Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 13 of 13

Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

Learning About Large Scale Image Search: Lessons From Global Scale Hotel Recognition To Fight Sex Trafficking, Abby Stylianou Dec 2018

Learning About Large Scale Image Search: Lessons From Global Scale Hotel Recognition To Fight Sex Trafficking, Abby Stylianou

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Hotel recognition is a sub-domain of scene recognition that involves determining what hotel is seen in a photograph taken in a hotel. The hotel recognition task is a challenging computer vision task due to the properties of hotel rooms, including low visual similarity between rooms in the same hotel and high visual similarity between rooms in different hotels, particularly those from the same chain. Building accurate approaches for hotel recognition is important to investigations of human trafficking. Images of human trafficking victims are often shared by traffickers among criminal networks and posted in online advertisements. These images are often taken …


Leveraging Eye Structure And Motion To Build A Low-Power Wearable Gaze Tracking System, Addison Mayberry Oct 2018

Leveraging Eye Structure And Motion To Build A Low-Power Wearable Gaze Tracking System, Addison Mayberry

Doctoral Dissertations

Clinical studies have shown that features of a person's eyes can function as an effective proxy for cognitive state and neurological function. Technological advances in recent decades have allowed us to deepen this understanding and discover that the actions of the eyes are in fact very tightly coupled to the operation of the brain. Researchers have used camera-based eye monitoring technology to exploit this connection and analyze mental state across across many different metrics of interest. These range from simple things like attention and scene processing, to impairments such as a fatigue or substance use, and even significant mental disorders …


Entity-Grounded Image Captioning, Annika Lindh, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher Sep 2018

Entity-Grounded Image Captioning, Annika Lindh, Robert J. Ross, John D. Kelleher

Conference papers

An urgent limitation in current Image Captioning models is their tendency to produce generic captions that avoid the interesting detail which makes each image unique. To address this limitation, we propose an approach that enforces a stronger alignment between image regions and specific segments of text. The model architecture is composed of a visual region proposer, a region-order planner and a region-guided caption generator. The region-guided caption generator incorporates a novel information gate which allows visual and textual input of different frequencies and dimensionalities in a Recurrent Neural Network.


Enhancing 3d Visual Odometry With Single-Camera Stereo Omnidirectional Systems, Carlos A. Jaramillo Sep 2018

Enhancing 3d Visual Odometry With Single-Camera Stereo Omnidirectional Systems, Carlos A. Jaramillo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We explore low-cost solutions for efficiently improving the 3D pose estimation problem of a single camera moving in an unfamiliar environment. The visual odometry (VO) task -- as it is called when using computer vision to estimate egomotion -- is of particular interest to mobile robots as well as humans with visual impairments. The payload capacity of small robots like micro-aerial vehicles (drones) requires the use of portable perception equipment, which is constrained by size, weight, energy consumption, and processing power. Using a single camera as the passive sensor for the VO task satisfies these requirements, and it motivates the …


Bounding Box Improvement With Reinforcement Learning, Andrew Lewis Cleland Jun 2018

Bounding Box Improvement With Reinforcement Learning, Andrew Lewis Cleland

Dissertations and Theses

In this thesis, I explore a reinforcement learning technique for improving bounding box localizations of objects in images. The model takes as input a bounding box already known to overlap an object and aims to improve the fit of the box through a series of transformations that shift the location of the box by translation, or change its size or aspect ratio. Over the course of these actions, the model adapts to new information extracted from the image. This active localization approach contrasts with existing bounding-box regression methods, which extract information from the image only once. I implement, train, and …


Integrity Monitoring For Automated Aerial Refueling: A Stereo Vision Approach, Thomas R. Stuart Mar 2018

Integrity Monitoring For Automated Aerial Refueling: A Stereo Vision Approach, Thomas R. Stuart

Theses and Dissertations

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) increasingly require the capability to y autonomously in close formation including to facilitate automated aerial refueling (AAR). The availability of relative navigation measurements and navigation integrity are essential to autonomous relative navigation. Due to the potential non-availability of the global positioning system (GPS) during military operations, it is highly desirable that relative navigation can be accomplished without the use of GPS. This paper develops two algorithms designed to provide relative navigation measurements solely from a stereo image pair. These algorithms were developed and analyzed in the context of AAR using a stereo camera system modeling that …


Object Localization, Segmentation, And Classification In 3d Images, Allan Zelener Feb 2018

Object Localization, Segmentation, And Classification In 3d Images, Allan Zelener

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

We address the problem of identifying objects of interest in 3D images as a set of related tasks involving localization of objects within a scene, segmentation of observed object instances from other scene elements, classifying detected objects into semantic categories, and estimating the 3D pose of detected objects within the scene. The increasing availability of 3D sensors motivates us to leverage large amounts of 3D data to train machine learning models to address these tasks in 3D images. Leveraging recent advances in deep learning has allowed us to develop models capable of addressing these tasks and optimizing these tasks jointly …


