Current two dimensional face recognition methods rely on visible photometric or geometric attributes that are present in the intensity image. In many of these approaches a technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) is extensively used. PCA extracts the maximum intensity variations from the set of input images in the form of "eigen" faces which are used as a feature vector. In these approaches the intensity images used were mostly that of the subject's frontal face, which yielded promising results after doing PCA. These approaches however fail in the presence of facial expression, unstable lighting conditions and artifacts such as make-up, glasses etc. Thus, it is desirable to establish a new biometric source that will be least affected bythe afore mentioned factors. This study describes a face recognition method that is designed based on the consideration of anatomical and biomechanical characteristics of facial tissues. During facial expressions such as smile, frown, anger etc, various muscles get activated in tandem. A strain pattern inferred from a face expression can reveal an individual's signature associated with the underlying anatomical structure, and thus has the potential for face recognition. In this study, the strain is computed by measuring the displacement of a point on the face that results from a facial expression such as opening the mouth. The information provided by the change in the depth value for the face across the open and close mouth frames does not provide any information required for computing the strain maps, because the strain map depends on the relative displacements of two points on the face, which remains same with rigid motions of the face such as rotation and translation. Hence the information in the 2D spaceis sufficient to compute strain since the depth is assumed constant. The approach used to calculate strain computes the strain distribution directly using the mathematical definition of strain as the derivative of displacement in 2D space (XY plane). The strain values obtained are converted to gray scale intensity images, which are used as inputs for the intensity based PCA analysis. Experiments were conducted using 62 subjects. The data set comprised of two pairs of images for a subject: closed mouth and open mouth under bright and low light. Analysis of CMC and ROC curves indicate that the proposed strain map biometric is a promising new biometric that has the potential to improve the performance of current face recognition method. In summary, the contribution of this thesis is twofold: 1. Facial strain map proves to be promising new biometric. 2. Strain map helps increase the identification rate when used in conjunction with intensity based biometric as a multi-classifier.

The past two decades has witnessed growing interest in physics based techniques in computer vision, computer graphics and medical imaging. The main advantage of a physical model is its mathematical rigor and physical soundness, which makes it an ideal tool to study complex nonrigid motion. However, since a model based on continuum mechanics is computationally demanding, an idealized framework is often adopted where physical motion parameters are significantly simplified, which inevitably affects the accuracy and reliability of modeling results. In this study, a new modeling approach is developed that features the reconstruction of actual material properties such as the Young's modulus and the Poisson's ratio. Justified by the constitutive law and mathematical considerations, the Young's modulus is identified as a unique physical motion parameter. By imposing an adaptive smoothness constraint, the Young's modulus helps preserve the local characteristics (discontinuity) of an object's deformation, a role similar to the weighting coefficient in the study of edge-preserving visual surface reconstruction. The contribution of this work is fourfold: (1) two recovery algorithms are developed to solve the inverse elastic problem: A deterministic algorithm that is based on the Gauss-Newton method and the general cross validation, and a stochastic algorithm that is based on the constrained genetic evolution; (2) a new modeling approach is proposed that has the ability to recover nonrigid motion in terms of the physical parameters. The use of recovered parameters can be implemented within a boundary-driven motion synthesis scheme; (3) A sensitivity method is proposed to evaluate the impact of different parameters. The method uses the adjoint state equation and hence is suitable for large scale models. (4) the proposed modeling approach has been applied to burn scar assessment and face recognition.

