Engineering Commons^™

Enhancements To The Modified Composite Pattern Method Of Structured Light 3d Capture, Charles Joseph Casey

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

The use of structured light illumination techniques for three-dimensional data acquisition is, in many cases, limited to stationary subjects due to the multiple pattern projections needed for depth analysis. Traditional Composite Pattern (CP) multiplexing utilizes sinusoidal modulation of individual projection patterns to allow numerous patterns to be combined into a single image. However, due to demodulation artifacts, it is often difficult to accurately recover the subject surface contour information. On the other hand, if one were to project an image consisting of many thin, identical stripes onto the surface, one could, by isolating each stripe center, recreate a very accurate …

Global Change Reactive Background Subtraction, Edwin Premkumar Sathiyamoorthy

University of Kentucky Master's Theses

Background subtraction is the technique of segmenting moving foreground objects from stationary or dynamic background scenes. Background subtraction is a critical step in many computer vision applications including video surveillance, tracking, gesture recognition etc. This thesis addresses the challenges associated with the background subtraction systems due to the sudden illumination changes happening in an indoor environment. Most of the existing techniques adapt to gradual illumination changes, but fail to cope with the sudden illumination changes. Here, we introduce a Global change reactive background subtraction to model these changes as a regression function of spatial image coordinates. The regression model is …

An Integrated Computer-Aided Robotic System For Dental Implantation, Xiaoyan Sun, Yongki Yoon, Jiang Li, Frederic D. Mckenzie

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

This paper describes an integrated system for dental implantation including both preoperative planning utilizing computer-aided technology and automatic robot operation during the intra-operative stage. A novel two-step registration procedure was applied for transforming the preoperative plan to the operation of the robot, with the help of a Coordinate Measurement Machine (CMM). Experiments with a patient-specific phantom were carried out to evaluate the registration error for both position and orientation. After adopting several improvements, registration accuracy of the system was significantly improved. Sub-millimeter accuracy with the Target Registration Errors (TREs) of 0.38±0.16 mm (N=5) was achieved. The target orientation errors after …

Quantitative Computed-Tomography Based Bone-Strength Indicators For The Identification Of Low Bone-Strength Individuals In A Clinical Environment, Bino Abel Varghese

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The aim of the current study was to develop quantitative computed-tomography (QCT)-based bone-strength indicators that highly correlate with finite-element (FE)-based strength. We perform a combined numerical-experimental study, comparing FE-predicted surface strains with strain gauge measurements, to validate the FE models of 36 long bones (humerus, radius, femur and tibia) under three-point bending and torsion. The FE models were constructed from trans-axial volumetric CT scans, and the segmented bone images were corrected for partial-volume effects. The material properties (Young's modulus for cortex, density-modulus relationship for trabecular bone and Poisson's ratio) were calibrated by minimizing the error between experiments and simulations among …

Circuit Techniques On Improving Timing And Noise In Dynamic Cmos, Arvind Vaidyanadeswaran

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Dynamic CMOS are widely employed in high-performance CMOS chips due to high speed and less area in comparison with Static CMOS. However, Dynamic CMOS circuits are inherently less noise tolerant than Static CMOS circuits. This problem becomes more severe with aggressive technology scaling into nanometer process, particularly caused by the charge sharing, the sub-threshold leakage current, the power rail noise and the crosstalk noise. In this thesis, circuit techniques on improving both timing and noise of Dynamic CMOS are presented. A comparison with previous reported work is also presented. Simulations proved that the proposed circuit techniques can achieve a high …

Measuring Uncertainty Of Protein Secondary Structure, Alan Eugene Herner

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This dissertation develops and demonstrates a method to measure the uncertainty of secondary structure of protein sequences using Shannon's information theory. This method is applied to a newly developed large dataset of chameleon sequences and to several protein hinges culled from the Hinge Atlas. The uncertainty of the central residue in each tripeptide is computed for each amino acid in a sequence using Cuff and Barton's CB513 as the reference set. It is shown that while secondary structure uncertainty is relatively high in chameleon regions [avg = 1.27 bits] it is relatively low in the regions 1-7 residues nearest a …

Aberrant Dna Replication At An Ectopic Chromosomal Site In Human Cells, Xiaomi Chen

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Aberrant DNA replication, including over-replication or under-replication may lead to life-threatening mutation or even cause human diseases. This thesis focused on three issues related to abnormal DNA replication in human chromosomes including: I) to define the function of DNA unwinding element (DUE) and DNA unwinding element-binding protein (DUE-B) to maintain an active c-myc replicator; II) to determine the role of trans-acting factors in defining a replication origin on human chromosomes; III) to investigate the mechanism by which hairpins affect DNA replication and instability of (CTG)n•(CAG)n trinucleotide repeat tracts in human cells.

