With vast improvements in computing power in the last two decades, humans have invested significantly in engineering resources in an attempt to automate labor intensive or dangerous tasks. A particularly dangerous and labor-intensive task is painting lines on roads for facilitating urban mobility. This thesis proposes an approach to automate the process of painting lines on the ground using an autonomous ground vehicle (AGV) fitted with a stabilized painting mechanism. The AGV accepts Global Positioning System (GPS) coordinates for waypoint navigation. A computer vision algorithm is developed to provide vision feedback to stabilize the painting mechanism. The system is demonstrated to follow an input desired trajectory and cancel any high frequency vibrations due to the uneven terrain that the vehicle is traversing. Also, the stabilizing system is able to eliminate the long-term drift (due to inaccurate GPS waypoint navigation) using the complementary vision system. / MS / There is a need to develop an automated system capable of painting lines on the ground with minimal human intervention as the current methods to paint lines on the ground are inefficient, labor intensive, and dangerous. The human input to such a system is limited to the determination of the desired trajectory of the line to be drawn. This thesis presents the design and development of an autonomous line painting system that includes an autonomous ground vehicle (capable of following GPS waypoints) integrated with an automatic line painting mechanism. As the vehicle traverses the ground, it experiences disturbances due to the interaction between the wheels and the ground, and also a long-term drift due to inaccurate tracking of the input GPS coordinates. In order to compensate for these disturbances, a vision system is implemented providing feedback to a stabilizing arm. This automated system is able to demonstrate the capability to follow a square trajectory defined by GPS coordinates while compensating for the disturbances.

Cette thèse a pour objectif de développer un système de reconnaissance de structures logique des documents d'entreprises sans modèle. Il s'agit de reconnaître la fonction logique de blocs de textes qui sont importants à localiser et à identifier. Ce problème est identique à celui de la détection d'objets dans une scène naturelle puisqu'il faut à la fois reconnaître les objets et les localiser dans une image. A la différence de la reconnaissance d'objets, les documents d'entreprises doivent être interprétés sans aucune information a priori sur leurs modèles de structures. La seule solution consiste à développer une approche non supervisée basée principalement sur les relations spatiales et sur les informations textuelles et images. Les documents d'entreprises possèdent des contenus et des formes très hétérogènes car chaque entreprise et chaque administration créent son propre formulaire ou ses propres modèles de factures. Nous faisons l'hypothèse que toute structure logique de document est constituée de morceaux de micro-structures déjà observées dans d'autres documents. Cette démarche est identique en détection d'objets dans les images naturelles. Tout modèle particulier d'objet dans une scène est composé de morceaux d'éléments déjà vu sur d'autres exemples d'objets de même classe et qui sont reliés entre eux par des relations spatiales déjà observées. Notre modèle est donc basé sur une reconnaissance partie par partie et sur l'accumulation d'évidences dans l'espace paramétrique et spatial. Notre solution a été testée sur des applications de détection d'objets dans les scènes naturelles et de reconnaissance de structure logique de documents d'entreprises. Les bonnes performances obtenues valident les hypothèses initiales. Ces travaux contiennent aussi de nouvelles méthodes de traitement et d'analyse d'image couleurs de documents et d'images naturelles. / This digital revolution introduces new services and new usages in numerous domains. The advent of the digitization of documents and the automatization of their processing constitutes a great cultural and economic revolution. In this context, computer vision provides numerous applications and impacts our daily lives and businesses. Behind computer-vision technology, fundamental concepts, methodologies, and algorithms have been developed worldwide in the last fifty years. Today, computer vision technologies arrive to maturity and become a reality in many domains. Computer-vision systems reach high performance thanks to the large amount of data and the increasing performance of the hardware. Despite the success of computer-vision applications, however, numerous other applications require more research, new methodologies, and novel algorithms. Among the difficult problems encountered in the computer-vision domain, detection remains a challenging task. Detection consists of localizing and recognizing an object in an image. This problem is far more difficult than the problem of recognition alone. Among the numerous applications based on detection, object detection in a natural scene is the most popular application in the computer-vision community. This work is about the detection tasks and its applications.