Mental-state and emotion understanding are important constructs for successful interpretation of behaviour and interaction with others. While false-belief understanding has been the main focus of investigations into children�s mentalising over the past 30 years, we now have tasks available that allow assessment of a broader range and more advanced set of mentalising skills amongst older age groups of typically developing young people (Baron-Cohen, Jolliffe, Mortimore, & Robertson, 1997a; Baron-Cohen, O�Riordan, Stone, Jones, & Plaisted, 1999; Happé, 1994). A recent trend has seen a shift away from investigating when children attain these skills towards examining individual differences in their performance. This has included consideration of both the factors that contribute to (Carlson & Moses, 2001; Hughes & Dunn, 1997; Meins et al., 2002; Milligan, Astington, & Dack, 2007; Ruffman, Slade, & Crowe, 2002), and the factors that are influenced by (Astington & Jenkins, 2000; Cassidy, Werner, Rourke, Zubernis, & Balaraman, 2003; Diesendruck & Ben-Eliyahu, Repacholi, Slaughter, Pritchard, & Gibbs, 2003) individual differences in mental-state understanding. One of the interesting questions in this area is what are the subsequent benefits or harm that individual differences in mentalising and emotion skills hold for children�s social competence? The current study investigates young people�s growing socioemotional understanding and how it is related to their social abilities, both prosocial and antisocial. The aims were to provide information on the relations amongst advanced mental-state skills, to investigate how these skills were related to emotion understanding, and, further, to investigate how socioemotional skills were related to social competence. The current study also extended the literature by addressing these aims amongst older children. Two studies were conducted, involving children (4- to 7-years) seen on four occasions in a three-year longitudinal study, and adolescents (13- to 17-years) in a cross-sectional study. There were a number of key findings. Individual differences in children�s advanced mental-state understanding are relatively stable across time, and the relations which they show with emotion skills are more consistent when examining tasks that shared skill sets. Language plays an important mediating role in the relation between socioemotional skills, although this influence appears to decrease with age. Mental-state and emotion understanding are both important for children and adolescents� social competence. It seems that greater socioemotional abilities influence prosocial behaviours, and poorer socioemotional abilities influence antisocial behaviours. Overall, the current study provides evidence that socioemotional skills are overlapping but distinct constructs, that they show varied interactions in social settings, and that future investigations of how children come to understand and interact with others will be best served by careful consideration of appropriate measures and by including multiple aspects of children�s social cognition.

Despite the widespread use of project risk management, the results of such efforts are often underwhelming. Do project risk management practices somehow miss the point? To explore this idea I use a critical management studies framework to study project risk management. The approach prescribed in the Project Management Institute's Project Management Body of Knowledge is compared to the very different approach of a professional project manager. A theorised analysis of the difference between these approaches finds that they employ the logic of different knowledge-constitutive interests thereby making them suitable for different purposes. The study concludes with a discussion of how the results of this analysis can be presented to practitioners in a way consistent with the emancipatory agenda of critical management studies.

