abstract: Texture analysis plays an important role in applications like automated pattern inspection, image and video compression, content-based image retrieval, remote-sensing, medical imaging and document processing, to name a few. Texture Structure Analysis is the process of studying the structure present in the textures. This structure can be expressed in terms of perceived regularity. Our human visual system (HVS) uses the perceived regularity as one of the important pre-attentive cues in low-level image understanding. Similar to the HVS, image processing and computer vision systems can make fast and efficient decisions if they can quantify this regularity automatically. In this work, the problem of quantifying the degree of perceived regularity when looking at an arbitrary texture is introduced and addressed. One key contribution of this work is in proposing an objective no-reference perceptual texture regularity metric based on visual saliency. Other key contributions include an adaptive texture synthesis method based on texture regularity, and a low-complexity reduced-reference visual quality metric for assessing the quality of synthesized textures. In order to use the best performing visual attention model on textures, the performance of the most popular visual attention models to predict the visual saliency on textures is evaluated. Since there is no publicly available database with ground-truth saliency maps on images with exclusive texture content, a new eye-tracking database is systematically built. Using the Visual Saliency Map (VSM) generated by the best visual attention model, the proposed texture regularity metric is computed. The proposed metric is based on the observation that VSM characteristics differ between textures of differing regularity. The proposed texture regularity metric is based on two texture regularity scores, namely a textural similarity score and a spatial distribution score. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed regularity metric, a texture regularity database called RegTEX, is built as a part of this work. It is shown through subjective testing that the proposed metric has a strong correlation with the Mean Opinion Score (MOS) for the perceived regularity of textures. The proposed method is also shown to be robust to geometric and photometric transformations and outperforms some of the popular texture regularity metrics in predicting the perceived regularity. The impact of the proposed metric to improve the performance of many image-processing applications is also presented. The influence of the perceived texture regularity on the perceptual quality of synthesized textures is demonstrated through building a synthesized textures database named SynTEX. It is shown through subjective testing that textures with different degrees of perceived regularities exhibit different degrees of vulnerability to artifacts resulting from different texture synthesis approaches. This work also proposes an algorithm for adaptively selecting the appropriate texture synthesis method based on the perceived regularity of the original texture. A reduced-reference texture quality metric for texture synthesis is also proposed as part of this work. The metric is based on the change in perceived regularity and the change in perceived granularity between the original and the synthesized textures. The perceived granularity is quantified through a new granularity metric that is proposed in this work. It is shown through subjective testing that the proposed quality metric, using just 2 parameters, has a strong correlation with the MOS for the fidelity of synthesized textures and outperforms the state-of-the-art full-reference quality metrics on 3 different texture databases. Finally, the ability of the proposed regularity metric in predicting the perceived degradation of textures due to compression and blur artifacts is also established. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Electrical Engineering 2014

