Tampere University of Technology

About: Tampere University of Technology is a based out in . It is known for research contribution in the topics: Laser & Context (language use). The organization has 6802 authors who have published 19787 publications receiving 431793 citations. The organization is also known as: Tampereen teknillinen yliopisto.

Occurrence of pharmaceuticals in river water and their elimination in a pilot-scale drinking water treatment plant.

Abstract: The occurrence of four beta blockers, one antiepileptic drug, one lipid regulator, four anti-inflammatories, and three fluoroquinolones was studied in a river receiving sewage effluents. All compounds but two of the fluoroquinolones were observed in the water above their limit of quantification concentrations. The highest concentrations (up to 107 ng L-1) of the compounds were measured during the winter months. The river water was passed to a pilot-scale drinking water treatment plant, and the elimination of the pharmaceuticals was followed during the treatment. The processes applied by the plant consisted of ferric salt coagulation, rapid sand filtration, ozonation, two-stage granular activated carbon filtration (GAC), and UV disinfection. Following the coagulation, sedimentation, and rapid sand filtration, the studied pharmaceuticals were found to be eliminated only by an average of 13%. An efficient elimination was found to take place during ozonation at an ozone dose of about 1 mg L-1 (i.e., 0.2−0.4 m...

TUT database for acoustic scene classification and sound event detection

Abstract: We introduce TUT Acoustic Scenes 2016 database for environmental sound research, consisting of binaural recordings from 15 different acoustic environments. A subset of this database, called TUT Sound Events 2016, contains annotations for individual sound events, specifically created for sound event detection. TUT Sound Events 2016 consists of residential area and home environments, and is manually annotated to mark onset, offset and label of sound events. In this paper we present the recording and annotation procedure, the database content, a recommended cross-validation setup and performance of supervised acoustic scene classification system and event detection baseline system using mel frequency cepstral coefficients and Gaussian mixture models. The database is publicly released to provide support for algorithm development and common ground for comparison of different techniques.

Superhydrophobic surfaces for the reduction of bacterial adhesion

Abstract: As an important research area, the development of antibacterial materials has attracted extensive interest from researchers. Typical antibacterial materials involve the use of biocides and antibacterial metallic ions, such as Ag+, as well as killing by highly reactive species, such as hydroxyl radical, hydrogen peroxide and superoxide produced by the photocatalysis of TiO2. However, the intensive usage of biocides has a growing concern in the increase of bacterial resistance and cross-resistance to antibiotics and antibacterial Ag+ depending on its dissolution property may have potential implications on human health and environment. Currently TiO2 is mainly activated with UVA light and research on visible light photocatalysis is still under development. Recently, a new scheme using superhydrophobicity has raised more attention and interests especially for its ability in reducing bacterial adhesion. This paper provides a detailed review on the basics, recent developments, existing challenges and future perspectives of superhydrophobic surfaces especially in reducing bacterial adhesion.

Seasonal variation in the occurrence of pharmaceuticals in effluents from a sewage treatment plant and in the recipient water

Abstract: The occurrence of five pharmaceuticals (ibuprofen, naproxen, ketoprofen, diclofenac, and bezafibrate) in the influent and effluent water of a sewage treatment plant (STP) in the recipient river water and in a drinking water treatment plant (DWTP) located downstream from the STP was followed during three seasons: winter, spring, and summer. In the STP, the elimination of the pharmaceuticals decreased significantly (an average of 25% compared to spring and summer) in wintertime leading to increased concentrations of pharmaceuticals in the effluent water. The total concentration of all the studied pharmaceuticals in the effluent water was 3−5 times higher in wintertime (about 2500 ng L-1) than during the other seasons (about 500−900 ng L-1). Accordingly, the highest concentrations (up to 129 ng L-1) in the recipient river were measured in the wintertime. Pharmaceuticals were carried longer distances downstream from the STP when the river was covered by ice and snow. During a drastic increase in water flow r...

Video denoising by sparse 3D transform-domain collaborative filtering

Abstract: We propose an effective video denoising method based on highly sparse signal representation in local 3D transform domain. A noisy video is processed in blockwise manner and for each processed block we form a 3D data array that we call “group” by stacking together blocks found similar to the currently processed one. This grouping is realized as a spatio-temporal predictive-search block-matching, similar to techniques used for motion estimation. Each formed 3D group is filtered by a 3D transform-domain shrinkage (hard-thresholding and Wiener filtering), the result of which are estimates of all grouped blocks. This filtering — that we term “collaborative filtering” — exploits the correlation between grouped blocks and the corresponding highly sparse representation of the true signal in the transform domain. Since, in general, the obtained block estimates are mutually overlapping, we aggregate them by a weighted average in order to form a non-redundant estimate of the video. Significant improvement of this approach is achieved by using a two-step algorithm where an intermediate estimate is produced by grouping and collaborative hard-thresholding and then used both for improving the grouping and for applying collaborative empirical Wiener filtering. We develop an efficient realization of this video denoising algorithm. The experimental results show that at reasonable computational cost it achieves state-of-the-art denoising performance in terms of both peak signal-to-noise ratio and subjective visual quality.