Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Requirement Elicitation Of Large Web Projects., David E. Frazier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the most important aspects of developing a large Web-based project is getting the correct requirements from the client. Time and money can be lost if the requirements are incomplete or inaccurate. Traditional Web design sources tend to gloss over this important activity.

Software engineering is a mature field that can help in the quest for more complete and accurate requirement gathering. This paper explores the ways that traditional software engineering techniques can be applied to Web projects. A methodology is presented based on both existing and new techniques. Several experiments are conducted to determine the usefulness of each …

Generating Linear Orders Of Events For Geospatial Domains, Suzannah Hall

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Events in the world do not occur in neat chronological order, but may take place, for example, during or overlapping each other, or as simultaneous events. Efficient summaries of real-world events are important in many disciplines and require events to be modeled in a linear fashion. This thesis focuses on modeling events as intervals and using relations between the events to derive linear orders from more complex partially ordered sets. A method is developed for mapping Allen's thirteen temporal relations to only two relations, before and equals, which allow a linear ordering of all events present in the set. This …

Using Linear Features For Aerial Image Sequence Mosaiking, Caixia Wang

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With recent advances in sensor technology and digital image processing techniques, automatic image mosaicking has received increased attention in a variety of geospatial applications, ranging from panorama generation and video surveillance to image based rendering. The geometric transformation used to link images in a mosaic is the subject of image orientation, a fundamental photogrammetric task that represents a major research area in digital image analysis. It involves the determination of the parameters that express the location and pose of a camera at the time it captured an image. In aerial applications the typical parameters comprise two translations (along the x …

Context-Specific Preference Learning Of One Dimensional Quantitative Geospatial Attributes Using A Neuro-Fuzzy Approach, Georgios Mountrakis

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Change detection is a topic of great importance for modern geospatial information systems. Digital aerial imagery provides an excellent medium to capture geospatial information. Rapidly evolving environments, and the availability of increasing amounts of diverse, multiresolutional imagery bring forward the need for frequent updates of these datasets. Analysis and query of spatial data using potentially outdated data may yield results that are sometimes invalid. Due to measurement errors (systematic, random) and incomplete knowledge of information (uncertainty) it is ambiguous if a change in a spatial dataset has really occurred. Therefore we need to develop reliable, fast, and automated procedures that …

A Data Model For Exploration Of Temporal Virtual Reality Geographic Information Systems, Jorge Alberto Prado De Campos

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Geographic information systems deal with the exploration, analysis, and presentation of geo-referenced data. Virtual reality is a type of human-computer interface that comes close to the way people perceive information in the real world. Thus, virtual reality environments become the natural paradigm for extending and enhancing the presentational and exploratory capability of GIs applications in both the spatial and temporal domains. The main motivation of this thesis is the lack of a framework that properly supports the exploration of geographic information in a multi-dimensional and multi-sensorial environment (i.e., temporal virtual reality geographic information systems). This thesis introduces a model for …

A Vulnerability Assessment Of The East Tennessee State University Administrative Computer Network., James Patrick Ashe

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A three phase audit of East Tennessee State University's administrative computer network was conducted during Fall 2001, Spring 2002, and January 2004. Nmap and Nessus were used to collect the vulnerability data. Analysis discovered an average of 3.065 critical vulnerabilities per host with a low of 2.377 in Spring 2001 to a high of 3.694 in Fall 2001. The number of unpatched Windows operating system vulnerabilities, which accounted for over 75% of these critical vulnerabilities, strongly argues for the need of an automated patch deployment system for the approximately 3,000 Windows-based systems at ETSU.

Structuring A Wayfinder's Dynamic And Uncertain Environment, Michael D. Hendricks

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Wayfinders typically travel in dynamic environments where barriers and requirements change over time. In many cases, uncertainty exists about the future state of this changing environment. Current geographic information systems lack tools to assist wayfinders in understanding the travel possibilities and path selection options in these dynamic and uncertain settings. The goal of this research is a better understanding of the impact of dynamic and uncertain environments on wayfinding travel possibilities. An integrated spatio-temporal framework, populated with barriers and requirements, models wayfinding scenarios by generating four travel possibility partitions based on the wayfinder's maximum travel speed. Using these partitions, wayfinders …

Partitioning A Graph In Alliances And Its Application To Data Clustering, Khurram Hassan-Shafique

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Any reasonably large group of individuals, families, states, and parties exhibits the phenomenon of subgroup formations within the group such that the members of each group have a strong connection or bonding between each other. The reasons of the formation of these subgroups that we call alliances differ in different situations, such as, kinship and friendship (in the case of individuals), common economic interests (for both individuals and states), common political interests, and geographical proximity. This structure of alliances is not only prevalent in social networks, but it is also an important characteristic of similarity networks of natural and unnatural …

