Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons^™

Morp: Monocular Orientation Regression Pipeline, Jacob Gunderson

Master's Theses

Orientation estimation of objects plays a pivotal role in robotics, self-driving cars, and augmented reality. Beyond mere position, accurately determining the orientation of objects is essential for constructing precise models of the physical world. While 2D object detection has made significant strides, the field of orientation estimation still faces several challenges. Our research addresses these hurdles by proposing an efficient pipeline which facilitates rapid creation of labeled training data and enables direct regression of object orientation from a single image. We start by creating a digital twin of a physical object using an iPhone, followed by generating synthetic images using …

A Gateway To Next-Generation Patient Monitoring System, Kishore Kumar Kadari

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Healthcare patient monitoring is undergoing a significant digital transformation, and the integration of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly crucial in reshaping patient care. In an era where digital technology is revolutionizing medical practices, this research aims to take a leading role in advancing a fundamental aspect of predictive and sustainable healthcare practices, enhancing patient outcomes and uplifting the practice of medicine.

This research focuses on the study of Digital Twins for precision health, which are designed to monitor and provide intricate, personalized feedback dynamically during a patient's healthcare experience. The architecture of the system is …

Deep Learning-Based Human Action Understanding In Videos, Elahe Vahdani

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The understanding of human actions in videos holds immense potential for technological advancement and societal betterment. This thesis explores fundamental aspects of this field, including action recognition in trimmed clips and action localization in untrimmed videos. Trimmed videos contain only one action instance, with moments before or after the action excluded from the video. However, the majority of videos captured in unconstrained environments, often referred to as untrimmed videos, are naturally unsegmented. Untrimmed videos are typically lengthy and may encompass multiple action instances, along with the moments preceding or following each action, as well as transitions between actions. In the …

Mivt: Medical-Informed Vision Transformer For Early Epilepsy Diagnosis, Md Masum Rana

Dissertations and Theses

Epilepsy is a neurological disorder characterized by recurrent, unprovoked seizures, and early diagnosis is crucial for effective management and treatment. However, the diagnosis of epilepsy, particularly in its early stages, remains challenging due to the subtle nature of seizures and the complexity of brain activity patterns. In this research, we introduce the Medical-Informed Vision Transformer (MIVT), a deep learning architecture specifically designed to improve early epilepsy diagnosis from multimodal neuroimaging data. Our model integrates insights from both medical knowledge and state-of-the-art Vision Transformers (ViTs) to enhance the accuracy and interpretability of seizure detection and localization. The MIVT leverages the rich …

Media Haze Classification In Retinal Images Using Deep Learning, Jonathan O'Berry

UNF Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Media Haze (MH) is a condition that affects an individual’s quality of life by affecting their eyes. Current practice is to detect MH by manually examining retinal fundus (retinal) images. The analysis of images being used as the prevalent technique for identifying the MH condition strongly suggests that automation of this process may be possible. In recent years, machine learning, specifically computer vision, has allowed for the automation of tasks relating to image analysis. This ability to automate has also recently been shown in the medical field for some eye conditions and diseases. This thesis centers around the problem of …

Using Pose Estimation Software To Predict Actions In Sabre Fencing, Micah Edwin Peters Ii

Honors College Theses

Fencing is a combat sport that uses three different swords: epee, foil, and sabre. Due to its fast-paced nature and employment of right of way, sabre fencing is often considered the most difficult of the three to learn. Computer vision and pose estimation software can be used to lower the barrier of entry to sabre fencing by identifying the different actions in sabre fencing. This project focuses on using open-source software to design a program that can identify the sabre parries as well as the main sabre movements. This program could be used to help newer fencers and spectators better …

Bias-Aware Gaze Uniformity Assessment In Group Images, Omkar Kulkarni

Electronic Theses & Dissertations (2024 - present)

Today, more than 5 billion photos are captured every day, with smartphones generating over 94\% of these images. However, despite advancements in technology, achieving aesthetically pleasing group photos remains challenging, especially when it comes to aligning the direction of everyone’s gaze. While current methods focus on facial features, they often fail to ensure consistent gaze direction. The introduction of the iPhone's Live mode, which captures a 1.5-second video snippet along with still images, complicates the selection of the best key photo due to its subjective nature and a lack of publicly available data, especially during the pandemic.

To address these …

Dropped Objects Recognition In Offshore Operations Based On Computer Vision And Artificial Intelligence, Xiaochuan Yu

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

We are more interested in recovering and salvaging containers which may be loaded with either valuable or harmful substances. Therefore, we designed various container models to account for different loading conditions and then exported them to a 3D printer. Six small container models were dropped into the trailer pool at the University of New Orleans (UNO) as planned at angles of 0°, 45°, and 90°.

