Engineering Commons^™

Improving The Performance And Evaluation Of Computer-Assisted Semen Analysis, Ji-Won Choi

Dissertations

Semen analysis is performed routinely in fertility clinics to analyze the quality of semen and sperm cells of male patients. The analysis is typically performed by trained technicians or by Computer-Assisted Semen Analysis (CASA) systems. Manual semen analysis performed by technicians is subjective, time-consuming, and laborious, and yet most fertility clinics perform semen analysis in this manner. CASA systems, which are designed to perform the same tasks automatically, have a considerable market share, yet many studies still express concerns about their accuracy and consistency. In this dissertation, the focus is on detection, tracking, and classification of sperm cells in semen …

A Multimodal Investigation In Eye Movements, Raj Jaswal

Dissertations

While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has identified which regions of interest (ROIs) are functionally active during a vergence movement (inward or outward eye rotation), task-modulated coactivation between ROIs is less understood. This study tests the following hypotheses: (1) significant task-modulated coactivation would be observed between the frontal eye fields (FEFs), the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), and the cerebellar vermis (CV); (2) significantly more functional activity and task-modulated coactivation would be observed in binocularly normal controls (BNCs) compared with convergence insufficiency (CI) subjects; and (3) after vergence training, the functional activity and task-modulated coactivation would increase in CIs compared with …

Robust Techniques And Applications In Fuzzy Clustering, Amit Banerjee

Dissertations

This dissertation addresses issues central to frizzy classification. The issue of sensitivity to noise and outliers of least squares minimization based clustering techniques, such as Fuzzy c-Means (FCM) and its variants is addressed. In this work, two novel and robust clustering schemes are presented and analyzed in detail. They approach the problem of robustness from different perspectives. The first scheme scales down the FCM memberships of data points based on the distance of the points from the cluster centers. Scaling done on outliers reduces their membership in true clusters. This scheme, known as the Mega-clustering, defines a conceptual mega-cluster which …

Stereo Matching Algorithm By Propagation Of Correspondences And Stereo Vision Instrumentation, Peerajak Witoonchart

Theses

A new image processing method is described for measuring the 3-D coordinates of a complex, biological surface. One of the problems in stereo vision is known as the accuracy-precision tradeoff problem. This thesis proposes a new method that promises to solve this problem. To do so, two issues are addressed. First, stereo vision instrumentation methods are described. This instrumentation includes a camera system as well as camera calibration, rectification, matching and triangulation. Second, the approach employs an array of cameras that allow accurate computation of the depth map of a surface by propagation of correspondences through pair-wise camera views.

The …

Detection And Robustness Of Digital Image Watermarking Signals : A Communication Theory Approach, George F. Elmasry

Dissertations

The detection and robustness of the watermark signal is studied from a communications point of view. The contributions of this dissertation are presented in two parts. The first part, which covers the detection aspect, introduces a new digital image watermarking approach that embeds meaningful information in a copyright protection watermark signal; demonstrates the need to approach the watermark signal as a power-constrained signal; studies the relationship between the watermark signal dimension and the image capacity to the signal; explains the similarities and differences between detecting the watermark signal and detecting a signal over a spread-spectrum communication channel; and analyzes the …

Detection Of Planar Facets In Noisy Range Images, Ajey S. Atre

Theses

Segmentation of the image is one of the major tasks of a machine vision system designed for constructing a three-dimensional representation of the object being imaged. A robust approach for segmenting planar surfaces from range images is presented in this paper. An algorithm based on clustering through fuzzy covariance matrices, which has been proposed by Gustafson and Kessel is considered for planar segmentation. However this algorithm performs poorly if the data is noisy, which is usually the case in real life applications. In order to handle noisy data, a robust modification, based on the "noise clustering" concept, is introduced to …

Simplification Of The Generalized Adaptive Neural Filter And Comparative Studies With Other Nonlinear Filters, Henry Steven Hanek

Theses

Recently, a new class of adaptive filters called Generalized Adaptive Neural Filters (GANFs) has emerged. They share many characteristics in common with stack filters, include all stack filters as a subset. The GANFs allow a very efficient hardware implementation once they are trained. However, there are some problems associated with GANFs. Three of these arc slow training speeds and the difficulty in choosing a filter structure and neural operator.

