No description available.

Techniques, suitable for parallel implementation, for robust 2D model-based object recognition in the presence of sensor error are studied. Models and scene data are represented as local geometric features and robust hypothesis of feature matchings and transformations is considered. Bounds on the error in the image feature geometry are assumed constraining possible matchings and transformations. Transformation sampling is introduced as a simple, robust, polynomial-time, and highly parallel method of searching the space of transformations to hypothesize feature matchings. Key to the approach is that error in image feature measurement is explicitly accounted for. A Connection Machine implementation and experiments on real images are presented.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1997. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-167). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 1997. / Typescript. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 164-167). Also available on the Internet.

This dissertation explores controversial themes in the youth literature of Barrie Hough. The novels under discussion are My kat word herfs (1986), Droomwa (1990), Vlerkdans (1992) and Skilpoppe (1998). My kat word herfs was translated as My cat turns Autumn, Droomwa as Dream Chariot and Vlerkdans as In full Flight. Afrikaans youth novels historically centered around naive themes such as the idyllic life on the farm or at boarding school. However, young people found it increasingly difficult to identify with these naive storylines and during the nineteen eighties and nineties the Afrikaans youth novel experienced a renewal. Barrie Hough was one of the pioneers, writing about controversial issues like aids, homosexuality, teenage sex, suicide, drug abuse, divorce and single parenthood. The aim of this dissertation is to explore the liberation of Afrikaans youth literature and the role that controversial themes play in this regard. These themes enable the reader to identify with the story and serve as an allurement to draw the reader into the world of the text. Furthermore, the writer is given the opportunity to experience a sense of liberation while he narratively confronts events of his past. This liberation process allows the writer to deal and come to terms with his own past. At the end of each novel both the reader and writer go through a process of purification and liberation, facilitated by the therapeutic process of writing or reading a story. / Dr. M.P. Beukes

This theses presents an image processing approach to estimating the length of cynobacteria strands in digitally acquired images. An algorithm utilizing the Hough transform to determine strand continuity at strand intersections is presented. The algorithm is demonstrated on selected images, the examined strands are separated and their lengths are estimated. A Delphi implementation of the algorithm is included.