Cada vez mais observa-se a inserção de novas tecnologias em salas de aulas. Com o auxílio de políticas publicas, computadores ligados a internet tem estado presentes nas classes nos mais longinquos lugares do nosso país. Isto tem proporcionado que o conhecimento chegue de forma mais ampla e irrestrita a todas as crianças em fase de desenvolvimento. Na ultima decada, além de microcomputadores, tem-se observado a presença, em salas de aulas, de Ipads, celulares, cujos proprietários são os próprios alunos e até mesmo lousa eletrônica em escolas com poder aquisitivo maior. Aliado a isto, nota-se também a inserção de kits robóticos que tem motivado muito os alunos no aprendizado de raciocínio lógico e de programação, pois, eles experimentam o conceito: \"aprender por meio do fazer\". O uso de todas estas tecnologias tem como objetivo principal cativar a atenção dos alunos, incentivar a pesquisa e o aprendizado interativo, uma vez que o ensino antes expositivo dá lugar ao ensino interativo, isto é, que conta com a participação mais ativa do estudante. Nesta direção, esta dissertação de Mestrado traz uma inovação no sentido que está sendo proposto um sistema que permite que um robô humanoide seja inserido em salas de aulas. Trata-se de um protótipo que permite que o robô reconheça figuras geométricas planas, que pode ser estendido para outros tipos de conteúdos. O objetivo é a integração de um sistema de visão computacional em um ambiente de controle de um robô humanoide para torná-lo capaz de reconhecer figuras geométricas planas, para ser utilizada como uma ferramenta de ensino. Este sistema de visão é baseado em técnicas de Atenção Visual e utiliza uma rede neural LEGION para segmentar os objetos mais salientes da imagem e uma rede neural do tipo Multicamadas (MLP), para realizar a classificação desses objetos. Graças a este sistema de visão, o robô consegue discernir figuras sobrepostas independente do ambiente real no qual esteja inserido. Para avaliar o desempenho do sistema proposto, algumas aplicações foram desenvolvidas que envolveram a participação de crianças interagindo com o robô no reconhecimento de figuras geométricas. Embora sejam necessários uma maior numero de experimentos, os resultados obtidos indicam que o sistema proposto apresenta-se como uma ferramenta alternativa, promissora e interessante, tendo sida muito bem recebida por parte dos alunos e professores. / Increasingly there has been the introduction of new technologies in the classroom. With the help of public policies, computers connected to the internet has been used in the classes in the far reaches of our country. This has provided the knowledge reachs broader and unrestricted way to all children under development. In the last decade, besides computers, has been seen the presence in classrooms of Ipads, smart phones, owned by the students themselves and even electronic whiteboard in schools with higher purchasing power. Added to this, there is also the inclusion of robotic kits that has motivated much students in learning logical reasoning and programming, as they experience the concept: \"learning through doing\". The use of all these technologies aims to captivate the attention of students, encourage research and interactive learning, since the school, before exhibition, gives way to interactive teaching, that is, who has the most active student participation. In this direction, this Masters thesis brings an innovation in the sense that is being proposed a system that allows a robot humanoid is inserted into classrooms. It is a prototype that allows the robot to recognize planar geometric figures, which can be extended to other types of content. The goal is the integration of a computer vision system in a control a humanoid robot environment to make it able to recognize This has provided the knowledge gets broader and unrestricted way all children under development geometric figures, to be used as a teaching tool. This vision system is based on Visual Attention techniques and uses a neural network LEGION to target the salient objects image and a Multilayer (MLP) neural network, to perform the classification of these objects. Thanks to the vision system, the robot can distinguish independent of the actual environment in which overlapping figures is inserted. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, some applications were developed that involved the participation of children interacting with the robot in the recognition of geometric figures. Although a larger number of experiments are needed, the results indicate that the proposed system is presented as an alternative tool, promising and interesting, and it was very well received by students and teachers.

A robótica é uma área multidisciplinar que cresce continuamente com a contribuição do avanço científico e aumento frequente do poder computacional do hardware. As pesquisas em robótica estão divididas em diversas linhas de investigação. A visão computacional é uma das linhas de pesquisa de grande interesse devido à farta variedade de métodos e técnicas oferecidas. Um dos maiores desafios para os robôs é descobrir e analisar o ambiente em que estão inseridos. Dentre os principais sensores que podem ser utilizados, as câmeras digitais oferecem um bom benefício: podem ser leves, pequenas e baratas, características fundamentais para alguns robôs. Este trabalho propõe o desenvolvimento e análise de um sistema de visão computacional para rastrear veículos usando sistemas de detecção e classificação de segmentos em imagens. Para atingir os objetivos são investigados métodos de extração de informações das imagens, modelos de atenção visual e modelos de aprendizado bioinspirados para detecção e classificação de veículos. Para a tarefa de atenção visual foram utilizadas as técnicas de geração de mapas de saliência iNVT e VOCUS2, enquanto que para classificação foi empregada a técnicas bag-of-features e finalmente, para o rastreamento do veículo especificado, durante seu percurso em uma rodovia, foi adotada a técnica Camshift com filtro de Kalman. O sistema desenvolvido foi implementado com um robô aéreo e testado com imagens reais contendo diferentes veículos em uma rodovia e os resultados de classificação e rastreamento obtidos foram muito satisfatórios. / Robotics is a multidisciplinary area that continually grows with the contribution of scientific advancement and frequent increase in computational hardware power. Research in robotics are divided into several lines of investigation. Computer vision is one of the research areas of great interest due to the abundant variety of methods and techniques offered. One of the biggest challenges for the robots is to discover and analyze the environment in which they are inserted. Among the main sensors that can be used, digital cameras offer good benefits: they can be lightweitgh, small and cheap, which are fundamental characteristics for some robots. This work undertakes the development and analysis of a computer vision system to track vehicles by detecting and classifying segments in imaging systems. To achieve the objectives, methods on image information extraction, visual attention models and bioinspired learning models were studied for detection and classification of vehicles. For the task of visual attention the INVT and VOCUS2 models were used to generate saliency maps, while for classification was applied the bag-of-features method and finally to track the specified vehicle during its journey on a highway, it was adopted CamShift technique joint with a Kalman filter. The developed system was implemented with an aerial robot and tested with real images containing different vehicles on a highway and the results of classification and tracking obtained were very satisfactory.