Our laboratory previously demonstrated that both DUE and DUE-B, …

Development And Evaluation Of An Interface Aid To Support Web Based Information Seeking For The Blind Research Study, Carissa Ann Brunsman-Johnson

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Information seeking on websites has become more and more challenging for people who are blind. Screen readers attempt to make that task easier by introducing new commands and functionality but there still exists a fundamental gap in the difficulty for people who are blind compared to their sighted counterparts. This research identifies the strategies used by people who are blind and sighted to create an information seeking model, develop the Keywords Expected for Your Search (KEYS) conceptual model for assisting task performance and evaluate a KEYS prototype of this concept for information search and retrieval.

This information seeking model was …

Real-Time Fault Diagnosis Of Automotive Electrical Power Generation And Storage System, Luis Farfan-Ramos

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Automobiles depend more and more on electric power. Analysis of warranty data by automotive OEMs shows that faults in the automotive electrical power generation and storage (EPGS) system are often misdiagnosed. Therefore, monitoring of the state of health (SOH) of the automotive EPGS system is vital for early and correct diagnosis of faults in it, ensuring a reliable supply of electric power to the vehicle and reducing maintenance costs. In this research project, a model-based SOH monitoring method for the EPGS system is developed without the requirement of an alternator current sensor. A model representing the dynamic relationship between the …

Distributed Fault Detection For A Class Of Large-Scale Nonlinear Uncertain Systems, Qi Zhang

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In the distributed large-scale system, the behavior of any subsystem is not only influenced by variables belonging to it (local variables), but also by the variables in other subsystems during its interaction with neighboring subsystems. The effect of the fault in one subsystem will be quickly propagated to other subsystems due to their interconnections. Currently, most of the fault detection and diagnosis schemes are focused on centralized system which do not consider the interaction terms and can not efficiently detect the faults.

In this thesis, a distributed fault detection scheme is developed for a class of large-scale nonlinear uncertain systems …

Graphene Based Anode Materials For Lithium-Ion Batteries, Sree Lakshmi Cheekati

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Improvements of the anode performances in Li-ions batteries are in demand to satisfy applications in transportation. In comparison with graphitic carbons, transition metal oxides as well as graphene can store over twice amount of lithium per gram. Recently, graphene-based anodes for Li-ion batteries are under extensive development. In this research, lithium storage characteristics in graphene oxide (GO), GO/Manganese acetate (GO/MnAc), GO/manganese oxide (GO/MnOx) composites and Nano Graphene Platelets (NGP) were studied. The prepared GO delivered reversible capacities of 706mAh/g with an average columbic efficiency of 87%. Reversible capacities of 533 mAh/g were observed for GO/MnAc composite. GO/MnOx nanocomposite thermal annealed …

Cognitive Cyber Weapon Selection Tool Empirical Evaluation, Preethi Vinayak Ponangi

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Keeping in pace with the latest technological innovations in the cyber world, the misuse of this powerful infrastructure has also increased proportionally. Although a lot of recent attacks have been documented in the mainstream media, counter measures for cyber defense mechanism have only received some attention in the recent research literature. Most of the global attacks in the cyber space have proved to be carefully planned premeditated attacks. Considering that most of these attacks are co-coordinated by humans, a new area of psychological weaponry is being investigated by the research community. This study aims to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of …

A User Centered Design And Prototype Of A Mobile Reading Device For The Visually Impaired, Robert B. Keefer

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While mobile reading devices have been on the market and investigated by researchers in recent years, there is still work required to make these devices highly accessible to the visually impaired. A usability test with one such device revealed gaps in the current state of the art devices. These gaps focus mostly on the user interaction and his or her ability to quickly consume written reading material. In this dissertation a voice user interface (VUI) is presented that improves the ability of a blind user of a mobile reading device to interact with written material. The image processing techniques required …

Human Micro-Range/Micro-Doppler Signature Extraction, Association, And Statistical Characterization For High-Resolution Radar, Orelle Ryan Fogle

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Recently, the use of micro-Doppler (μD) radar signatures for classification has become an area of focus, in particular for the case of dynamic targets where many components are interacting over time. To fully exploit the signature information, individual scattering centers may be extracted and associated over the full target observation. Due to the complexity of the target signature, the automated analysis is very difficult. However, the availability of ultra-fine resolution or micro-range (μR) resolution along with target scattering knowledge, can aid this process immensely. Here, we describe a feature extraction algorithm which utilizes both μD and …

Framework For Cohesive Zone Model Based Multiscale Damage Evolution In A Fatigue Environment, Michael Andrew Thomas

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The focus of this research is to develop a framework to track damage evolution in a structural model subjected to a fatigue environment. This framework incorporates a micromechanical approach of continuous damage modeling, where damage in a homogenized representative microstructure is introduced at the continuum scale through the material constitutive matrix. In this research, damage in the representative microstructure is simulated utilizing cohesive zone models (CZM) whose properties are a function of the magnitude of applied stresses and the resulting separation. In order to minimize the mesh dependence of the cohesive zone model an adaptive meshing technique is employed. A …

