Computer Engineering Commons^™

Selective Subtraction: An Extension Of Background Subtraction, Adeel Bhutta

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Background subtraction or scene modeling techniques model the background of the scene using the stationarity property and classify the scene into two classes of foreground and background. In doing so, most moving objects become foreground indiscriminately, except for perhaps some waving tree leaves, water ripples, or a water fountain, which are typically "learned" as part of the background using a large training set of video data. Traditional techniques exhibit a number of limitations including inability to model partial background or subtract partial foreground, inflexibility of the model being used, need for large training data and computational inefficiency. In this thesis, …

Distributed Multi-Agent Optimization And Control With Applications In Smart Grid, Towfiq Rahman

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

With recent advancements in network technologies like 5G and Internet of Things (IoT), the size and complexity of networked interconnected agents have increased rapidly. Although centralized schemes have simpler algorithm design, in practicality, it creates high computational complexity and requires high bandwidth for centralized data pooling. In this dissertation, for distributed optimization of networked multi-agent architecture, the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) is investigated. In particular, a new adaptive-gain ADMM algorithm is derived in closed form and under the standard convex property to greatly speed up the convergence of ADMM-based distributed optimization. Using the Lyapunov direct approach, the proposed …

Investigations On The Use Of Hyperthermia For Breast Cancer Treatment, Sreekala Suseela

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Hyperthermia using electromagnetic energy has been proven to be an effective method in the treatment of cancer. Hyperthermia is a therapeutic procedure in which the temperature in the tumor tissue is raised above 42°C without causing any damage to the surrounding healthy tissue. This method has been shown to increase the effectiveness of radiotherapy and chemotherapy. Radio frequencies, microwave frequencies or focused ultrasound can be used to deliver energy to the tumor tissue to attain higher temperatures in the tumor region for hyperthermia application. In this dissertation the use of a near field focused (NFF) microstrip antenna array for the …

Deep Hashing For Image Similarity Search, Ali Al Kobaisi

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Hashing for similarity search is one of the most widely used methods to solve the approximate nearest neighbor search problem. In this method, one first maps data items from a real valued high-dimensional space to a suitable low dimensional binary code space and then performs the approximate nearest neighbor search in this code space instead. This is beneficial because the search in the code space can be solved more efficiently in terms of runtime complexity and storage consumption. Obviously, for this method to succeed, it is necessary that similar data items be mapped to binary code words that have small …

Extracting Data-Level Parallelism In High-Level Synthesis For Reconfigurable Architectures, Juan Andres Escobedo Contreras

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools are a set of algorithms that allow programmers to obtain implementable Hardware Description Language (HDL) code from specifications written high-level, sequential languages such as C, C++, or Java. HLS has allowed programmers to code in their preferred language while still obtaining all the benefits hardware acceleration has to offer without them needing to be intimately familiar with the hardware platform of the accelerator. In this work we summarize and expand upon several of our approaches to improve the automatic memory banking capabilities of HLS tools targeting reconfigurable architectures, namely Field-Programmable Gate Arrays or FPGA's. We explored …

Mfpa: Mixed-Signal Field Programmable Array For Energy-Aware Compressive Signal Processing, Adrian Tatulian

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Compressive Sensing (CS) is a signal processing technique which reduces the number of samples taken per frame to decrease energy, storage, and data transmission overheads, as well as reducing time taken for data acquisition in time-critical applications. The tradeoff in such an approach is increased complexity of signal reconstruction. While several algorithms have been developed for CS signal reconstruction, hardware implementation of these algorithms is still an area of active research. Prior work has sought to utilize parallelism available in reconstruction algorithms to minimize hardware overheads; however, such approaches are limited by the underlying limitations in CMOS technology. Herein, the …

Digital, Automated Reactive Target System, Nicholas Haas, Saipranay Vellala, Trandon Ware, Thomas Martin

