Automatically determining the temporal characteristics of facial expressions has extensive application domains such as human-machine interfaces for emotion recognition, face identification, as well as medical analysis. However, many papers in the literature have not addressed the step of determining when such expressions occur. This dissertation is focused on the problem of automatically segmenting macro- and micro-expressions frames (or retrieving the expression intervals) in video sequences, without the need for training a model on a specific subset of such expressions. The proposed method exploits the non-rigid facial motion that occurs during facial expressions by modeling the strain observed during the elastic deformation of facial skin tissue. The method is capable of spotting both macro expressions which are typically associated with emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, and surprise, and rapid micro- expressions which are typically, but not always, associated with semi-suppressed macro-expressions. Additionally, we have used this method to automatically retrieve strain maps generated from peak expressions for human identification. This dissertation also contributes a novel 3-D surface strain estimation algorithm using commodity 3-D sensors aligned with an HD camera. We demonstrate the feasibility of the method, as well as the improvements gained when using 3-D, by providing empirical and quantitative comparisons between 2-D and 3-D strain estimations.

Laboratory test of reinforced and prestressed concrete structures have been used widely to explore the behavior of reinforced and prestressed concrete components and structures; Such tests are often time-consuming and costly. However, numerical models have been shown to compare favorably with experiments. Thus, computations are viewed nowadays as efficient alternatives to tests, time-wise and cost-wise. In the research reported in this thesis, finite-element model were used in a study of pretressed structural components in order to correlate levels of pretension with deflection and strain measurements. The two main objectives were to develop a suitable finite element model of prestressed concrete beams and to forecast beam prestension on the basis of deformations resulting from specified simple load, e.g., a uniformly distributed transverse load. A commercial finite-element analysis package (ANSYS 12) was used to set up, use and evaluate the computational model. Furthermore, a finite-difference model was employed in order to ascertain the validity of ANSYS results by comparison with engineering beam theory taking into account the applied pretension. This study demonstrates the potential usefulness of deflection and strain measurements as indicators of the pretension applied or remaining in prestressed concrete beams. / text