Main goal of classifying proteins into families is to understand structural, functional and evolutionary relationships between individual proteins, which are not easily deducible from available data. Since the structure and function of proteins are closely related, determination of function is mainly based on structural properties, that can be obtained relatively easily with current resources. Protein classification is also used in development of special medicines, in the diagnosis of clinical diseases or in personalized healthcare, which means a lot of investment in it. I created a new hierarchical tool for protein classification that achieves better results than some existing solutions. The implementation of the tool was preceded by acquaintance with the properties of proteins, examination of existing classification approaches, creation of an extensive data set, realizing experiments and selection of the final classifiers of the hierarchical tool.

No description available.

La reconnaissance de mouvements naturels est de toute première importance dans la mise en oeuvre d’Interfaces Homme-Machine intelligentes et efficaces, utilisables de manière intuitive en environnement virtuel. En effet, elle permet à l’utilisateur d’agir de manière naturelle et au système de reconnaitre les mouvements corporel effectués tels qu’ils seraient perçu par un humain. Cette tâche est complexe, car elle demande de relever plusieurs défis : prendre en compte les spécificités du dispositif d’acquisition des données de mouvement, gérer la variabilité cinématique dans l’exécution du mouvement, et enfin gérer les différences morphologiques inter-individuelles, de sorte que les mouvements de tout nouvel utilisateur puissent être reconnus. De plus, de part la nature interactive des environnements virtuels, cette reconnaissancedoit pouvoir se faire en temps-réel, sans devoir attendre la fin du mouvement. La littérature scientifique propose de nombreuses méthodes pour répondre aux deux premiers défis mais la gestion de la variabilité morphologique est peu abordée. Dans cette thèse, nous proposons une description du mouvement permettant de répondre à cette problématique et évaluons sa capacité à reconnaitre les mouvements naturels d’un utilisateur inconnu. Enfin, nous proposons unenouvelle méthode permettant de tirer partie de cette représentation dans une reconnaissance précoce du mouvement / Recognition of natural movements is of utmost importance in the implementation of intelligent and effective Human-Machine Interfaces for virtual environments. It allows the user to behave naturally and the system to recognize its body movements in the same way a human might perceive it. This task is complex, because it addresses several challenges : take account of the specificities of the motion capture system, manage kinematic variability in motion performance, and finally take account of the morphological differences between individuals, so that actions of any new user can be recognized. Moreover, due to the interactive nature of virtual environments, this recognition must be achieved in real-time without waiting for the motion end. The literature offers many methods to meet the first two challenges. But the management of the morphological variability is not dealt. In this thesis, we propose a description of the movement to address this issue and we evaluate its ability to recognize the movements of an unknown user. Finally, we propose a new method to take advantage of this representation in early motion recognition

Este trabalho apresenta uma metodologia para inspeção de lentes oftalmológicas orgânicas esféricas durante seu processo de polimento. A metodologia consiste na obtenção de uma imagem em uma câmera de vídeo CCD, usando-se luz ultravioleta, da lente a ser inspecionada, e posterior processamento desta imagem para discriminar a presença de riscos de outros artefatos que poderão aparecer na imagem capturada. Para a detecção da presença de riscos foram utilizados os descritores de Fourier. Atenção especial foi dada à iluminação da lente, que é fator determinante na obtenção de uma boa qualidade de imagem. Os resultados mostram a eficiência do método e permitem sua utilização durante o processo de fabricação de lentes. / This work presents a methodology for inspection of spherical organic ophthalmic lenses during the polishing process. The methodology encompasses the capture of an ultraviolet image of the lens under inspection by a CCD video camera and associated processing of the image to discriminate between scratches on the lens and artifacts that can appear on the image. Fourier descriptors were used to detect the existence of scratches. Special attention was given to illumination which is a determining factor in grabbing an image with good quality. The results show that the method is efficient and that it can be used in the lens manufacturing process.

