Execution time control is a technique that allows execution time budgets to be set and overruns to be handled dynamically to prevent deadline misses. This removes the need for the worst-case execution time (WCET) of tasks to be found by offline timing analysis – a problem that can be very hard to solve for modern computer architectures. Execution time control can also increase the processor utilization, as the WCET will often be much higher than the average execution time. This thesis describes how the GNU Ada Compiler and a bare-board Ravenscar run-time environment were ported to the Atmel AVR32 UC3 microcontroller series making the Ada programming language available on this architecture for the first time, and an implementation of Ada execution time control for this system that supports full execution time control for interrupt handling. Usage patterns for this brand new feature are demonstrated in Ada by extending the object-oriented real-time framework with execution time servers for interrupt handling, allowing the system to be protected against unexpected bursts of interrupts that could otherwise result in deadline misses. Separate execution time measurement for interrupt handling also improves the accuracy of measurement for tasks. As a direct result of the work presented in this thesis separate execution time measurement for interrupts will be included in the forthcoming ISO-standard for Ada 2012. While the implementation of execution time control is for the Ada programming language and the UC3 microcontroller series, the design and implementation should be portable to other architectures, and the principles of execution time control for interrupt handling applicable to other programming languages. Low run-time overhead is important for execution time control to be useful for real-time systems. Therefore a hardware Time Management Unit (TMU) was designed to reduce the overhead of execution time control. This design has been implemented for the UC3 and performance tests with the developed run-time environment shows that it gives a significant reduction of overhead. The memory-mapped design of the TMU also allows it to be implemented on other architectures.

Precomputation has been previously used as a means to get global illumination effects in real-time on consumer hardware of the day. Our work uses Sloan’s 2002 PRT method as a starting point, and builds on it with two new ideas. We first explore an alternative representation for PRT data. “Cpherical harmonics” (CH) are introduced as an alternative to spherical harmonics, by substituting the Chebyshev polynomial in the place of the Legendre polynomial as the orthogonal polynomial in the spherical harmonics definition. We show that CH can be used instead of SH for PRT with near-equivalent performance. “Vector occluders” (VO) are introduced as a novel, precomputed, real-time, empirical technique for adding global illumination effects including shadows, caustics and interreflections to a locally illuminated scene on static geometry. VO encodes PRT data as simple vectors instead of using SH. VO can handle point lights, whereas a standard SH implementation cannot. / UOIT

A physical control/protection platform needs to be tested and its functionality verified prior to installation and commissioning. Closed-loop testing of a physical control/protection platform, in a real-time simulator environment is practically the only option to safely and thoroughly verify the design integrity and evaluate its functionality and performance. Moreover, a real-time simulator is also required to conduct statistical switching studies, as it substantially reduces the total run time of the study. This thesis proposes and develops a generalized methodology for implementation of the power system equations in the FPGA environment. The developed methodology enables real-time operation, for closed-loop testing of physical control/protection platforms in hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) configuration, and even faster-than-real-time operation, for statistical switching studies. Based on the developed methodology, an FPGA-based simulator is developed and tested. The salient features of the proposed implementation are: ² It enables the use of a nanosecond range simulation time-step to simulate large systems in real-time, in contrast to the us range time-steps used in the existing simulators. Thus it is also able to provide a wide frequency bandwidth for the simulation results. ² It retains the calculation time, within each simulation time-step, nearly fixed irrespective of the size of the system. ² It eliminates the need for the corrective measures, adopted in the existing real-time simulators, to reduce error due to the lack of synchronization between the simulation time-grid and the output signals of the control/protection platform under test. As an integral part of this work, this thesis proposes and develops the modified two-layer network equivalent (M-TLNE). The salient feature of the M-TLNE is its computational efficiency, as compared to the existing network equivalents, which makes it a prime choice for statistical switching studies and real-time simulation of electromagnetic transients. This thesis also proposes a generalized methodology, applicable to both single and multi-port network equivalents for both single- and multi-phase systems, for developing the proposed M-TLNE. The developed methodology ensures the stability and passivity of the M-TLNE.

Realistic computer generated images are computed by combining geometric effects, reflectance models for several captured and phenomenological materials, and real-world lighting according to mathematical models of physical light transport. Several important lighting phenomena should be considered when targeting realistic image simulation. A combination of soft and hard shadows, which arise from the interaction of surface and light geometries, provide necessary shape perception cues for a viewer. A wide variety of realistic materials, from physically-captured reflectance datasets to empirically designed mathematical models, modulate the virtual surface appearances in a manner that can further dissuade a viewer from considering the possibility of computational image synthesis over that of reality. Lastly, in many important cases, light reflects off many different surfaces before entering the eye. These secondary effects can be critical in grounding the viewer in a virtual world, since the human visual system is adapted to the physical world, where such effects are constantly in play. Simulating each of these effects is challenging due to their individual underlying complexity. The net complexity is compounded when several effects are combined. This thesis will investigate real-time approaches for simulating these effects under stringent performance and memory constraints, and with varying degrees of interactivity. In order to make these computations tractable given these added constraints, I will use data and signal analysis techniques to identify predictable patterns in the different spatial and angular signals used during image synthesis. The results of this analysis will be exploited with several analytic and data-driven mathematical models that are both efficient, and yield accurate approximations with predictable and controllable error.

