Made available in DSpace on 2017-07-21T14:19:25Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Andrey Orloski.pdf: 5923583 bytes, checksum: 1a18c76b30193410838467808e3fa40d (MD5) Previous issue date: 2015-09-04 / This paper describes a procedure for self-localization of mobile and autonomous agrobots in greenhouses, that is, the determination of the robot's position relative to a coordinate system,using procedures and computational resources. The proposed procedure uses computer vision techniques to recognize markers objects in the greenhouse and, from them, estimate the coordinate of the robot in a parallel plane to the surface of the stove. The detection of the presence of markers in the scene is performed using the SURF algorithm. To enable the estimation of coordinates, based on data contained in a single image, the method of Rahman et al. (2008), which consists in etermining the distance between a camera and a marker object has been extended to allow the coordinate calculation. The performance of the procedure was evaluated in three experiments. In the first experiment, the objective was to verify, in the laboratory, the influence of image resolution on accuracy. The results indicate that by reducing the image resolution, the range of the process is impaired for the recognition of the markers. These results also show that by reducing the resolution, the error in estimating the coordinates relative to the distance between the camera and the marker increases. The second experiment ran a test that evaluates the computational performance of the SURF algorithm, in terms of computing time, in the image processing. This is important because agrobots usually need to perform tasks that require the processing power in real time. The results of this test indicate that the efficiency of the procedure drops with the increase of image resolution. A second test compared the processing time of two implementations of the algorithm. One explores a sequential version of the SURF algorithm and another uses a parallel implementation. The results of this test suggest that the parallel implementation is more efficient in all tested resolutions, with an almost constant proportionate improvement.The third experiment was performed in a greenhouse to evaluate the performance of the proposed procedure in the environment for which it was designed. Field results were similar to the laboratory, but indicate that lighting variations require parameter settings of the SURF algorithm. / Este trabalho descreve um procedimento para autolocalização de agrobots móveis e autônomos em casas de vegetação. Isto é, a determinação da posição do robô em relação a um sistema de coordenadas, usando procedimentos e recursos computacionais. O procedimento proposto emprega técnicas de visão computacional para reconhecer objetos marcadores na casa de vegetação e, a partir deles, estimar a coordenada do robô em um plano paralelo a superfície da estufa. A detecção da presença dos marcadores na cena é realizada através do algoritmo SURF. Para viabilizar a estimativa das coordenadas, a partir de dados contidos em uma única imagem, o método de Rahman et al. (2008), que consiste em determinar a distância entre uma câmera e um objeto marcador, foi estendido para permitir o cômputo de coordenadas. O desempenho do procedimento proposto foi avaliado em três experimentos. No primeiro experimento, o objetivo foi verificar, em laboratório, a influência da resolução da imagem sobre a precisão. Os resultados indicam que, ao reduzir a resolução da imagem, o alcance do procedimento é prejudicado para reconhecimento dos marcadores. Estes resultados também mostram que, ao reduzir a resolução, o erro na estimativa das coordenadas em relação à distância entre a câmera e o marcador aumenta. O segundo experimento executou um teste que avalia o desempenho computacional do algoritmo SURF, em termos de tempo de computação, no processamento das imagens. Isto é importante pois agrobots usualmente precisam executar tarefas que demandam capacidade de processamento em tempo real. Os resultados deste teste indicam que a eficiência do procedimento cai com o aumento da resolução da imagem. Um segundo teste comparou o tempo de processamento de duas implementações do algoritmo. Uma que explora uma versão sequencial do algoritmo SURF e outra que usa uma implementação paralela. Os resultados deste teste sugerem que a implementação paralela foi mais eficiente em todas as resoluções testadas, apresentando uma melhora proporcional quase constante. O terceiro experimento foi realizado em uma casa de vegetação com objetivo de avaliar o desempenho do procedimento proposto no ambiente para o qual foi projetado. Os resultados de campo se mostraram semelhantes aos do laboratório, mas indicam que variações de iluminação exigem ajustes de parâmetros do algoritmo SURF.

