abstract: Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of mortality yet largely preventable, but the key to prevention is to identify at-risk individuals before adverse events. For predicting individual CVD risk, carotid intima-media thickness (CIMT), a noninvasive ultrasound method, has proven to be valuable, offering several advantages over CT coronary artery calcium score. However, each CIMT examination includes several ultrasound videos, and interpreting each of these CIMT videos involves three operations: (1) select three enddiastolic ultrasound frames (EUF) in the video, (2) localize a region of interest (ROI) in each selected frame, and (3) trace the lumen-intima interface and the media-adventitia interface in each ROI to measure CIMT. These operations are tedious, laborious, and time consuming, a serious limitation that hinders the widespread utilization of CIMT in clinical practice. To overcome this limitation, this paper presents a new system to automate CIMT video interpretation. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that the suggested system significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods. The superior performance is attributable to our unified framework based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) coupled with our informative image representation and effective post-processing of the CNN outputs, which are uniquely designed for each of the above three operations. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2016

abstract: Computational visual aesthetics has recently become an active research area. Existing state-of-art methods formulate this as a binary classification task where a given image is predicted to be beautiful or not. In many applications such as image retrieval and enhancement, it is more important to rank images based on their aesthetic quality instead of binary-categorizing them. Furthermore, in such applications, it may be possible that all images belong to the same category. Hence determining the aesthetic ranking of the images is more appropriate. To this end, a novel problem of ranking images with respect to their aesthetic quality is formulated in this work. A new data-set of image pairs with relative labels is constructed by carefully selecting images from the popular AVA data-set. Unlike in aesthetics classification, there is no single threshold which would determine the ranking order of the images across the entire data-set. This problem is attempted using a deep neural network based approach that is trained on image pairs by incorporating principles from relative learning. Results show that such relative training procedure allows the network to rank the images with a higher accuracy than a state-of-art network trained on the same set of images using binary labels. Further analyzing the results show that training a model using the image pairs learnt better aesthetic features than training on same number of individual binary labelled images. Additionally, an attempt is made at enhancing the performance of the system by incorporating saliency related information. Given an image, humans might fixate their vision on particular parts of the image, which they might be subconsciously intrigued to. I therefore tried to utilize the saliency information both stand-alone as well as in combination with the global and local aesthetic features by performing two separate sets of experiments. In both the cases, a standard saliency model is chosen and the generated saliency maps are convoluted with the images prior to passing them to the network, thus giving higher importance to the salient regions as compared to the remaining. Thus generated saliency-images are either used independently or along with the global and the local features to train the network. Empirical results show that the saliency related aesthetic features might already be learnt by the network as a sub-set of the global features from automatic feature extraction, thus proving the redundancy of the additional saliency module. / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2016

abstract: Handwritten documents have gained popularity in various domains including education and business. A key task in analyzing a complex document is to distinguish between various content types such as text, math, graphics, tables and so on. For example, one such aspect could be a region on the document with a mathematical expression; in this case, the label would be math. This differentiation facilitates the performance of specific recognition tasks depending on the content type. We hypothesize that the recognition accuracy of the subsequent tasks such as textual, math, and shape recognition will increase, further leading to a better analysis of the document. Content detection on handwritten documents assigns a particular class to a homogeneous portion of the document. To complete this task, a set of handwritten solutions was digitally collected from middle school students located in two different geographical regions in 2017 and 2018. This research discusses the methods to collect, pre-process and detect content type in the collected handwritten documents. A total of 4049 documents were extracted in the form of image, and json format; and were labelled using an object labelling software with tags being text, math, diagram, cross out, table, graph, tick mark, arrow, and doodle. The labelled images were fed to the Tensorflow’s object detection API to learn a neural network model. We show our results from two neural networks models, Faster Region-based Convolutional Neural Network (Faster R-CNN) and Single Shot detection model (SSD). / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Computer Science 2018

