Background: Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) is particularly useful for novice driversand self-driving cars. Driver Assistance Systems(DAS) involves automatic trafficsign recognition. Efficient classification of the traffic signs is required in DAS andunmanned vehicles for safe navigation. Convolutional Neural Networks(CNN) isknown for establishing promising results in the field of image classification, whichinspired us to employ this technique in our thesis. Computer vision is a process thatis used to understand the images and retrieve data from them. OpenCV is a Pythonlibrary used to detect traffic sign images in real-time. Objectives: This study deals with an experiment to build a CNN model which canclassify the traffic signs in real-time effectively using OpenCV. The model is builtwith low computational cost. The study also includes an experiment where variouscombinations of parameters are tuned to improve the model’s performance. Methods: The experimentation method involve building a CNN model based onmodified LeNet architecture with four convolutional layers, two max-pooling layersand two dense layers. The model is trained and tested with the German Traffic SignRecognition Benchmark (GTSRB) dataset. Parameter tuning with different combinationsof learning rate and epochs is done to improve the model’s performance.Later this model is used to classify the images introduced to the camera in real-time. Results: The graphs depicting the accuracy and loss of the model before and afterparameter tuning are presented. An experiment is done to classify the traffic signimage introduced to the camera by using the CNN model. High probability scoresare achieved during the process which is presented. Conclusions: The results show that the proposed model achieved 95% model accuracywith an optimum number of epochs, i.e., 30 and default optimum value oflearning rate, i.e., 0.001. High probabilities, i.e., above 75%, were achieved when themodel was tested using new real-time data.

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A big hurdle for many companies to start using machine learning is that trending techniques need a huge amount of structured data. One potential way to reduce the need for data is taking advantage of previous knowledge from a related task. This is so called transfer learning. A basic description of it would be when you take a model trained on existing data and reuse that for another problem. The purpose of this master thesis is to investigate if transfer learning can reduce the need for data when faced with a new machine learning task which is, in particular, to use transfer learning on ultrasound spectrograms of weld joints for predictive maintenance. The base for transfer learning is VGGish, a convolutional neural network model trained on audio samples collected from YouTube videos. The pre-trained weights are kept, and the prediction layer is replaced with a new prediction layer consisting of two neurons. The whole model is re-trained on the ultrasound spectrograms. The dataset is restricted to a minimum of ten and a maximum of 100 training samples. The results are evaluated and compared to a regular convolutional neural network trained on the same data. The results show that transfer learning improves the test accuracy compared to the regular convolutional neural network when the dataset is small. This thesis project concludes that transfer learning can reduce the need for data when faced with a new machine learning task. The results indicate that transfer learning could be useful in the industry.

Neutrinoless Double Beta Decay(0𝜈𝛽𝛽) is one of the major research interests in neutrino physics. The discovery of 0𝜈𝛽𝛽 would answer persistent puzzles in the Standard Model of Elementary Particles. KamLAND-Zen is one of the leading efforts in the search of 0𝛽𝛽 and has acquired data from 745 kg of ^{136}Xe over 224 live-days. This data is analyzed using a Bayesian approach consisting of a Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) algorithm. The implementation of the Bayesian analysis, which is the focal point of this dissertation, yields a 90\% Credible Interval at T^{0𝜈}_{1/2} = 7.03 × 10^{25} years. Finally, a machine learning event classification algorithm, based on a spherical convolutional neural network (spherical CNN) was developed to increase the T^{0𝜈}_{1/2} sensitivity. The classification power of this algorithm was demonstrated on a Monte Carlo detector simulation, and a data driven classifier was trained to reject crucial backgrounds in the 0𝜈𝛽𝛽 analysis. After implementing the spherical CNN, an increase in T^{0𝜈}_{1/2} sensitivity of 11.0% is predicted. These early studies pave the way for substantial improvements in future 0𝜈𝛽𝛽 analyses.