Estuarine ecosystems are under enormous stress due to rapid coastal developments and climate change. Proper management of these important ecosystems requires a good understanding of their key processes. In this thesis, riparian groundwater-surface water interaction is explored for an aquifer-estuary system primarily by a series of numerical experiments. The work focuses on riparian-scale groundwater flow and salinization. The overall aim of the study was to extend our understanding of aquifer-estuary exchange, which is currently centered on the lower marine estuarine reach, to middle estuaries (i.e., the estuary reach that has variable salinity). The numerical experiments were guided by previous studies and observations made from an exploratory field investigation conducted in and next to Sandy Creek, a macro-tidal estuary incised in the alluvial aquifer of the Pioneer Valley, North-eastern Australia (Longitude 49.11°, Latitude -21.27°). The following observations were made from the field investigation: Sandy Creek estuary experiences a variable salinity regime in its mid reaches that consists of periods of 1) freshwater flushing due to up catchment-derived flooding, 2) persistent freshwater conditions for at least 2 months following the flooding, 3) tidal salinity fluctuations and 4) constant near-seawater salinity; laterally extensive and disconnected aquitards were found to occur at the field site; Sandy Creek had an essentially ‘vertical’ bank slope. Numerical simulations were conducted using the finite element modeling code FEFLOW for saturated unsaturated, variable-density groundwater flow and solute transport, to examine the influence of the following factors on aquifer-estuary exchange: a tidally varying estuarine salinity and hydraulic head, a seasonal freshwater flush (i.e., estuary with freshwater and an elevated stage due to an up catchment sourced flood), near estuary aquitard layers, lateral asymmetry (about the estuary centerline) in hydraulic conductivity and regional hydraulic gradients. The simulations neglected seepage face development after numerical experiments showed that for a vertical bank estuary interacting with a sandy loam aquifer, seepage face effects on groundwater flow and associated salinity distribution were minimal. The following observations were drawn from the range of numerical experiments considered. Tidal salinity fluctuations in the estuary (varying between 0 and 1 - i.e., using a relative salinity scale where a salinity of 1 is seawater) produced flow paths and residence times that were distinctly different to the constant seawater salinity case. While the constant average 0.5 salinity case and the corresponding tidally-varying salinity case (i.e., salinity varying between 0 and 1) produced somewhat comparable results in terms of RUC and RLC (RUC represents groundwater discharge to the estuary that originated from recharge to the estuary bank and RLC groundwater discharge to the estuary that originated from recharge through the estuary bed), whereas flow paths and the total salt mass in the aquifer differed. Freshwater flushing simulations indicated that the near-estuary aquifer responds rapidly to a 2-day ‘wet season’ flushing event with a short-lived freshwater lens created through freshening of the hyporheic zone. Annual cycling of the seasonal flushing led to significant disruption of the estuary water circulation in the aquifer thereby impacting on residence times, transport pathways, and RUC and RLC, and acting to potentially remobilize groundwater and contaminants previously trapped in continuous and semi-continuous re-circulation cells. Although groundwater flow paths determined using tide-averaged velocity vectors were representative of flow paths from transient tidally driven flow vector field, residence times calculated from the two flow fields were markedly different. The influence of riparian scale aquitards and lateral asymmetry (about the estuary centreline) in hydraulic gradients and hydraulic conductivity on groundwater flow and associated salinity distribution was also found to be sensitive to estuarine salinity conditions. The results indicate that observations made about aquifer-estuary interaction in the lower estuary may not be directly applicable to the middle estuary. According to the simulations, tidal salinity variations in the estuary are important factors that affect hyporheic-riparian salt transport processes and that the use of a time averaged estuarine salinity as an approximation to variable salinity conditions is unsuitable for the accurate prediction of the near-estuary dynamics in middle estuaries. This study was based on a two dimensional representation of the riparian scale interaction and it is clear that future research needs to focus on the three-dimensionality of the aquifer-estuary system, incorporating spatially and temporally varying flow and transport characteristics. That is, many estuaries are tortuous and the aquifer geology spatially complex such that assumptions required for the two-dimensional section will most likely restrict application to the field. The tidal dynamics in the middle estuary is also expected to generate three dimensional aspects to the aquifer-estuary interaction. Thus further investigation that explicitly models the hydrodynamics and salt transport in the estuary and estuarine morphology is required to refine the insight provided by the simple conceptual model adopted in this study.

Les traumatismes subis à la face lors d'accidents sur la voie publique, d'activités sportives ou bien de rixes ne nuisent généralement pas à la sur-vie de l'individu mais peuvent requérir des soins coûteux et laisser des séquelles esthétiques importantes. Par ailleurs, la face joue un rôle protecteur du contenu intracrânien et sa réponse au choc conditionne les sollicitations appliquées à celui-ci.<br />En vue de prédire précisément les risques de blessures de la face et du contenu intracrânien, l'objectif de cette thèse est de développer un modèle en éléments finis de la structure osseuse de la face et du crâne pour la simulation de sa réponse au choc.<br />Une première partie du travail a consisté à construire le maillage d'une structure osseuse cranio-faciale à partir de coupes scanner de tête. Le choix d'un maillage en éléments de type plaque, de densité suffisante pour représenter fidèlement la géométrie complexe de cette structure osseuse et d'épaisseur variable, a été fait.<br />L'hypothèse d'un matériau osseux homogène et isotrope a été choisie pour l'ensemble de la structure cranio-faciale. Des essais de flexion statique sur des échantillons d'os crânien, associés à leur simulation numé-rique et une méthode d'identification, ont permis de définir les propriétés élasto-plastiques de ce matériau. Les résultats se situent correctement par rapport aux intervalles de valeurs de la littérature.<br />La réponse du modèle cranio-facial a été validée sous sollicita-tions statiques. Pour cela des essais spécifiques de compression de la face ont été réalisés sur pièce anatomique. Les courbes globales effort - déplacement expérimentale et numérique ont été comparées pour « calibrer » les propriétés du matériau. La réponse du modèle a ensuite été validée par comparaison du champ de déplacement mesuré expérimentalement par une méthode de corrélation d'images et obtenu par simulation.<br />Le modèle ainsi validé en statique a été évalué sous sollicitations dynamiques. Sa réponse au choc a été comparée aux résultats d'un impact sur la face réalisé spécifiquement. La réponse au choc globale du modèle est similaire à celle enregistrée expérimentalement.<br />Plusieurs perspectives d'exploitation de ce modèle sont envisa-geables dans le domaine du choc ou celui de la chirurgie. En particulier, il aidera à définir des critères de blessures de la tête en cas de choc sur la face.

