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The purpose of this paper is to present a preliminary solution to address the problem of estimating human pose and trajectory by an aerial robot with a monocular camera in near real time.

The distinguishing feature of the solution is a dynamic classifier selection architecture. Each video frame is corrected for perspective using projective transformation. Then, a silhouette is extracted as a Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG). The HOG is then classified using a dynamic classifier. A class is defined as a pose-viewpoint pair, and a total of 64 classes are defined to represent a forward walking and turning gait sequence. The dynamic classifier consists of a Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier C64 that recognizes all 64 classes, and 64 SVM classifiers that recognize four classes each – these four classes are chosen based on the temporal relationship between them, dictated by the gait sequence.

The solution provides three main advantages: first, classification is efficient due to dynamic selection (4-class vs 64-class classification). Second, classification errors are confined to neighbors of the true viewpoints. This means a wrongly estimated viewpoint is at most an adjacent viewpoint of the true viewpoint, enabling fast recovery from incorrect estimations. Third, the robust temporal relationship between poses is used to resolve the left-right ambiguities of human silhouettes.

Experiments conducted on both fronto-parallel videos and aerial videos confirm that the solution can achieve accurate pose and trajectory estimation for these different kinds of videos. For example, the “walking on an 8-shaped path” data set (1,652 frames) can achieve the following estimation accuracies: 85 percent for viewpoints and 98.14 percent for poses.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of total productive maintenance (TPM) practices on manufacturing performance of textile and apparel manufacturing firms.

A self-administered survey questionnaire was used for data collection. A total of 236 usable responses resulted in a 78 percent response rate from 30 textile and apparel firms. Correlation and regression analysis was performed using SPSS software to identify the effect of TPM on manufacturing performance.

The results show that all the TPM practices have positive and significant relationship with manufacturing performance and significantly improve cost effectiveness, product quality, on-time delivery and volume flexibility.

The study presented in this paper offers academics and practitioners a better understanding of the relationship and impact of the TPM practices on the manufacturing performances. Thus practitioners will be able to make better and more effective decisions about the implementation of TPM practices.

The understanding of the effect of TPM practices on manufacturing performance is timely for labor intensive manufacturing industries such as textile and apparel since it has not been researched adequately. Therefore, findings will impact the global textile and apparel industry positively.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of peripheral services offered by distance education (DE) institutes on student involvement in DE and, examine whether this impact is mediated by student experience quality.

Quantitative research approach based on cross-sectional survey design was used where data were collected using a structured questionnaire. Sample consisted of 400 undergraduates of the Open University of Sri Lanka, drawn using simple random sampling technique. Collected data were analyzed using the structural equation model.

Data analysis revealed that there is a significant direct impact of peripheral services offered by DE institutes on student involvement in the Sri Lankan context. Furthermore, it is validated that this impact is mediated by student experience quality.

Focus of the study is only on the impact of contextual elements rather than personal or demographic factors of students which can have an important impact on their experience quality as well as involvement.

Findings are useful in designing and redesigning service offering and policy development by DE institutes to make their services more appealing.

Even though previous studies have identified student dropout and lower academic excellence as issues in DE, how service offering can be used to overcome them via student involvement has not received considerable attention. Hence, the tested conceptual model developed on multiple theories is a novel contribution to the existing knowledge base.

This paper aims to explore how sexual harassment is experienced and understood by heterosexual working men in their day-to-day work lives in an Asian patriarchal culture, underpinned by rigid sex-role norms and gender role stereotypes, which promote heterosexual hegemonic masculinity

Using qualitative research approach, 19 in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with self-identified heterosexual men.

The findings indicate common, yet unique, ways heterosexual men experience sexual harassment at workplaces, perpetrated by women and men, holding different organizational positions. Unwanted sexual attention, gender harassment, sexploitation and sexual hubris are, thus, identified as the main manifestations of sexual harassment for men. The nature of the experiences, how they were understood and perceived by heterosexual men, who the harassers were, how men have responded to their experiences and the existing theories point toward numerous explanations for the heterosexual men’s experiences of sexual harassment. Among these reasons, hegemonic masculinity, power and sexual attraction were found to be predominant.

The themes and explanations of different and sometimes unique sexual harassment experiences expand and add to the understudied area of sexual harassment of heterosexual men in general, and in a cultural context, rarely explored, more specifically.