Camera System Support For Highway Transportation Using Mobile Devices, Le Minh

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

With the very fast growing technology in wireless, advancement in hardware and the dramatically falling cost of mobile computing devices such as PDA, handheld device, People nowadays can have a personal device that fits in their hand but has computing power as a desktop did few years ago. The same device now is able to communicate over a wireless network and view office document at the same time. The combination of size, power and flexibility makes the personal devices increasingly appear in many aspects of life. In this proposal, we focus on a simple yet useful application of mobile devices …

Toward Building A Social Robot With An Emotion-Based Internal Control, Andreas Marpaung

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

In this thesis, we aim at modeling some aspects of the functional role of emotions on an autonomous embodied agent. We begin by describing our robotic prototype, Cherry--a robot with the task of being a tour guide and an office assistant for the Computer Science Department at the University of Central Florida. Cherry did not have a formal emotion representation of internal states, but did have the ability to express emotions through her multimodal interface. The thesis presents the results of a survey we performed via our social informatics approach where we found that: (1) the idea of having emotions …

Depth From Defocused Motion, Zarina Myles

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Motion in depth and/or zooming causes defocus blur. This work presents a solution to the problem of using defocus blur and optical flow information to compute depth at points that defocus when they move. We first formulate a novel algorithm which recovers defocus blur and affine parameters simultaneously. Next we formulate a novel relationship (the blur-depth relationship) between defocus blur, relative object depth and three parameters based on camera motion and intrinsic camera parameters. We can handle the situation where a single image has points which have defocused, got sharper or are focally unperturbed. Moreover, our formulation is valid regardless …

Automatic Annotation Of Database Images For Query-By-Concept, Nualsawat Hiransakolwong

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As digital images become ubiquitous in many applications, the need for efficient and effective retrieval techniques is more demanding than ever. Query by Example (QBE) and Query by Concept (QBC) are among the most popular query models. The former model accepts example images as queries and searches for similar ones based on low-level features such as colors and textures. The latter model allows queries to be expressed in the form of high-level semantics or concept words, such as "boat" or "car," and finds images that match the specified concepts. Recent research has focused on the connections between these two models …

A New Optimal Algorithm For Outerplanar Graph Testing., Yuanyuan. Lin

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

A graph is a mathematical abstraction that is useful in solving a variety of problems. NP-complete (Non-deterministic Polynomial) problems are computational problems for which there is no known polynomial time algorithm solving them. Unfortunately, many important graph theoretic problems are known to be NP-Complete for arbitrary graph. However, for some classes of graphs, polynomial time algorithms have been discovered. Owing to this reason, it is of both theoretical and practical interest to be able to tell if a given graph belongs to one of those classes. As a result, graph recognition has received considerable attention over the last few decades. …

Sinbad Automation Of Scientific Process: From Hidden Factor Analysis To Theory Synthesis, Olcay Kursun

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Modern science is turning to progressively more complex and data-rich subjects, which challenges the existing methods of data analysis and interpretation. Consequently, there is a pressing need for development of ever more powerful methods of extracting order from complex data and for automation of all steps of the scientific process. Virtual Scientist is a set of computational procedures that automate the method of inductive inference to derive a theory from observational data dominated by nonlinear regularities. The procedures utilize SINBAD – a novel computational method of nonlinear factor analysis that is based on the principle of maximization of mutual information …

Object Tracking And Activity Recognition In Video Acquired Using Mobile Cameras, Alper Yilmaz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Due to increasing demand on deployable surveillance systems in recent years, object tracking and activity recognition are receiving considerable attention in the research community. This thesis contributes to both the tracking and the activity recognition components of a surveillance system. In particular, for the tracking component, we propose two different approaches for tracking objects in video acquired by mobile cameras, each of which uses a different object shape representation. The first approach tracks the centroids of the objects in Forward Looking Infrared Imagery (FLIR) and is suitable for tracking objects that appear small in airborne video. The second approach tracks …

Fast Algorithms For Fragment Based Completion In Images Of Natural Scenes, Siddharth Rajkumar Borikar

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Textures are used widely in computer graphics to represent fine visual details and produce realistic looking images. Often it is necessary to remove some foreground object from the scene. Removal of the portion creates one or more holes in the texture image. These holes need to be filled to complete the image. Various methods like clone brush strokes and compositing processes are used to carry out this completion. User skill is required in such methods. Texture synthesis can also be used to complete regions where the texture is stationary or structured. Reconstructing methods can be used to fill in large-scale …

High Performance Data Mining Techniques For Intrusion Detection, Muazzam Ahmed Siddiqui