Ces travaux ont pour application la détection l'identification des signaux audio et particulièrement les signaux d'alarmes de voitures prioritaires. Dans un premier temps, nous proposons une méthode de détection des signaux d'alarme dans un environnement bruité, fondée sur des techniques d'analyse temps-fréquence des signaux. Cette méthode permet de détecter et d'identifier des signaux d'alarmes noyés dans du bruit, y compris pour des rapports signal à bruit négatifs. Puis nous proposons une quantification des signaux robuste aux bruits de transmission. Il s'agit de remplacer chaque niveau de bit d'un vecteur d'échantillons temporels ou fréquentiels par un mot binaire de même longueur fourni par un codeur correcteur d'erreur. Dans une première approche, chaque niveau de bits est quantifié indépendamment des autres selon le critère de minimisation de la distance de Hamming. Dans une seconde approche, pour réduire l'erreur de quantification à robustesse égale, les différents niveaux de bits sont quantifiés successivement selon un algorithme de type matching pursuit. Cette quantification donne aux signaux une forme spécifique permettant par la suite de les reconnaitre facilement parmi d'autres signaux. Nous proposons donc enfin deux méthodes de détection et d'identification des signaux fondées sur la quantification robuste, opérant dans le domaine temporel ou dans le domaine fréquentiel, par minimisation de la distance entre les signaux reçus restreints à leurs bits de poids fort et les signaux de référence. Ces méthodes permettent de détecter et d'identifier les signaux dans des environnements à rapport signal à bruit très faible et ceci grâce à la quantification. Par ailleurs, la première méthode, fondée sur la signature temps-fréquence, s'avère plus performante avec les signaux quantifiés. / This work targets the detection and identification of audio signals and in particular alarm signals from priority cars. First, we propose a method for detecting alarm signals in a noisy environment, based on time-frequency signal analysis. This method makes it possible to detect and identify alarm signals embedded in noise, even with negative signal-to-noise ratios. Then we propose a signal quantization robust against transmission noise. This involves replacing each bit level of a vector of time or frequency samples with a binary word of the same length provided by an error- correcting encoder. In a first approach, each bit level is quantized independently of the others according to the Hamming distance minimization criterion. In a second approach, to reduce the quantization error at equal robustness, the different bit levels are quantized successively by a matching pursuit algorithm. This quantization gives the signals a specific shape that allows them to be easily recognized among other signals. Finally, we propose two methods for detecting and identifying signals based on robust quantization, operating in the time domain or in the frequency domain, by minimizing the distance between the received signals restricted to their high-weight bits and the reference signals. These methods make it possible to detect and identify signals in environments with very low signal-to-noise ratios, thanks to quantization. In addition, the first method, based on the time-frequency signature, is more efficient with quantized signals.

In this dissertation, some new algorithms are developed for hyperspectral imaging analysis enhancement. Tensor data format is applied in hyperspectral dataset sparse and low-rank decomposition, which could enhance the classification and detection performance. And multi-view learning technique is applied in hyperspectral imaging clustering. Furthermore, kernel version of multi-view learning technique has been proposed, which could improve clustering performance. Most of low-rank and sparse decomposition algorithms are based on matrix data format for HSI analysis. As HSI contains high spectral dimensions, tensor based extended low-rank and sparse decomposition (TELRSD) is proposed in this dissertation for better performance of HSI classification with low-rank tensor part, and HSI detection with sparse tensor part. With this tensor based method, HSI is processed in 3D data format, and information between spectral bands and pixels maintain integrated during decomposition process. This proposed algorithm is compared with other state-of-art methods. And the experiment results show that TELRSD has the best performance among all those comparison algorithms. HSI clustering is an unsupervised task, which aims to group pixels into different groups without labeled information. Low-rank sparse subspace clustering (LRSSC) is the most popular algorithms for this clustering task. The spatial-spectral based multi-view low-rank sparse subspace clustering (SSMLC) algorithms is proposed in this dissertation, which extended LRSSC with multi-view learning technique. In this algorithm, spectral and spatial views are created to generate multi-view dataset of HSI, where spectral partition, morphological component analysis (MCA) and principle component analysis (PCA) are applied to create others views. Furthermore, kernel version of SSMLC (k-SSMLC) also has been investigated. The performance of SSMLC and k-SSMLC are compared with sparse subspace clustering (SSC), low-rank sparse subspace clustering (LRSSC), and spectral-spatial sparse subspace clustering (S4C). It has shown that SSMLC could improve the performance of LRSSC, and k-SSMLC has the best performance. The spectral clustering has been proved that it equivalent to non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) problem. In this case, NMF could be applied to the clustering problem. In order to include local and nonlinear features in data source, orthogonal NMF (ONMF), graph-regularized NMF (GNMF) and kernel NMF (k-NMF) has been proposed for better clustering performance. The non-linear orthogonal graph NMF combine both kernel, orthogonal and graph constraints in NMF (k-OGNMF), which push up the clustering performance further. In the HSI domain, kernel multi-view based orthogonal graph NMF (k-MOGNMF) is applied for subspace clustering, where k-OGNMF is extended with multi-view algorithm, and it has better performance and computation efficiency.