A DSP-based system is developed in this thesis for tracking ¡§an arbitrary-shaped object¡¨. It uses CCD camera to capture images, and detects in the video sequence. When we want to track a target that we interest, we can make the target in the view of camera. If the target move, the system will lock it and extract its contour by using active contour model. After extracting contour, the system will start to track target and shows the locked image on the LCD screen. The tracking system includes three sub-systems : ¡§Moving Object Detection¡¨, ¡§Active Contour Model¡¨, and ¡§Contour Matching¡¨. From the results of experiment, it can meet the expectation and gain good performance and robustness.

The purposes of this study include: (1) investigating the reasons why drinking water quality degrades during transportation in the distribution system and developing an easy and effective tool to evaluate the status of distribution system; (2) investigating residents¡¦ satisfaction with advanced treated drinking water. It is found that the main reason of drinking water degradation is that most people don¡¦t flush the drinking water storage facilities routinely. It is also found that although most respondents are satisfied with advanced treated drinking water, nearly 40% of local residents still buy bottle water instead of drinking tap water. Therefore, Taiwan Water Supply Corp. (TWSC) should let people know the importance of flushing water storage facilities routinely and what TWSC has done to improve drinking water quality. The LSI (Langelier Saturation Index) of most water samples is negative, which means that the drinking water is corrosive when too much hardness is removed to comply with the regulations. A simple, efficient and cost-effective method is developed to provide TWSC sufficient information to solve the problems regarding water quality degradations in distribution systems. By using contour maps of different water quality parameters, TWSC can easily identifies locations with potential problems and easily assesses the necessity and appropriate locations of building re-chlorination stations, even though the lack of information regarding pipeline material, hydraulic conditions, thickness of biofilm¡Ketc.

Les techniques d’usinage avancées sont un élément indispensable du développement des industries manufacturières. L’une de ces techniques, l’usinage à grande vitesse, constitue le sujet principal de cette thèse de doctorat. Ainsi, l’objectif majeur des travaux vise à améliorer la précision de contour dans le contexte de l’usinage multiaxes à grande vitesse de surfaces de forme libre, en agissant directement au niveau des boucles de commande d’axe. Pour cela, une première étape consiste à élaborer une stratégie permettant d’estimer le plus précisément possible l’erreur de contour pour différentes configurations de l’outil. Cette erreur de contour est ensuite minimisée grâce à l’adaptation hors ligne, pour un profil de pièce donné, des gains proportionnel et d’anticipation des régulateurs des boucles d’asservissement de la position de chaque axe. L’adaptation de ces gains est réalisée via un algorithme d’optimisation à l’aide d’un modèle non-linéaire du comportement de la machine, en considérant en particulier les frottements sur chacun des axes. L’optimisation permettant d’obtenir les gains des correcteurs des boucles de régulation tient compte des contraintes en termes de limitations cinématiques des axes (vitesse, accélération et jerk), de stabilité des boucles d’asservissement et de limites au niveau des courants des moteurs. Afin d’en faciliter la mise en oeuvre dans un cadre industriel, les stratégies développées s’avèrent directement implantables au sein des commandes numériques actuellement sur le marché, exploitant toutes les possibilités de la structure de commande classique de l’entraînement d’axe. / The advanced machining techniques are always the backbone of the manufacturing industries. Among such techniques, high speed machining is the main subject of this PhD thesis. Indeed, the main objective of this work is to improve the contouring accuracy in multi-axis high speed machining of free-form surfaces, directly acting inside the axis control loops. To do that, a first step aims at elaborating a strategy to estimate as accurately as possible the contour error for different tool configurations. This contour error is then minimized by means of an off-line adaptation for a given profile of the proportional and feedforward gains of the axis position loop controllers. This gain adaptation is performed via an optimization algorithm that considers a nonlinear model of the machine behaviour, in particular including friction related to each axis. This optimization leading to the controllers gains takes into account several constraints, including the axis kinematic (velocity, acceleration and jerk) limitations, the stability of the controlled loops and the motor current limits. Finally, to help their integration within an industrial framework, the developed strategies can be directly implemented in commercial CNC, by exploiting all possibilities of the classical control structure of axis drive.