Les dernières années, la taille des collections vidéo a connu une forte augmentation. La recherche et la navigation efficaces dans des telles collections demande une indexation avec des termes pertinents, ce qui nous amène au sujet de cette thèse, l’indexation sémantique des vidéos. Dans ce contexte, le modèle Sac de Mots (BoW), utilisant souvent des caractéristiques SIFT ou SURF, donne de bons résultats sur les images statiques. Notre première contribution est d’améliorer les résultats des descripteurs SIFT/SURF BoW sur les vidéos en pré-traitant les vidéos avec un modèle de rétine humaine, ce qui rend les descripteurs SIFT/SURF BoW plus robustes aux dégradations vidéo et qui leurs donne une sensitivité à l’information spatio-temporelle. Notre deuxième contribution est un ensemble de descripteurs BoW basés sur les trajectoires. Ceux-ci apportent une information de mouvement et contribuent vers une description plus riche des vidéos. Notre troisième contribution, motivée par la disponibilité de descripteurs complémentaires, est une fusion tardive qui détermine automatiquement comment combiner un grand ensemble de descripteurs et améliore significativement la précision moyenne des concepts détectés. Toutes ces approches sont validées sur les bases vidéo du challenge TRECVid, dont le but est la détection de concepts sémantiques visuels dans un contenu multimédia très riche et non contrôlé. / During the last years, we have witnessed a great increase in the size of digital video collections. Efficient searching and browsing through such collections requires an indexing according to various meaningful terms, bringing us to the focus of this thesis, the automatic semantic indexing of videos. Within this topic, the Bag of Words (BoW) model, often employing SIFT or SURF features, has shown good performance especially on static images. As our first contribution, we propose to improve the results of SIFT/SURF BoW descriptors on videos by pre-processing the videos with a model of the human retina, thereby making these descriptors more robust to video degradations and sensitivite to spatio-temporal information. Our second contribution is a set of BoW descriptors based on trajectories. These give additional motion information, leading to a richer description of the video. Our third contribution, motivated by the availability of complementary descriptors, is a late fusion approach that automatically determines how to combine a large set of descriptors, giving a high increase in the average precision of detected concepts. All the proposed approaches are validated on the TRECVid challenge datasets which focus on visual concept detection in very large and uncontrolled multimedia content.

The study presented in this thesis discusses the topic of ASRs through the use of a specific case study constructed at Boscombe, UK. With the main aim to provide an impartial and independent study into the environmental, social and economic impacts of an ASR. The research presented is therefore multidisciplinary in nature, the separate components utilise key techniques from the geophysical, numerical modelling and socio-economic disciplines are combined to present a significant contribution to the knowledge and understanding of ASRs. Whilst previous studies have focused on one of these disciplines, there are no independent detailed studies of a constructed ASR utilising an multidisciplinary approach. The ASR concept and structures are still in their development infancy, the subject has received cursory independent review in the literature. There have been few successful projects, those that have survived structurally in the ocean are not being used primarily for surfing. The Boscombe ASR is an example of high overspend, poor management and construction, loss of geotextile SFC and users deem the project a failure. The consequences of not correctly planning, managing and overseeing the construction has resulted in a poorly viewed project of limited success. All stages of this project could have benefited from thoughtful planning, thereby avoiding this outcome. If lessons are to be learnt from this project then the planning and management are key areas of the process that need addressing. Ensuring that any future ASR projects are securely integrated with the coastal zone management plan will provide sustainability and success. The DPSIR framework approach can be used to highlight and address the causes of problems in the project. This framework enables the various disciplines to be discussed in relation to each other; links can be identified between the environmental, social and economic impacts of the ASR construction. Strict protocols will increase the success of any ASR project. The final crest height of the Boscombe ASR was 0.5 m higher than the final design height, this is a fundamental design flaw that should not be occurring in modern coastal engineering practice. It is suggested that guidelines are written based on this research for the design and construction process of an ASR. The recommendations and guidelines for ASR monitoring are provided by this research. The emphasis for future projects should lie in the final design and in monitoring, baseline field data should be collected to understand the environmental state change and socio-economic impacts. Planning and government proposals should be accompanied by extensive stakeholder engagement ensuring transparency for the project and ownership within the coastal community. The exclusion of stakeholders at key decision points created distrust and misunderstanding towards the Boscombe ASR project. Avoiding unrealistic expectations within the surfing community and wider coastal community was discussed throughout this research, and by others in the literature. This research agrees with these statements, the issue of poor surfability would be improved by a greater area to manipulate the bathymetry. However this would come at a greatly increased cost in geotextile SFCs, which the current construction method is certainly not capable of delivering successfully. It would be recommended in this case that an alternative construction material was used that is resilient to the marine environment and readily adaptable given poor performance. Further testing of materials, both geotextile SFCs and alternatives, are required for the successful advancement of ASR technology.

