Computer Engineering Commons^™

Face Recognition Using Statistical Adapted Local Binary Patterns., Abdallah Abd-Elghafar Mohamed

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Biometrics is the study of methods of recognizing humans based on their behavioral and physical characteristics or traits. Face recognition is one of the biometric modalities that received a great amount of attention from many researchers during the past few decades because of its potential applications in a variety of security domains. Face recognition however is not only concerned with recognizing human faces, but also with recognizing faces of non-biological entities or avatars. Fortunately, the need for secure and affordable virtual worlds is attracting the attention of many researchers who seek to find fast, automatic and reliable ways to identify …

An Inter-Domain Supervision Framework For Collaborative Clustering Of Data With Mixed Types., Artur Abdullin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

We propose an Inter-Domain Supervision (IDS) clustering framework to discover clusters within diverse data formats, mixed-type attributes and different sources of data. This approach can be used for combined clustering of diverse representations of the data, in particular where data comes from different sources, some of which may be unreliable or uncertain, or for exploiting optional external concept set labels to guide the clustering of the main data set in its original domain. We additionally take into account possible incompatibilities in the data via an automated inter-domain compatibility analysis. Our results in clustering real data sets with mixed numerical, categorical, …

Dexterous Hexrotor Uav Platform, Guangying Jiang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Mobile manipulation is a hot area of study in robotics as it unites the two classes of robots: locomotors and manipulators. An emerging niche in the field of mobile manipulation is aerial mobile manipulation. Although there has been a fair amount of study of free-flying satellites with graspers, the more recent trend has been to outfit UAVs with graspers to assist various manipulation tasks. While this recent work has yielded impressive results, it is hampered by a lack of appropriate testbeds for aerial mobile manipulation, similar to the state of ground-based mobile manipulation a decade ago. Typical helicopters or quadrotors …

Human Action Recognition Via Fused Kinematic Structure And Surface Representation, Salah R. Althloothi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Human action recognition from visual data has remained a challenging problem in the field of computer vision and pattern recognition. This dissertation introduces a new methodology for human action recognition using motion features extracted from kinematic structure, and shape features extracted from surface representation of human body. Motion features are used to provide sufficient information about human movement, whereas shape features are used to describe the structure of silhouette. These features are fused at the kernel level using Multikernel Learning (MKL) technique to enhance the overall performance of human action recognition. In fact, there are advantages in using multiple types …

Towards A Filmic Look And Feel In Real Time Computer Graphics, Sherief Farouk

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Film footage has a distinct look and feel that audience can instantly recognize, making its replication desirable for computer generated graphics. This thesis presents methods capable of replicating significant portions of the film look and feel while being able to fit within the constraints imposed by real-time computer generated graphics on consumer hardware.

Improving The Performance Of The Parallel Ice Sheet Model On A Large-Scale, Distributed Supercomputer, Timothy J. Morey

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we describe our work to understand and improve the performance and scalability of the Parallel Ice Sheet Model (PISM) on the Ranger supercomputer. PISM enables the simulation of large-scale ice sheets, such as those found in Greenland and Antarctica, which are of particular interest to climate scientists due to their potential to contribute to sea-level rise.

PISM has a unique parallel architecture that is designed to take advantage of the computational resources available on state-of-the-art supercomputers. The problem, however, is that even though PISM can run without modifcation on a supercomputer, it is generally unable to do …

Categorization Of Security Design Patterns, Jeremiah Y. Dangler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Strategies for software development often slight security-related considerations, due to the difficulty of developing realizable requirements, identifying and applying appropriate techniques, and teaching secure design. This work describes a three-part strategy for addressing these concerns. Part 1 provides detailed questions, derived from a two-level characterization of system security based on work by Chung et. al., to elicit precise requirements. Part 2 uses a novel framework for relating this characterization to previously published strategies, or patterns, for secure software development. Included case studies suggest the framework's effectiveness, involving the application of three patterns for secure design (Limited View, Role-Based Access Control, …

Routing, Localization And Positioning Protocols For Wireless Sensor And Actor Networks, Mustafa Akbas