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

In this era, technology is woven into almost every facet of our leisure activities. Although technology has innovated hobbies ranging from chess to soccer, the art of shooting has been neglected. Unnecessary insufficiency such as bullet ricochets off of mechanical steel targets, ineffective progress tracking, and general inaccessibility to outdoor training facilities are all improvable areas of this sport. The Dynamic Automated Reactive Target (D.A.R.T) System aims to fill some of these gaps and help modernize recreational marksmanship. Modeling the system after a dueling tree will optimize the use of the system and allow for different training models to challenge …

Creature Care, Alexander Weber

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Caring for a pet is a formidable responsibility that requires intense care and monitoring in order to protect and prolong the life of the animal. Traditionally, caring for a reptile presents a unique challenge for pet owners, who not only need to care for the animal but for the environment as well. Individual species distinctly require precise monitoring and control of environmental parameters such as temperature, humidity, and air quality; and deviation from the nominal values often leads to serious health problems for the reptile. To simplify reptile ownership, a system was designed that measures the critical parameters of a …

Terraria Server On A Raspberry Pi, Bradley Stoldt

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

My senior project is designed to display some of the material I have learned throughout the four years at The University of Akron, as well as explore into a newer piece of technology. I will be researching and documenting myself setting up a live network at my house that will have a raspberry pi running on it as a game server. The goal of this project is to get internal users to connect to the server, as well as users that are outside of my home network.

Tabletop Mechanical Tester, Jamie Dombroski, Brian English, Richard Leffler, Andrew Shirk

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

The need for hands-on and face-to-face experiences in the engineering classroom is very great. The equations, principles, and concepts can all be learned, but without the visual and tactile application, these don’t always sink in or become concrete. A small-scale tensile test machine was designed, sourced, manufactured, and tested for the purpose of being applied in classroom settings to provide this experience to engineering students. Extensive research was performed concerning tensile machines on the market, the essential elements of which are the load cell, grips, crosshead, extensometer, motor, and frame. The raw materials for the frame were purchased and drawings …

Bioimpedance Sensor, Ryan Byo, Kevin Libertowski

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

A bioimpdance senor to measure the impedance of a human body. Completed as part of the engineering Senior Design Project

Stream Clustering And Visualization Of Geotagged Text Data For Crisis Management, Nathaniel C. Crossman

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

In the last decade, the advent of social media and microblogging services have inevitably changed our world. These services produce vast amounts of streaming data, and one of the most important ways of analyzing and discovering interesting trends in the streaming data is through clustering. In clustering streaming data, it is desirable to perform a single pass over incoming data, such that we do not need to process old data again, and the clustering model should evolve over time not to lose any important feature statistics of the data. In this research, we have developed a new clustering system that …

An Adversarial Framework For Deep 3d Target Template Generation, Walter E. Waldow

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents a framework for the generation of 3D models. This is an important problem for many reasons. For example, 3D models are important for systems that are involved in target recognition. These systems use 3D models to train up accuracy on identifying real world object. Traditional means of gathering 3D models have limitations that the generation of 3D models can help overcome. The framework uses a novel generative adversarial network (GAN) that learns latent representations of two dimensional views of a model to bootstrap the network’s ability to learn to generate three dimensional objects. The novel architecture is …

Quantitative Susceptibility Mapping (Qsm) Reconstruction From Mri Phase Data, Sara Gharabaghi

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) is a powerful technique that reveals changes in the underlying tissue susceptibility distribution. It can be used to measure the concentrations of iron and calcium in the brain both of which are linked with numerous neurodegenerative diseases. However, reconstructing the QSM image from the MRI phase data is an ill-posed inverse problem. Different methods have been proposed to overcome this difficulty. Still, the reconstructed QSM images suffer from streaking artifacts and underestimate the measured susceptibility of deep gray matter, veins, and other high susceptibility regions. This thesis proposes a structurally constrained Susceptibility Weighted Imaging and Mapping …

