Computer Engineering Commons^™

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 …

Numerical Examination Of Acousto-Optic Bragg Interactions For Profiled Lightwaves Using A Transfer Function Formalism, Monish Ranjan Chatterjee, Fares S. Almehmadi

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Classically, acousto-optic (AO) interactions comprise scattering of photons by energetic phonons into higher and lower orders. Standard weak interaction theory describes diffraction in the Bragg regime as the propagation of a uniform plane wave of light through a uniform plane wave of sound, resulting in the well-known first- and zeroth-order diffraction.

Our preliminary investigation of the nature of wave diffraction and photon scattering from a Bragg cell under intensity feedback with profiled light beams indicates that the diffracted (upshifted photon) light continues to maintain the expected (uniform plane wave) behavior versus the optical phase shift in the cell within a …

Adaptive Wiener Filter Super-Resolution Of Color Filter Array Images, Barry K. Karch, Russell C. Hardie

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Digital color cameras using a single detector array with a Bayer color filter array (CFA) require interpolation or demosaicing to estimate missing color information and provide full-color images. However, demosaicing does not specifically address fundamental undersampling and aliasing inherent in typical camera designs. Fast non-uniform interpolation based super-resolution (SR) is an attractive approach to reduce or eliminate aliasing and its relatively low computational load is amenable to real-time applications. The adaptive Wiener filter (AWF) SR algorithm was initially developed for grayscale imaging and has not previously been applied to color SR demosaicing. Here, we develop a novel fast SR method …

Smarter Neat Nets, Ryan Swords Dehaven

Master's Theses

This paper discusses a modification to improve usability and functionality of a ge- netic neural net algorithm called NEAT (NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topolo- gies). The modification aims to accomplish its goal by automatically changing parameters used by the algorithm with little input from a user. The advan- tage of the modification is to reduce the guesswork needed to setup a successful experiment with NEAT that produces a usable Artificial Intelligence (AI). The modified algorithm is tested against the unmodified NEAT with several different setups and the results are discussed. The algorithm shows strengths in some areas but can increase the …

Occlusion-Aware Multi-View Reconstruction Of Articulated Objects For Manipulation, Xiaoxia Huang

All Dissertations

The goal of this research is to develop algorithms using multiple views to automatically recover complete 3D models of articulated objects in unstructured environments and thereby enable a robotic system to facilitate further manipulation of those objects. First, an algorithm called Procrustes-Lo-RANSAC (PLR) is presented. Structure-from-motion techniques are used to capture 3D point cloud models of an articulated object in two different configurations. Procrustes analysis, combined with a locally optimized RANSAC sampling strategy, facilitates a straightforward geometric approach to recovering the joint axes, as well as classifying them automatically as either revolute or prismatic. The algorithm does not require prior …

Solving The Search For Source Code, Kathryn T. Stolee

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Programmers frequently search for source code to reuse using keyword searches. When effective and efficient, a code search can boost programmer productivity, however, the search effectiveness depends on the programmer's ability to specify a query that captures how the desired code may have been implemented. Further, the results often include many irrelevant matches that must be filtered manually. More semantic search approaches could address these limitations, yet existing approaches either do not scale, are not flexible enough to find approximate matches, or require complex specifications.

We propose a novel approach to semantic search that addresses some of these limitations and …

User Modeling Via Machine Learning And Rule-Based Reasoning To Understand And Predict Errors In Survey Systems, Leonard Cleve Stuart

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

User modeling is traditionally applied to systems were users have a large degree of control over their goals, the content they view, and the manner in which they navigate through the system. These systems aim to both recommend useful goals to users and to assist them in achieving perceived goals. Systems such as online or telephone surveys are different in that users have only a singular goal of survey completion, extremely limited control over navigation, and content is restricted to prescribed set of survey tasks; changing the user modeling problem to one in which the best means of assisting users …

End-To-End Delay Analysis For Wireless Control Networks Under Edf Scheduling, Chengjie Wu

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

Analysis Of Parameter Tuning On Energy Efficiency In Asynchronous Circuits, Justin Thomas Roark

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Power and energy consumption are the primary concern of the digital integrated circuit (IC) industry. Asynchronous logic, in the past several years, has increased in popularity due to its low power nature. This thesis analyzes a collection of array multipliers with different parameters to compare two asynchronous design paradigms, NULL Convention Logic (NCL) and Multi-Threshold NULL Convention Logic (MTNCL). Several commercially available pieces of software and custom scripts are used to analyze the asynchronous circuits and their components to provide the energy consumption estimation on various parts of each circuit. The analysis of the software results revealed that MTNCL circuits …

