Orchard fruits and vegetable crops are vulnerable to wild birds and animals. These wild birds and animals can cause critical damage to the produce. Traditional methods of scaring away birds such as scarecrows are not long-term solutions but short-term solutions. This is a huge problem especially near areas like San Luis Obispo where there are vineyards. Bird damage can be as high as 50% for grapes being grown in vineyards. The total estimated revenue lost annually in the 10 counties in California due to bird and rodent damage to 22 selected crops ranged from $168 million to $504 million (in 2009 dollars). A more effective and permanent system needs to be put into place. Monitoring systems in agricultural settings could potentially provide a lot of data for image processing. Most current monitoring systems however don’t focus on image processing but instead really heavily on sensors. Just having sensors for certain systems work, but for birds, monitoring it is not an option because they are not domesticated like pigs, cows etc. in which most these agricultural monitoring systems work on. Birds can fly in and out of the area whereas domesticated animals can be confined to certain physical regions. The most crucial step in a smart scarecrow system would be how a threat would v be detected. Image processing methods can be effectively applied to detecting items in video footage. This paper will focus on bird detection and will analyze motion detection with image subtraction, bird detection with template matching, and bird detection with the Viola-Jones Algorithm. Of the methods considered, bird detection with the Viola-Jones Algorithm had the highest accuracy (87%) with a somewhat low false positive rate. This image processing step would ideally be incorporated with hardware (such as a microcontroller or FPGA, sensors, a camera etc.) to form a smart scarecrow system.

This master's thesis focuses on smartphone game for iOS, which uses recognition of face features and other information, which can be obtained from a smartphone's camera and sensors. This work describes a few approaches for real-time face detection and then introduces and compares possibilities for such task on iOS. Moreover, the thesis contains a draft of the final game and its levels. The game showcases various technologies in its levels such as object detection, processing an image color and others. Finally, the thesis introduces the final form of the game that is released and available on the App Store.

Description cephalometric images and the characteristic points on the skull for cephalometric analysis. Theoretical analysis of digital image editing and image before the actual detection. The range of possible methods for determining the characteristic points on the face. Experimental verification of edge detectors, Hu moments with neural networks and Haar wavelets with Viola-Jones detector.

This master thesis deals with the detection and recognition of faces in the image. The content of this thesis is a description of methods that are used for the face detection and recognition. Method described in detail is the principal component analysis (PCA). This method is subsequently used in the implementation of face recognition in video sequence. In conjunction with the implementation work describes the OpenCV library package, which was used for implementation, specifically the C ++ API. Finally described application tests were done on two different video sequences.

The project is focused on methods of obtaining large number of images of human faces. Such database should then serve as a set of data for face detection and recognition by the means of supervised machine learning. The work deals with the basic principles of supervised machine learning and available data sets for this procedure. Project contains proposals of techniques and implementation of algorithms suitable for acquiring images from video and a concept of user interface for semi-automatic acceptation and annotation of located images.

The seventeenth century in England produced a large and historically significant body of music for the viola da gamba played "lyra-way." Broadly defined, playing "lyra-way" on the viol meant playing from tablature notation in a polyphonic style. Most players of plucked strings such as lute and guitar are familiar with tablature and, as a result, have a decisive advantage when attempting to explore this music. Other factors that make lyra viol repertory potentially attractive to the modern guitarist are its chordal textures, similarities in physical properties of the instruments, and many points of connection regarding the principles of left hand technique. The purpose of this study is two-fold: 1) to illuminate the historical and cultural context of the seventeenth-century English lyra viol music in general and that of Tobias Hume (c. 1579-1645) in particular; and 2) to present an idiomatic transcription for the modern guitar of four representative pieces from Hume's 1605 collection Musicall Humours. Musicall Humours, published in London in 1605, is one of the first and most significant collections of music for the lyra viol. The collection is both ambitious and groundbreaking, being the largest repertory of solo music for the lyra viol by a single composer in the early seventeenth century. Since the modern guitar, although not as contrapuntally facile as the keyboard, is nevertheless capable of executing two- or three-voice polyphony, reconstruction of the polyphonic implications of solo lyra viol music becomes the first step in creating an idiomatic arrangement. The differences in acoustical properties and technical capabilities between the viol and the modern guitar have to be taken into consideration when deciding on the degree to which harmony must be filled in. Generally, thinner textures of the lyra viol music, when transferred directly to the guitar, tend to sound incomplete. The arranger's musical sensitivity and intimate familiarity with both instruments must guide the final stages of the transcription process.

