6 Abstract This thesis focuses on the identification and quantification of volatile metabolites in the exhaled breath that might be used as possible biomarkers of Gastroesophageal Reflux Disease. Animal tissue samples were exposed to conditions simulating the gastric environment to identify specific volatile compounds that would be chosen for real-time quantification in exhaled breath of GERD patients and healthy controls using selected ion flow tube mass spectrometry. Solid phase microextraction, was used in combination with gas chromatography mass spectrometry, for qualitative analyses of the headspace of these samples. Only acetic acid was significantly elevated and so it has been elected for the quantitative analysis in the breath of the patients. The median concentration of acetic acid measured by SIFT-MS in the exhaled breath of twenty-two GERD patients was found to be higher (85 ppbv) in comparison to the control group (31 ppbv). The results show that breath acetic acid could be valuable marker for GERD diagnosis and monitoring.

LKAB has a mineshaft trolley used for scanning mineshafts. It is suspended down into a mineshaft by wire, scanning the mineshaft on both descent and ascent using two LiDAR (Light Detection And Ranging) sensors and an IMU (Internal Measurement Unit) used for tracking the position. With good tracking, one could use the LiDAR scans to create a three-dimensional model of the mineshaft which could be used for monitoring, planning and visualization in the future. Tracking with IMU is very unstable since most IMUs are susceptible to disturbances and will drift over time; we strive to track the movement using monocular visual odometry instead. Visual odometry is used to track movement based on video or images. It is the process of retrieving the pose of a camera by analyzing a sequence of images from one or multiple cameras. The mineshaft trolley is also equipped with one camera which is filming the descent and ascent and we aim to use this video for tracking. We present a simple algorithm for visual odometry and test its tracking on multiple datasets being: KITTI datasets of traffic scenes accompanied by their ground truth trajectories, mineshaft data intended for the mineshaft trolley operator and self-captured data accompanied by an approximate ground truth trajectory. The algorithm is feature based, meaning that it is focused on tracking recognizable keypoints in sequent images. We compare the performance of our algortihm by tracking the different datasets using two different feature detection and description systems, ORB and SIFT. We find that our algorithm performs well on tracking the movement of the KITTI datasets using both ORB and SIFT whose largest total errors of estimated trajectories are $3.1$ m and $0.7$ m for ORB and SIFT respectively in $51.8$ m moved. This was compared to their ground truth trajectories. The tracking of the self-captured dataset shows by visual inspection that the algorithm can perform well on data which has not been as carefully captured as the KITTI datasets. We do however find that we cannot track the movement with the current data from the mineshaft. This is due to the algorithm finding too few matching features in sequent images, breaking the pose estimation of the visual odometry. We make a comparison of how ORB and SIFT finds features in the mineshaft images and find that SIFT performs better by finding more features. The mineshaft data was never intended for visual odometry and therefore it is not suitable for this purpose either. We argue that the tracking could work in the mineshaft if the visual conditions are made better by focusing on more even lighting and camera placement or if it can be combined with other sensors such as an IMU, that assist the visual odometry when it fails.

L’objectif de cette thèse est de trouver de nouvelles méthodes de compression sémantique compatible avec un encodeur classique tel que H.264/AVC. . L’objectif principal est de maintenir la sémantique et non pas la qualité globale. Un débit cible de 300 kb/s a été fixé pour des applications de sécurité et de défense Pour cela une chaine complète de compression a dû être réalisée. Une étude et des contributions sur les modèles de saillance spatio-temporel ont été réalisées avec pour objectif d’extraire l’information pertinente. Pour réduire le débit, une méthode de redimensionnement dénommée «seam carving » a été combinée à un encodeur H.264/AVC. En outre, une métrique combinant les points SIFT et le SSIM a été réalisée afin de mesurer la qualité des objets sans être perturbée par les zones de moindre contenant la majorité des artefacts. Une base de données pouvant être utilisée pour des modèles de saillance mais aussi pour de la compression est proposée avec des masques binaires. Les différentes approches ont été validées par divers tests. Une extension de ces travaux pour des applications de résumé vidéo est proposée. / The objective of this thesis is to find new methods for semantic video compatible with a traditional encoder like H.264/AVC. The main objective is to maintain the semantic and not the global quality. A target bitrate of 300 Kb/s has been fixed for defense and security applications. To do that, a complete chain of compression has been proposed. A study and new contributions on a spatio-temporal saliency model have been done to extract the important information in the scene. To reduce the bitrate, a resizing method named seam carving has been combined with the H.264/AVC encoder. Also, a metric combining SIFT points and SSIM has been created to measure the quality of objects without being disturbed by less important areas containing mostly artifacts. A database that can be used for testing the saliency model but also for video compression has been proposed, containing sequences with their manually extracted binary masks. All the different approaches have been thoroughly validated by different tests. An extension of this work on video summary application has also been proposed.

This thesis report aims to explain the research, implementation, and testing of a monocular SLAM system in an application developed by Voysys AB called Oden, as well as the making and investigation of a new data set used to test the SLAM system. Using CUDASIFT to find and match feature points, OpenCV to compute the initial guess, and the Ceres Solver to optimize the results. / <p>Examensarbetet är utfört vid Institutionen för teknik och naturvetenskap (ITN) vid Tekniska fakulteten, Linköpings universitet</p>

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Stereopsis or Stereo vision is a technique that has been extensively used in computer vision these days helps to percept the 3D structure and distance of a scene from two images taken at different viewpoints, precisely the same way a human being visualizes anything using both eyes. The research involves object matching by extracting features from images and includes some preliminary tasks like camera calibration, correspondence and reconstruction of images taken by a stereo vision unit and 3D construction of an object. The main goal of this research work is to estimate the position and the orientation of a front loader bucket of an autonomous mobile robot configured in a work machine name 'Avant', which consists a stereo vision unit and several other sensors and is designed for outdoor operations like excavation. Several image features finding algorithms, including the most prominent two, SIFT and SURF has been considered for the image matching and object recognition. Both algorithms find interest points in an image in different ways which apparently accelerates the feature extraction procedure, but still the time requires for matching in both cases is left as an important issue to be resolved. As the machine requires to do some loading and unloading tasks, dust and other particles could be a major obstacle for recognizing the bucket at workspace, also it has been observed that the hydraulic arm and other equipment comes inside the FOV of the cameras which also makes the task much challenging. The concept of using markers has been considered as a solution to these problems. Moreover, the outdoor environment is very different from indoor environment and object matching is far more challenging due to some factors like light, shadows, environment, etc. that change the features inside a scene very rapidly. Although the work focuses on position and orientation estimation, optimum utilization of stereo vision like environment perception or ground modeling can be an interesting avenue of future research / <p>Validerat; 20101230 (ysko)</p>