Triangular Road Research Articles

Digital Triangular Road Signs for Improving Road Safety

Road accidents result in the loss of life and property, and statistics reveal that they are now the leading cause of death worldwide, surpassing diseases like HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, and diarrhoea. One area contributing to road accidents is vehicle breakdowns parked on roads. Usually, drivers of broken vehicles use emergency triangular road signs (reflective triangles) to alert oncoming drivers. However, the effectiveness of reflective triangles is hindered by the inability of oncoming drivers to notice those reflective triangles at a reasonable distance due to bad weather and the topographical structure of the road. To solve this problem, the present paper develops a Digital Triangular Road Sign (DiTRoS) algorithm. The algorithm complements reflective triangles installed on the rear and front sides of the broken vehicle to warn oncoming drivers. Development of DiTRoS algorithm builds on navigation system enabled by global positioning system that works on portable devices –specifically the smartphones. The DiTRoS algorithm is tested in the natural environment. Results demonstrate that the DiTRoS algorithm is effective in notifying oncoming drivers in advance about the presence of the broken vehicle. The study ends by recommending minimum distance at which an oncoming driver may start receiving alerts.

Road detection based on illuminant invariance and quadratic estimation

Road extraction is an important part of the intelligent vehicle systems for automatic driving, navigation, and traffic warning. For the complicated road scene, we present a road detection method based on illumination invariant image and quadratic estimation. The algorithm firstly extracts the illumination invariant image, and a priori triangular road region is used as the color sample to analyze the illumination invariant image and obtain the probability maps. Next, based on the histogram analysis, the combined probability map is significantly resettled, and the road region is estimated for the first time. Then gradient images of the illumination invariant image and the probability map are extracted, and the gradient image is analyzed by the estimated road region. Finally, the effective road boundary is extracted, and the more accurate road region is obtained. The experimental results show that our method can adapt to the road image in a variety of environments. Compared with other algorithms, our algorithm is more stable, and the computational efficiency is improved obviously.

Chaotic Vibration of a Vehicle Model Induced by Triangular Humps

In this study, the dynamic responses of a 4DOF non-linear vehicle model under the excitation of triangular road humps are investigated with numerical simulation. The model displays complicated dynamic responses including harmonic motions and chaos. It is concluded that the chaotic vibrations of the model can be induced by selection of the parameters of the humps.

Water, Roads, and Mapping Diaspora Through Biomythography

Reading Paule Marshall’s 2009 memoir Triangular Road as a biomythography illumines the ways in which the African diaspora is imagined in and through personal and collective narrative. African diaspora studies has sought to map the historical moments, cultural practices, political considerations, and geographical and conceptual spaces that constitute the African diaspora. This article explores how biomythography can possibly map African diaspora discourse beyond the temporal and the spatial. Triangular Road connects diasporic movement and misunderstanding. It uses the concept of bodies of water to map Marshall’s life path. It crosses the lines of official nation-state representations, social gatherings, and international cultural exchange. As biomythography it uses the memoir form to both refute the singularity of an autobiography, rooting Marshall’s story in the communities she has moved through and existed within, and meld the realities of what she can know of those communities with the fantasies she produces in place of absent histories. Marshall’s text crosses generations of literary artistry, nation-building, and diasporic longing. In conversation with other Caribbean women’s biomythographies such as Audre Lorde’s Zami, Triangular Road helps us to navigate the intentionally fuzzy lines between fiction and history, between the personal and the communal, between the rootedness of lands we know and the fluid possibilities of the waters that both separate and join them.

Literariness and Racial Consciousness in Paule Marshall’s Memoir Triangular Road and Gloria Naylor’s Fictionalized Memoir 1996

Abstract Black American women writers were side-lined by the literary canon as recently as the 1980s. Today, as a result of their agency, a distinct literary tradition that bears witness to black women’s particular expressiveness is recognized. Bernard Bell observes that the defining features common to most literary works by black American women are a focus on racist oppression, black female protagonists, the pursuit of demarginalization, women’s bonding, women’s relationship with the community, the power of emotions, and black female language. Although these elements refer predominantly to novels, they are also present in Paule Marshall’s memoir Triangular Road (2009) and Gloria Naylor’s fictionalized memoir 1996 (2005). Moreover, the two works are fitting examples of racial art, the point of departure of which, according to Black Arts Movement advocates, should be the black experience. Actually, since through memoirs the authors offer significant insights into themselves, the genre seems closer to this objective of racial art than novels. At the same time, taking into consideration the intricate plot structures, vivid images, and emotional intensity, their memoirs evidence the quality of literariness i.e., in formalist terms, the set of features that distinguish texts from non-literary ones, for instance, reports, articles, text books, and encyclopaedic biographical entries. Moreover, Marshall and Naylor utilize creative imagination incorporating fabulation, stories within stories, and people or events they have never personally encountered, which dramatizes and intensifies the experiences they relate. In Marshall’s memoir, the fictitious elements are discernable when she imagines the historical past. Naylor demarks imagined narrative passages with separate sections that intertwine with those based upon her actual life experience.