Sol: Segmentation With Overlapping Labels, Karin Ng Jan 2018

Sol: Segmentation With Overlapping Labels, Karin Ng

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Image segmentation is a fundamental problem in Computer Vision which involves segmenting an image into two or more segments. These segments usually correspond to objects of interest in the image, i.e. liver, kidney’s etc. The classic approach to this problem segments the image into mutually exclusive segments. However, this approach is not well-suited when segmenting overlapping objects, e.g. cells, or when segmenting a single object into multiple parts that are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Moreover, we show that optimization methods for multi-part object segmentation with different priors/constraints may better avoid local minima in case of a relaxation allowing parts to …


Modeling And Mapping Location-Dependent Human Appearance, Zachary Bessinger Jan 2018

Modeling And Mapping Location-Dependent Human Appearance, Zachary Bessinger

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Human appearance is highly variable and depends on individual preferences, such as fashion, facial expression, and makeup. These preferences depend on many factors including a person's sense of style, what they are doing, and the weather. These factors, in turn, are dependent upon geographic location and time. In our work, we build computational models to learn the relationship between human appearance, geographic location, and time. The primary contributions are a framework for collecting and processing geotagged imagery of people, a large dataset collected by our framework, and several generative and discriminative models that use our dataset to learn the relationship …


Quantitative Behavior Tracking Of Xenopus Laevis Tadpoles For Neurobiology Research, Alexander Hansen Hamme Jan 2018

Quantitative Behavior Tracking Of Xenopus Laevis Tadpoles For Neurobiology Research, Alexander Hansen Hamme

Senior Projects Fall 2018

Xenopus laevis tadpoles are a useful animal model for neurobiology research because they provide a means to study the development of the brain in a species that is both physiologically well-understood and logistically easy to maintain in the laboratory. For behavioral studies, however, their individual and social swimming patterns represent a largely untapped trove of data, due to the lack of a computational tool that can accurately track multiple tadpoles at once in video feeds. This paper presents a system that was developed to accomplish this task, which can reliably track up to six tadpoles in a controlled environment, thereby …


Leveraging Overhead Imagery For Localization, Mapping, And Understanding, Scott Workman Jan 2018

Leveraging Overhead Imagery For Localization, Mapping, And Understanding, Scott Workman

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

Ground-level and overhead images provide complementary viewpoints of the world. This thesis proposes methods which leverage dense overhead imagery, in addition to sparsely distributed ground-level imagery, to advance traditional computer vision problems, such as ground-level image localization and fine-grained urban mapping. Our work focuses on three primary research areas: learning a joint feature representation between ground-level and overhead imagery to enable direct comparison for the task of image geolocalization, incorporating unlabeled overhead images by inferring labels from nearby ground-level images to improve image-driven mapping, and fusing ground-level imagery with overhead imagery to enhance understanding. The ultimate contribution of this thesis …


Deep Probabilistic Models For Camera Geo-Calibration, Menghua Zhai Jan 2018

Deep Probabilistic Models For Camera Geo-Calibration, Menghua Zhai

Theses and Dissertations--Computer Science

The ultimate goal of image understanding is to transfer visual images into numerical or symbolic descriptions of the scene that are helpful for decision making. Knowing when, where, and in which direction a picture was taken, the task of geo-calibration makes it possible to use imagery to understand the world and how it changes in time. Current models for geo-calibration are mostly deterministic, which in many cases fails to model the inherent uncertainties when the image content is ambiguous. Furthermore, without a proper modeling of the uncertainty, subsequent processing can yield overly confident predictions. To address these limitations, we propose …


Estimating Meteorological Visibility Range Under Foggy Weather Conditions: A Deep Learning Approach, Hazar Chaabani, Naoufel Werghi, Faouzi Kamoun, Bilal Taha, Fatma Outay, Ansar Ul Haque Yasar Jan 2018

Estimating Meteorological Visibility Range Under Foggy Weather Conditions: A Deep Learning Approach, Hazar Chaabani, Naoufel Werghi, Faouzi Kamoun, Bilal Taha, Fatma Outay, Ansar Ul Haque Yasar

All Works

© 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. Systems capable of estimating visibility distances under foggy weather conditions are extremely useful for next-generation cooperative situational awareness and collision avoidance systems. In this paper, we present a brief review of noticeable approaches for determining visibility distance under foggy weather conditions. We then propose a novel approach based on the combination of a deep learning method for feature extraction and an SVM classifier. We present a quantitative evaluation of the proposed solution and show that our approach provides better performance results compared to an earlier approach that was based on the combination …