Orientador: Jaime Portugheis / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Faculdade de Engenharia Eletrica e de Computação / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-06T08:08:11Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sharma_Manish_M.pdf: 1001397 bytes, checksum: 04250e6b88e19bb784d3b68313ace258 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2006 / Resumo: Nesta dissertação abordamos o problema de como construir codificadores bit-geometricamente uniformes (BGU) para a utilização como codificadores internos em sistemas com concatenação serial de códigos. A utilização destes codificadores implica na facilidade de determinação de parâmetros necessários para a análise do desempenho dos sistemas. Há um grande controle sobre estes parâmetros no projeto destes codificadores utilizando o método descrito neste trabalho, o que sugere que bons codificadores e conseqüentemente bons sistemas podem ser obtidos desta maneira. Além disso, os códigos gerados por estes codificadores possuem a propriedade de uniformidade de erro de bit, o que facilita bastante sua análise / Abstract: This thesis approaches the problem of building bit-geometrically uniform (BGU) encoders to be used as inner encoders in systems with serially concatenated codes. By using this type of encoders, certain parameters that are used to analyze the system's performance are easily determined. There is a great control over these parameters when building encoders using the method described in this work, suggesting that good encoders and subsequently good systems can be obtained. Besides, the codes generated by these encoders posses the uniform bit error property, that greatly facilitates their analysis / Mestrado / Engenharia de Telecomunicações / Mestre em Engenharia Elétrica

In a digital world of Flickr, Picasa and Google Images, developing a semantic image represen-tation has become a vital problem. Image processing and computer vision researchers to date, have used several di erent representations for images. They vary from low level features such as SIFT, HOG, GIST etc. to high level concepts such as objects and people. When asked to describe an object or a scene, people usually resort to mid-level features such as size, appearance, feel, use, behaviour etc. Such descriptions are commonly referred to as the attributes of the object or scene. These human understandable, machine detectable attributes have recently become a popular feature category for image representation for various vision tasks. In addition to image and object characteristics, object interactions and back-ground/context information and the actions taking place in the scene form an important part of an image description. It is therefore, essential, to develop an image representation which can e ectively describe various image components and their interactions. Towards this end, we propose a novel image representation, termed Attribute-Graph. An Attribute-Graph is an undirected graph, incorporating both local and global image character-istics. The graph nodes characterise objects as well as the overall scene context using mid-level semantic attributes, while the edges capture the object topology and the actions being per-formed. We demonstrate the e ectiveness of Attribute-Graphs by applying them to the problem of image ranking. Since an image retrieval system should rank images in a way which is compatible with visual similarity as perceived by humans, it is intuitive that we work in a human understandable feature space. Most content based image retrieval algorithms treat images as a set of low level features or try to de ne them in terms of the associated text. Such a representation fails to capture the semantics of the image. This, more often than not, results in retrieved images which are semantically dissimilar to the query. Ranking using the proposed attribute-graph representation alleviates this problem. We benchmark the performance of our ranking algorithm on the rPascal and rImageNet datasets, which we have created in order to evaluate the ranking performance on complex queries containing multiple objects. Our experimental evaluation shows that modelling images as Attribute-Graphs results in improved ranking performance over existing techniques.

Agents being able to play board games such as Tic Tac Toe, Chess, Go and Arimaa has been, and still is, a major difficulty in Artificial Intelligence. For the mentioned board games, there is a certain amount of legal moves a player can do in a specific board state. Tic Tac Toe have in average around 4-5 legal moves, with a total amount of 255168 possible games. Both Chess, Go and Arimaa have an increased amount of possible legal moves to do, and an almost infinite amount of possible games, making it impossible to have complete knowledge of the outcome. This thesis work have created various Neural Networks, with the purpose of evaluating the likelihood of winning a game given a certain board state. An improved evaluation function would compensate for the inability of doing a deeper tree search in Arimaa, and the anticipation is to compete on equal skills against another well-performing agent (meijin) having one less search depth. The results shows great potential. From a mere one hundred games against meijin, the network manages to separate good from bad positions, and after another one hundred games able to beat meijin with equal search depth. It seems promising that by improving the training and by testing different sizes for the neural network that a neural network could win even with one less search depth. The huge branching factor of Arimaa makes such an improvement of the evaluation beneficial, even if the evaluation would be 10 000 times more slow.

The company Ericsson is taking steps towards embracing automating techniques and applying them to their product development cycle. Ericsson wants to apply machine learning techniques to automate the evaluation of a text categorization problem of error reports, or trouble reports (TRs). An excess of 100,000 TRs are handled annually. This thesis presents two possible solutions for solving the routing problems where one technique uses traditional classifiers (Multinomial Naive Bayes and Support Vector Machines) for deciding the route through the company hierarchy where a specific TR belongs. The other solution utilizes a Convolutional Neural Network for translating the TRs into low-dimensional word vectors, or word embeddings, in order to be able to classify what group within the company should be responsible for the handling of the TR. The traditional classifiers achieve up to 83% accuracy and the Convolutional Neural Network achieve up to 71% accuracy in the task of predicting the correct class for a specific TR.