High performance real-time applications have become and will continue to be anintegral part of today’s world. With this comes the requirement to provide reliablecommunication networks for these applications requiring real-time guarantees.Depending on the specific application the requirements vary and adapting to allthese requirements is important. Ethernet is a commonly used communication medium in these real-time applicationnetworks because of the advantages it provides with its simplicity, which comesalong with lower cost and higher bit rates. However since Ethernet was notspecifically designed for real-time applications, it has been under constant study inorder provide the required QoS (Quality of Service) requirements for theapplication. In this thesis our aim is to provide a less pessimistic approach to the real-timeanalysis of packet switched networks by the use of knowledge about the offsetintroduced to the packets travelling in the network. Therefore we have taken aspecific application with high real-time requirements, namely a radar application.We are using the available data to simulate and analyze the network’s performanceunder the use of offsets. The analysis is done by calculating some of the commonlyused QoS requirements such as end to end delay, deadline miss ratio and link utilization.

In this thesis we explore several algorithms for automatic real-time tracking of a tennis ball. We first investigate the use of background subtraction with color/shape recognition for fast tracking of the tennis ball. We then compare our solution with a cascade of boosted Haar classifiers [68] in a simulated environment to estimate the accuracy and ideal processing speeds. The results show that background subtraction techniques were not only faster but also more accurate than Haar classifiers. Following these promising results, we extend the background subtraction and develop other three improved techniques. These techniques use more accurate background models, more reliable and stringent criteria. They allow us to track the tennis ball in a real tennis environment with cameras having higher resolutions and frame rates. <p>We tested our techniques with a large number of real tennis videos. In the indoors environment, We achieved a true positive rate of about 90%, a false alarm rate of less than 2%, and a tracking speed of about 20 fps. For the outdoors environment, the performance of our techniques is not as good as the indoors cases due to the complexity and instability of the outdoors environment. The problem can be solved by resetting our system such that the camera focuses mainly on the tennis ball. Therefore, the influence of the external factors is minimized.<p>Despite the existing limitations, our techniques are able to track a tennis ball with very high accuracy and fast speed which can not be achieved by most tracking techniques currently available. We are confident that the motion information generated from our techniques is reliable and accurate. Giving this promising result, we believe some real-world applications can be constructed.

A physical control/protection platform needs to be tested and its functionality verified prior to installation and commissioning. Closed-loop testing of a physical control/protection platform, in a real-time simulator environment is practically the only option to safely and thoroughly verify the design integrity and evaluate its functionality and performance. Moreover, a real-time simulator is also required to conduct statistical switching studies, as it substantially reduces the total run time of the study. This thesis proposes and develops a generalized methodology for implementation of the power system equations in the FPGA environment. The developed methodology enables real-time operation, for closed-loop testing of physical control/protection platforms in hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) configuration, and even faster-than-real-time operation, for statistical switching studies. Based on the developed methodology, an FPGA-based simulator is developed and tested. The salient features of the proposed implementation are: ² It enables the use of a nanosecond range simulation time-step to simulate large systems in real-time, in contrast to the us range time-steps used in the existing simulators. Thus it is also able to provide a wide frequency bandwidth for the simulation results. ² It retains the calculation time, within each simulation time-step, nearly fixed irrespective of the size of the system. ² It eliminates the need for the corrective measures, adopted in the existing real-time simulators, to reduce error due to the lack of synchronization between the simulation time-grid and the output signals of the control/protection platform under test. As an integral part of this work, this thesis proposes and develops the modified two-layer network equivalent (M-TLNE). The salient feature of the M-TLNE is its computational efficiency, as compared to the existing network equivalents, which makes it a prime choice for statistical switching studies and real-time simulation of electromagnetic transients. This thesis also proposes a generalized methodology, applicable to both single and multi-port network equivalents for both single- and multi-phase systems, for developing the proposed M-TLNE. The developed methodology ensures the stability and passivity of the M-TLNE.

Realistic computer generated images are computed by combining geometric effects, reflectance models for several captured and phenomenological materials, and real-world lighting according to mathematical models of physical light transport. Several important lighting phenomena should be considered when targeting realistic image simulation. A combination of soft and hard shadows, which arise from the interaction of surface and light geometries, provide necessary shape perception cues for a viewer. A wide variety of realistic materials, from physically-captured reflectance datasets to empirically designed mathematical models, modulate the virtual surface appearances in a manner that can further dissuade a viewer from considering the possibility of computational image synthesis over that of reality. Lastly, in many important cases, light reflects off many different surfaces before entering the eye. These secondary effects can be critical in grounding the viewer in a virtual world, since the human visual system is adapted to the physical world, where such effects are constantly in play. Simulating each of these effects is challenging due to their individual underlying complexity. The net complexity is compounded when several effects are combined. This thesis will investigate real-time approaches for simulating these effects under stringent performance and memory constraints, and with varying degrees of interactivity. In order to make these computations tractable given these added constraints, I will use data and signal analysis techniques to identify predictable patterns in the different spatial and angular signals used during image synthesis. The results of this analysis will be exploited with several analytic and data-driven mathematical models that are both efficient, and yield accurate approximations with predictable and controllable error.

Global illumination techniques are used to improve the realism of 3D scenes. Calculating accurate global illumination requires a method for solving the rendering equation. However, the integral form of this equation cannot be evaluated. This thesis presents research in non real-time illumination techniques which are evaluated with a finite number of light rays. This includes a new technique which improves realism of the scene over traditional techniques. All computer rendering requires distortion free texture mapping to appear plausible to the eye. Inverse texture mapping, however, can be numerically unstable and computationally expensive. Alternative techniques for texture mapping and texture coordinate generation were developed to simplify rendering. Real-time rendering is improved by pre-calculating non real-time reflections. The results of this research demonstrate that a polynomial approximation of reflected light can be more accurate than a constant approximation. The solution improves realism and makes use of new features in graphics hardware. / May 2007

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