Near-Duplicate Video Retrieval: Current Research And Future Trends, Jiajun Liu, Zi Huang, Hongyun Cai, Heng Tao Shen, Chong-Wah Ngo, Wei Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The exponential growth of online videos, along with increasing user involvement in video-related activities, has been observed as a constant phenomenon during the last decade. User's time spent on video capturing, editing, uploading, searching, and viewing has boosted to an unprecedented level. The massive publishing and sharing of videos has given rise to the existence of an already large amount of near-duplicate content. This imposes urgent demands on near-duplicate video retrieval as a key role in novel tasks such as video search, video copyright protection, video recommendation, and many more. Driven by its significance, near-duplicate video retrieval has recently attracted …

A Systematic Approach To Verify An Embedded Capacitive Touchscreen System, Jeffrey Lee Richardson

Boise State University Theses and Dissertations

The conspicuously massive growth in the number of products utilizing capacitive touchscreen technology has raised awareness of the technology. The embedded system used to detect and report finger touches to the host is fairly complex and difficult to verify. An automated verification system is required to systematically test this type of system in a reasonable amount of time. This thesis describes the framework for an automated verification system for embedded capacitive touchscreen systems. The framework includes a Cartesian desktop robot, test instruments, communications bridge, and custom-built test management software. The criteria for selecting a Cartesian desktop robot rather than a …

High-Performance, Scalable Optical Network-On-Chip Architectures, Xianfang Tan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

The rapid advance of technology enables a large number of processing cores to be integrated into a single chip which is called a Chip Multiprocessor (CMP) or a Multiprocessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) design. The on-chip interconnection network, which is the communication infrastructure for these processing cores, plays a central role in a many-core system. With the continuously increasing complexity of many-core systems, traditional metallic wired electronic networks-on-chip (NoC) became a bottleneck because of the unbearable latency in data transmission and extremely high energy consumption on chip. Optical networks-on-chip (ONoC) has been proposed as a promising alternative paradigm for electronic NoC with …

An End To End V.M.T Framework With Controlled V.M.T Tax Rate Using Optimal Feedback Control Technique, Pratik Verma

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Vehicle Mile Travel (VMT) is a study related to available alternatives for the road

revenue collection system. As per the demand, the existing Gas/Fuel tax based revenue

collection system is not found an appropriate option in the longer run. Due

to existing system constraints like: no eective tax process for vehicles based on alternative

fuel (e.g. electric vehicles), no eective changes in tax due to economical

ination, and more highway expenditure than generated revenue, an alternative revenue

collection mechanism is required. Hence, the objective is to study an alternative

option in detail, which can address the gaps between required revenue …

Segmentation And Model Generation For Large-Scale Cyber Attacks, Steven E. Strapp

Theses

Raw Cyber attack traffic can present more questions than answers to security analysts. Especially with large-scale observables it is difficult to identify which packets are relevant and what attack behaviors are present. Many existing works in Host or Flow Clustering attempt to group similar behaviors to expedite analysis; these works often phrase the problem directly as offline unsupervised machine learning. This work proposes online processing to simultaneously model coordinating actors and segment traffic that is relevant to a target of interest, all while it is being received. The goal is not just to aggregate similar attack behaviors, but to provide …

Statistical Regression Methods For Gpgpu Design Space Exploration, Nimisha Raut

All Theses

General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) have leveraged the performance and power efficiency of today's heterogeneous systems to usher in a new era of innovation in high-performance scientific computing. These systems can offer significantly high performance for massively parallel applications; however, their resources may be wasted due to inefficient tuning strategies. Previous application tuning studies pre-dominantly employ low-level, architecture specific tuning which can make the performance modeling task difficult and less generic. In this research, we explore the GPGPU design space featuring the memory hierarchy for application tuning using regression-based performance prediction framework and rank the design space based on …

Continuum Robotic Surface: Forward Kinematic Analysis And Implementation, Jessica Merino

