Alpha matting is an important topic in areas of computer vision. It has various applications, such as virtual reality, digital image and video editing, and image synthesis. The conventional approaches for alpha matting perform unsatisfactorily when they encounter complicated background and foreground. It is also difficult for them to extract alpha matte accurately when the foreground objects are transparent, semi-transparent, perforated or hairy. Fortunately, the rapid development of deep learning techniques brings new possibilities for solving alpha matting problems. In this thesis, we propose a residual convolutional grid network for alpha matting, which is based on the convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and can learn the alpha matte directly from the original image and its trimap. Our grid network consists of horizontal residual convolutional computation blocks and vertical upsampling/downsampling convolutional computation blocks. By choosing different paths to pass information by itself, our network can not only retain the rich details of the image but also extract high-level abstract semantic information of the image. The experimental results demonstrate that our method can solve the matting problems that plague conventional matting methods for decades and outperform all the other state-of-the-art matting methods in quality and visual evaluation. The only matting method performs a little better than ours is the current best matting method. However, that matting method requires three times amount of trainable parameters compared with ours. Hence, our matting method is the best considering the computation complexity, memory usage, and matting performance.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Meningioma represent more than one-third of all primary central nervous system (CNS) tumors, and it can be classified into three grades according to WHO (World Health Organization) in terms of clinical aggressiveness and risk of recurrence. A key component of meningioma grades is the mitotic count, which is defined as quantifying the number of cells in the process of dividing (i.e., undergoing mitosis) at a specific point in time. Currently, mitosis counting is done manually by a pathologist looking at 10 consecutive high-power fields (HPF) on a glass slide under a microscope, which is an extremely laborious and time-consuming process. The goal of this thesis is to investigate the use of computerized methods to automate the detection of mitotic nuclei with limited labeled data. We built computational methods to detect and quantify the histological features of mitotic cells on a whole slides image which mimic the exact process of pathologist workflow. Since we do not have enough training data from meningioma slide, we learned the mitotic cell features through public available breast cancer datasets, and predicted on meingioma slide for accuracy. We use either handcrafted features that capture certain morphological, statistical, or textural attributes of mitoses or features learned with convolutional neural networks (CNN). Hand crafted features are inspired by the domain knowledge, while the data-driven VGG16 models tend to be domain agnostic and attempt to learn additional feature bases that cannot be represented through any of the handcrafted features. Our work on detection of mitotic cells shows 100% recall , 9% precision and 0.17 F1 score. The detection using VGG16 performs with 71% recall, 73% precision, and 0.77 F1 score. Finally, this research of automated image analysis could drastically increase diagnostic efficiency and reduce inter-observer variability and errors in pathology diagnosis, which would allow fewer pathologists to serve more patients while maintaining diagnostic accuracy and precision. And all these methodologies will increasingly transform practice of pathology, allowing it to mature toward a quantitative science.

Face recognition is the problem of identifying individuals in images. This thesis evaluates two methods used to determine if pairs of face images belong to the same individual or not. The first method is a combination of principal component analysis and a neural network and the second method is based on state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks. They are trained and evaluated using two different data sets. The first set contains many images with large variations in, for example, illumination and facial expression. The second consists of fewer images with small variations. Principal component analysis allowed the use of smaller networks. The largest network has 1.7 million parameters compared to the 7 million used in the convolutional network. The use of smaller networks lowered the training time and evaluation time significantly. Principal component analysis proved to be well suited for the data set with small variations outperforming the convolutional network which need larger data sets to avoid overfitting. The reduction in data dimensionality, however, led to difficulties classifying the data set with large variations. The generous amount of images in this set allowed the convolutional method to reach higher accuracies than the principal component method.

The aim of this thesis is to study problems of deep convolutional neural networks and the connected classification of images and to experiment with the architecture of particular network with the aim to get the most accurate results on the selected dataset. The thesis is divided into two parts, the first part theoretically outlines the properties and structure of neural networks and briefly introduces selected networks. The second part deals with experiments with this network, such as the impact of data augmentation, batch size and the impact of dropout layers on the accuracy of the network. Subsequently, all results are compared and discussed with the best result achieved an accuracy of 86, 44% on test data.