Ingeniero Civil Eléctrico / La revisión sistemática de la prensa es una importante herramienta para el análisis de presencia de marcas y desarrollo de estrategias publicitarias, el monitoreo de estos medios tradicionalmente es realizado por operadores que manualmente extraen la información. Este trabajo tiene como objetivo presentar un novedoso sistema de detección automática de publicidad sobre imágenes procedentes de diarios y revistas, dentro del marco del proyecto IntelliMEDIA, llevado a cabo por el startup chileno CPDLabs. La metodología para detectar anuncios publicitarios se basa en un modelamiento específico de la estructura de la prensa escrita, permitiendo llegar a obtener una estimación del costo de los anuncios detectados. Para ello se separa el problema en 4 bloques: Preprocesamiento que separa el texto de las imágenes dentro de la página. Detección de logos que busca logos dentro de la página. Detección de publicidad que identifica el anuncio publicitario al que pertenece el logo y finalmente una etapa de tarificación que entrega una estimación del costo asociado al espacio publicitario. El problema es abordado principalmente mediante tres estrategias: Primero la representación de la imagen en descriptores locales, que permite calzar características similares entre imágenes. Segundo, la estrategia de detección de objetos Viola-Jones, algoritmo de machine learning que genera un clasificador en base a un conjunto de imágenes de entrenamiento. La última estrategia es comparar histogramas de color permitiendo integrar información de color a la clasificación. Para medir el desempeño de dichas estrategias se desarrolla un marco de evaluación, que consiste en una base de validación de 20.000 páginas de diario con 27 logos marcados, para así medir el desempeño de las distintas estrategias y configuraciones de parámetros, encontrar una solución eficaz para el problema y analizar las fortalezas y debilidades de los distintos métodos. Los resultados demuestran que la solución es viable y es posible detectar logos mediante descriptores locales y Viola-Jones, logrando desempeños mayores al 90%. Por lo tanto IntelliMediA puede llegar a ser una manera eficaz y eficiente de extraer información publicitaria automáticamente de prensa escrita.

This work describes the transportation of excess sports equipment by air travel in particular with regard to the liability of air carriers in case of destruction, loss, damage or delay. Increased attention is paid to transportation to specific surf destinations, e.g. Canary Islands and island of Bali in Indonesia. The aim is to confirm or refute the unsatisfactory situation in the field of transportation of excess sports equipment by air travel, own survey was carried out for this purpose.

The primary purpose of this ethnographic study is to contextualize Mexican American surfers experiences with sport as a lens into race, gender and class relations. Specifically, it seeks to understand how a history of gender, race, and class oppression has played out in this understudied terrain of sports. This study offers empirical insight into the ways in which Mexican Americans navigate and (un)successfully infiltrate predominantly white, male, middle-class sporting arenas. In this study I also examine the relationship between access and barriers, specifically how access to public recreational spaces are constricted by participants’ real and imagined barriers. By exploring Mexican American surfers’ everyday experiences, I unearthed the varying ways Mexican American surfers experienced discrimination and marginalization across intersecting and interlocking identities.

Como o corpo humano é concebido, percebido e publicado em suas relações com a natureza, por meio das práticas corporais de aventura em meios naturais, no caso específico, os praticantes do surfe e suas correlações com a visão de mundo e demais aspectos da cultura são os questionamentos centrais deste estudo, analisando a percepção e o ponto de vista a partir da perspectiva ético-existencial e do discurso oral e performático. A ludicidade na construção social desta atividade contemporânea, os elementos da subjetividade e da estrutura de significados resumem esta possível tentativa de (re)aproximação com a natureza. Diante do pressuposto de que o desenvolvimento tecnológico e a estrutura da vida urbana criaram um distanciamento entre homem e natureza e com isso uma possível desconexão entre o homem e sua natureza interna, os praticantes de tais atividades utilizam como elemento discursivo da simbologia moderna o cuidado de si e do outro por meio da integração total com meio ambiente. O hommo ludens pode estar reorientando, através da emoção e da crença no mundo natural, ações com a natureza e o socioambiente no qual está inserido. O local escolhido para a realização desta pesquisa etnográfica foi o município de Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, mais especificamente a sua região insular, devido suas características naturais e a grande quantidade de indivíduos que se dedicam à prática do surfe. / The way the human body is conceived, understood and published in their relations with nature, through bodily practices of adventure in the natural environment, in this specific case, the surfers and the correlations with their understanding of the world around them and other aspects of the culture are the central questions of this study, also analyzing the perception and the view from the ethical and existential perspective of the oral and performative discourse. The playfulness in the social construction of this contemporary activity, the elements of subjectivity and the structure of significance summarize this possible attempt to (re) approach to nature. Assuming that the technological development and urban life routine have created a gap between man and nature and thus a possible disconnection between the man and his inner nature, the practitioners of such activities use as a discursive element the modern symbology of self-care and caring about the others through the full integration with the environment. The hommo ludens may be redirecting, through emotion and belief in the natural world, actions with the nature and the social environment in which they are inserted. The site chosen for this ethnographic research was Florianópolis city, in Santa Catarina State, more specifically its insular region, because it’s natural characteristics and the large number of individuals who are dedicated to surfing there.