After collecting all the videos using a high-definition camera set outside the tank, we perform pre-processing tasks on the videos in preparation for model training. The two-phase angle classification method uses a pretrained ResNet50 model …

Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation, Zhaozheng Chen

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in computer vision that assigns a label to every pixel in an image based on the semantic meaning of the objects present. It demands a large amount of pixel-level labeled images for training deep models. Weakly-supervised semantic segmentation (WSSS) is a more feasible approach that uses only weak annotations to learn the segmentation task. Image-level label based WSSS is the most challenging and popular, where only the class label for the entire image is provided as supervision. To address this challenge, Class Activation Map (CAM) has emerged as a powerful technique in WSSS. CAM …

Deep Learning For Photovoltaic Characterization, Adrian Manuel De Luis Garcia

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis introduces a novel approach to Photovoltaic (PV) installation segmentation by proposing a new architecture to understand and identify PV modules from overhead imagery. Pivotal to this concept is the creation of a new Transformer-based network, S3Former, which focuses on small object characterization and modelling intra- and inter- object differentiation inside an image. Accurate mapping of PV installations is pivotal for understanding their adoption and guiding energy policy decisions. Drawing insights from current Deep Learning methodologies for image segmentation and building upon State-of-the-Art (SOTA) techniques in solar cell mapping, this work puts forth S3Former with the following enhancements: 1. …

Smartphone Based Object Detection For Shark Spotting, Darrick W. Oliver

Master's Theses

Given concern over shark attacks in coastal regions, the recent use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, has increased to ensure the safety of beachgoers. However, much of city officials' process remains manual, with drone operation and review of footage still playing a significant role. In pursuit of a more automated solution, researchers have turned to the usage of neural networks to perform detection of sharks and other marine life. For on-device solutions, this has historically required assembling individual hardware components to form an embedded system to utilize the machine learning model. This means that the camera, neural processing …

Decoding The Underlying Meaning Of Multimodal Hateful Memes, Ming Shan Hee, Wen Haw Chong, Roy Ka-Wei Lee

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Recent studies have proposed models that yielded promising performance for the hateful meme classification task. Nevertheless, these proposed models do not generate interpretable explanations that uncover the underlying meaning and support the classification output. A major reason for the lack of explainable hateful meme methods is the absence of a hateful meme dataset that contains ground truth explanations for benchmarking or training. Intuitively, having such explanations can educate and assist content moderators in interpreting and removing flagged hateful memes. This paper address this research gap by introducing Hateful meme with Reasons Dataset (HatReD), which is a new multimodal hateful meme …

Automatic Identification Of Jetting Behavior In 3d Printing With Binary Classification And Anomaly Detection, Alexander Chandy

Honors Scholar Theses

Consistently jetting different materials from the print head of a 3D printer is a key, yet challenging task in manufacturing processes. By using active machine learning, we can efficiently predict complex diagrams that illustrate the region of printing conditions under which “desirable jetting”, “jetting”, and “no jetting” of ink occurs for different substances. However, labeling the images of printed ink droplets that are fed to the active learning model can be time intensive. Therefore, it is ideal to use computer vision to automate the classification of this image data. This classification can be broken down into two steps. In the …

Region Detection & Segmentation Of Nissl-Stained Rat Brain Tissue, Alexandro Arnal

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

People who analyze images of biological tissue rely on the segmentation of structures as a preliminary step. In particular, laboratories studying the rat brain delineate brain regions to position scientific findings on a brain atlas to propose hypotheses about the rat brain and, ultimately, the human brain. Our work intersects with the preliminary step of delineating regions in images of brain tissue via computational methods.

We investigate pixel-wise classification or segmentation of brain regions using ten histological images of brain tissue sections stained for Nissl substance. We present a deep learning approach that uses the fully convolutional neural network, U-Net, …

Semantic-Aligned Matching For Enhanced Detr Convergence And Multi-Scale Feature Fusion, Gongjie Zhang, Zhipeng Luo, Yingchen Yu, Jiaxing Huang, Kaiwen Cui, Shijian Lu, Eric Xing

Machine Learning Faculty Publications

The recently proposed DEtection TRansformer (DETR) has established a fully end-to-end paradigm for object detection. However, DETR suffers from slow training convergence, which hinders its applicability to various detection tasks. We observe that DETR's slow convergence is largely attributed to the difficulty in matching object queries to relevant regions due to the unaligned semantics between object queries and encoded image features. With this observation, we design Semantic-Aligned-Matching DETR++ (SAM-DETR++) to accelerate DETR's convergence and improve detection performance. The core of SAM-DETR++ is a plug-andplay module that projects object queries and encoded image features into the same feature embedding space, where …