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) are distributed systems of sensor nodes and actors that are interconnected over the wireless medium. Sensor nodes collect information about the physical world and transmit the data to actors by using one-hop or multi-hop communications. Actors collect information from the sensor nodes, process the information, take decisions and react to the events. This dissertation presents contributions to the methods of routing, localization and positioning in WSANs for practical applications. We first propose a routing protocol with service differentiation for WSANs with stationary nodes. In this setting, we also adapt a sports ranking algorithm to …

Influence Of Task-Role Mental Models On Human Interpretation Of Robot Motion Behavior, Scott Ososky

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The transition in robotics from tools to teammates has begun. However, the benefit autonomous robots provide will be diminished if human teammates misinterpret robot behaviors. Applying mental model theory as the organizing framework for human understanding of robots, the current empirical study examined the influence of task-role mental models of robots on the interpretation of robot motion behaviors, and the resulting impact on subjective ratings of robots. Observers (N = 120) were exposed to robot behaviors that were either congruent or incongruent with their task-role mental model, by experimental manipulation of preparatory robot task-role information to influence mental models (i.e., …

Life Long Learning In Sparse Learning Environments, John Reeder

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Life long learning is a machine learning technique that deals with learning sequential tasks over time. It seeks to transfer knowledge from previous learning tasks to new learning tasks in order to increase generalization performance and learning speed. Real-time learning environments in which many agents are participating may provide learning opportunities but they are spread out in time and space outside of the geographical scope of a single learning agent. This research seeks to provide an algorithm and framework for life long learning among a network of agents in a sparse real-time learning environment. This work will utilize the robust …

Robust Subspace Estimation Using Low-Rank Optimization. Theory And Applications In Scene Reconstruction, Video Denoising, And Activity Recognition., Omar Oreifej

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we discuss the problem of robust linear subspace estimation using low-rank optimization and propose three formulations of it. We demonstrate how these formulations can be used to solve fundamental computer vision problems, and provide superior performance in terms of accuracy and running time. Consider a set of observations extracted from images (such as pixel gray values, local features, trajectories . . . etc). If the assumption that these observations are drawn from a liner subspace (or can be linearly approximated) is valid, then the goal is to represent each observation as a linear combination of a compact …

Modeling Learner Mood In Realtime Through Biosensors For Intelligent Tutoring Improvements, Keith Brawner

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Computer-based instructors, just like their human counterparts, should monitor the emotional and cognitive states of their students in order to adapt instructional technique. Doing so requires a model of student state to be available at run time, but this has historically been difficult. Because people are different, generalized models have not been able to be validated. As a person’s cognitive and affective state vary over time of day and seasonally, individualized models have had differing difficulties. The simultaneous creation and execution of an individualized model, in real time, represents the last option for modeling such cognitive and affective states. This …

Mathematical And Computational Methods For Freeform Optical Shape Description, Ilhan Kaya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Slow-servo single-point diamond turning as well as advances in computer controlled small lap polishing enable the fabrication of freeform optics, specifically, optical surfaces for imaging applications that are not rotationally symmetric. Freeform optical elements will have a profound importance in the future of optical technology. Orthogonal polynomials added onto conic sections have been extensively used to describe optical surface shapes. The optical testing industry has chosen to represent the departure of a wavefront under test from a reference sphere in terms of orthogonal φ-polynomials, specifically Zernike polynomials. Various forms of polynomials for describing freeform optical surfaces may be considered, however, …

Measuring The Evolving Internet Ecosystem With Exchange Points, Mohammad Zubair Ahmad

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Internet ecosystem comprising of thousands of Autonomous Systems (ASes) now include Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) as another critical component in the infrastructure. Peering plays a significant part in driving the economic growth of ASes and is contributing to a variety of structural changes in the Internet. IXPs are a primary component of this peering ecosystem and are playing an increasing role not only in the topology evolution of the Internet but also inter-domain path routing. In this dissertation we study and analyze the overall affects of peering and IXP infrastructure on the Internet. We observe IXP peering is enabling …

Multiple Bounding Boxes Algorithm In Collision Detection And Its Performances In Sequential Vs Cuda Parallel Processing, Min Qi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The traditional method for detecting collisions in a 2D computer game uses a axisaligned bounding box around each sprite, and checks to determine if the bounding boxes overlap periodically. Using this single bounding box method may result in a large amount of pixel intersection tests, since a sprite may be composed of areas where the pixels are empty and the intersecting bounding box test results in false positives.