영상인식과 사진측량 기술을 이용한 교통표지 자동측정 방법

최근 도시의 도로시설물 관리에 대한 중요성이 증대됨에 따라 보다 정확한 시설물의 데이터베이스 정보가 요구되고 있다. 본 연구에서는 효율적인 도로시설물 DB 구축에 필요한 교통표지를 자동으로 검출하는 방법을 제안하였다. 검출 방법은 영상에서 특정 교통표지를 인식하여 자동으로 검출한 후 시설물의 중심위치를 찾는 순서로 진행하였다. 최종적으로 검출된 교통표지의 위치 정확도를 평가하기 위해서, 실제 측량한 좌표값과 연구를 통해 교통표지의 좌표값을 비교하였다. 교통표지 인식과 검출 과정에서는 OPEN CV를 이용한 코딩을 통해 컴퓨터 비젼 기술을 이용하였으며, 검출된 교통표지의 정확한 위치 계산은 사진측량 기술을 이용하였다. 다양한 종류의 도로표지판 중에서 원형 교통표지판(주차금지)과 삼각형 교통표지판(횡단보도)을 선택하여 진행하였다. 제안한 연구를 통해 산출된 좌표값과 실제 측량된 좌표값의 차이는 원형 교통표지판이 약 50cm, 삼각형 교통표지판이 약 60cm의 오차값으로 나타났다. 이러한 결과는 만족할 만한 결과는 아니지만 교통표지의 위치를 찾기에는 무리가 없을 것으로 판단된다.

Triangular Road: A Memoir (review)

Reviewed by: Triangular Road: A Memoir Prudence Layne Paule Marshall. 2009. Triangular Road: A Memoir. New York: Basic Citivas Books. 2009. 192 pp. ISBN: 9780465013593. While renewed or increased dissections of the influences on an author’s life and work often occur after the author wins some prestigious award, suffers a grave illness, or on the heels of his/ her death, Triangular Road, Paule Marshall’s 192-page memoir, treats audiences to an intimate look at the bodies of waters, people, and places [End Page 188] that influenced the writer’s trajectory. In the memoir appropriately titled Triangular Road, Marshall credits (broadly speaking) the United States (specifically New York and Virginia), the Caribbean (particularly Barbados and Grenada), and Africa for providing some of the most transformative people, places, and experiences in her work and what she calls her “tripartite self.” With a clarity and honesty that one garners with time and age, Marshall, now 80 years strong and five decades after the publication of her first novel Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959), provides a lasting blueprint for writers embarking on their own professional journeys and to Africa’s children, wondering/wandering through the existential experiences of diaspora. From her retrospective emerges these important lessons: mentor and encourage young writers; nurture and make room for one’s passions, including family, friends, and writing; and pay homage through a literal and or spiritual return to one’s lineage and heritage. Fittingly, Marshall begins her memoir with a serenade to Langston Hughes, whose acts of kindness and encouragement mentored the talent and inspired the confidence of the writer early in and throughout her career. Describing their sojourns throughout Europe (London, Paris, Berlin, Copenhagen) in 1965, Marshall credits Hughes’ two travel memoirs, The Big Sea and I Wonder as I Wander, with her vow to become “... not only ... a writer, but a travelin’ woman as well” and the writer himself, who “... became a kind of West African griot, a tribal elder passing down black American culture and history ...” for her ongoing desire to become an ethnographic scholar of the world. However, not all of Marshall’s mentors were famous outright. Virginia (her lifelong friend and the American state after which she is named), the “Kitchen Poets,” the Barbadian women who gathered in her mother’s kitchen in Brooklyn conversing in their lyrical Bajan dialect about the events and “scandals” of their tight-knit community, her grandmother, aunt and the other relatives she meets during her extended stays in the Caribbean, later gain their fame through Marshall’s writings. Connecting them all are the bodies of water and the watery bodies that flow amongst them: the James River in Virginia, the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. In her own reverse journey, just as emotionally fraught with the memories of loss, death, and abandonment, Marshall describes how these bodies—human, geographic, and aquatic—greeted her slave ancestors during their first point of entry and ports of call in the New World, now transport her to memories of her past. Triangular Road ends where the journey of Marshall’s ancestors began—in Africa, which she calls “... the greater portion of my tripartite self that I had yet to discover, yet to know.” Describing her attendance in 1977 at FESTAC, the Second World Festival of Black and African [End Page 189] Arts in Lagos, Nigeria, not only does the journey back spark a passion to rediscover her African heritage, but it also highlighted the chaotic nature of the African American struggle for political and civil rights with which she was involved as early as the 1940s, calling her people “Unprepared. Unrehearsed. Improvised. Disorganized.” At 80, Marshall shows no signs of slowing down, a testament perhaps that the memoir does not spell her impending demise. She leaves her fans not only with the promise of a commentary “... about that limited and frustrating East African experience,” what appears to be some discovery since 1977 about the African portion of her “tripartite self,” but also that she will return to “... her primary love: the novel, the short story” (p. 165). Omowale Paule! We salute your “return”! Prudence Layne Elon University playne@elon.edu Copyright © 2010 Instituto de Estudios del Caribe, Universidad...