L'étude des caractéristiques faciales a suscité l'intérêt croissant de la communauté scientifique et des industriels. En effet, ces caractéristiques véhiculent des informations non verbales qui jouent un rôle clé dans la communication entre les hommes. De plus, elles sont très utiles pour permettre une interaction entre l'homme et la machine. De ce fait, l'étude automatique des caractéristiques faciales constitue une tâche primordiale pour diverses applications telles que les interfaces homme-machine, la science du comportement, la pratique clinique et la surveillance de l'état du conducteur. Dans cette thèse, nous nous intéressons à la surveillance de l'état du conducteur à travers l'analyse de ses caractéristiques faciales. Cette problématique sollicite un intérêt universel causé par le nombre croissant des accidents routiers, dont une grande partie est provoquée par une dégradation de la vigilance du conducteur, connue sous le nom de l'hypovigilance. En effet, nous pouvons distinguer trois états d'hypovigilance. Le premier, et le plus critique, est la somnolence qui se manifeste par une incapacité à se maintenir éveillé et se caractérise par les périodes de micro-sommeil correspondant à des endormissements de 2 à 6 secondes. Le second est la fatigue qui se définit par la difficulté croissante à maintenir une tâche à terme et se caractérise par une augmentation du nombre de bâillements. Le troisième est l'inattention qui se produit lorsque l'attention est détournée de l'activité de conduite et se caractérise par le maintien de la pose de la tête en une direction autre que frontale. L'objectif de cette thèse est de concevoir des approches permettant de détecter l'hypovigilance chez le conducteur en analysant ses caractéristiques faciales. En premier lieu, nous avons proposé une approche dédiée à la détection de la somnolence à partir de l'identification des périodes de micro-sommeil à travers l'analyse des yeux. En second lieu, nous avons introduit une approche permettant de relever la fatigue à partir de l'analyse de la bouche afin de détecter les bâillements. Du fait qu'il n'existe aucune base de données publique dédiée à la détection de l'hypovigilance, nous avons acquis et annoté notre propre base de données représentant différents sujets simulant des états d'hypovigilance sous des conditions d'éclairage réelles afin d'évaluer les performances de ces deux approches. En troisième lieu, nous avons développé deux nouveaux estimateurs de la pose de la tête pour permettre à la fois de détecter l'inattention du conducteur et de déterminer son état, même quand ses caractéristiques faciales (yeux et bouche) ne peuvent être analysées suite à des positions non-frontales de la tête. Nous avons évalué ces deux estimateurs sur la base de données publique Pointing'04. Ensuite, nous avons acquis et annoté une base de données représentant la variation de la pose de la tête du conducteur pour valider nos estimateurs sous un environnement de conduite. / Studying facial features has attracted increasing attention in both academic and industrial communities. Indeed, these features convey nonverbal information that plays a key role in humancommunication. Moreover, they are very useful to allow human-machine interactions. Therefore, the automatic study of facial features is an important task for various applications includingrobotics, human-machine interfaces, behavioral science, clinical practice and monitoring driver state. In this thesis, we focus our attention on monitoring driver state through its facial features analysis. This problematic solicits a universal interest caused by the increasing number of road accidents, principally induced by deterioration in the driver vigilance level, known as hypovigilance. Indeed, we can distinguish three hypovigilance states. The first and most critical one is drowsiness, which is manifested by an inability to keep awake and it is characterized by microsleep intervals of 2-6 seconds. The second one is fatigue, which is defined by the increasing difficulty of maintaining a task and it is characterized by an important number of yawns. The third and last one is the inattention that occurs when the attention is diverted from the driving activity and it is characterized by maintaining the head pose in a non-frontal direction.The aim of this thesis is to propose facial features based approaches allowing to identify driver hypovigilance. The first approach was proposed to detect drowsiness by identifying microsleepintervals through eye state analysis. The second one was developed to identify fatigue by detecting yawning through mouth analysis. Since no public hypovigilance database is available,we have acquired and annotated our own database representing different subjects simulating hypovigilance under real lighting conditions to evaluate the performance of these two approaches. Next, we have developed two driver head pose estimation approaches to detect its inattention and also to determine its vigilance level even if the facial features (eyes and mouth) cannot be analyzed because of non-frontal head positions. We evaluated these two estimators on the public database Pointing'04. Then, we have acquired and annotated a driver head pose database to evaluate our estimators in real driving conditions.