Este trabalho apresenta uma metodologia para inspeção de lentes oftalmológicas orgânicas esféricas durante seu processo de polimento. A metodologia consiste na obtenção de uma imagem em uma câmera de vídeo CCD, usando-se luz ultravioleta, da lente a ser inspecionada, e posterior processamento desta imagem para discriminar a presença de riscos de outros artefatos que poderão aparecer na imagem capturada. Para a detecção da presença de riscos foram utilizados os descritores de Fourier. Atenção especial foi dada à iluminação da lente, que é fator determinante na obtenção de uma boa qualidade de imagem. Os resultados mostram a eficiência do método e permitem sua utilização durante o processo de fabricação de lentes. / This work presents a methodology for inspection of spherical organic ophthalmic lenses during the polishing process. The methodology encompasses the capture of an ultraviolet image of the lens under inspection by a CCD video camera and associated processing of the image to discriminate between scratches on the lens and artifacts that can appear on the image. Fourier descriptors were used to detect the existence of scratches. Special attention was given to illumination which is a determining factor in grabbing an image with good quality. The results show that the method is efficient and that it can be used in the lens manufacturing process.

This master thesis deals with recognition of a person by comparing symptom sets extracted from images of the retinal vessels pattern. The first part includes the insight into biometric issues, the punctual analysis of human identification using retina images, and especially the literature research of methods of extraction and comparison. In the practical part there were realized algorithms for human identification with the method of nearest neighbor search (NS), translation, template matching (TM) and extended NS and TM including more symptoms, for which MATLAB program was used. The thesis includes testing of suggested programs on the biometric database of symptomatic vectors with the following evaluation.

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No description available.

Os sistemas de recuperação de imagens por conteúdo (CBIR -Content-based Image Retrieval) possuem a habilidade de retornar imagens utilizando como chave de busca outras imagens. Considerando uma imagem de consulta, o foco de um sistema CBIR é pesquisar no banco de dados as "n" imagens mais similares à imagem de consulta de acordo com um critério dado. Este trabalho de pesquisa foi direcionado na geração de vetores de características para um sistema CBIR considerando bancos de imagens médicas, para propiciar tal tipo de consulta. Um vetor de características é uma representação numérica sucinta de uma imagem ou parte dela, descrevendo seus detalhes mais representativos. O vetor de características é um vetor "n"-dimensional contendo esses valores. Essa nova representação da imagem pode ser armazenada em uma base de dados, e assim, agilizar o processo de recuperação de imagens. Uma abordagem alternativa para caracterizar imagens para um sistema CBIR é a transformação do domínio. A principal vantagem de uma transformação é sua efetiva caracterização das propriedades locais da imagem. Recentemente, pesquisadores das áreas de matemática aplicada e de processamento de sinais desenvolveram técnicas práticas de "wavelet" para a representação multiescala e análise de sinais. Estas novas ferramentas diferenciam-se das tradicionais técnicas de Fourier pela forma de localizar a informação no plano tempo-freqüência; basicamente, elas têm a capacidade de mudar de uma resolução para outra, o que faz delas especialmente adequadas para a análise de sinais não estacionários. A transformada "wavelet" consiste de um conjunto de funções base que representa o sinal em diferentes bandas de freqüência, cada uma com resoluções distintas correspondentes a cada escala. Estas foram aplicadas com sucesso na compressão, melhoria, análise, classificação, caracterização e recuperação de imagens. Uma das áreas beneficiadas, onde essas propriedades têm encontrado grande relevância, é a área médica, através da representação e descrição de imagens médicas. Este trabalho descreve uma abordagem para um banco de imagens médicas, que é orientada à extração de características para um sistema CBIR baseada na decomposição multiresolução de "wavelets" utilizando os filtros de Daubechies e Gabor. Essas novas características de imagens foram também testadas utilizando uma estrutura de indexação métrica "Slim-tree". Assim, pode-se aumentar o alcance semântico do sistema cbPACS (Content-Based Picture Archiving and Comunication Systems), atualmente em desenvolvimento conjunto entre o Grupo de Bases de Dados e Imagens do ICMC--USP e o Centro de Ciências de Imagens e Física Médica do Hospital das Clínicas de Riberão Preto-USP. / Content-based image retrieval (CBIR) refers to the ability to retrieve images on the basis of the image content. Given a query image, the goal of a CBIR system is to search the database and return the "n" most similar (close) ones to the query image according to a given criteria. Our research addresses the generation of feature vectors of a CBIR system for medical image databases. A feature vector is a numeric representation of an image or part of it over its representative aspects. The feature vector is a "n"-dimensional vector organizing such values. This new image representation can be stored into a database and allow a fast image retrieval. An alternative for image characterization for a CBIR system is the domain transform. The principal advantage of a transform is its effective characterization for their local image properties. In the past few years, researches in applied mathematics and signal processing have developed practical "wavelet" methods for the multiscale representation and analysis of signals. These new tools differ from the traditional Fourier techniques by the way in which they localize the information in the time-frequency plane; in particular, they are capable of trading one type of resolution for the other, which makes them especially suitable for the analysis of non-stationary signals. The "wavelet" transform is a set of basis functions that represents signals in different frequency bands, each one with a resolution matching its scale. They have been successfully applied to image compression, enhancements, analysis, classifications, characterization and retrieval. One privileged area of application where these properties have been found to be relevant is medical imaging. In this work we describe an approach to CBIR for medical image databases focused on feature extraction based on multiresolution "wavelets" decomposition, taking advantage of the Daubechies and Gabor. Fundamental to our approach is how images are characterized, such that the retrieval procedure can bring similar images within the domain of interest, using a metric structure indexing, like the "Slim-tree". Thus, it increased the semantic capability of the cbPACS(Content-Based Picture Archiving and Comunication Systems), currently in joined developing between the Database and Image Group of the ICMC--USP and the Science Center for Images and Physical Medic of the Clinics Hospital of Riberão Preto--USP.