All Theses

This thesis presents a new class of biologically inspired robots: continuum robotic surfaces. This work is fueled by the question: can the interaction between robot and environment be advanced with “programmable surfaces in space?” The novelty of continuum robotic surfaces lies in their ability to be actively controlled and reconfigured in what we believe is the current “missing dimension” in robot movements — two–dimensional space. We believe that such surfaces will lend themselves to more complex applications. However, to effectively deploy such surfaces for these complex applications, kinematic models will be necessary to plan and control desired configurations. The forward …

An Assessment Of The Accuracy Of An Automated Bite Counting Method In A Cafeteria Setting, Ziqing Huang

All Theses

Advances in body-worn sensors and mobile health technology have created new opportunities for empowering people to take a more active role in managing their health. Obesity has been recognized as a target of opportunity that could particularly benefit from this approach. Self-monitoring of dietary intake is critical for weight loss/management, but currently used tools such as
food diaries require users to manually estimate and record energy intake, making them subjective, prone to error, and difficult to use for long periods of time. Our group is developing a new tool called
the 'bite counter' that automates the monitoring of caloric intake. …

Modeling, Control, And Motion Analysis Of A Class Of Extensible Continuum Manipulators, Apoorva Kapadia

All Dissertations

In this dissertation, the development of a kinematic model, a configuration-space controller, a master-slave teleoperation controller, along with the analysis of the self-motion properties for redundant, extensible, continuous backbone (continuum) ``trunk and tentacle' manipulators are detailed. Unlike conventional rigid-link robots, continuum manipulators are robots that can bend at any point along their backbone, resulting in new and unique modeling and control issues. Taken together, these chapters represent one of the first efforts towards devising model-based controllers of such robots, as well as characterizing their self-motion in its simplest form.
Chapter 2 describes the development of a convenient set of generalized, …

Mobile Robot Navigation For Person Following In Indoor Environments, Ninad Pradhan

All Dissertations

Service robotics is a rapidly growing area of interest in robotics research. Service robots inhabit human-populated environments and carry out specific tasks. The goal of this dissertation is to develop a service robot capable of following a human leader around populated indoor environments. A classification system for person followers is proposed such that it clearly defines the expected interaction between the leader and the robotic follower. In populated environments, the robot needs to be able to detect and identify its leader and track the leader through occlusions, a common characteristic of populated spaces. An appearance-based person descriptor, which augments the …

Hierarchical Channel-Access And Routing Protocols For Heterogeneous Multichannel Ad Hoc Networks, Crystal Jackson

All Dissertations

In this work, we consider a heterogeneous multichannel ad hoc network consisting of frequency-agile radios with the ability to change their carrier frequency and chip rate over a wide range of possibilities. The radios in this type of network are permitted to utilize multiple non-overlapping channels, and each channel differs significantly in its characteristics such as achievable data rate and communication range. A channel-access protocol regulates access to the channels available, and a routing protocol determines how a packet should be forwarded from its source to its destination through the network. The initial focus of this research is on channel-access …

Decentralized Collision Avoidance, Jayasri K. Janardanan

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Autonomous Robots must carry out their tasks as independently as possible and each robot may be assigned different tasks at different locations. As these tasks are being performed, the robots have to navigate correctly such that the assigned tasks are completed efficiently, while also avoiding each other and other obstacles. To accomplish effective navigation, we must ensure that the robots are calibrated to avoid colliding with any kind of object on its path. Each robot has to sense the obstacles on its path and take necessary corrective measure to avoid those obstacles. In a situation with multiple robots, robots may …

Cad Tool Design For Ncl And Mtncl Asynchronous Circuits, Vijay Mani Pillai

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents an implementation of a method developed to readily convert Boolean designs into an ultra-low power asynchronous design methodology called MTNCL, which combines multi-threshold CMOS (MTCMOS) with NULL Convention Logic (NCL) systems. MTNCL provides the leakage power advantages of an all high-Vt implementation with a reasonable speed penalty compared to the all low-Vt implementation, and has negligible area overhead. The proposed tool utilizes industry-standard CAD tools. This research also presents an Automated Gate-Level Pipelining with Bit-Wise Completion (AGLPBW) method to maximize throughput of delay-insensitive full-word pipelined NCL circuits. These methods have been integrated into the Mentor Graphics and …

Wireless Cyber-Physical Simulator And Case Studies On Structural Control, Bo Li

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

Difficulties And Opportunities In Building Resilient Clinical Monitoring Systems With Wireless Sensor Networks, Rahav Dor

All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs)

No abstract provided.