A presente pesquisa tem por objetivo desenvolver um sistema automático de detecção de eixos de caminhões a partir de imagens. Para isso, são apresentados dois sistemas automáticos: o primeiro para extração de imagens de caminhões a partir de filmagens de tráfego rodoviário feitas em seis locais de uma mesma rodovia situada no Estado de São Paulo, e o segundo, para detecção dos eixos dos caminhões nas imagens. Ambos os sistemas foram fundamentados em conceitos de Processamento de Imagens e Visão Computacional e o desenvolvimento foi feito utilizando programação em linguagem Python e as bibliotecas OpenCV e SciKit. O salvamento automático das imagens de caminhões foi necessário para a construção do banco de imagens utilizado no outro método: a detecção dos eixos dos veículos identificados. Neste estágio foram realizadas a segmentação da imagem do caminhão, a detecção propriamente dita e a classificação dos eixos. Na segmentação dos veículos, utilizou-se as técnicas de limiarização adaptativa seguida de morfologia matemática e em outra ocasião, o descritor de texturas LBP; enquanto na detecção, a Transformada de Hough. Da análise de desempenho desses métodos, a taxa de salvamento das imagens foi 69,2% considerando todos os caminhões que se enquadraram nos frames. Com relação às detecções, a segmentação das imagens dos caminhões feita utilizando limiarização adaptativa com morfologia matemática ofereceu resultados de 57,7% da detecção do total de eixos dos caminhões e 65,6% de falsas detecções. A técnica LBP forneceu, para os mesmos casos, respectivamente, 68,3% e 84,2%. O excesso de detecção foi um ponto negativo dos resultados e pode ser relacionado aos problemas do ambiente externo, geralmente intrínsecos às cenas de tráfego de veículos. Dois fatores que interferiram de maneira significativa foram a iluminação e a movimentação das folhas e galhos das árvores devido ao vento. Desconsiderando esse inconveniente, derivado dos fatores recém citados, as taxas de acerto dos dois tipos de segmentação aumentariam para 90,4% e 93,5%, respectivamente, e as falsas detecções mudariam para 66,5% e 54,7%. Desse modo, os dois sistemas propostos podem ser considerados promissores para o objetivo proposto. / This research aims to develop an automatic truck axle detection system using images. Two automatic systems are presented: one for the extraction of truck images from road videos recorded in a São Paulo state highway and one for the axle detection on images. Both systems are based on Image Processing and Computational Vision techniques, with using programming in Python and OpenCV and SciKit libraries. The truck image extraction system was necessary for the creation of image base, to be used on the axle detection system. Thereunto, image segmentation, axle detection and classification on images were made. In segmentation was used adaptive threshold technique, followed by mathematical morphology and on another time, LBP texture descriptors; for detection, was used Hough Transform. Performance analysis on these methods wielded 69.2% on image save rate, on trucks entirely framed on the image. About axle detection, the truck image segmentation using a combination of adaptive threshold and mathematical morphology wielded 57.7% on axle detection, whilst achieving 65.6% of false detection. Using LBP wielded, on the same images, 68.3% on axle detection and 84.2% of false detection. These excesses was a negative result and can be related to intrinsic issues on the external road traffic environment. Two main factors affected the result: lighting condition changes and the movement of tree leaves and branches. Disregarding these two factors, the proposed system had 90.4% axle truck detection rate using adaptive threshold and mathematical morphology and 93.5% using LBP, and the false detection, changed for 66.5% e 54.7%. Thus, both proposed systems are considered promising.

Schistosoma mansoni é o parasita causador da esquistossomose mansônica que, de acordo com o Ministério da Saúde do Brasil, afeta atualmente vários milhões de pessoas no país. Uma das formas de diagnóstico da esquistossomose é a detecção de ovos do parasita através da análise de lâminas microscópicas com material fecal. Esta tarefa é extremamente cansativa, principalmente nos casos de baixa endemicidade, pois a quantidade de ovos é muito pequena. Nesses casos, uma abordagem computacional para auxílio na detecção de ovos facilitaria o trabalho de diagnóstico. Os ovos têm formato ovalado, possuem uma membrana translúcida, apresentam uma espícula e sua cor é ligeiramente amarelada. Porém nem todas essas características são observadas em todos os ovos e algumas delas são visíveis apenas com uma ampliação adequada. Além disso, o aspecto visual do material fecal varia muito de indivíduo para indivíduo em termos de cor e presença de diversos artefatos (tais como partículas que não são desintegradas pelo sistema digestivo), tornando difícil a tarefa de detecção dos ovos. Neste trabalho investigamos, em particular, o problema de detecção das linhas que contornam a borda de vários dos ovos. Propomos um método composto por duas fases. A primeira fase consiste na detecção de estruturas do tipo linha usando operadores morfológicos. A detecção de linhas é dividida em três etapas principais: (i) realce de linhas, (ii) detecção de linhas, e (iii) refinamento do resultado para eliminar segmentos de linhas que não são de interesse. O resultado dessa fase é um conjunto de segmentos de linhas. A segunda fase consiste na detecção de subconjuntos de segmentos de linha dispostos em formato elíptico, usando um algoritmo baseado na transformada Hough. As elipses detectadas são fortes candidatas a contorno de ovos de S. mansoni. Resultados experimentais mostram que a abordagem proposta pode ser útil para compor um sistema de auxílio à detecção dos ovos. / Schistosoma mansoni is one of the parasites which causes schistosomiasis. According to the Brazilian Ministry of Health, several million people in the country are currently affected by schistosomiasis. One way of diagnosing it is by egg identification in stool. This task is extremely time-consuming and tiring, especially in cases of low endemicity, when only few eggs are present. In such cases, a computational approach to help the detection of eggs would greatly facilitate the diagnostic task. Schistosome eggs present oval shape, have a translucent membrane and a spike, and their color is slightly yellowish. However, not all these features are observed in every egg and some of them are visible only with an adequate microscopic magnification. Furthermore, the visual aspect of the fecal material varies widely from person to person in terms of color and presence of different artifacts (such as particles which are not disintegrated by the digestive system), making it difficult to detect the eggs. In this work we investigate the problem of detecting lines which delimit the contour of the eggs. We propose a method comprising two steps. The first phase consists in detecting line-like structures using morphological operators. This line detection phase is divided into three steps: (i) line enhancement, (ii) line detection, and (iii) result refinement in order to eliminate line segments that are not of interest. The output of this phase is a set of line segments. The second phase consists in detecting subsets of line segments arranged in an elliptical shape, using an algorithm based on the Hough transform. Detected ellipses are strong candidates to contour of S. mansoni eggs. Experimental results show that the proposed approach has potential to be effectively used as a component in a computer system to help egg detection.