This study investigates the possibility of applying Hatten’s theory of musical gesture to a formal system of musical analysis. Using historical antecedents and established musicological practice as a guide, a range of musical parameters in a motive length span of music are incorporated into a single gesture. This gesture forms the basic semantic unit upon which an analytical tableau structure is built, and a syntax is developed to allow derivations of new gestures; a large scale structure displaying fractal-like self-similarity is then proposed. The completed system is applied to the analysis of the ‘Adagio’ of Mozart’s Flute Quartet K.285 to test whether it can consistently be implemented and whether it produces falsifiable results while maintaining predictive power. It is found that these requirements are indeed met and that a set of inference rules can be derived suggesting that the proposed system has ample scope for further development. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M. Mus.

Text in English / Most Xhosa people experience the condition of feeling dislocated and confused when choosing a spiritual belief between Christianity and Xhosa ancestral traditions. This study uses the concept of diaspora to describe the mental dislocation that people whose culture has changed experience. This study is based on the phenomenon of diaspora as a state of identity in the contemporary cultural identity of amaXhosa, the people of the Eastern Cape Province, by exploring the interrelationship between the key concepts, namely, identity, culture, land, and home as they relate to ancestral worship and Christian practice. Two installation artworks by Bill Viola and Nicholas Hlobo were selected for a comparative analysis under the spectacle of Xhosa ancestral tradition. In this study, I seek to understand how identity is constructed within a particular geographical and ideological culture and how self-identity can be constituted through the construction, deconstruction, and reconstruction of cultural histories. Touching on notions of mediation, altar, and dislocation, this study uses Martin Buber’s concept of I AND THOU to weave the key concepts together. / Art History, Visual Arts & Musicology / M.A. (Visual Arts)

Labyrinth for piano sextet -- Music for oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon and piano -- The ride-by-nights (for treble choir or female choir) / Lai Nga Ting Ada. / Thesis (M.Mus.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1998. / Abstract also in Chinese. / Abstract in English --- p.1 / Abstract in Chinese --- p.3 / Labyrinth for Piano Sextet --- p.4 / Programme notes --- p.5 / First movement --- p.6 / Second movement --- p.17 / Third movement --- p.32 / "Music for Oboe， Clarinet, Bass Clarinet, Bassoon and Piano" --- p.53 / Programme notes --- p.54 / Score --- p.55 / The Ride-by-Nights (for Treble Choir or Female Choir) --- p.75 / Programme notes --- p.76 / Lyrics --- p.77 / Score --- p.78

This study investigates the possibility of applying Hatten’s theory of musical gesture to a formal system of musical analysis. Using historical antecedents and established musicological practice as a guide, a range of musical parameters in a motive length span of music are incorporated into a single gesture. This gesture forms the basic semantic unit upon which an analytical tableau structure is built, and a syntax is developed to allow derivations of new gestures; a large scale structure displaying fractal-like self-similarity is then proposed. The completed system is applied to the analysis of the ‘Adagio’ of Mozart’s Flute Quartet K.285 to test whether it can consistently be implemented and whether it produces falsifiable results while maintaining predictive power. It is found that these requirements are indeed met and that a set of inference rules can be derived suggesting that the proposed system has ample scope for further development. / Art History, Visual Arts and Musicology / M. Mus.