Self-Calibrating Cricket Motes For Indoor Navigation, Yogendra Jayant Patil

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Global Positioning System (GPS) plays a vital role for providing localization to the autonomous robots. But the quality of the GPS signal degrades in an indoor location and hence GPS cannot be used for indoor localization. Cricket motes are location-aware system that can provide localization service to its users in an indoor location. Cricket motes apply the acoustic ranging technique to find distance between two points. But before a user can use this localization system, assigning coordinate system to the motes requires manual assistance. This project presents a novel algorithm for self-calibration of the cricket motes to a coordinate system …

V1-Derived Renshaw Cells And Ia Inhibitory Interneurons Differentiate Early During Development, Ana Benito González

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Locomotor development is dependent on the maturation of spinal cord circuits controlling motor output, but little is known about the development of the spinal interneurons that control motoneuron activity. This study focused on the development of Renshaw cells (RCs) and Ia inhibitory interneurons (IaINs), which mediate recurrent and reciprocal inhibition, respectively, two basic inhibitory circuits for motorneuron control. Both interneurons originate from the same progenitor pool (p1) giving rise to ventral spinal embryonic interneurons denominated V1. V1-derived interneurons (V1-INs) establish local inhibitory connections with ipsilateral motoneurons and express the transcription factor engrailed-1. This characteristic permitted the generation of transgenic mice …

Multi-Objectivization In Genetic Algorithms, Darrell F. Lochtefeld

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Multi-objectivization is the process of reformulating a single-objective problem into a multi-objective problem and solving it with a multi-objective method in order to provide a solution to the original single-objective problem. Multi-objectivization differs from other traditional divide-and-conquer techniques-the method splits the objective function rather than the search space. Prior to recent evidence, such reformulations were thought to make a problem more complex. However, more recent research suggests that decomposition in the objective space can lead to useful optimization techniques when coupled with a population-based search. Machine based optimization techniques are varied but often based upon an analogy to real-world phenomena. …

Highly Active Porous Catalysts Fabricated By Attachment Of Palladium Nanoparticles On Hierarchical Carbon Structures, Hema Vijwani

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The effectiveness of metal-based catalysts can be significantly enhanced by increasing the available surface area relative to the volume through the creation of hierarchical nanostructures. The catalyst demonstrated here is palladium, which is a widely recognized heterogeneous catalyst suitable for a variety of industrial applications such as water purification, hydrogen storage, and electrochemical devices. In this study, a novel multi-scale supporting material developed in this group, has been used as support. It consists of micro-porous graphitic carbon with strongly attached carbon nanotubes. This can increase the surface area by orders of magnitude without increasing the size or weight while still …

A Triangulation-Based Approach To Nonrigid Image Registration, Timothy R. Linden

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A triangulation-based approach to nonrigid image registration is presented. This method builds upon control point projective registration methods. Control points for this method are located using the Harris point detector. An analysis is presented for this detector to show its properties. Projective registration is used as the basis for this non-rigid registration method. Details of the projective registration method used are presented. Nonrigid registration is used to spatially align images of a 3-D scene taken from different views. Projective registration approximates the scene geometry as a plane. This nonrigid approach subdivides the images into small corresponding triangles, to improve the …

Multidisciplinary Optimization Framework For High Speed Train Using Robust Hybrid Ga-Pso Algorithm, Veera Venkata Sunil Kumar Vytla

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High speed trains are the most efficient means of public transportation. However the speed of the train needs to be increased (> 350 km/hr) to cover large distances in a short time to make it accessible to large population. With the increase in speed, number of issues related to efficiency, safety and comfort like the aerodynamic drag, structural strength, as well as the noise levels inside and outside of the train etc. need to be considered in the design of the high speed trains. Hence making it a multi disciplinary design problem. There are a large number of parameters from …

A Study On The Effects Of Coil Wedge During Rewinding Of Thin Gauge Metals, Jantzen L. Hinton

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With the increase in demand for high quality thin gauge metals improvements to control systems that monitor strip characteristics must first be acquired. During the rewinding of sheet metal, little insight is known as to what stresses are attributed to the actual winding process, not simply those induced by the mill. When winding effects become too severe they will alter control system readings, prompting the need for a rapid model that can predict winding effects and filter them from current control systems. This research develops a new method to determine a 4th order Airy function that predicts the 2D stress …

Computational Investigation Of Optimal Heavy Fuel Direct Injection Spark Ignition In Rotary Engine, Asela A. Benthara Wadumesthrige