<p>Faces constitute one of the most important stimuli for humans. Studies show that women recognize more faces than men, and that females are particularly able to recognize female faces, thus exhibiting an own-sex bias. In the present thesis, three empirical studies investigated the generality of sex differences in face recognition and the female own-sex bias. <i>Study I</i> explored men’s and women’s face recognition performance for Bangladeshi and Swedish female and male faces of adults and children. Result showed sex differences, favoring women, for all face categories. <i>Study II </i>assessed boys’ and girls’ ability to recognize female and male faces from two age- and ethnic groups. The result demonstrated that girls recognize more faces than boys do, but that no sex differences were present for Swedish male faces. The results from <i>Study I</i> and <i>II</i> consistently demonstrate that females show reliable own-sex biases independent of whether the female faces were young, old, or of Bangladeshi or Swedish origin. In an attempt to explain the mechanisms of sex differences in face recognition and the female own-sex bias, <i>Study III</i> investigated men’s and women’s recognition performance for androgynous faces, either labeled “men”, “women”, or “faces”. The result showed that women told to remember “women” recognized more faces than women told to remember faces labeled “men” or “faces”, and that sex differences were present for androgynous faces, regardless of the label. Based on these findings, it is suggested that females’ attention is in particular directed towards other females, resulting in an own-sex bias. It is also suggested that there may be a difference in females’ and males’ orientation toward other individuals. This difference can have a biological base, which together with socialization may result in sex differences in face recognition. </p>

<p>Computer animated faces have found their way into a wide variety of areas. Starting from entertainment like computer games, through television and films to user interfaces using “talking heads”. Animated faces are also becoming popular in web applications in form of human-like assistants or newsreaders. </p><p>This thesis presents a few aspects of dealing with human face animations, namely: editing, playing and transmitting such animations. It describes a standard for handling human face animations, the MPEG-4 Face Animation, and shows the process of designing, implementing and evaluating applications compliant to this standard. </p><p>First, it presents changes introduced to the existing components of the Visage|toolkit package for dealing with facial animations, offered by the company Visage Technologies AB. It also presents the process of designing and implementing of an application for editing facial animations compliant to the MPEG-4 Face Animation standard. Finally, it discusses several approaches to the problem of streaming facial animations over the Internet or the Local Area Network (LAN).</p>

<p>The purpose of this master’s thesis was to study the possibility to use computer vision methods to detect and classify objects in the front passenger seat in a car. This work presents different approaches to solve this problem and evaluates the usefulness of each technique. The classification information should later be used to modulate the speed and the force of the airbag, to be able to provide each occupant with optimal protection and safety.</p><p>This work shows that computer vision has a great potential in order to provide data, which may be used to perform reliable occupant classification. Future choice of method to use depends on many factors, for example costs and requirements on the system from laws and car manufacturers. Further, evaluation and tests of the methods in this thesis, other methods, the ABE approach and post-processing of the results should also be made before a reliable classification algorithm may be written.</p>

<p>The WinCandide application, a platform for face tracking and model based coding, had become out of date and needed to be upgraded. This report is based on the work of investigating possible open source GUIs and computer vision tool kits that could replace the old ones that are unsupported. Multi platform GUIs are of special interest.</p>