The following master's thesis paper equipped with a short description of CT scans and MR images and the main differences between them, explanation of the structure of convolutional neural networks and how they implemented into biomedical image analysis, besides it was taken a popular modification of U-Net and tested on two loss-functions. As far as segmentation quality plays a highly important role for doctors, in experiment part it was paid significant attention to training quality and prediction results of the model. The experiment has shown the effectiveness of the provided algorithm and performed 100 training cases with the following analysis through the similarity. The proposed outcome gives us certain ideas for future improving the quality of image segmentation via deep learning techniques.

We trained a combined deep convolutional neural network to predict seals’ age (3 categories) and gender (2 categories). The entire dataset contains 110 seals with around 489 thousand location records. Most records are continuous and measured in a certain step. We created five convolutional layers for feature representation and established two fully connected structure as age’s and gender’s classifier, respectively. Each classifier consists of three fully connected layers. Treating seals’ latitude and longitude as input, entire deep learning network, which includes 780,000 neurons and 2,097,000 parameters, can reach to 70.72% accuracy rate for predicting seals’ age and simultaneously achieve 79.95% for gender estimation.

With the rapid development of deep learning techniques, the application of Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) has benefited the task of target object recognition. Several state-of-the-art object detectors have achieved excellent performance on the precision for object recognition. When it comes to applying the detection results for the real world application of collaborative robots, the reliability and robustness of the target object detection stage is essential to support efficient task allocation. In this work, collaborative robots task allocation is based on the assumption that each individual robotic agent possesses specialized capabilities to be matched with detected targets representing tasks to be performed in the surrounding environment which impose specific requirements. The goal is to reach a specialized labor distribution among the individual robots based on best matching their specialized capabilities with the corresponding requirements imposed by the tasks. In order to further improve task recognition with convolutional neural networks in the context of robotic task allocation, this thesis proposes an innovative approach for progressively refining the target detection process by taking advantage of the fact that additional images can be collected by mobile cameras installed on robotic vehicles. The proposed methodology combines a CNN-based object detection module with a refinement module. For the detection module, a two-stage object detector, Mask RCNN, for which some adaptations on region proposal generation are introduced, and a one-stage object detector, YOLO, are experimentally investigated in the context considered. The generated recognition scores serve as input for the refinement module. In the latter, the current detection result is considered as the a priori evidence to enhance the next detection for the same target with the goal to iteratively improve the target recognition scores. Both the Bayesian method and the Dempster-Shafer theory are experimentally investigated to achieve the data fusion process involved in the refinement process. The experimental validation is conducted on indoor search-and-rescue (SAR) scenarios and the results presented in this work demonstrate the feasibility and reliability of the proposed progressive refinement framework, especially when the combination of adapted Mask RCNN and D-S theory data fusion is exploited.

As the world is moving towards a more digital world with the majority of people having tablets, smartphones and smart objects, solving real-world computational problems with handheld devices seems more common. Detection or tracking of objects using a camera is starting to be used in all kinds of fields, from self-driving cars, sorting items to x-rays, referenced in Introduction. Object detection is very calculation heavy which is why a good computer is necessary for it to work relatively fast. Object detection using lightweight models is not as accurate as a heavyweight model because the model trades accuracy for inference to work relatively fast on such devices. As handheld devices get more powerful and people have better access to object detection models that can work on limited-computing devices, the ability to build their own small object detection machines at home or at work increases substantially. Knowing what kind of factors that have a big impact on object detection can help the user to design or choose the correct model. This study aims to explore what kind of impact distance, angle and light have on Inceptionv2 SSD, MobileNetv3 Large SSD and MobileNetv3 Small SSD on the COCO dataset. The results indicate that distance is the most dominant factor on the Inceptionv2 SSD model using the COCO dataset. The data for the MobileNetv3 SSD models indicate that the angle might have the biggest impact on these models but the data is too inconclusive to say that with certainty. With the knowledge of knowing what kind of factors that affect a certain model’s performance the most, the user can make a more informed choice to their field of use.