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The rapid growth of computers transformed the way in which information and data was stored. With this new paradigm of data access, comes the threat of this information being exposed to unauthorized and unintended users. Many systems have been developed which scrutinize the data for a deviation from the normal behavior of a user or system, or search for a known signature within the data. These systems are termed as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS). These systems employ different techniques varying from statistical methods to machine learning algorithms. Intrusion detection systems use audit data generated by operating systems, application softwares or …

Interactivity And User-Heterogeneity In On Demand Broadcast Video, Mounir Tantaoui El Araki

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Video-On-Demand (VOD) has appeared as an important technology for many multimedia applications such as news on demand, digital libraries, home entertainment, and distance learning. In its simplest form, delivery of a video stream requires a dedicated channel for each video session. This scheme is very expensive and non-scalable. To preserve server bandwidth, many users can share a channel using multicast. Two types of multicast have been considered. In a non-periodic multicast setting, users make video requests to the server; and it serves them according to some scheduling policy. In a periodic broadcast environment, the server does not wait for service …

Dynamic Shared State Maintenance In Distributed Virtual Environments, Felix George Hamza-Lup

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Advances in computer networks and rendering systems facilitate the creation of distributed collaborative environments in which the distribution of information at remote locations allows efficient communication. Particularly challenging are distributed interactive Virtual Environments (VE) that allow knowledge sharing through 3D information. In a distributed interactive VE the dynamic shared state represents the changing information that multiple machines must maintain about the shared virtual components. One of the challenges in such environments is maintaining a consistent view of the dynamic shared state in the presence of inevitable network latency and jitter. A consistent view of the shared scene will significantly increase …

Adaptive Intelligent User Interfaces With Emotion Recognition, Fatma Nasoz

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The focus of this dissertation is on creating Adaptive Intelligent User Interfaces to facilitate enhanced natural communication during the Human-Computer Interaction by recognizing users' affective states (i.e., emotions experienced by the users) and responding to those emotions by adapting to the current situation via an affective user model created for each user. Controlled experiments were designed and conducted in a laboratory environment and in a Virtual Reality environment to collect physiological data signals from participants experiencing specific emotions. Algorithms (k-Nearest Neighbor [KNN], Discriminant Function Analysis [DFA], Marquardt-Backpropagation [MBP], and Resilient Backpropagation [RBP]) were implemented to analyze the collected data signals …

The Proteomics Approach To Evolutionary Computation: An Analysis Of Pr, Ivan Garibay

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As the complexity of our society and computational resources increases, so does the complexity of the problems that we approach using evolutionary search techniques. There are recent approaches to deal with the problem of scaling evolutionary methods to cope with highly complex difficult problems. Many of these approaches are biologically inspired and share an underlying principle: a problem representation based on basic representational building blocks that interact and self-organize into complex functions or designs. The observation from the central dogma of molecular biology that proteins are the basic building blocks of life and the recent advances in proteomics on analysis …

Image Based View Synthesis, Jiangjian Xiao

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation deals with the image-based approach to synthesize a virtual scene using sparse images or a video sequence without the use of 3D models. In our scenario, a real dynamic or static scene is captured by a set of un-calibrated images from different viewpoints. After automatically recovering the geometric transformations between these images, a series of photo-realistic virtual views can be rendered and a virtual environment covered by these several static cameras can be synthesized. This image-based approach has applications in object recognition, object transfer, video synthesis and video compression. In this dissertation, I have contributed to several sub-problems …

The Effects Of Microprocessor Architecture On Speedup In Distrbuted Memory Supercomputers, Glen L. Beane

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Amdahl's Law states that speedup in moving from one processor to N identical processors can never be greater than N, and in fact usually is lower than N because of operations that must be done sequentially. Amdahl's Law gives us the following formula for speedup: Speedup < or = (S+P)/(S+(P/N)) where is the number of processors, S is the percentage of the code that is serial (i.e., cannot be parallelized), and P is the percentage of code that is parallelizable. We can substitute 1 - S for P in the above formula and we see that as S approaches zero speedup approaches N. It can also be shown that seemingly small values of S can severely limit the maximum speedup. Researchers at the University of Maine saw speedups that seemed to contradict Amdahl's Law, and identified an assumption made by the law that is not always true. When this assumption is not true, it is possible to achieve speedups that are larger than the theoretical maximum speedup of N given by Amdahl's Law. The assumption in question is that the computer performance scales linearly as the size of the problem is reduced by dividing it over a larger number of processors. This assumption is not valid for computers with tiered memory. In this thesis we investigate superlinear speedup through a series of test programs specifically designed to exhibit superlinear speedup. After demonstrating these programs show superlinear speedup, we suggest methods for detecting the potential for superlinear speedup in a variety of algorithms.