The business of market research has been expanding since the local enterprises make more and more efforts trying to understand consumers¡¦ needs with the assistances from market research firms offering new research methods and know-how supports. Given the overwhelming popularity of Internet and the fast-growing population of Internet users, online survey has become a popular research method that both academic and research communities widely employed with great potential opporutnities in the coming future. Since established in 1997, Focus Survey Research has been expanding its business scope with election research as its core business, and successfully covered its business to polls and market research since 2004. In order to provide clients with more comprehensive research services, FSR set up its online panel database since 2008 and started its strategy alliance with Easy Travel in 2011 launching E-Survey with a online panel database of 300,000 members, and started its online surevey business. This thesis would like to provide related industries or other new buiness units a reference by deep diving on different development stages of FSR, and evaluate how FSR could use its competitiveness to expand its online survey business and further define its marketing strategy planning. The thesis concludes that the three objectives of the online survey development strategy of FSR as follows: 1) Deploys more comprehensive research techniques to meet the clients¡¦ needs, and provide the clients with value-added services, which can help to expand the business scope of FSR accordingly; 2) Strategy alliances with partners from advertising, marketing, media buying and PR field to better increase the awareness of FSR among the market research industry; 3) FSR¡¦s expertise and experiences of conventional research can help to make up for the weakness of the online survey sampling. The combination of online survey with the expertise from offline survey could develop a better online study platform which could even provide clients with better deliverables. The thesis also aims to provide guidelines for FSR¡¦s online survey further strategy development. Given the marketing strategy of ¡§customized services¡¨, the further online business will cover either research studies among its panel database on social issues / consumer trends or customer satisfaction study among the name list provided by clients. Based on the two major business segments, FSR would be suggested to be positioned as ¡§a proactive and aggressive online survey information provider with good cost performance¡¨. Based on its business function, FSR is recommended to be positioned as ¡§clients¡¦ in-house research consultant and partner, which can provide consultations on research projects, handle research requests and assist coordinations.¡¨

In this paper, we propose a Kalman filtering method to restore signal when both the digital and analog signal are available. The digital video signal is coded by method of MPEG. The error can be introduced in the quantization process of the block DCT transformation. So the quality of the image from the digital video signal needs to be improved. Considering the analog video signal is corrupted by the Gauss White Noise. We can apply the Kalman filter to these two signals at the same time to restore the image for a better quality. The image structure is defined to be the linear relationship between pixels with their upper and left neighbors. So we can determinate the image structure property by the linear equations of the pixel gray level. Generally, the image segmentation takes the gray values as the property. In our case we take the linear equations as our property function. This property implies an abstract concept and can¡¦t measure directly. We determine the unity of the image structure by measuring the error from merging the pixel into one region. We achieve a recursive formula for computing the error by the sequential least square error method. In the signal processing, Kalman filter is used for optimal estimation of the signal corrupted by additive noise. We segment the image by its local property. By our segmentation technique every region has its specific image structure. The structures are system parameters of Kalman filter. We first utilize the method of segmentation on the image recovered from the MPEG signal to find the local parameters. The results of experiments show that we can improve the images quality when the MPEG signal is not very good.

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Displacement information is important in dynamic image analysis. The method of optical flow has been well applied to compute the displacement in the field of computer vision. We apply the method of optical flow to compute the displacement information for video compression. We can predict the optical flow between picture 2 and picture 3 by the optical flow between picture 1 and picture 2 by using the principle of inertia. Using the predicted optical flow between picture 2 and picture 3, we can recover a rough version of picture 3. This version can be taken as a reference picture for encoding picture 3. This reference will decrease the compensation information in the following stage, and then improve the compression ratio of MPEG . We modified the traditional optical flow of Horn & Schunck to a regional optical flow by segmentation. Then, the displacement information could be reduced. The picture is recovered by the optical flow in a modified way because some objects couldn¡¦t move in the same direction and velocity. We propose two methods in optical flow prediction. One is the complete information: shape and value. The other is shape only with value recomputed and extra encoded. Experiments demonstrate a better compression ratio of 1% for our motion compensation than the regular motion compensation.

The depth information is a fundamental factor in stereo imaging. The depth information of an object can be associated to the horizontal shift (with respect to the location in the parallax image) in a simple linear relation. Therefore, we can generate a stereo video by combining a regular monoscopic video with an artificial parallax video implemented with a designed horizontal shift. In this research, the manmade horizontal shift is designed according to the pixel translations of the monoscopic video obtained by the optical flow computation algorithm. Optical flow proposed by Horn and Schunck was originally developed in the field of computer vision for the application of moving detection. Following this flow computation algorithm, a vector segmentation algorithm is applied to the flow field for grouping effects associated to the foreground. Finally, some merging procedures are applied to get a better foreground mask. With this foreground mask,the parallax video is then generated for creating our artificial stereo video.