Nowadays, everyone is very busy and running around trying to maintain a balance between their work life and family, as the working hours are increasing day by day. In such hassled life people either ignore or do not give enough attention to a healthy diet. An imperative part of a healthy eating routine is the cognizance and maintenance of nourishing data and comprehension of how extraordinary sustenance and nutritious constituents influence our bodies. Besides in the USA, in many other countries, nutritional information is fundamentally passed on to consumers through nutrition labels (NLs) which can be found in all packaged food products in the form of nutrition table. However, sometimes it turns out to be challenging to utilize this information available in these NLs notwithstanding for consumers who are health conscious as they may not be familiar with nutritional terms and discover it hard to relate nutritional information into their day by day activities because of lack of time, inspiration, or training. So it is essential to automate this information gathering and interpretation procedure by incorporating Machine Learning based algorithm to abstract nutritional information from NLs on the grounds that it enhances the consumer’s capacity to participate in nonstop nutritional information gathering and analysis.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) has been a major threat to bee colonies around the world which affects vital human food crop pollination. The decline in bee population can have tragic consequences, for humans as well as the bees and the ecosystem. Bee health has been a cause of urgent concern for farmers and scientists around the world for at least a decade but a specific cause for the phenomenon has yet to be conclusively identified. This work uses Artificial Intelligence and Computer Vision approaches to develop and analyze techniques to help in continuous monitoring of bee traffic which will further help in monitoring forager traffic. Bee traffic is the number of bees moving in a given area in front of the hive over a given period of time. And, forager traffic is the number of bees entering and/or exiting the hive over a given period of time. Forager traffic is an important variable to monitor food availability, food demand, colony age structure, impact of pesticides, etc. on bee hives. This will lead to improved remote monitoring and general hive status and improved real time detection of the impact of pests, diseases, pesticide exposure and other hive management problems.

Semantic Segmentation processes RGB scenes and classifies pixels collectively as an object. Recent deep learning methods have shown promising results in the accuracy and the speed of semantic segmentation. However, it is inevitable for the deep learning models to fall in overfitting to data used in training due to its nature of data-centric approaches. There have been numerous Regularization methods to overcome an overfitting problem, such as data augmentation, additional loss methods such as Euclidean or Least-Square terms, and structure-related methods by adding or modifying layers like Dropout and DropConnect in a network. Among those methods, penalizing a model via an additional loss or a weight constraint does not require memory increase. With this sight, our work purposes to improve a given segmentation model through temperatures and a lightweight discriminator. Temperatures have the role of generating different versions of probability maps through the division in softmax calculations. On top of probability maps from temperatures, we concatenate a simple discriminator after the segmentation network for the competition between groundtruth feature maps and modified feature maps. We pass the additional loss calculated from those probability maps into the principal network. Our contribution consists of two parts. Firstly, we use the adversarial loss as the regularization loss in the segmentation networks and validate that it can substitute the L2 regularization loss with better validation results. Also, we apply temperatures in segmentation probability maps for providing different information without using additional convolutional layers. The experiments indicate that the spiking temperature in a generator with keeping an original probability map in a discriminator provides the model improvement in terms of pixel accuracy and mean Intersection-of-Union (mIoU). Our framework shows that the segmentation model can be improved with a small increase in training time and the number of parameters.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Depth estimation is one of the most important problems in computer vision. It has attracted a lot of attention because it has applications in many areas, such as robotics, VR and AR, self-driving cars etc. Using the defocus blur of a camera lens is one of the methods of depth estimation. In this thesis, we have researched this technique in virtual environments. Virtual datasets have been created for this purpose. In this research, we have applied graph cuts and convolutional neural network (DfD-net) to estimate depth from defocus blur using a natural (Middlebury) and a virtual (Maya) dataset. Graph Cuts showed similar performance for both natural and virtual datasets in terms of NMAE and NRMSE. However, with regard to SSIM, the performance of graph cuts is 4% better for Middlebury compared to Maya. We have trained the DfD-net using the natural and the virtual dataset and then combining both datasets. The network trained by the virtual dataset performed best for both datasets. The performance of graph-cuts and DfD-net have been compared. Graph-Cuts performance is 7% better than DfD-Net in terms of SSIM for Middlebury images. For Maya images, DfD-Net outperforms Graph-Cuts by 2%. With regard to NRMSE, Graph-Cuts and DfD-net shows similar performance for Maya images. For Middlebury images, Graph-cuts is 1.8% better. The algorithms show no difference in performance in terms of NMAE. The time DfD-net takes to generate depth maps compared to graph cuts is 500 times less for Maya images and 200 times less for Middlebury images.

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Glioblastoma Multiforme (GBM) is a very aggressive brain tumour. Previous studies have suggested that the morphological distribution of single GBM cells may hold information about the severity. This study aims to find if there is a potential for automated morphological qualification and clustering of GBM cells and what it shows. In this context, phase-contrast images from 10 different GBMcell cultures were analyzed. To test the hypothesis that morphological differences exist between the cell cultures, images of single GBM cells images were created from an image over the well using CellProfiler and Python. Singlecellimages were passed through multiple different feature extraction models to identify the model showing the most promise for this dataset. The features were then clustered and quantified to see if any differentiation exists between the cell cultures. The results suggest morphological feature differences exist between GBM cell cultures when using automated models. The siamese network managed to construct clusters of cells having very similar morphology. I conclude that the 10 cell cultures seem to have cells with morphological differences. This highlights the importance of future studies to find what these morphological differences imply for the patients' survivability and choice of treatment.