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Motion Estimation is an important research field with many commercial applications including surveillance, navigation, robotics, and image compression. As a result, the field has received a great deal of attention and there exist a wide variety of Motion Estimation techniques which are often specialised for particular problems. The relative performance of these techniques, in terms of both accuracy and of computational requirements, is often found to be data dependent, and no single technique is known to outperform all others for all applications under all conditions. Information Fusion strategies seek to combine the results of different classifiers or sensors to give results of a better quality for a given problem than can be achieved by any single technique alone. Information Fusion has been shown to be of benefit to a number of applications including remote sensing, personal identity recognition, target detection, forecasting, and medical diagnosis. This thesis proposes and demonstrates that Information Fusion strategies may also be applied to combine the results of different Motion Estimation techniques in order to give more robust, more accurate and more timely motion estimates than are provided by any of the individual techniques alone. Information Fusion strategies for combining motion estimates are investigated and developed. Their usefulness is first demonstrated by combining scalar motion estimates of the frequency of rotation of spinning biological cells. Then the strategies are used to combine the results from three popular 2D Motion Estimation techniques, chosen to be representative of the main approaches in the field. Results are presented, from both real and synthetic test image sequences, which illustrate the potential benefits of Information Fusion to Motion Estimation applications. There is often a trade-off between accuracy of Motion Estimation techniques and their computational requirements. An architecture for Information Fusion that allows faster, less accurate techniques to be effectively combined with slower, more accurate techniques is described. This thesis describes a number of novel techniques for both Information Fusion and Motion Estimation which have potential scope beyond that examined here. The investigations presented in this thesis have also been reported in a number of workshop, conference and journal papers, which are listed at the end of the document.

The aim of the work was to study the morphology of various polymers under a variety of conditions. The research followed various lines. The morphology of crosslinked polyethylene and its implications with respect to that of linear polyethylene was studied by Raman spectroscopy, differential scanning calorimetry, electron microscopy, small angle light scattering and nuclear magnetic resonance. The efficiency of the crosslinking reaction was evaluated. The morphology of flowing molten polymers was investigated by Raman spectroscopy. Hot stretched crosslinked polyethylene was studied by vibrational spectroscopy as an aid to investigating the structure of flowing melts. The following results are reported: The morphology, of crosslinked polyethylene is very similar to that of linear polyethylene. This supports Flory's view of the crystallization process. The efficiency of crosslinking polyethylene with dicumyl peroxide is approximately 81.5,1). Orientation of polymer molecules by flow under the wide range of temperatures and shear rates investigated was found to be negligible. Stretching crosslinked polyethylene at temperatures above its crystalline melting point results in preferential extension of a small proportion of polymer chains with little effect on others.

This study investigates domestic slavery in Syrian and Egyptian society from the thirteenth century to the fifteenth century. It focuses on the agency of slaves in the context of master-slave relationships within households and in wider society. It argues that the ability of slaves to shape the world around them was underpinned by a constant process of negotiation within the master-slave relationship and that intermediaries such as the court system channelled the agency of slaves. The principal sources for this study are purchase contracts, listening certificates, marriage contracts, and estate inventories in combination with scribal, market inspection, and slave purchase manuals as well as chronicles. The structure of the study broadly follows the life cycle of slaves from importation to integration, accommodation, procreation, the possibility of manumission, and death. The first chapter investigates the topography and the commercial practices of slave markets, where owners chose slaves and initiated a deeply unequal personal bond which assigned a new function and identity to newly imported slaves. The second chapter provides two case studies based on manuscript collections in order to historicize and problematize the patterns set out previously. The third chapter studies the social integration of slaves and freed slaves on the basis of listening certificates. It argues that the slave population consisted mainly of imported Ethiopian and Turkish slaves who were highly integrated into urban society. The fourth chapter discusses the sexual dimension of domestic slavery by focusing on concubinage, marriage, and slave procreation. It brings together a range of documentary and legal sources to provide case studies of strategies of accommodation and resistance. The fifth chapter investigates manumission and its impact on the household dynamics of slavery. The sixth and final chapter analyses a collection of estate inventories of freed slaves and discusses the continuity of master-slave relations after manumission.