Durante o turno de trabalho em atividades repetitivas, foram avaliados 8 homens com idade entre 20 e 40 anos, com cronotipo moderadamente matutino, e dominância manual e visual direita. Os sujeitos foram submetidos a testes de alocação da atenção visual 6 vezes ao dia, em 9 dias. Os testes consistiam em manter o olhar fixo no centro da tela do computador, e responder o mais rapidamente possível a todos os estímulos que aparecerem. No experimento 1 (atenção explícita) devia-se prestar particular atenção à área de 4ox4o centrada no ponto de fixação, no experimento 2 (atenção dividida) devia-se prestar atenção simultaneamente a duas regiões de 4ox4o centradas lateralmente, a 10 o do centro. Os voluntários executaram a primeira tarefa sem problemas durante todo o turno de trabalho, com TRs médios mais rápidos no início da manhã (7h40min), e no início da tarde (14h20min). Quanto aos testes de atenção dividida, houve uma aparente oscilação no desempenho médio dos sujeitos a cada uma hora e vinte, com TRs mais rápidos nos mesmos horários (7:40 e 14:20). / During their worshift with repetitive activity, we evaluated 8 male subjects between 20 and 40 years old, right eye and hand dominance, and with moderate morningness chronotype. The subjects were submitted to tests of allocation of visual attention on 9 days. Tests consisted of fixing the point center of a computer screen and pressing a key as quickly as possible to any stimulus that they appeared anywhere on the screen. In experiment 1 attentioni should be focussed in a 4ox4o central area, whereas in experiment 2, attention should be divided simultaneously sideways, in two such 4ox4o areas, indicated by two lateral squares frames. Subjects easily focused attention in the center (experiment 1) throughout their workshift, whit quicker average of reaction times (RTs) at the beginning of the morning (7h40min), and at the beginning in the afternoon (14h20min). There was, on the other hand, an apparent oscillation in their ability to divide attentio with period of approximately 80 min. Again, mean RTs were faster at 7:40 and again at 14:20.

Avaliamos a orientação da atenção visual de pacientes com Doença de Parkinson (DP), idosos e jovens saudáveis. Foram feitos cinco experimentos de Tempo de Reação (TR) e de Julgamento de Ordem Temporal (JOT), nos quais se avaliaram a atenção automática e voluntária e a percepção de ordem temporal. Os pacientes com DP apresentaram déficits em relação aos idosos na atenção voluntária, na percepção de ordem temporal e na flexibilidade mental, mas tiveram resultados semelhantes aos idosos na avaliação da atenção automática. A correlação entre os valores do TR e do JOT foi significativa entre os experimentos de TR e JOT, o que evidencia que os déficits dos DP e idosos têm origem num mecanismo em comum: a atenção. / We investigated the orienting of visual attention in patients with Parkinson?s disease (PD), healthy elderly and young subjects. Five Reaction Time (RT) and Temporal Order Judgment (TOJ) experiments were performed in order to evaluate automatic and voluntary attention and perception of temporal order. The PD patients exhibited a deficit when compared to the healthy elderly subjects in voluntary attention, perception of temporal order and mental flexibility, but had similar results in the automatic attention task. The correlation between the values obtained in RT and TOJ experiments was significant, which points towards a common mechanism underlying deficits of PD patients and effects of aging: attention.

