<p>Imaging at range for the purposes of biometric, scientific, or militaristic applications often suffer due to degradations by the atmosphere. These degradations, due to the non-uniformity of the atmospheric medium, can be modeled as being caused by turbulence. Dating back to the days of Kolmogorov in the 1940’s, the field has had many successes in modeling and some in mitigating the effects of turbulence in images. Today, modern restoration methods are often in the form of learning-based solutions which require a large amount of training data. This places atmospheric turbulence mitigation at an interesting point in its history; simulators which accurately capture the effects of the atmosphere were developed without any consideration of deep learning methods and are often missing critical requirements for today’s solutions.</p><p><br></p><p>In this work, we describe a simulator which is not only fast and accurate but has the additional property of being end-to-end differentiable, allowing for end-to-end training with a reconstruction network. This simulation, which we refer to as Zernike-based simulation, performs at a similar level of accuracy as its purely optics-based simulation counterparts while being up to 1000x faster. To achieve this we combine theoretical developments, engineering efforts, and learning-based solutions. Our Zernike-based simulation not only aids in the application of modern solutions to this classical problem but also opens the field to new possibilities with what we refer to as computational image formation.chimi</p>

Scene understanding attempts to produce a textual description of visible and latent concepts in an image to describe the real meaning of the scene. Concepts are either objects, events or relations depicted in an image. To recognize concepts, the decision of object detection algorithm must be further enhanced from visual similarity to semantical compatibility. Semantically relevant concepts convey the most consistent meaning of the scene. Object detectors analyze visual properties (e.g., pixel intensities, texture, color gradient) of sub-regions of an image to identify objects. The initially assigned objects names must be further examined to ensure they are compatible with each other and the scene. By enforcing inter-object dependencies (e.g., co-occurrence, spatial and semantical priors) and object to scene constraints as background information, a concept classifier predicts the most semantically consistent set of names for discovered objects. The additional background information that describes concepts is called context. In this dissertation, a framework for building context-based concept detection is presented that uses a combination of multiple contextual relationships to refine the result of underlying feature-based object detectors to produce most semantically compatible concepts. In addition to the lack of ability to capture semantical dependencies, object detectors suffer from high dimensionality of feature space that impairs them. Variances in the image (i.e., quality, pose, articulation, illumination, and occlusion) can also result in low-quality visual features that impact the accuracy of detected concepts. The object detectors used to build context-based framework experiments in this study are based on the state-of-the-art generative and discriminative graphical models. The relationships between model variables can be easily described using graphical models and the dependencies and precisely characterized using these representations. The generative context-based implementations are extensions of Latent Dirichlet Allocation, a leading topic modeling approach that is very effective in reduction of the dimensionality of the data. The discriminative contextbased approach extends Conditional Random Fields which allows efficient and precise construction of model by specifying and including only cases that are related and influence it. The dataset used for training and evaluation is MIT SUN397. The result of the experiments shows overall 15% increase in accuracy in annotation and 31% improvement in semantical saliency of the annotated concepts. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

An important research area in computer vision is parameter estimation. Given a mathematical model and a sample of image measurement data, key parameters are sought to encapsulate geometric properties of a relevant entity. An optimisation problem is often formulated in order to find these parameters. This thesis presents an elaboration of fundamental numerical algorithms for estimating parameters of multi-objective models of importance in computer vision applications. The work examines ways to solve unconstrained and constrained minimisation problems from the view points of theory, computational methods, and numerical performance. The research starts by considering a particular form of multi-equation constraint function that characterises a wide class of unconstrained optimisation tasks. Increasingly sophisticated cost functions are developed within a consistent framework, ultimately resulting in the creation of a new iterative estimation method. The scheme operates in a maximum likelihood setting and yields near-optimal estimate of the parameters. Salient features of themethod are that it has simple update rules and exhibits fast convergence. Then, to accommodate models with functional dependencies, two variant of this initial algorithm are proposed. These methods are improved again by reshaping the objective function in a way that presents the original estimation problem in a reduced form. This procedure leads to a novel algorithm with enhanced stability and convergence properties. To extend the capacity of these schemes to deal with constrained optimisation problems, several a posteriori correction techniques are proposed to impose the so-called ancillary constraints. This work culminates by giving two methods which can tackle ill-conditioned constrained functions. The combination of the previous unconstrained methods with these post-hoc correction schemes provides an array of powerful constrained algorithms. The practicality and performance of themethods are evaluated on two specific applications. One is planar homography matrix computation and the other trifocal tensor estimation. In the case of fitting a homography to image data, only the unconstrained algorithms are necessary. For the problem of estimating a trifocal tensor, significant work is done first on expressing sets of usable constraints, especially the ancillary constraints which are critical to ensure that the computed object conforms to the underlying geometry. Evidently here, the post-correction schemes must be incorporated in the computational mechanism. For both of these example problems, the performance of the unconstrained and constrained algorithms is compared to existing methods. Experiments reveal that the new methods perform with high accuracy to match a state-of-the-art technique but surpass it in execution speed. / Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Adelaide, School of Mathemtical Sciences, Discipline of Pure Mathematics, 2008

One of the most impressive qualities of the brain is its neuro-plasticity. The neocortex has roughly the same structure throughout its whole surface, yet it is involved in a variety of different tasks from vision to motor control, and regions which once performed one task can learn to perform another. Machine learning algorithms which aim to be plausible models of the neocortex should also display this plasticity. One such candidate is the stacked denoising autoencoder (SDA). SDA's have shown promising results in the field of machine perception where they have been used to learn abstract features from unlabeled data. In this thesis I develop a flexible distributed implementation of an SDA and train it on images and audio spectrograms to experimentally determine properties comparable to neuro-plasticity. Specifically, I compare the visual-auditory generalization between a multi-level denoising autoencoder trained with greedy, layer-wise pre-training (GLWPT), to one trained without. I test a hypothesis that multi-modal networks will perform better than uni-modal networks due to the greater generality of features that may be learned. Furthermore, I also test the hypothesis that the magnitude of improvement gained from this multi-modal training is greater when GLWPT is applied than when it is not. My findings indicate that these hypotheses were not confirmed, but that GLWPT still helps multi-modal networks adapt to their second sensory modality.