Craft distillery internationalization - Case: Kyrö Distillery Company

The purpose of this thesis is to identify attractive foreign markets for Kyrö Distillery Company. A small company with limited resources, it needs to make the right choices in their internationalization process to be able to succeed. Market research is needed. The amassed theory at the beginning gives insight and a general framework that we follow later in the empirical part; should they go abroad, where should the go and how are answered. After analyzing the company, the industry and all the necessary forces affecting the environment it was evident that they are ready to start their internationalization process and that the time is opportune. They have a quality brand that will not shy away even under closer inspection and their biggest impediment is access to distribution channels. After concluding that the company is fit to enter foreign markets a system of ranking countries in our target region was formed. Market data was painstakingly collected and analyzed resulting in an a priori list of attractive foreign market options to aid in the company's decision making. Finally we concluded that according to the transaction cost theory, it is beneficial for Kyrö Distillery Company to engage in partnerships, where local companies handle logistics and sales on their behalf.

Local Binary Patterns in Focal-Plane Processing. Analysis and Applications

Feature extraction is the part of pattern recognition, where the sensor data is transformed into a more suitable form for the machine to interpret. The purpose of this step is also to reduce the amount of information passed to the next stages of the system, and to preserve the essential information in the view of discriminating the data into different classes. For instance, in the case of image analysis the actual image intensities are vulnerable to various environmental effects, such as lighting changes and the feature extraction can be used as means for detecting features, which are invariant to certain types of illumination changes. Finally, classification tries to make decisions based on the previously transformed data. The main focus of this thesis is on developing new methods for the embedded feature extraction based on local non-parametric image descriptors. Also, feature analysis is carried out for the selected image features. Low-level Local Binary Pattern (LBP) based features are in a main role in the analysis. In the embedded domain, the pattern recognition system must usually meet strict performance constraints, such as high speed, compact size and low power consumption. The characteristics of the final system can be seen as a trade-off between these metrics, which is largely affected by the decisions made during the implementation phase. The implementation alternatives of the LBP based feature extraction are explored in the embedded domain in the context of focal-plane vision processors. In particular, the thesis demonstrates the LBP extraction with MIPA4k massively parallel focal-plane processor IC. Also higher level processing is incorporated to this framework, by means of a framework for implementing a single chip face recognition system. Furthermore, a new method for determining optical flow based on LBPs, designed in particular to the embedded domain is presented. Inspired by some of the principles observed through the feature analysis of the Local Binary Patterns, an extension to the well known non-parametric rank transform is proposed, and its performance is evaluated in face recognition experiments with a standard dataset. Finally, an a priori model where the LBPs are seen as combinations of n-tuples is also presented

Aircraft tracking and classification with vhf passive bistatic radar

Since the times preceding the Second World War the subject of aircraft tracking has been a core interest to both military and non-military aviation. During subsequent years both technology and configuration of the radars allowed the users to deploy it in numerous fields, such as over-the-horizon radar, ballistic missile early warning systems or forward scatter fences. The latter one was arranged in a bistatic configuration. The bistatic radar has continuously re-emerged over the last eighty years for its intriguing capabilities and challenging configuration and formulation. The bistatic radar arrangement is used as the basis of all the analyzes presented in this work. The aircraft tracking method of VHF Doppler-only information, developed in the first part of this study, is solely based on Doppler frequency readings in relation to time instances of their appearance. The corresponding inverse problem is solved by utilising a multistatic radar scenario with two receivers and one transmitter and using their frequency readings as a base for aircraft trajectory estimation. The quality of the resulting trajectory is then compared with ground-truth information based on ADS-B data. The second part of the study deals with the developement of a method for instantaneous Doppler curve extraction from within a VHF time-frequency representation of the transmitted signal, with a three receivers and one transmitter configuration, based on a priori knowledge of the probability density function of the first order derivative of the Doppler shift, and on a system of blocks for identifying, classifying and predicting the Doppler signal. The extraction capabilities of this set-up are tested with a recorded TV signal and simulated synthetic spectrograms. Further analyzes are devoted to more comprehensive testing of the capabilities of the extraction method. Besides testing the method, the classification of aircraft is performed on the extracted Bistatic Radar Cross Section profiles and the correlation between them for different types of aircraft. In order to properly estimate the profiles, the ADS-B aircraft location information is adjusted based on extracted Doppler frequency and then used for Bistatic Radar Cross Section estimation. The classification is based on seven types of aircraft grouped by their size into three classes.

Structural and Computational Existence Results for Multidimensional Subshifts

Symbolic dynamics is a branch of mathematics that studies the structure of infinite sequences of symbols, or in the multidimensional case, infinite grids of symbols. Classes of such sequences and grids defined by collections of forbidden patterns are called subshifts, and subshifts of finite type are defined by finitely many forbidden patterns. The simplest examples of multidimensional subshifts are sets of Wang tilings, infinite arrangements of square tiles with colored edges, where adjacent edges must have the same color. Multidimensional symbolic dynamics has strong connections to computability theory, since most of the basic properties of subshifts cannot be recognized by computer programs, but are instead characterized by some higher-level notion of computability. This dissertation focuses on the structure of multidimensional subshifts, and the ways in which it relates to their computational properties. In the first part, we study the subpattern posets and Cantor-Bendixson ranks of countable subshifts of finite type, which can be seen as measures of their structural complexity. We show, by explicitly constructing subshifts with the desired properties, that both notions are essentially restricted only by computability conditions. In the second part of the dissertation, we study different methods of defining (classes of ) multidimensional subshifts, and how they relate to each other and existing methods. We present definitions that use monadic second-order logic, a more restricted kind of logical quantification called quantifier extension, and multi-headed finite state machines. Two of the definitions give rise to hierarchies of subshift classes, which are a priori infinite, but which we show to collapse into finitely many levels. The quantifier extension provides insight to the somewhat mysterious class of multidimensional sofic subshifts, since we prove a characterization for the class of subshifts that can extend a sofic subshift into a nonsofic one.