Development Of Real-Time Systems For Supporting Collaborations In Distributed Human And Machine Teams, Aishwarya Bositty

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

Real-time distributed systems constitute computing nodes that are connected by a network and coordinate with one another to accomplish a cooperative task, combining the responsiveness, fault-tolerance and geographic independence to support time-constrained collaborative applications, including distributed Human-Machine Teaming. In this thesis research the viability of real-time distributed collaborative technologies is demonstrated through the design, development and validation of prototype systems that support two human-machine teaming scenarios namely, ACE-IMS (Affirmation Cue based Interruption Management Systems) and ReadMI (Real-time Assessment of Dialogue in Motivational Interview). ACE-IMS demonstrates how a combination of AI capabilities and the cloud and mobile computing infrastructure can be …

Stream Clustering And Visualization Of Geotagged Text Data For Crisis Management, Nathaniel C. Crossman

Browse all Theses and Dissertations

In the last decade, the advent of social media and microblogging services have inevitably changed our world. These services produce vast amounts of streaming data, and one of the most important ways of analyzing and discovering interesting trends in the streaming data is through clustering. In clustering streaming data, it is desirable to perform a single pass over incoming data, such that we do not need to process old data again, and the clustering model should evolve over time not to lose any important feature statistics of the data. In this research, we have developed a new clustering system that …

High-Performance Spectral Methods For Computer-Aided Design Of Integrated Circuits, Zhiqiang Zhao

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Recent research shows that by leveraging the key spectral properties of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of graph Laplacians, more efficient algorithms can be developed for tackling many graph-related computing tasks. In this dissertation, spectral methods are utilized for achieving faster algorithms in the applications of very-large-scale integration (VLSI) computer-aided design (CAD)

First, a scalable algorithmic framework is proposed for effective-resistance preserving spectral reduction of large undirected graphs. The proposed method allows computing much smaller graphs while preserving the key spectral (structural) properties of the original graph. Our framework is built upon the following three key components: a spectrum-preserving node aggregation and …

Route Planning For Long-Term Robotics Missions, Christopher Alexander Arend Tatsch

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Many future robotic applications such as the operation in large uncertain environment depend on a more autonomous robot. The robotics long term autonomy presents challenges on how to plan and schedule goal locations across multiple days of mission duration. This is an NP-hard problem that is infeasible to solve for an optimal solution due to the large number of vertices to visit. In some cases the robot hardware constraints also adds the requirement to return to a charging station multiple times in a long term mission. The uncertainties in the robot model and environment require the robot planner to account …

Resource Efficient Design Of Quantum Circuits For Cryptanalysis And Scientific Computing Applications, Edgard Munoz-Coreas

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Quantum computers offer the potential to extend our abilities to tackle computational problems in fields such as number theory, encryption, search and scientific computation. Up to a superpolynomial speedup has been reported for quantum algorithms in these areas. Motivated by the promise of faster computations, the development of quantum machines has caught the attention of both academics and industry researchers. Quantum machines are now at sizes where implementations of quantum algorithms or their components are now becoming possible. In order to implement quantum algorithms on quantum machines, resource efficient circuits and functional blocks must be designed. In this work, we …

Scalable Universalspace Vector Pulse Width Modulation Scheme For Multilevel Inverters, Wei Qiao, Fa Chen, Liyan Qu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

A scalable universal space vector pulse-width modulation (SVPWM) scheme for multilevel inverters is disclosed. In the disclosed SVPWM scheme, the modulation triangle is quickly identified based on a coordinate transformation from an a-ß coordinate system to a 120° oblique coordinate system. Then, the duty cycles and switching states of the three vertices of the modulation triangle are determined by simple algebric computations. In a switching period, any vertex of the modulation triangle can be flexibly selected as the start point to optimize the switching sequence with flexibly adjustable duty cycles(s) for the redundant switching state(s) according to specific applications.