Garbage collectors (GCs) automate the problem of deciding when objects are no longer reachable and therefore should be reclaimed, however, there currently exists no automated process for the design of a correct garbage collector. Formal models exist that prove the correctness of individual GCs; more general models describe a wider range of GCs but do not prove their correctness or provide a concrete instantiation process. The lack of a formal model means that GCs have been designed in an ad-hoc manner, published without proof of correctness and with bugs; it also means that it is difficult to apply experience gained from one implementation to the design of another. This thesis presents Surf, an abstract model of distributed garbage collection that bridges the gap between expressibility and specificity: it can describe a wide range of GCs and contains a proof of correctness that defines a list of requirements that must be fulfilled. Surf’s design space and its requirements for correctness provide a process that may be followed to analyse an existing collector or create a new GC. Surf predicts the abstract behaviour of GCs; this thesis evaluates those predictions in light of the understood behaviour of published GCs to confirm the accuracy of the model. A distributed persistent implementation of the Train Algorithm is created as an instantiation of Surf and the model is used to analyse progress in the GC and drive the design of a partition selection policy that provides a lower bound on progress and therefore reduces the GC’s complexity to completeness. Tests with mesh data structures from finite element analysis confirm the progress predictions from Surf. Published GCs cluster mostly in one corner of the Surf design space so this thesis explores the design of a GC at an unoccupied design point: the Tram Algorithm. Analysis via Surf leads to the prediction that Trams are capable of discovering topology in the live object graph that approximately identifies the strongly connected components, permitting O(1) timeliness that is unique to the Tram Algorithm. / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Computer Science, 2008

Sea water intake structures submerged in the surf zone are used to provide water for cooling processes in large facilities such as power plants and refineries. Structures submerged in the surf zone are subject to large forces from breaking waves. To study these forces induced from realistic sea state conditions, a physical model of an intake structure submerged in the wave breaking zone was constructed and subjected to a wide spectrum of regular and irregular waves. The model structure was designed in a manner so force measurement could be isolated to separate components of the structure. The data of peak forces on the structure was analyzed for correlations with varying irregular wave properties. Using the results of forcing on the structure from regular wave tests, drag and inertia coefficients for use in the Morison equation were determined for each separate component and configuration of the structure. These force coefficients were plotted against various wave properties to analyze correlations with wave conditions. Finally, the force coefficients for the structure were used with the Morison equation and current data from the experiments to successfully model forcing on the structure during irregular wave tests.

Park management at Padre Island National Seashore (PAIS) actively continues to modify the General Management Plan to maintain the safety of the increasing numbers of visitors and protect natural resources. When changes conflict with anglers' current usage of the beach, park management receives vocal opposition from local and visiting anglers who do not want their long-standing rights to the beach to be affected. To better inform management decisions and policies surrounding the beach area, this qualitative thesis research used ethnographic interviews to address the following key objectives: (1) Understand the relationship between surf anglers and the beach at PAIS, (2) Identify the main issues, concerns, needs, and expectations of the surf anglers at PAIS, (3) Describe the relationship between surf anglers and the National Park Service (NPS), and (4) Determine key areas of conflict and tension surrounding NPS management of the beach. At Padre Island National Seashore (PAIS), referred to by local anglers as "the PINS," anglers connect to the beach because of memories experienced there, a heritage of use, a sense of serenity and spirituality, and camaraderie. Those who have a long-standing relationship to the beach at the PINS, in some cases multi-generational, feel a sense of guardianship and even ownership over the beach. Many surf anglers at the PINS experience the outdoors through a family heritage of fishing, connect to others through fishing, and promote conservation practices through media, camaraderie, and local knowledge. Angler feelings towards the NPS range from distrust to an appreciation of the role of the NPS in protecting their sacred fishing place. Areas of conflict and tension stem from anglers' safety concerns, new regulations that challenge and threaten their traditional values and experiences associated with surf fishing, and a lack of communication and inclusion of anglers in the National Seashore's decision-making processes. To better manage conflict surrounding management issues on the beach at PAIS, this thesis suggests that park managers (1) reinstate public meetings; (2) utilize moderated roundtable discussion at public meetings; and (3) involve the scientific community, appropriate stakeholder groups, and angler knowledge in informing decisions and new regulations.