Resultados anteriores de nosso laboratório em tarefas de tempo de reação vai/não-vai utilizando uma pista periférica sugerem que a presença do efeito atencional depende da saliência do alvo em relação ao distraidor. O objetivo deste trabalho foi examinar e estender esses resultados assumindo a hipótese de que a interferência de estímulos irrelevantes é menor em condições de alta carga perceptual. No experimento 1, confirmando resultados anteriores, registramos o efeito atencional quando o alvo era uma linha vertical e o distraidor era uma linha horizontal, porém, quando esses estímulos desempenhavam papel oposto, não houve mobilização da atenção. Supusemos que uma maior saliência perceptual da linha vertical em relação à linha horizontal pode ter sido o fator responsável pela ausência do efeito atencional quando a linha vertical assumiu o papel de distraidor. Testamos essa hipótese nos experimentos 2 e 3, onde removemos o distraidor e diminuímos sua saliência, respectivamente. Nos dois casos, registramos o efeito atencional para a linha horizontal. Esse resultado é consistente com a hipótese de menor saliência perceptual da linha horizontal em relação à vertical e também com a hipótese da carga perceptual. O objetivo do experimento 4 foi identificar um dos possíveis fatores responsáveis pela menor saliência da linha horizontal. Replicamos o experimento 1, porém diminuindo a luminosidade da tela, para testarmos um possível efeito de enquadramento, e obtivemos o efeito atencional, como previsto. Porém, ao repetirmos o mesmo experimento, aumentando a saliência dos distraidores, registramos o efeito atencional apenas na condição em que o alvo era a linha vertical. Embora os fatores responsáveis pela maior saliência relativa da linha vertical ainda não estejam claros, o conjunto de resultados corrobora a hipótese de que o processamento da pista é prejudicado em condições de maior carga perceptual. / Previous studies from our laboratory suggest that the presence of the attentional effect in go/no-go reaction time tasks using a peripheral cue depends on the salience of the go target stimulus in relation to the distactor. The aim of this study was to examine and extend these results, assuming the hypothesis that there is less interference of irrelevant stimuli during conditions of high perceptual load. In experiment 1, we obtained an attentional effect when the go target was a vertical line and the distractor was a horizontal line, but no effect when the go target was the horizontal line and the distractor was the vertical line. We suggested that a greater perceptual salience of the vertical line relative to the horizontal line might be the factor responsible for the absence of the attentional effect when the vertical line was the distractor. We tested this hypothesis in experiments 2 and 3, where we removed the distractor and reduced its salience, respectively. In both cases, we observed an attentional effect for the horizontal line. This result is consistent with the hypothesis of greater salience of the vertical line relative to the horizontal line and also with the perceptual load hypothesis. The aim of experiment 4 was to identify a possible factor responsible by the smaller perceptual salience of the horizontal line. We replicated experiment 1, but reducing the luminosity of the monitor screen, as a test for a possible framing effect, and obtained an attentional effect as expected. However, when we repeated the same experiment, raising the perceptual salience of the distractors, we observed an attentional effect only when the vertical line was the go target. Although the factors responsible for the greater perceptual salience of the vertical line relative to the horizontal line are not clear yet, our results support the hypothesis that the sensory processing of the cue is reduced in conditions of higher perceptual load.

Existe interesse crescente em informações científicas sobre o papel da percepção visual e da atenção visuo-espacial nos esportes. Comparamos os Tempos de Reação (TR) de atletas profissionais com os de não atletas em 5 condições de atenção visual voluntária: difusa, manifesta, encoberta (à esquerda e à direita do ponto de fixação) e dividida. Os atletas apresentaram TR médios menores que os não atletas em todos os experimentos. Diferenças em TRs a estímulos visuais dentro e fora dos focos atencionais não foram significativas (p>0,31), exceto na condição de atenção manifesta (p=0,0001), mas foram ligeiramente maiores em atletas. Tais diferenças foram significativas em experimentos com outros grupos de interesse do nosso laboratório, provavelmente devido a pequenas mudanças no protocolo experimental (detalhes nas instruções fornecidas aos voluntários). Importante salientar que na literatura existem resultados contraditórios na comparação entre atletas e não atletas em tarefas atencionais, provavelmente também por pequenas diferenças nos protocolos experimentais. / There is growing interest in scientific information on the role of visual perception and visuospatial attention in sports. We compared Reaction Times (RT) of professional athletes with those of non-athletes in 5 conditions of voluntary visual attention: diffuse, manifest, covert (to the right and to the left of gaze) and divided. Athletes showed shorter mean RT than non-athletes in all experiments. Differences in RT to visual stimuli inside and outside the attentional focus were not significant (p>0,31), except under manifest attention conditions (p=0,0001), but where slightly higher in athletes. These differences were significant in experiments on other populations of interest in our laboratory, probably due to small changes in the experimental protocol (details in the instructions provided to volunteers). It is important to note that the literature presents contradictory results in the comparison between athletes and non-athletes in attentional tasks, again, probably due to small differences in experimental protocol.

Há evidências que os mecanismos responsáveis pela atenção visuoespacial estão assimetricamente representados nos dois hemisférios cerebrais. A existência de uma diferença interlateral da atenção voluntária foi investigada em uma tarefa de escolha simples e de escolha vai/não-vai. Estímulos pistas centrais unilaterais (indicando lado esquerdo ou direito do espaço) e estímulos pistas centrais bilaterais (indicando ambos os lados do espaço) foram utilizados para direcionar a atenção. Tempos de reação a um alvo quando as pistas eram válidas, inválidas e bilaterais foram avaliados. O efeito atencional (diferença entre o tempo de reação quando a pista era inválida e o tempo de reação quando a pista era válida) foi maior quando a pista indicava o lado direito do que quando indicava o lado esquerdo. Quando a pista ocorria bilateralmente, o tempo de reação foi menor no lado direito do que no lado esquerdo. A atenção voluntária tende a favorecer o lado direito do espaço particularmente quando a discriminação da forma do alvo é requerida. / There is evidence that the mechanisms responsible for visuospatial attention are asymmetrically represented in the two cerebral hemispheres. The existence of an interlateral difference of voluntary attention was investigated in a simple choice reaction time task and in a go/no-go choice reaction time task. Unilateral central cues (indicating left side or right side) and bilateral central cue (indicating both sides of space) were used to control attention. Reaction time to a visual target stimulus when the cue was valid, invalid or bilateral was evaluated. The attentional effect (difference between reaction time when the cue was invalid minus when the cue was valid) was larger when the cue indicated the right side than when it indicated the left. When the cue occurred bilaterally, reaction time was faster on the right hemifield. The voluntary attention tends to favor the right side of space particularly when discrimination of the shape of the target stimulus is required.