Gesture Recognition Using Neural Networks, Ashwini Kurady

Master's Projects

The advances in technology have brought in a lot of changes in the way humans go about their lives. This has enhanced the significance of Artificial Neural Networks and Computer Vision- based interactions with the world. Gesture Recognition is one of the major focus areas in Computer Vision. This involves Human Computer Interfaces (HCI) that would capture and understand human actions. In this project, we will explore how Neural Network concepts can be applied in this challenging field of Computer Vision. By leveraging the latest research for Gesture Recognition, we researched on how to capture the movement across different frames …

License Plate Image Quality Enhancement Utilizing Super Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks, Mark Moelter

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis focuses primarily on enhancing the image quality of blurred license plates through the use of Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks (SRGANs) [1]. We propose a synthetic dataset with SRGAN model to promote blurred image quality enhancement, and allow for model evaluation on a multitude of image input and output size combinations. SRGAN is mainly used for low-resolution image enhancement, but by heavily blurring the input images, the model is tested on its ability to blindly deblur and upsample images to the desired super-resolution (SR) size. The model enhances the image quality to nearly that of the reference images. The …

Task Classification During Visual Search Using Classic Machine Learning And Deep Learning, Devangi Vilas Chinchankar

Master's Projects

In an average human life, the eyes not only passively scan visual scenes, but most times end up actively performing tasks including, but not limited to, searching, comparing, and counting. As a result of the advances in technology, we are observing a boost in the average screen time. Humans are now looking at an increasing number of screens and in turn images and videos. Understanding what scene a user is looking at and what type of visual task is being performed can be useful in developing intelligent user interfaces, and in virtual reality and augmented reality devices. In this research, …

Analysis Of Camera Trap Footage Through Subject Recognition, Nirnayak Bhardwaj

Master's Projects

Motion-sensitive cameras, otherwise known as camera traps, have become increasingly popular amongst ecologists for studying wildlife. These cameras allow scientists to remotely observe animals through an inexpensive and non-invasive approach. Due to the lenient nature of motion cameras, studies involving them often generate excessive amounts of footage with many photographs not containing any animal subjects. Thus, there is a need for a system that is capable of analyzing camera trap footage to determine if a picture holds value for researchers. While research into automated image recognition is well documented, it has had limited applications in the field of ecology. This …

Artificial Intelligence Algorithms For Medical Imaging And Healthcare, Jonathan William Stubblefield

Student Theses and Dissertations

In this dissertation, we studied several applications of artificial intelligence applications to healthcare. In the first chapter, we examined a machine learning algorithm for classifying patients presenting to the emergency department with acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). Patients presenting with this life-threatening condition require a quick and accurate assessment of whether the condition is infectious or cardiac in etiology as the treatments for these etiologies of ARDS differ significantly. We used a transfer learning approach to develop our model. The model used a combination of clinical data and a chest x-ray as its input and achieved an accuracy 0.675 on …

Multi-Modal Data Fusion, Image Segmentation, And Object Identification Using Unsupervised Machine Learning: Conception, Validation, Applications, And A Basis For Multi-Modal Object Detection And Tracking, Nicholas Lahaye

Computational and Data Sciences (PhD) Dissertations

Remote sensing and instrumentation is constantly improving and increasing in capability. Included within this, is the increase in amount of different instrument types, with various combinations of spatial and spectral resolutions, pointing angles, and various other instrument-specific qualities. While the increase in instruments, and therefore datasets, is a boon for those aiming to study the complexities of the various Earth systems, it can also present a large number of new challenges. With this information in mind, our group has set our aims on combining datasets with different spatial and spectral resolutions in an effective and as-general-as-possible way, with as little …

Take The Lead: Toward A Virtual Video Dance Partner, Ty Farris

Master's Theses

My work focuses on taking a single person as input and predicting the intentional movement of one dance partner based on the other dance partner's movement. Human pose estimation has been applied to dance and computer vision, but many existing applications focus on a single individual or multiple individuals performing. Currently there are very few works that focus specifically on dance couples combined with pose prediction. This thesis is applicable to the entertainment and gaming industry by training people to dance with a virtual dance partner.

