3,600 research outputs found
Perception of Motion and Architectural Form: Computational Relationships between Optical Flow and Perspective
Perceptual geometry refers to the interdisciplinary research whose objectives
focuses on study of geometry from the perspective of visual perception, and in
turn, applies such geometric findings to the ecological study of vision.
Perceptual geometry attempts to answer fundamental questions in perception of
form and representation of space through synthesis of cognitive and biological
theories of visual perception with geometric theories of the physical world.
Perception of form, space and motion are among fundamental problems in vision
science. In cognitive and computational models of human perception, the
theories for modeling motion are treated separately from models for perception
of form.Comment: 10 pages, 13 figures, submitted and accepted in DoCEIS'2012
Conference: http://www.uninova.pt/doceis/doceis12/home/home.ph
Ship Wake Detection in SAR Images via Sparse Regularization
In order to analyse synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images of the sea surface,
ship wake detection is essential for extracting information on the wake
generating vessels. One possibility is to assume a linear model for wakes, in
which case detection approaches are based on transforms such as Radon and
Hough. These express the bright (dark) lines as peak (trough) points in the
transform domain. In this paper, ship wake detection is posed as an inverse
problem, which the associated cost function including a sparsity enforcing
penalty, i.e. the generalized minimax concave (GMC) function. Despite being a
non-convex regularizer, the GMC penalty enforces the overall cost function to
be convex. The proposed solution is based on a Bayesian formulation, whereby
the point estimates are recovered using maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimation.
To quantify the performance of the proposed method, various types of SAR images
are used, corresponding to TerraSAR-X, COSMO-SkyMed, Sentinel-1, and ALOS2. The
performance of various priors in solving the proposed inverse problem is first
studied by investigating the GMC along with the L1, Lp, nuclear and total
variation (TV) norms. We show that the GMC achieves the best results and we
subsequently study the merits of the corresponding method in comparison to two
state-of-the-art approaches for ship wake detection. The results show that our
proposed technique offers the best performance by achieving 80% success rate.Comment: 18 page
Velocity fluctuations and population distribution in clusters of settling particles at low Reynolds number
A study on the spatial organization and velocity fluctuations of non Brownian
spherical particles settling at low Reynolds number in a vertical Hele-Shaw
cell is reported. The particle volume fraction ranged from 0.005 to 0.05, while
the distance between cell plates ranged from 5 to 15 times the particle radius.
Particle tracking revealed that particles were not uniformly distributed in
space but assembled in transient settling clusters. The population distribution
of these clusters followed an exponential law. The measured velocity
fluctuations are in agreement with that predicted theoretically for spherical
clusters, from the balance between the apparent weight and the drag force. This
result suggests that particle clustering, more than a spatial distribution of
particles derived from random and independent events, is at the origin of the
velocity fluctuations.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure
All-sky search for periodic gravitational waves in LIGO S4 data
We report on an all-sky search with the LIGO detectors for periodic
gravitational waves in the frequency range 50-1000 Hz and with the frequency's
time derivative in the range -1.0E-8 Hz/s to zero. Data from the fourth LIGO
science run (S4) have been used in this search. Three different semi-coherent
methods of transforming and summing strain power from Short Fourier Transforms
(SFTs) of the calibrated data have been used. The first, known as "StackSlide",
averages normalized power from each SFT. A "weighted Hough" scheme is also
developed and used, and which also allows for a multi-interferometer search.
The third method, known as "PowerFlux", is a variant of the StackSlide method
in which the power is weighted before summing. In both the weighted Hough and
PowerFlux methods, the weights are chosen according to the noise and detector
antenna-pattern to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio. The respective
advantages and disadvantages of these methods are discussed. Observing no
evidence of periodic gravitational radiation, we report upper limits; we
interpret these as limits on this radiation from isolated rotating neutron
stars. The best population-based upper limit with 95% confidence on the
gravitational-wave strain amplitude, found for simulated sources distributed
isotropically across the sky and with isotropically distributed spin-axes, is
4.28E-24 (near 140 Hz). Strict upper limits are also obtained for small patches
on the sky for best-case and worst-case inclinations of the spin axes.Comment: 39 pages, 41 figures An error was found in the computation of the C
parameter defined in equation 44 which led to its overestimate by 2^(1/4).
The correct values for the multi-interferometer, H1 and L1 analyses are 9.2,
9.7, and 9.3, respectively. Figure 32 has been updated accordingly. None of
the upper limits presented in the paper were affecte
An Experimental Study on Pitch Compensation in Pedestrian-Protection Systems for Collision Avoidance and Mitigation
This paper describes an improved stereovision system for the anticipated detection of car-to-pedestrian accidents. An improvement of the previous versions of the pedestrian-detection system is achieved by compensation of the camera's pitch angle, since it results in higher accuracy in the location of the ground plane and more accurate depth measurements. The system has been mounted on two different prototype cars, and several real collision-avoidance and collision-mitigation experiments have been carried out in private circuits using actors and dummies, which represents one of the main contributions of this paper. Collision avoidance is carried out by means of deceleration strategies whenever the accident is avoidable. Likewise, collision mitigation is accomplished by triggering an active hood system
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