This thesis begins with a tutorial on filtering and traces the GANF development up through its origin -- the stack filter. After the GANF is covered in reasonable depth, its use …

Evaluation Of Collision Properties Of Spheres Using High-Speed Video Analysis, Jian Yu

Theses

Experimental evaluation of the collision properties of spheres is performed using video image analysis techniques. A high-speed Kodak EktaPro1000 video camera is utilized to record a collision sequence between two spheres at 1000 frames/sec, and then the images are analyzed to calculate three dimensional translation and rotation before and after the collision. These quantities are used to compute the collision properties for a pair of one inch nylon spheres, i.e. the coefficient of friction, and the coefficients of normal and tangential restitution. The focus of the thesis is on image analysis techniques that provide high accuracy results even though the …

A Direct Method For Surface Structure Recovering Based On Uoff, Ping Lin

Theses

The unified optical flow field (UOFF) theory which can be used for estimating motion and recovering surface structure was recently established in [9, 10]. The direct method developed in [2, 3, 4, 6, 7] does not need to explicitly solve the optical flow field and to find feature correspondence. Based on the UOFF, a direct method in space domain is developed to reconstruct the curved surface structure characterized by an Nth degree polynomial equation from a pair of stereo images. The initial work on this new method was reported in [8, 11].

In this study, I basically work on simulation …

Evaluation Of Homogeneity For Hazardous Waste Solidification By Video Imaging Technique, Yi-Min Gao

Theses

The field of chemical solidification has just begun to mature into an accepted environmental technology for hazardous waste disposal. From the engineering point of view, some key issues still dominate the feasibility and effectiveness of hazardous waste solidification process. "Mixing" is essentially regarded as the most critical element but unfortunately, no evidence has been proposed to prove the homogeneity of the large monolith produced by solidification in order that the effectiveness of the solidification process can be evaluated in satisfactorily short time. The Homogeneity Evaluation by Video Imaging System (HEVIS) proposed in this study is to solve this problem with …

The Design And Testing Of A Personal Computer Controlled Scanning Acoustic Microscope For Orthopaedic Surgical Applications, Hubert Heinrich Berndt

Theses

This thesis describes scanning acoustic microscopy and ultrasonic image processing to characterize and evaluate materials of known properties, as well as novel materials. This work describes the assembly and testing of a PC based device for nondestructive evaluation of bone materials for usage in orthopaedics research. It includes the identification of some hardware problems and their solution, and it also describes different image processing techniques that have been developed and applied in this work. In a growing number of disciplines it has been discovered that an acoustic microscope can provide new information, especially about the elastic properties of specimens and …

A Parallelogram Four-Frame Model In 3-D Motion And Structure Recovery Using Unified Optical Flow Field Approach, Zhichun Lin

Theses

In this paper a new concept of the unified optical flow field (UOFF) for 3 D motion analysis from a stereo image sequence is implemented which is an extension of the temporal optical flow formulations developed by Horn and Schunck. A four frame model is established and a spatial optical flow is also introduced.

In order to alleviate the problem of the strict requirement of two identical sensors in common stereo imagery a new imaging system is presented in this paper that needs only one camera, two plane mirrors and two switches to generate a phase shifted binocular sequence of …

A Mouse-Driven Interface For Androx Ics-400, Chin-Tien Chen

Theses

A mouse-driven interface is extremely useful for software performing image processing tasks. This thesis describes an implementation of a mouse-driven interface for the Androx ICS-400 image processing board. The Androx board is housed in a Sun 4/330 running a UNIX-based operating system. The main goal of this interface is to provide a consistent and friendly user interface for image processing tasks and integrating the Sun window libraries with the Androx libraries. Various image processing tasks, such as gray scale and binary morphological operations, histogram, thresholding, filtering, spot, logical operations, arithmetic operations, zooming, scrolling, rank and image acquisition are implemented in …