Today, the advent of networking technologies and computer hardware have enabled more and more inexpensive PCs, various mobile devices, smart phones, PDAs, sensors and cameras to be linked to the Internet with better connectivity. In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of several instances of distributed applications, providing infrastructures for social interactions over large-scale wide-area networks and facilitating the ways users share and publish data. User generated data today range from simple text files to (semi-) structured documents and multimedia content. With the emergence of Semantic Web, the number of features (associated with a content) that are used in order to index those large amounts of heterogenous pieces of data is growing dramatically. The feature sets associated with each content type can grow continuously as we discover new ways of describing a content in formulated terms. As the number of dimensions in the feature data grow (as high as 100 to 1000), it becomes harder and harder to search for information in a dataset due to the curse of dimensionality and it is not appropriate to use naive search methods, as their performance degrade to linear search. As an alternative, we can distribute the content and the query processing load to a set of peers in a distributed Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network and incorporate high-dimensional distributed search techniques to attack the problem. Currently, a large percentage of Internet traffic consists of video and music files shared and exchanged over P2P networks. In most present services, searching for music is performed through keyword search and naive string-matching algorithms using collaborative filtering techniques which mostly use tag based approaches. In music information retrieval (MIR) systems, the main goal is to make recommendations similar to the music that the user listens to. In these systems, techniques based on acoustic feature extraction can be employed to achieve content-based music similarity search (i.e., searching through music based on what can be heard from the music track). Using these techniques we can devise an automated measure of similarity that can replace the need for human experts (or users) who assign descriptive genre tags and meta-data to each recording and solve the famous cold-start problem associated with the collaborative filtering techniques. In this work we explore the advantages of distributed structures by efficiently distributing the content features and query processing load on the peers in a P2P network. Using a family of Locality Sensitive Hash (LSH) functions based on p-stable distributions we propose an efficient, scalable and load-balanced system, capable of performing K-Nearest-Neighbor (KNN) and Range queries. We also propose a new load-balanced indexing algorithm and evaluate it using our Java based simulator. Our results show that this P2P design ensures load-balancing and guarantees logarithmic number of hops for query processing. Our system is extensible to be used with all types of multi-dimensional feature data and it can also be employed as the main indexing scheme of a multipurpose recommendation system. / Graduate