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The main objective of this computational study is to investigate the optimum injection and spark parameters for the direct injection spark ignition (DISI) Wankel rotary engine using diesel fuel. Currently only port fuel injected gasoline rotary engines are available in the automotive industry. Compared to reciprocating type engines rotary engine is mechanically simple, less vibrate, have higher power to weight ratio and achieve better performance at high rpm. Due to the inherent low fuel efficiency of rotary engine and increasing gas prices, application of the rotary engine in conventional automobiles is decreasing. This project seeks to introduce DISI technology to …

A Probabilistic Assessment Of Vertebral Cortical Bone Fracture Of Intraosteonal Structures, Isaac Graham Mabe

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Cortical bone is a porous structure. The presence of these pores creates the possibility of a local overstressed area that has the likelihood of premature failure. Some failure modes of the vertebral endplates, for example subsidence which occurs at rates as high as 77 percent, can be better predicted with further understanding of failure mechanisms and the ability to predict those mechanisms. A probabilistic assessment of the pore size and its contribution to the fracture toughness has not been investigated in the cortical shell of the vertebral endplates. This research develops a probabilistic model that has the ability to determine …

Surface Stress Sensors For Closed Loop Low Reynolds Number Separation Control, Christopher R. Marks

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Low Reynolds number boundary layer separation causes reduced aerodynamic performance in a variety of applications such as MAVs, UAVs, and turbomachinery. The inclusion of a boundary layer separation control system offers a way to improve efficiency in conditions that would otherwise result in poor performance. Many effective passive and active boundary layer control methods exist. Active methods offer the ability to turn on, off, or adjust parameters of the flow control system with either an open loop or closed loop control strategy using sensors. This research investigates the use of a unique sensor called Surface Stress Sensitive Film (S3F) in …

Weapon Engagement Zone Maximum Launch Range Approximation Using A Multilayer Perceptron, Brian Michael Birkmire

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This thesis investigates the use of an artificial neural network (ANN), in particular a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), to perform function approximation on truth data representing a weapon engagement zone's (WEZ) maximum launch range. The WEZ of an air-to-air missile represents the boundaries and zones of effectiveness for a one-vs-one air-to-air combat engagement [13]. The intent is for the network to fuse table lookup and interpolation functionality into a physically compact and computationally efficient package, while improving approximation accuracy over conventional methods. Data was collected from simulated firings of a notional air-to-air missile model and used to train a two layer …

Design And Development Of A Fall Detection Device With Infrared Receiving Capabilities, Ammari Ramzi

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Fall related injuries are the leading cause of death and hospitalization among the elderly. Falls among older people become a major problem facing hospitals and nursing homes. In this study we put an effort to design a wireless device capable of detecting falls with the hope that this study will provide a path towards better healthcare monitoring and better independent living for the elderly.

In this project I showed how the fall detection device can be interfaced with different systems to achieve functionality without adding extra cost. For seniors who prefer to stay at their homes and live independently, the …

An Implicit High-Order Spectral Difference Method For The Compressible Navier-Stokes Equations Using Adaptive Polynomial Refinement, Caleb J. Barnes

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A high/variable-order numerical simulation procedure for gas dynamics problems was developed to model steep grading physical phenomena. Higher order resolution was achieved using an orthogonal polynomial Gauss-Lobatto grid, adaptive polynomial refinement and artificial diffusion activated by a pressure switch. The method is designed to be computationally stable, accurate, and capable of resolving discontinuities and steep gradients without the use of one-sided reconstructions or reducing to low-order. Solutions to several benchmark gas-dynamics problems were produced including a shock-tube and a shock-entropy wave interaction. The scheme's 1st-order solution was validated in comparison to a 1st-order Roe scheme solution. Higher-order solutions were shown …

Fusion Of Video And Multi-Waveform Fmcw Radar For Traffic Surveillance, Nicholas C. Gale

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Modern frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar technology provides the ability to modify the system transmission frequency as a function of time, which in turn provides the ability to generate multiple output waveforms from a single radar unit. Current low-power multi-waveform FMCW radar techniques lack the ability to reliably associate measurements from the various waveform sections in the presence of multiple targets and multiple false detections within the field-of-view. Two approaches are developed here to address this problem.

The first approach takes advantage of the relationships between the waveform segments to generate a weighting function for candidate combinations of measurements …

Anthropometric Analysis Of The Cervical Spine, Susan Hueston

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An understanding of the dimensional anatomy of the cervical spine is necessary in order to help diagnose disease, deformity, injury, and device development. Previous investigation has been completed utilizing cadavers, X-rays and other imaging techniques. This research utilized computer tomography images from the trauma registry at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio to complete an anthropometric study of the cervical spine. Linear mathematical models were developed to investigate the relationships present in the dimensional anatomy of the cervical spine. New measurements were completed on subjects of both Caucasian and African American descent and of both genders. An approximation of the …