In this dissertation, I investigated some fundamental issues related to medical image segmentation, registration, and watermarking. I used color retinal fundus images to perform my study because of the rich representation of different objects (blood vessels, microaneurysms, hemorrhages, exudates, etc.) that are pathologically important and have close resemblance in shapes and colors. To attack this complex subject, I developed a divide-and-conquer strategy to address related issues step-by-step and to optimize the parameters of different algorithm steps. Most, if not all, objects in our discussion are related. The algorithms for detection, registration, and protection of different objects need to consider how to differentiate the foreground from the background and be able to correctly characterize the features of the image objects and their geometric properties. To address these problems, I characterized the shapes of blood vessels in retinal images and proposed the algorithms to extract the features of blood vessels. A tracing algorithm was developed for the detection of blood vessels along the vascular network. Due to the noise interference and various image qualities, the robust segmentation techniques were used for the accurate characterization of the objects’ shapes and verification. Based on the segmentation results, a registration algorithm was developed, which uses the bifurcation and cross-over points of blood vessels to establish the correspondence between the images and derive the transformation that aligns the images. A Region-of-Interest (ROI) based watermarking scheme was proposed for image authenticity. It uses linear segments extracted from the image as reference locations for embedding and detecting watermark. Global and locally-randomized synchronization schemes were proposed for bit-sequence synchronization of a watermark. The scheme is robust against common image processing and geometric distortions (rotation and scaling), and it can detect alternations such as moving or removing of the image content.

Texture segmentation is an effortless process in scene analysis, yet its mechanisms have not been sufficiently understood. Several theories and algorithms exist for texture discrimination based on vision. These models diverge from one another in algorithmic approaches to address texture imagery using spatial elements and their statistics. Even though there are differences among these approaches, they all begin from the assumption that texture segmentation is a visual task. However, considering that texture is basically a surface property, this assumption can at times be misleading. An interesting possibility is that since surface properties are most immediately accessible to touch, texture perception may be more intimately associated with texture than with vision (it is known that tactile input can affect vision). Coincidentally, the basic organization of the touch (somatosensory) system bears some analogy to that of the visual system. In particular, recent neurophysiological findings showed that receptive fields for touch resemble that of vision, albeit with some subtle differences. The main novelty and contribution of this thesis is in the use of tactile receptive field responses for texture segmentation. Furthermore, we showed that touch-based representation is superior to its vision-based counterpart when used in texture boundary detection. Tactile representations were also found to be more discriminable (LDA and ANOVA). We expect our results to help better understand the nature of texture perception and build more powerful texture processing algorithms. The results suggest that touch has an advantage over vision in texture processing. Findings in this study are expected to shed new light on the role of tactile perception of texture and its interaction with vision, and help develop more powerful, biologically inspired texture segmentation algorithms.

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Die vorliegende Arbeit untersuchte die Durchführbarkeit und Genauigkeit der manuellen Segmentierung des Nervus facialis in hochauflösenden CT – Bildern im Vergleich mit einer semi – automatischen Segmentierung durch verschiedene Probanden. Die Untersuchung erfolgte für beide Segmentierformen Software gestützt. Zusätzlich wurde das subjektive Vertrauen der Probanden in die eigene Segmentierung abgefragt. Die beiden in dieser Arbeit untersuchten Methoden wiesen keinen signifikanten Unterschied für die Genauigkeit auf. Dabei betrug die mittlere quadratische Abweichung für die manuelle Segmentierform 0,53 mm und 0,42 mm für den semi-automatischen Ansatz. Die semi – automatische Segmentierung benötigte zudem mit einer mittleren Segmentierzeit/Datensatz von t = 94 sec deutlich weniger Zeit als die Probanden der manuellen Segmentierung mit einer mittleren Segmentierzeit/Datensatz von t = 219,5 sec. Anhand einer Korrelationsanalyse konnte festgestellt werden, dass bei der manuellen Segmentierung die Höhe der Abweichung (in mm) nicht mit der Segmentierzeit (in sec) korrelierte. Für den semi-automatischen Ansatz ergab sich auch lediglich für den zweiten Durchlauf eine Korrelation zwischen Höhe der Abweichung (in mm) und der Segmentierzeit (in sec) auf Signifikanzniveau (p < 0,01): Je mehr Zeit der Proband für seine Segmentierung in Anspruch nahm, desto höher fiel die Abweichung vom Referenzverlauf aus. Die Abfrage des subjektiven Segmentierungsvertrauens zeigte deutlich, dass sich die Probanden in ihrer Festlegung des Fazialisverlaufes sicher waren. Des Weiteren traten keine Unterschiede des Segmentierungsvertrauens zwischen den verschiedenen Durchläufen auf. Im Ergebnis zeigen die manuelle und die semi-automatische Segmentierung keine signifikanten Genauigkeitsunterschiede im Vergleich zur Referenz und können genutzt werden, um vor Eingriffen am Felsenbein eine sichere Identifikation des Nervus facialis zu liefern.