Our algorithm analysis shows that the optimal two or three bounding boxes is the best partition we can get for a reasonable time complexity. The results further show significantly diminishing returns for …

Reducing Communication Delay Variability For A Group Of Robots, Goncalo Martins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A novel architecture is presented for reducing communication delay variability for a group of robots. This architecture relies on using three components: a microprocessor architecture that allows deterministic real-time tasks; an event-based communication protocol in which nodes transmit in a TDMA fashion, without the need of global clock synchronization techniques; and a novel communication scheme that enables deterministic communications by allowing senders to transmit without regard for the state of the medium or coordination with other senders, and receivers can tease apart messages sent simultaneously with a high probability of success. This approach compared to others, allows simultaneous communications without …

Robot Team Formation Control Using Communication "Throughput Approach", Fatmazahra Ahmed Benhalim

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we consider a team of robots forming a mobile robot network cooperating to accomplish a mission in an unknown but structured environment. The team has no a-priori knowledge of the environment. Robots have limited memory storage capabilities, not enough to map the environment. Each robot also has limited sensor capability and computational power. Due to the need to avoid obstacles and other environment effects, some robots get delayed from the rest. Using tracking controller, the robot team should follow the leader in a flexible formation shape without losing network connectivity, and that was achieved by monitoring the …

Radar Based Collision Avoidance For Unmanned Aircraft Systems, Allistair A. Moses

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have become increasingly prevalent and will represent an increasing percentage of all aviation. These unmanned aircraft are available in a wide range of sizes and capabilities and can be used for a multitude of civilian and military applications. However, as the number of UAS increases so does the risk of mid-air collisions involving unmanned aircraft. This dissertation aims present one possible solution for addressing the mid-air collision problem in addition to increasing the levels of autonomy of UAS beyond waypoint navigation to include preemptive sensor-based collision avoidance. The presented research goes beyond the current state of …

Recognition Of Complex Events In Open-Source Web-Scale Videos: Features, Intermediate Representations And Their Temporal Interactions, Subhabrata Bhattacharya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Recognition of complex events in consumer uploaded Internet videos, captured under realworld settings, has emerged as a challenging area of research across both computer vision and multimedia community. In this dissertation, we present a systematic decomposition of complex events into hierarchical components and make an in-depth analysis of how existing research are being used to cater to various levels of this hierarchy and identify three key stages where we make novel contributions, keeping complex events in focus. These are listed as follows: (a) Extraction of novel semi-global features – firstly, we introduce a Lie-algebra based representation of dominant camera motion …

Accelerated Data Delivery Architecture, Michael L. Grecol

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper introduces the Accelerated Data Delivery Architecture (ADDA). ADDA establishes a framework to distribute transactional data and control consistency to achieve fast access to data, distributed scalability and non-blocking concurrency control by using a clean declarative interface. It is designed to be used with web-based business applications. This framework uses a combination of traditional Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) combined with a distributed Not Only SQL (NoSQL) database and a browser-based database. It uses a single physical and conceptual database schema designed for a standard RDBMS driven application. The design allows the architect to assign consistency levels to entities …

Application Of Self-Monitoring For Situational Awareness, Christopher Trickler

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Self-monitoring devices and services are used for physical wellness, personal tracking and self-improvement. These individual devices and services can only provide information based on what they can measure directly or historically without an intermediate system. This paper proposes a self-monitoring system to perform situational awareness which may extend into providing insight into predictable behaviors. Knowing an individual’s current state and likelihood of particular behaviors occurring is a general solution. This knowledge-based solution derived from sensory data has many applications. The proposed system could monitor current individual situational status, automatically provide personal status as it changes, aid personal improvement, contribute to …