There has been a disparity between the conventional method of describing topographic surfaces (i.e. contour line definition) and a format of surface description often used in continuous-line computer graphics (i.e. panel definition). The two differ enough that conversion from contours to panels is not a trivial problem. A computer program that performs such a conversion would greatly facilitate continuous tone display of topographical surfaces, or any other surface which is defined by contour lines. This problem has been addressed by Keppel and alluded to by Fuchs. Keppel's is a highly systematic approach in which he uses graph theory to find the panel arrangement which maximizes the volume enclosed by concave surfaces. Fuchs mentions an approach to the problem as part of an algorithm to reconstruct a surface from data retrieved from a laser scan sensor. This thesis elaborates on a general conversion system. Following a brief overview of computer graphics, a simple algorithm is described which extracts a panel definition from a pair of adjacent contour loops subject to the restriction that the two loops are similarly sized and shaped, and are mutually centered. Next, a mapping procedure is described which greatly relaxes the above restrictions. It is also shown that the conversion from contours to panels is inherently ambiguous (to various degrees) and that occasionally the ambiguity is great enough to require user interaction to guide the conversion algorithm. An important complication addressed in this thesis is the problem of handling cases where one contour loop branches into two or more (or vice versa). Attention turns next to a contour line definition of the human brain, and special problems encountered in preparing those data for continuous tone display, The final chapters explain the fortran implementation, present an example-problem, and show sample pictures of the brain parts.

<p>This thesis develops an algorithm for tracking the boundary of an airbag throughout an image sequence. The algorithm is designed to work even if various problematic features, e.g. objects in the background, are present in the image. The work is built on an existing commercially available image processing and analysis suite targeted at the automotive industry. The software suite runs on standard PC hardware. </p><p>Firstly, improvements to the airbag tracking algorithm already available in the suite are considered. Testing reveals that these measures are not sufficient to overcome the problems posed by the problematic image sequences. </p><p>A new tracking algorithmis then proposed. It consists of a Canny edge detector, optional steps to enhance feature detection by removing edges in the background and edges interior to the boundary of the airbag and finally an active contour. The role of the active contour is to produce a closed curve while imposing smoothness constraints on the detected boundary. The active contour is in each frame initialized by linearly extrapolating the contour from previous frames. </p><p>The algorithm works very well and it is fast enough to run on slower machines than was initially targeted.</p>

Feature matching in images plays an important role in computer vision such as for 3D reconstruction, motion analysis, object recognition, target tracking and dynamic scene analysis. In this paper, we present a robust cooperative strategy to establish the correspondence of the contours between two uncalibrated images based on the recovered epipolar geometry. We take into account two representations of contours in image as contour points and contour chains. The method proposed in the paper is composed of the following two consecutive steps: (1) The first step uses the LMedS method to estimate the fundamental matrix based on Hartley’s 8-point algorithm, (2) The second step uses a new robust cooperative strategy to match contours. The presented approach has been tested with various real images and experimental results show that our method can produce more accurate contour correspondences. / Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA)

Weighted graph matching is a good way to align a pair of shapes represented by a set of descriptive local features; the set of correspondences produced by the minimum cost of matching features from one shape to the features of the other often reveals how similar the two shapes are. However, due to the complexity of computing the exact minimum cost matching, previous algorithms could only run efficiently when using a limited number of features per shape, and could not scale to perform retrievals from large databases. We present a contour matching algorithm that quickly computes the minimum weight matching between sets of descriptive local features using a recently introduced low-distortion embedding of the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD) into a normed space. Given a novel embedded contour, the nearest neighbors in a database of embedded contours are retrieved in sublinear time via approximate nearest neighbors search. We demonstrate our shape matching method on databases of 10,000 images of human figures and 60,000 images of handwritten digits.

The objective of this thesis is to increase the correct recognition rate of the two-word Mandarin phrases. The reason for inaccuracy is due to the ambiguities of the syllables and the intonations. For the syllable ambiguity, a balanced speech training dataset is designed and the weights of the state observation probabilities on vowels and consonants are adjusted. For the tone ambiguity, both the pitch contour and the spectrum evolution property derived from the Karhunen-Lo&#x00E9;ve transform are applied. The experimental results indicate that an 85% correct rate can be achieved, that is a 6% increase in the performance for the system without the above improvements.

No description available.

Image segmentation is an important step in image processing, with many applications such as pattern recognition, object detection, and medical image analysis. It is a technique that separates objects of interests from the background in an image. Geometric active contour is a recent image segmentation method that overcomes previous problems with snakes. It is an attractive method for medical image segmentation as it is able to capture the object of interest in one continuous curve. The theory and implementation details of geometric active contours are discussed in this work. The robustness of the algorithm is tested through a series of tests, involving both synthetic images and medical images. Curve leaking past boundaries is a common problem in cases of non-ideal edges. Noise is also problematic for the advancement of the curve. Smoothing and parameters selection are discussed as ways to help solve these problems. This work also explores the incorporation of the multi-resolution method of Gaussian pyramids into the algorithm. Multi-resolution methods, used extensively in the areas of denoising and edge-selection, can help capture the spatial structure of an image. Results show that similar to the multi-resolution methods applied to parametric active contours, the multi-resolution can greatly increase the computation without sacrificing performance. In fact, results show that with successive smoothing and sub-sampling, performance often improves. Although smoothing and parameter adjustment help improve the performance of geometric active contours, the edge-based approach is still localized and the improvement is limited. Region-based approaches are recommended for further work on active contours.