An Agent-Based Network Analytic Perspective On The Evolution Of Complex Adaptive Supply Chain Networks, L. Ponnambalam, A. Tan, X. Fu, X. F. Yin, Zhaoxia Wang, R. S. Goh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Supply chain networks of modern era are complex adaptive systems that are dynamic and highly interdependent in nature. Business continuity of these complex systems depend vastly on understanding as to how the supply chain network evolves over time (based on the policies it adapts), and identifying the susceptibility of the evolved networks to external disruptions. The objective of this article is to illustrate as to how an agent-based network analytic perspective can aid this understanding on the network-evolution dynamics, and identification of disruption effects on the evolved networks. To this end, we developed a 4-tier agent based supply chain model …

Experimental Analysis Of The Effects Of Manipulations In Weighted Voting Games, Ramoni Olaoluwa Lasisi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This dissertation investigates weighted voting games and three methods of manipulating those games, called splitting, merging, and annexation. The manipulations involve an agent or some agents misrepresenting their identities in anticipation of gaining more power over the outcomes of games. Indeed, in open anonymous environments, manipulation can be easy and cheap to achieve. We provide clear and sufficient discussion on related work and backgrounds to motivate this research topic, which certainly deserves attention. Weighted voting games are among key cooperative games, and the manipulations considered in this dissertation are natural, and have practical applications, that are likely …

Click-Boosting Random Walk For Image Search Reranking, Xiaopeng Yang, Yongdong Zhang, Ting Yao, Zheng-Jun Zha, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Image reranking is an effective way for improving the retrieval performance of keyword-based image search engines. A fundamental issue underlying the success of existing image reranking approaches is the ability in identifying potentially useful recurrent patterns or relevant training examples from the initial search results. Ideally, these patterns and examples can be leveraged to upgrade the ranks of visually similar images, which are also likely to be relevant. The challenge, nevertheless, originates from the fact that keyword-based queries are used to be ambiguous, resulting in difficulty in predicting the search intention. Mining useful patterns and examples without understanding query is …

Cross-Layer Optimized Wireless Video Surveillance, Yun Ye

Department of Computer Electronics and Engineering: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

A wireless video surveillance system contains three major components, the video capture and preprocessing, the video compression and transmission over wireless sensor networks (WSNs), and the video analysis at the receiving end. The coordination of different components is important for improving the end-to-end video quality, especially under the communication resource constraint. Cross-layer control proves to be an efficient measure for optimal system configuration. In this dissertation, we address the problem of implementing cross-layer optimization in the wireless video surveillance system.

The thesis work is based on three research projects. In the first project, a single PTU (pan-tilt-unit) camera is used …

An Efficient Cost Function For The Optimization Of An N-Layered Isotropic Cloaked Cylinder, Jason V. Paul, Peter J. Collins, Ronald A. Coutu Jr.

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

In this paper, we present an efficient cost function for optimizing n-layered isotropic cloaked cylinders. Cost function efficiency is achieved by extracting the expression for the angle independent scatterer contribution of an associated Green's function. Therefore, since this cost function is not a function of angle, accounting for every bistatic angle is not necessary and thus more efficient than other cost functions. With this general and efficient cost function, isotropic cloaked cylinders can be optimized for many layers and material parameters. To demonstrate this, optimized cloaked cylinders made of 10, 20 and 30 equal thickness layers are presented for …

Accuracy Improvement Of Quantitative Analysis By Spatial Confinement In Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy, L. B. Guo, Z. Q. Hao, M. Shen, W. Xiong, X. N. He, Z. Q. Xie, M. Gao, X. Y. Li, X. Y. Zeng, Yongfeng Lu

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering: Faculty Publications

To improve the accuracy of quantitative analysis in laser-induced breakdown spectroscopy, the plasma produced by a Nd:YAG laser from steel targets was confined by a cavity. A number of elements with low concentrations, such as vanadium (V), chromium (Cr), and manganese (Mn), in the steel samples were investigated. After the optimization of the cavity dimension and laser fluence, significant enhancement factors of 4.2, 3.1, and 2.87 in the emission intensity of V, Cr, and Mn lines, respectively, were achieved at a laser fluence of 42.9 J/cm2 using a hemispherical cavity (diameter: 5 mm). More importantly, the correlation coefficient of the …