AfB1) on the testis, epididymis, liver, and kidneys of adult male rats, and to employ camel milk as a natural antidote to neutralize these effects. For these purposes, 120 adult male Wister rats (90 days old) were divided into four groups (30 males each); control (C) group (drinking water was supplied), Cm group (camel milk was supplied at 10ml/kg bw/day), Af group (AfB1 was supplied at 0.3mg/kg bw/day), and CmAf group (combination treatment were supplied). The males were weighed and sacrificed on days 21 and 42 of the treatment to evaluate the histological changes of the liver, kidneys, testes, and epididymis. The body weight and testicular, epididymal, prostate, and seminal vesicle weights in the Af group decreased significantly, however this was improved in AfCm group. At day 21, histological findings of AF group revealed a decline of testicular germ layers and spermatogenesis arrest, necrotic and degenerative changes of hepatocytes and renal tubules, epididymal epithelial hyperplasia with cytoplasmic vacuolation, and depletion of sperms from the epididymis' lumen. At day 42, the severity of the histopathological changes were time-dependet. At both experimental periods, AfCm group reported substantial reduction in the degree of germ epithelium with normal seminiferous tubules epithelia with active spermatogenesis, necrosis of some hepatocytes beside infiltration of some inflammatory cells, most glomeruli and tubules were normal but some with sloughing tubular epithelia, and normal epididymalpseudostratified columnar epithelium with sperms in the lumen.

In this study, a number of nanocomposites were prepared by adding magnesium oxide (MgO) with weight percentages (1, 2 & 3)% to cellulose nitrate and sodium silicate as an intermediate layer and other nanocomposites by adding MgO, coal coke and hybrid (MgO & coal coke with ratio 1:1) with weight percentages (1, 2 & 3)% to epoxy resin as final layer. The identity of the used metal is determined by spectrometer OE thermo. The nature and topography of the surface layers were examined by optical microscope and atomic force microscope (AFM). Mechanical properties are indicated by hardness, wear rate, impact strength and adhesion strength. The efficiency of the layers prepared to inhibit corrosion in the oil mineral reservoirs of the oil products distribution company was studied by electrochemical corrosion test in addition to the chemical corrosion test. The used metal is (St-37) according to (ASTM). It was found that the best intermediate layer (cellulose nitrate+3%MgO) and the final layer is the epoxy resin reinforced by 2% hybrid.

Vehicular Ad-hoc Network (VANET) is an emerging technology which allows vehicles on the roads to communicate and exchange information with each other. Broadcast in VANET has gained a lot of attention because it is used extensively in many VANET applications. Recently, Cell Broadcast for streets (CB-S) [1], a cell based algorithm has been proposed and compared favorably to different class of broadcast in VANET. This paper proposes an enhanced version of CB-S called ECB-S which addresses CB-S limitations in selecting rebroadcast nodes only within any other cell and enhance it to include also any node reachable within the transmission range. Simulation study shows that ECB-S outperforms considerably the original CB-S in terms of end-to-end delay under different traffic, density, and mobility conditions.