Biometric identification has already been applied to society today, as today’s mobile phones use fingerprints and other methods like iris and the face itself. With growth for technologies like computer vision, the Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, The use of face recognition as a biometric identification on ordinary doors has become increasingly common. This thesis studies is looking into the possibility of replacing regular door locks with face recognition or supplement the locks to increase security by using a pre-trained state-of-the-art face recognition method based on a convolution neural network. A subsequent investigation concluded that a networks based face recognition are is highly vulnerable to attacks in the form of presentation attacks. This study investigates protection mechanisms against these forms of attack by developing a presentation attack detection and analyzing its performance. The obtained results from the proof of concept  showed that local binary patterns histograms as a presentation attack detection could help the state of art face recognition to avoid attacks up to 88\% of the attacks the convolution neural network approved without the presentation attack detection. However, to replace traditional locks, more work must be done to detect more attacks in form of both higher percentage of attacks blocked by the system and the types of attack that can be done. Nevertheless, as a supplement face recognition represents a promising technology to supplement traditional door locks, enchaining their security by complementing the authorization with biometric authentication. So the main contributions is that  by using simple older methods LBPH can help modern state of the art face regognition to detect presentation attacks according to the results of the tests. This study also worked to adapt this PAD to be suitable for low end edge devices to be able to adapt in an environment where modern solutions are used, which LBPH have.

Machine learning generally requires large amounts of data, however data is often limited. On the whole the amount of data needed grows with the complexity of the problem to be solved. Utilising transfer learning, data augmentation and problem reduction, acceptable performance can be achieved with limited data for a multitude of tasks. The goal of this master project is to develop an artificial neural network-based model for food waste analysis, an area in which large quantities of data is not yet readily available. Given two images an algorithm is expected to identify what has changed in the image, ignore the uncharged areas even though they might contain objects which can be classified and finally classify the change. The approach chosen in this project was to attempt to reduce the problem the machine learning algorithm has to solve by subtracting the images before they are handled by the neural network. In theory this should resolve both object localisation and filtering of uninteresting objects, which only leaves classification to the neural network. Such a procedure significantly simplifies the task to be resolved by the neural network, which results in reduced need for training data as well as keeping the process of gathering data relatively simple and fast. Several models were assessed and theories of adaptation of the neural network to this particular task were evaluated. Test accuracy of at best 78.9% was achieved with a limited dataset of about 1000 images with 10 different classes. This performance was accomplished by a siamese neural network based on VGG19 utilising triplet loss and training data using subtraction as a basis for ground truth mask creation, which was multiplied with the image containing the changed object. / Maskininlärning kräver generellt mycket data, men stora mängder data står inte alltid till förfogande. Generellt ökar behovet av data med problemets komplexitet. Med hjälp av överföringsinlärning, dataaugumentation och problemreduktion kan dock acceptabel prestanda erhållas på begränsad datamängd för flera uppgifter.  Målet med denna masteruppsats är att ta fram en modell baserad på artificiella neurala nätverk för matavfallsanalys, ett område inom vilket stora mängder data ännu inte finns tillgängligt. Givet två bilder väntas en algoritm identifiera vad som ändrats i bilden, ignorera de oförändrade områdena även om dessa innehåller objekt som kan klassificeras och slutligen klassificera ändringen. Tillvägagångssättet som valdes var att försöka reducera problemet som maskininlärningsalgoritmen, i detta fall ett artificiellt neuralt nätverk, behöver hantera genom att subtrahera bilderna innan de hanterades av det neurala nätverket. I teorin bör detta ta hand om både objektslokaliseringen och filtreringen av ointressanta objekt, vilket endast lämnar klassificeringen till det neurala nätverket. Ett sådant tillvägagångssätt förenklar problemet som det neurala nätverket behöver lösa avsevärt och resulterar i minskat behov av träningsdata, samtidigt som datainsamling hålls relativt snabbt och simpelt.  Flera olika modeller utvärderades och teorier om specialanpassningar av neurala nätverk för denna uppgift evaluerades. En testnoggrannhet på som bäst 78.9% uppnåddes med begränsad datamängd om ca 1000 bilder med 10 klasser. Denna prestation erhölls med ett siamesiskt neuralt nätverk baserat på VGG19 med tripletförlust och träningsdata som använde subtraktion av bilder som grund för framställning av grundsanningsmasker (eng. Ground truth masks) multiplicerade med bilden innehållande förändringen.