Many existing interactive or virtual dance partners require a motion capture system, multiple cameras …

Forecasting Pedestrian Trajectory Using Deep Learning, Arsal Syed

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

In this dissertation we develop different methods for forecasting pedestrian trajectories. Complete understanding of pedestrian motion is essential for autonomous agents and social robots to make realistic and safe decisions. Current trajectory prediction methods rely on incorporating historic motion, scene features and social interaction to model pedestrian behaviors. Our focus is to accurately understand scene semantics to better forecast trajectories. In order to do so, we leverage semantic segmentation to encode static scene features such as walkable paths, entry/exits, static obstacles etc. We further evaluate the effectiveness of using semantic maps on different datasets and compare its performance with already …

Model Uncertainty Guides Visual Object Tracking, Lijun Zhou, Antoine Ledent, Qintao Hu, Ting Liu, Jianlin Zhang, Marius Kloft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Model object trackers largely rely on the online learning of a discriminative classifier from potentially diverse sample frames. However, noisy or insufficient amounts of samples can deteriorate the classifiers' performance and cause tracking drift. Furthermore, alterations such as occlusion and blurring can cause the target to be lost. In this paper, we make several improvements aimed at tackling uncertainty and improving robustness in object tracking. Our first and most important contribution is to propose a sampling method for the online learning of object trackers based on uncertainty adjustment: our method effectively selects representative sample frames to feed the discriminative branch …

Perceptually Improved Medical Image Translations Using Conditional Generative Adversarial Networks, Anurag Vaidya

Honors Theses

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) can help visualize various brain regions. Typical MRI sequences consist of T1-weighted sequence (favorable for observing large brain structures), T2-weighted sequence (useful for pathology), and T2-FLAIR scan (useful for pathology with suppression of signal from water). While these different scans provide complementary information, acquiring them leads to acquisition times of ~1 hour and an average cost of $2,600, presenting significant barriers. To reduce these costs associated with brain MRIs, we present pTransGAN, a generative adversarial network capable of translating both healthy and unhealthy T1 scans into T2 scans. We show that the addition of non-adversarial …

Using Eye-Gaze To Evaluate Neural Attention, Shahansha Salim

Master’s Dissertations

The ability to selectively concentrate on areas of interest while ignoring the rest is termed as attention in human beings. This ability has played a key role in survival as well as information processing. Neural Attention is said to be an effort to bring similar action of selectively concentrating areas of relevance in deep neural networks. This simple yet powerful concept has attracted a lot of research in recent years, yielding breakthrough results in Natural Language Processing (NLP) problems and main stream Computer Vision problems such as Image Caption Generation, Neural Machine Translation (NMT), Visual Question Answering (VQA), Action Recognition, …

Dataset And Evaluation Of Self-Supervised Learning For Panoramic Depth Estimation, Ryan Nett

Master's Theses

Depth detection is a very common computer vision problem. It shows up primarily in robotics, automation, or 3D visualization domains, as it is essential for converting images to point clouds. One of the poster child applications is self driving cars. Currently, the best methods for depth detection are either very expensive, like LIDAR, or require precise calibration, like stereo cameras. These costs have given rise to attempts to detect depth from a monocular camera (a single camera). While this is possible, it is harder than LIDAR or stereo methods since depth can't be measured from monocular images, it has to …

Attentional Parsing Networks, Marcus Karr

Master's Theses

Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have dominated the computer vision field since the early 2010s, when deep learning largely replaced previous approaches like hand-crafted feature engineering and hierarchical image parsing. Meanwhile transformer architectures have attained preeminence in natural language processing, and have even begun to supplant CNNs as the state of the art for some computer vision tasks.

This study proposes a novel transformer-based architecture, the attentional parsing network, that reconciles the deep learning and hierarchical image parsing approaches to computer vision. We recast unsupervised image representation as a sequence-to-sequence translation problem where image patches are mapped to successive layers …

Attacking Computer Vision Models Using Occlusion Analysis To Create Physically Robust Adversarial Images, Jacobsen Loh

Master's Theses

Self-driving cars rely on their sense of sight to function effectively in chaotic and uncontrolled environments. Thanks to recent developments in computer vision, specifically convolutional neural networks, autonomous vehicles have developed the ability to see at or above human-level capabilities, which in turn has allowed for rapid advances in self-driving cars. Unfortunately, much like humans being confused by simple optical illusions, convolutional neural networks are susceptible to simple adversarial inputs. As there is no overlap between the optical illusions that fool humans and the adversarial examples that threaten convolutional neural networks, little is understood as to why these adversarial examples …

Detection Of Mild Cognitive Impairment Using Diffusion Compartment Imaging, Matthew Jones

Master's Projects

The result of applying the Neurite Orientation Density and Dispersion Index (NODDI) algorithm to improve the prediction accuracy for patients diagnosed with MCI is reported. Calculations were carried out using a collection of 68 patients (34 control and 34 with MCI) gathered from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative database (ADNI). Patient data includes the use of high-resolution Magnetic Resonance Images as with as Diffusion Tensor Imaging. A Linear Regression accuracy of 83% was observed using the added NODDI summary statistic: Orientation Dispersion Index (ODI). A statistically significant difference in groups was found between control patients and patients with MCI with …