The purpose of this thesis is to determine the performance of convolutional neural networks in classifications per millisecond, not training or accuracy, for the GTX960 and the TegraX1. This is done through varying parameters of the convolutional neural networks and using the Python framework Theano's function profiler to measure the time taken for different networks. The results show that increasing any parameter of the convolutional neural network also increases the time required for the classification of an image. The parameters do not punish the network equally, however. Convolutional layers and their depth have a far bigger negative impact on the network's performance than fully-connected layers and the amount of neurons in them. Additionally, the time needed for training the networks does not appear to correlate with the time needed for classification.

Les travaux développés dans cette thèse s’intéressent à l’analyse fine des véhicules à partir d’une image. Nous définissons le terme d’analyse fine comme un regroupement des concepts suivants : la détection des véhicules dans l’image, l’estimation de leur point de vue (ou orientation), la caractérisation de leur visibilité, leur localisation 3D dans la scène et la reconnaissance de leur marque et de leur modèle. La construction de solutions fiables d’analyse fine de véhicules laisse place à de nombreuses applications notamment dans le domaine du transport intelligent et de la vidéo surveillance.Dans ces travaux, nous proposons plusieurs contributions permettant de traiter partiellement ou complètement cette problématique. Les approches mises en oeuvre se basent sur l’utilisation conjointe de l’apprentissage profond et de modèles 3D de véhicule. Dans une première partie, nous traitons le problème de reconnaissance de marques et modèles en prenant en compte la difficulté de la création de bases d’apprentissage. Dans une seconde partie, nous investiguons une méthode de détection et d’estimation du point de vue précis en nous basant sur l’extraction de caractéristiques visuelles locales et de la cohérence géométrique. La méthode utilise des modèles mathématiques uniquement appris sur des données synthétiques. Enfin, dans une troisième partie, un système complet d’analyse fine de véhicules dans le contexte de la conduite autonome est proposé. Celui-ci se base sur le concept d’apprentissage profond multi-tâches. Des résultats quantitatifs et qualitatifs sont présentés tout au long de ce manuscrit. Sur certains aspects de l’analyse fine de véhicules à partir d’une image, ces recherches nous ont permis de dépasser l’état de l’art. / In this thesis, we are interested in fine-grained analysis of vehicle from an image. We define fine-grained analysis as the following concepts : vehicle detection in the image, vehicle viewpoint (or orientation) estimation, vehicle visibility characterization, vehicle 3D localization and make and model recognition. The design of reliable solutions for fine-grained analysis of vehicle open the door to multiple applications in particular for intelligent transport systems as well as video surveillance systems. In this work, we propose several contributions allowing to address partially or wholly this issue. Proposed approaches are based on joint deep learning technologies and 3D models. In a first section, we deal with make and model classification keeping in mind the difficulty to create training data. In a second section, we investigate a novel method for both vehicle detection and fine-grained viewpoint estimation based on local apparence features and geometric spatial coherence. It uses models learned only on synthetic data. Finally, in a third section, a complete system for fine-grained analysis is proposed. It is based on the multi-task concept. Throughout this report, we provide quantitative and qualitative results. On several aspects related to vehicle fine-grained analysis, this work allowed to outperform state of the art methods.

In this report I summarize my master’s thesis work, in which I have investigated different approaches for fusing imaging modalities for semantic segmentation with deep convolutional networks. State-of-the-art methods for semantic segmentation of RGB-images use pre-trained models, which are fine-tuned to learn task-specific deep features. However, the use of pre-trained model weights constrains the model input to images with three channels (e.g. RGB-images). In some applications, e.g. classification of satellite imagery, there are other imaging modalities that can complement the information from the RGB modality and, thus, improve the performance of the classification. In this thesis, semantic segmentation methods designed for RGB images are extended to handle multiple imaging modalities, without compromising on the benefits, that pre-training on RGB datasets offers. In the experiments of this thesis, RGB images from satellites have been fused with normalised difference vegetation index (NDVI) and a digital surface model (DSM). The evaluation shows that the modality fusion can significantly improve the performance of semantic segmentation networks in comparison with a corresponding network with only RGB input. However, the different investigated approaches to fuse the modalities proved to achieve similar performance. The conclusion of the experiments is, that the fusion of imaging modalities is necessary, but the method of fusion has shown to be of less importance.