Most traffic accidents are caused by human factors. The design of the driver environment has proven essential to facilitate safe driving. With the advent of new devices such as mobile telephones, GPS-navigation and similar systems the workload on the driver has been even more complicated. There is an obvious need for tools supporting objective evaluation of such systems, in order to design more effective and simpler driver environments. At the moment video is the most used technique for capturing the drivers visual behaviour. But the analysis of these recordings is very time consuming and only give an estimate of where the visual attention is. An automated tool for analysing visual behaviour would minimize the post processing drastically and leave more time for understanding the data. In this thesis the development of a tool for visualising where the driver’s attention is while driving the vehicle. This includes methods for playing back data stored on a hard drive, but also methods for joining data from multiple different sources.

In this thesis, we will explore direct and indirect measures of learning in a visual search task commonly called contextual cueing. In the first part, we present a review of the scientific literature on contextual cueing, in order to give the readers of this thesis a better general idea of existing evidence and open questions within this relatively new research field. The aims of our own experimental studies presented in the succeeding chapters are the following ones: (1) to replicate and extend the findings described in the various papers by Marvin Chun and various colleagues on contextual cueing of visual attention; (2) to explore the nature of memory representations underlying the observed learning effects, especially whether learning is actually implicit and whether memory representations are distinctive, episodic and instance-based or rather distributed, continuous and graded; (3) to extend the study of contextual cueing to more realistic visual stimuli, in order to test its robustness across various situations and validate its adaptive value in ecologically sound conditions;<p>and (4) to investigate whether such knowledge about the association between visual contexts and “meaningful” locations can be (automatically) transferred to other tasks, namely a change detection task.<p><p>In a first series of four experiments, we tried to replicate the documented contextual cueing effect using a wide range of various direct measures of learning (tasks that are supposed to be related to explicit knowledge) and we systematically varied the distinctiveness of context configurations to study its effect on both direct and indirect measures of learning. <p><p>We also ran a series of neural network simulations (briefly described in the general discussion of this thesis), based on a very simple association-learning mechanism, that not only account for the observed contextual cueing effect, but also yield rather specific predictions about future experimental data: contextual cueing effects should also be observed when repetitions of context configurations are not perfect, i.e. the networks were able to react to slightly distorted versions of repeating contexts in a similar way than they did to completely identical contexts. Human participants, we conjectured, should therefore (if the simple connectionist model captures some relevant aspects of the contextual cueing effect) become faster at detecting targets surrounded by context configurations that are only partially identical from trial to trial compared to those trials where the context configurations were randomly generated. These predictions were tested in a second series of experiments using pseudo-repeated context configurations, where some distractor items were either displaced from trial to trial or their orientation changed, while conserving their global layout. <p><p>In a third series of experiments, we used more realistic images of natural landscapes as background contexts to establish the robustness of the contextual cueing effect as well as its ecological relevance claimed by Chun and colleagues. We furthermore added a second task to these experiments to study whether the acquired knowledge about the background-target location associations would (automatically) transfer to another visual search task, namely a change detection task. If participants have learned that certain locations of the repeated images are “important”, since they contain the target item to look for, then changes occurring at those specific locations should lead to less “change blindness” than changes occurring at other irrelevant locations. We used two different types of instructions to introduce this second task after the visual search task, where we either stressed the link between the two tasks, i.e. telling them that remembering the “important” locations for each image could be used to find the changes faster, or we simply told them to perform the second task without any reference to the first one. <p><p>We will close this thesis with a general discussion, combining findings based on our review of the existing research literature and findings based on our own experimental explorations of the contextual cueing effect. By this we will discuss the implications of our empirical studies for the scientific investigation of contextual cueing and implicit learning, in terms of theoretical, empirical and methodological issues. / Doctorat en sciences psychologiques / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished