In the field of video surveillance, vast amounts of data are gathered each day. To be able to identify what occurred during a recorded session, a human annotator has to go through the footage and annotate the different events. This is a tedious and expensive process that takes up a large amount of time. With the rise of machine learning and in particular deep learning, the field of both image and video captioning has seen large improvements. Contrastive Language-Image Pretraining is capable of efficiently learning a multimodal space, thus able to merge the understanding of text and images. This enables visual features to be extracted and processed into text describing the visual content. This thesis presents a system for extracting and ranking important events from surveillance videos as well as a way of automatically generating a description of the event. By utilizing the pre-trained models X-CLIP and GPT-2 to extract visual information from the videos and process it into text, a video captioning model was created that requires very little training. Additionally, the ranking system was implemented to extract important parts in video, utilizing anomaly detection as well as polynomial regression. Captions were evaluated using the metrics BLEU, METEOR, ROUGE and CIDEr, and the model receives scores comparable to other video captioning models. Additionally, captions were evaluated by experts in the field of video surveillance, who rated them on accuracy, reaching up to 62.9%, and semantic quality, reaching 99.2%. Furthermore the ranking system was also evaluated by the experts, where they agree with the ranking system 78% of the time. / Inom videoövervakning samlas stora mängder data in varje dag. För att kunna identifiera vad som händer i en inspelad övervakningsvideo så måste en människa gå igenom och annotera de olika händelserna. Detta är en långsam och dyr process som tar upp mycket tid. Under de senaste åren har det setts en enorm ökning av användandet av olika maskininlärningsmodeller. Djupinlärningsmodeller har fått stor framgång när det kommer till att generera korrekt och trovärdig text. De har också använts för att generera beskrivningar för både bilder och video. Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training har gjort det möjligt att träna en multimodal rymd som kombinerar förståelsen av text och bild. Detta gör det möjligt att extrahera visuell information och skapa textbeskrivningar. Denna master uppsatts beskriver ett system som kan extrahera och ranka viktiga händelser i en övervakningsvideo samt ett automatiskt sätt att generera beskrivningar till dessa. Genom att använda de förtränade modellerna X-CLIP och GPT-2 för att extrahera visuell information och textgenerering, har en videobeskrivningsmodell skapats som endast behöver en liten mängd träning. Dessutom har ett rankingsystem implementerats för att extrahera de viktiga delarna i en video genom att använda anomalidetektion och polynomregression. Video beskrivningarna utvärderades med måtten BLEU, METOER, ROUGE och CIDEr, där modellerna får resultat i klass med andra videobeskrivningsmodeller. Fortsättningsvis utvärderades beskrivningarna också av experter inom videoövervakningsområdet där de fick besvara hur bra beskrivningarna var i måtten: beskrivningsprecision som uppnådde 62.9% och semantisk kvalité som uppnådde 99.2%. Ranknignssystemet utvärderades också av experterna. Deras åsikter överensstämde till 78% med rankningssystemet.

This thesis presents a body of work on the theme of millimetre-wave FMCW radar, for the purposes of security screening and remote sensing. First, the development of an optimised software radar signal processor will be outlined. Through use of threading and GPU acceleration, high data processing rates were achieved using standard PC hardware. The flexibility of this approach, compared to specialised hardware (e.g. DSP, FPGA etc…), allowed the processor to be rapidly adapted and has produced a significant performance increase in a number of advanced real-time radar systems. An efficient tracker was developed and was successfully deployed in live trials for the purpose of real-time wave detection in an autonomous boat control system. Automated radar operation and remote data telemetry functions were implemented in a terrain mapping radar to allow continuous monitoring of the Soufrière Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. This work concluded with the installation of the system 3 km from the volcano. Hardware modifications were made to enable coherent measurement in a number of existing radar systems, allowing phase sensitive measurements, including range-Doppler, to be performed. Sensitivity to displacements of less than 200 nm was demonstrated, which is limited by the phase noise of the system. Efficient compensation techniques are presented which correct for quadrature mixer imbalance, FMCW chirp non-linearity, and scanner drive distortions. In collaboration with the Home Office, two radar systems were evaluated for the stand-off detection of concealed objects. Automatic detection capability, based on polarimetric signatures, was developed using data gathered under controlled conditions. Algorithm performance was assessed through blind testing across a statistically significant number of subjects. A detailed analysis is presented, which evaluates the effect of clothing and object type on detection efficiency.

Recommendation systems are information filtering systems that help users effectively and efficiently explore large amount of information and identify items of interest. Accurate predictions of users' interests improve user satisfaction and are beneficial to business or service providers. Researchers have been making tremendous efforts to improve the accuracy of recommendations. Emerging trends of technologies and application scenarios, however, lead to challenges other than accuracy for recommendation systems. Three new challenges include: (1) opinion spam results in untrustworthy content and makes recommendations deceptive; (2) users prefer diversified content; (3) in some applications user behavior data may not be available to infer users' preference. This thesis tackles the above challenges. We identify features of untrustworthy commercial campaigns on a question and answer website, and adopt machine learning-based techniques to implement an adaptive detection system which automatically detects commercial campaigns. We incorporate diversity requirements into a classic theoretical model and develop efficient algorithms with performance guarantees. We propose a novel and robust approach to infer user preference profile from recommendations using copula models. The proposed approach can offer in-depth business intelligence for physical stores that depend on Wi-Fi hotspots for mobile advertisement. / Graduate / 0984 / cchenv@uvic.ca

This dissertation investigates and introduces novel algorithms, theories, and supporting frameworks to significantly improve the growing problem of Internet security. A distributed firewall and active response architecture is introduced that enables any device within a cyber environment to participate in the active discovery and response of cyber attacks. A theory of semantic association systems is developed for the general problem of knowledge discovery in data. The theory of semantic association systems forms the basis of a novel semantic path merger packet classification algorithm. The theoretical aspects of the semantic path merger packet classification algorithm are investigated, and the algorithm's hardware-based implementation is evaluated along with comparative analysis versus content addressable memory. Experimental results show that the hardware implementation of the semantic path merger algorithm significantly outperforms content addressable memory in terms of energy consumption and operational timing.

Le thème principal de cette thèse est d’étudier la détection d’anomalies dans des flux de données de grande dimension avec une application spécifique au Health Monitoring des moteurs d’avion. Dans ce travail, on considère que le problème de la détection d’anomalies est un problème d’apprentissage non supervisée. Les données modernes, notamment celles issues de la surveillance des systèmes industriels sont souvent des flux d’observations de grande dimension, puisque plusieurs mesures sont prises à de hautes fréquences et à un horizon de temps qui peut être infini. De plus, les données peuvent contenir des anomalies (pannes) du système surveillé. La plupart des algorithmes existants ne peuvent pas traiter des données qui ont ces caractéristiques. Nous introduisons d’abord un algorithme de clustering probabiliste offline dans des sous-espaces pour des données de grande dimension qui repose sur l’algorithme d’espérance-maximisation (EM) et qui est, en plus, robuste aux anomalies grâce à la technique du trimming. Ensuite, nous nous intéressons à la question du clustering probabiliste online de flux de données de grande dimension en développant l’inférence online du modèle de mélange d’analyse en composantes principales probabiliste. Pour les deux méthodes proposées, nous montrons leur efficacité sur des données simulées et réelles, issues par exemple des moteurs d’avion. Enfin, nous développons une application intégrée pour le Health Monitoring des moteurs d’avion dans le but de détecter des anomalies de façon dynamique. Le système proposé introduit des techniques originales de détection et de visualisation d’anomalies reposant sur les cartes auto-organisatrices. Des résultats de détection sont présentés et la question de l’identification des anomalies est aussi discutée. / The subject of this Thesis is to study anomaly detection in high-dimensional data streams with a specific application to aircraft engine Health Monitoring. In this work, we consider the problem of anomaly detection as an unsupervised learning problem. Modern data, especially those is-sued from industrial systems, are often streams of high-dimensional data samples, since multiple measurements can be taken at a high frequency and at a possibly infinite time horizon. More-over, data can contain anomalies (malfunctions, failures) of the system being monitored. Most existing unsupervised learning methods cannot handle data which possess these features. We first introduce an offline subspace clustering algorithm for high-dimensional data based on the expectation-maximization (EM) algorithm, which is also robust to anomalies through the use of the trimming technique. We then address the problem of online clustering of high-dimensional data streams by developing an online inference algorithm for the popular mixture of probabilistic principal component analyzers (MPPCA) model. We show the efficiency of both methods on synthetic and real datasets, including aircraft engine data with anomalies. Finally, we develop a comprehensive application for the aircraft engine Health Monitoring domain, which aims at detecting anomalies in aircraft engine data in a dynamic manner and introduces novel anomaly detection visualization techniques based on Self-Organizing Maps. Detection results are presented and anomaly identification is also discussed.

The purpose of this research is to study the detection of temporal changes between two (or more) multimodal images satellites, i.e., between two different imaging modalities acquired by two heterogeneous sensors, giving for the same scene two images encoded differently and depending on the nature of the sensor used for each acquisition. The two (or multiple) multimodal satellite images are acquired and coregistered at two different dates, usually before and after an event. In this study, we propose new models belonging to different categories of multimodal change detection in remote sensing imagery. As a first contribution, we present a new constraint scenario expressed on every pair of pixels existing in the before and after image change. A second contribution of our work is to propose a spatio-temporal textural gradient operator expressed with complementary norms and also a new filtering strategy of the difference map resulting from this operator. Another contribution consists in constructing an observation field from a pair of pixels and to infer a solution maximum a posteriori sense. A fourth contribution is proposed which consists to build a common feature space for the two heterogeneous images. Our fifth contribution lies in the modeling of patterns of change by anomalies and on the analysis of reconstruction errors which we propose to learn a non-supervised model from a training base consisting only of patterns of no-change in order that the built model reconstruct the normal patterns (non-changes) with a small reconstruction error. In the sixth contribution, we propose a pairwise learning architecture based on a pseudosiamese CNN network that takes as input a pair of data instead of a single data and constitutes two partly uncoupled CNN parallel network streams (descriptors) followed by a decision network that includes fusion layers and a loss layer in the sense of the entropy criterion. The proposed models are enough flexible to be used effectively in the monomodal change detection case. / Cette recherche a pour objet l’étude de la détection de changements temporels entre deux (ou plusieurs) images satellitaires multimodales, i.e., avec deux modalités d’imagerie différentes acquises par deux capteurs hétérogènes donnant pour la même scène deux images encodées différemment suivant la nature du capteur utilisé pour chacune des prises de vues. Les deux (ou multiples) images satellitaires multimodales sont prises et co-enregistrées à deux dates différentes, avant et après un événement. Dans le cadre de cette étude, nous proposons des nouveaux modèles de détection de changement en imagerie satellitaire multimodale semi ou non supervisés. Comme première contribution, nous présentons un nouveau scénario de contraintes exprimé sur chaque paire de pixels existant dans l’image avant et après changement. Une deuxième contribution de notre travail consiste à proposer un opérateur de gradient textural spatio-temporel exprimé avec des normes complémentaires ainsi qu’une nouvelle stratégie de dé-bruitage de la carte de différence issue de cet opérateur. Une autre contribution consiste à construire un champ d’observation à partir d’une modélisation par paires de pixels et proposer une solution au sens du maximum a posteriori. Une quatrième contribution est proposée et consiste à construire un espace commun de caractéristiques pour les deux images hétérogènes. Notre cinquième contribution réside dans la modélisation des zones de changement comme étant des anomalies et sur l’analyse des erreurs de reconstruction dont nous proposons d’apprendre un modèle non-supervisé à partir d’une base d’apprentissage constituée seulement de zones de non-changement afin que le modèle reconstruit les motifs de non-changement avec une faible erreur. Dans la dernière contribution, nous proposons une architecture d’apprentissage par paires de pixels basée sur un réseau CNN pseudo-siamois qui prend en entrée une paire de données au lieu d’une seule donnée et est constituée de deux flux de réseau (descripteur) CNN parallèles et partiellement non-couplés suivis d’un réseau de décision qui comprend de couche de fusion et une couche de classification au sens du critère d’entropie. Les modèles proposés s’avèrent assez flexibles pour être utilisés efficacement dans le cas des données-images mono-modales.

<p> This thesis presents work and simulations containing the use of Artificial Intelligence for real-time perception and real-time anomaly detection using the computer and sensors onboard an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. One goal of this research is to develop a highly accurate, high-performance computer vision system that can then be used as a framework for object detection, obstacle avoidance, motion estimation, 3D reconstruction, and vision-based GPS denied path planning. The method developed and presented in this paper integrates software and hardware techniques to reach optimal performance for real-time operations. </p> <p>This thesis also presents a solution to real-time anomaly detection using neural networks to further the safety and reliability of operations for the UAV. Real-time telemetry data from different sensors are used to predict failures before they occur. Both these systems together form the framework behind the Intelligent UAV platform, which can be rapidly adopted for different varieties of use cases because of its modular nature and on-board suite of sensors. </p>

Les dispositifs de protection de sites sensibles doivent permettre de détecter des menaces potentielles suffisamment à l’avance pour pouvoir mettre en place une stratégie de défense. Dans cette optique, les méthodes de détection et de reconnaissance d’aéronefs se basant sur des images infrarouge multispectrales doivent être adaptées à des images faiblement résolues et être robustes à la variabilité spectrale et spatiale des cibles. Nous mettons au point dans cette thèse, des méthodes statistiques de détection et de reconnaissance d’aéronefs satisfaisant ces contraintes. Tout d’abord, nous spécifions une méthode de détection d’anomalies pour des images multispectrales, combinant un calcul de vraisemblance spectrale avec une étude sur les ensembles de niveaux de la transformée de Mahalanobis de l’image. Cette méthode ne nécessite aucune information a priori sur les aéronefs et nous permet d’identifier les images contenant des cibles. Ces images sont ensuite considérées comme des réalisations d’un modèle statistique d’observations fluctuant spectralement et spatialement autour de formes caractéristiques inconnues. L’estimation des paramètres de ce modèle est réalisée par une nouvelle méthodologie d’apprentissage séquentiel non supervisé pour des modèles à données manquantes que nous avons développée. La mise au point de ce modèle nous permet in fine de proposer une méthode de reconnaissance de cibles basée sur l’estimateur du maximum de vraisemblance a posteriori. Les résultats encourageants, tant en détection qu’en classification, justifient l’intérêt du développement de dispositifs permettant l’acquisition d’images multispectrales. Ces méthodes nous ont également permis d’identifier les regroupements de bandes spectrales optimales pour la détection et la reconnaissance d’aéronefs faiblement résolus en infrarouge / Surveillance systems should be able to detect potential threats far ahead in order to put forward a defence strategy. In this context, detection and recognition methods making use of multispectral infrared images should cope with low resolution signals and handle both spectral and spatial variability of the targets. We introduce in this PhD thesis a novel statistical methodology to perform aircraft detection and classification which take into account these constraints. We first propose an anomaly detection method designed for multispectral images, which combines a spectral likelihood measure and a level set study of the image Mahalanobis transform. This technique allows to identify images which feature an anomaly without any prior knowledge on the target. In a second time, these images are used as realizations of a statistical model in which the observations are described as random spectral and spatial deformation of prototype shapes. The model inference, and in particular the prototype shape estimation, is achieved through a novel unsupervised sequential learning algorithm designed for missing data models. This model allows to propose a classification algorithm based on maximum a posteriori probability Promising results in detection as well as in classification, justify the growing interest surrounding the development of multispectral imaging devices. These methods have also allowed us to identify the optimal infrared spectral band regroupments regarding the low resolution aircraft IRS detection and classification

Financial institutions today generate a large amount of data, data that can contain interesting information to investigate to further the economic growth of said institution. There exists an interest in analyzing these points of information, especially if they are anomalous from the normal day-to-day work. However, to find these outliers is not an easy task and not possible to do manually due to the massive amounts of data being generated daily. Previous work to solve this has explored the usage of machine learning to find outliers in these financial datasets. Previous studies have shown that the pre-processing of data usually stands for a big part in information loss. This work aims to study if there is a proper balance in how the pre-processing is carried out to retain the highest amount of information while simultaneously not letting the data remain too complex for the machine learning models. The dataset used consisted of Foreign exchange transactions supplied by the host company and was pre-processed through the use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA). The main purpose of this work is to test if an ensemble of Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM), configured as autoencoders, can be used to detect outliers in the data and if the ensemble is more accurate than a single LSTM autoencoder. Previous studies have shown that Ensemble autoencoders can prove more accurate than a single autoencoder, especially when SkipCells have been implemented (a configuration that skips over LSTM cells to make the model perform with more variation). A datapoint will be considered an outlier if the LSTM model has trouble properly recreating it, i.e. a pattern that is hard to classify, making it available for further investigations done manually. The results show that the ensembled LSTM model proved to be more accurate than that of a single LSTM model in regards to reconstructing the dataset, and by our definition of an outlier, more accurate in outlier detection. The results from the pre-processing experiments reveal different methods of obtaining an optimal number of components for your data. One of those is by studying retained variance and accuracy of PCA transformation compared to model performance for a certain number of components. One of the conclusions from the work is that ensembled LSTM networks can prove very powerful, but that alternatives to pre-processing should be explored such as categorical embedding instead of PCA. / Finansinstitut genererar idag en stor mängd data, data som kan innehålla intressant information värd att undersöka för att främja den ekonomiska tillväxten för nämnda institution. Det finns ett intresse för att analysera dessa informationspunkter, särskilt om de är avvikande från det normala dagliga arbetet. Att upptäcka dessa avvikelser är dock inte en lätt uppgift och ej möjligt att göra manuellt på grund av de stora mängderna data som genereras dagligen. Tidigare arbete för att lösa detta har undersökt användningen av maskininlärning för att upptäcka avvikelser i finansiell data. Tidigare studier har visat på att förbehandlingen av datan vanligtvis står för en stor del i förlust av emphinformation från datan. Detta arbete syftar till att studera om det finns en korrekt balans i hur förbehandlingen utförs för att behålla den högsta mängden information samtidigt som datan inte förblir för komplex för maskininlärnings-modellerna. Det emphdataset som användes bestod av valutatransaktioner som tillhandahölls av värdföretaget och förbehandlades genom användning av Principal Component Analysis (PCA). Huvudsyftet med detta arbete är att undersöka om en ensemble av Long Short-Term Memory Recurrent Neural Networks (LSTM), konfigurerad som autoenkodare, kan användas för att upptäcka avvikelser i data och om ensemblen är mer precis i sina predikteringar än en ensam LSTM-autoenkodare. Tidigare studier har visat att en ensembel avautoenkodare kan visa sig vara mer precisa än en singel autokodare, särskilt när SkipCells har implementerats (en konfiguration som hoppar över vissa av LSTM-cellerna för att göra modellerna mer varierade). En datapunkt kommer att betraktas som en avvikelse om LSTM-modellen har problem med att återskapa den väl, dvs ett mönster som nätverket har svårt att återskapa, vilket gör datapunkten tillgänglig för vidare undersökningar. Resultaten visar att en ensemble av LSTM-modeller predikterade mer precist än en singel LSTM-modell när det gäller att återskapa datasetet, och då enligt vår definition av avvikelser, mer precis avvikelse detektering. Resultaten från förbehandlingen visar olika metoder för att uppnå ett optimalt antal komponenter för dina data genom att studera bibehållen varians och precision för PCA-transformation jämfört med modellprestanda. En av slutsatserna från arbetet är att en ensembel av LSTM-nätverk kan visa sig vara mycket kraftfulla, men att alternativ till förbehandling bör undersökas, såsom categorical embedding istället för PCA.

In the hope to increase the detection rate of faults in combined heat and power plant boilers thus lowering unplanned maintenance three machine learning models are constructed and evaluated. The algorithms; k-Nearest Neighbor, One-Class Support Vector Machine, and Auto-encoder have a proven track record in research for anomaly detection, but are relatively unexplored for industrial applications such as this one due to the difficulty in collecting non-artificial labeled data in the field.The baseline versions of the k-Nearest Neighbor and Auto-encoder performed very similarly. Nevertheless, the Auto-encoder was slightly better and reached an area under the precision-recall curve (AUPRC) of 0.966 and 0.615 on the trainingand test period, respectively. However, no sufficiently good results were reached with the One-Class Support Vector Machine. The Auto-encoder was made more sophisticated to see how much performance could be increased. It was found that the AUPRC could be increased to 0.987 and 0.801 on the trainingand test period, respectively. Additionally, the model was able to detect and generate one alarm for each incident period that occurred under the test period.The conclusion is that ML can successfully be utilized to detect faults at an earlier stage and potentially circumvent otherwise costly unplanned maintenance. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of room for improvements in the model and the collection of the data. / I hopp om att öka identifieringsgraden av störningar i kraftvärmepannor och därigenom minska oplanerat underhåll konstrueras och evalueras tre maskininlärningsmodeller.Algoritmerna; k-Nearest Neighbor, One-Class Support Vector Machine, och Autoencoder har bevisad framgång inom forskning av anomalidetektion, men är relativt outforskade för industriella applikationer som denna på grund av svårigheten att samla in icke-artificiell uppmärkt data inom området.Grundversionerna av k-Nearest Neighbor och Auto-encoder presterade nästan likvärdigt. Dock var Auto-encoder-modellen lite bättre och nådde ett AUPRC-värde av 0.966 respektive 0.615 på träningsoch testperioden. Inget tillräckligt bra resultat nåddes med One-Class Support Vector Machine. Auto-encoder-modellen gjordes mer sofistikerad för att se hur mycket prestandan kunde ökas. Det visade sig att AUPRC-värdet kunde ökas till 0.987 respektive 0.801 under träningsoch testperioden. Dessutom lyckades modellen identifiera och generera ett larm vardera för alla incidenter under testperioden. Slutsatsen är att ML framgångsrikt kan användas för att identifiera störningar iett tidigare skede och därigenom potentiellt kringgå i annat fall dyra oplanerade underhåll. Emellertid finns det fortfarande mycket utrymme för förbättringar av modellen samt inom insamlingen av data.