Ces travaux de recherche visaient à développer un système d'aide à la mobilité pour les personnes ayant une déficience visuelle (VIP ‘Visually Impaired Person’) appelé ‘Smart Environment Explorer Stick (SEES)’. Le but particulier de cette recherche était de développer de nouveaux algorithmes pour améliorer la précision de la détection de la présence de poteaux de la canne SEE-stick en utilisant la méthode de calcul de distance et la recherche de paires de lignes verticales basées sur l'optimisation de la technique de détection de contour de Canny. Désormais, l'algorithme de détection des poteaux est appelé l’algorithme YuRHoS. Le SEES développé comme système de support d'aide à la mobilité VIP a été intégré avec succès à plusieurs dispositifs tels que le serveur distant dénommé iSEE, le serveur local embarqué dénommé SEE-phone et la canne intelligente dénommée SEE-stick. Les performances de SEE-stick ont été améliorées grâce à l'algorithme YuRHoS qui permet de discriminer avec précision les objets (obstacles) en forme de poteau parmi les objets détectés. La comparaison des résultats de détection des poteaux avec ceux des autres algorithmes a conclu que l'algorithme YuRHoS était plus efficace et précis. Le lieu et la couleur des poteaux de test d’évaluation étaient deux des facteurs les plus importants qui influaient sur la capacité du SEE-stick à détecter leur présence. Le niveau de précision de SEE-stick est optimal lorsque le test d’évaluation est effectué à l'extérieur et que les poteaux sont de couleur argentée. Les statistiques montrent que la performance de l'algorithme YuRHoS à l'intérieur était 0,085 fois moins bonne qu'à l'extérieur. De plus, la détection de la présence de poteaux de couleur argentée est 11 fois meilleure que celle de poteaux de couleur noir. / This research aimed to develop a technology system of mobility aid for Visually Impaired Person (VIP) called Smart Environment Explorer Stick (SEES).Particular purpose of this research was developing new algorithm in improving accuracy of SEE-stick for pole detection using distance calculation method and vertical line pair search based on Canny edge detection optimization and Hough transform. Henceforth, the pole detection algorithm was named as YuRHoS algorithm.The developed SEES as supporting system of VIP mobility aid had been successfully integrated several devices such as global remote server (iSEE), embedded local server (SEE-phone) and smart stick (SEE-stick). Performance of SEE-stick could be improved through YuRHoS algorithm, which was able to fix the accuracy of SEE-stick in detecting pole. Test comparison of pole detection results among others algorithm concluded that YuRHoS algorithm had better accuracy in pole detection.Two most significant factors affecting SEE-stick ability in detecting pole was test location and pole color. Level of accuracy of SEE-stick would be optimum once the test location was performed outdoor and pole color was silver. Statistics result shown that YuRHoS algorithm performance indoor was 0.085 times worse than outdoor. Meanwhile, silver-pole-color as object detection could increase YuRHoS algorithm performance as much as 11 times better compare to black-pole-color.