Interaction between high-level and low-level image analysis for semantic video object extraction

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Computational intelligence approaches to robotics, automation, and control [Volume guest editors]

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NASA SBIR abstracts of 1991 phase 1 projects

The objectives of 301 projects placed under contract by the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) are described. These projects were selected competitively from among proposals submitted to NASA in response to the 1991 SBIR Program Solicitation. The basic document consists of edited, non-proprietary abstracts of the winning proposals submitted by small businesses. The abstracts are presented under the 15 technical topics within which Phase 1 proposals were solicited. Each project was assigned a sequential identifying number from 001 to 301, in order of its appearance in the body of the report. Appendixes to provide additional information about the SBIR program and permit cross-reference of the 1991 Phase 1 projects by company name, location by state, principal investigator, NASA Field Center responsible for management of each project, and NASA contract number are included

Design, Development and Implementation of Intelligent Algorithms to Increase Autonomy of Quadrotor Unmanned Missions

This thesis presents the development and implementation of intelligent algorithms to increase autonomy of unmanned missions for quadrotor type UAVs. A six-degree-of freedom dynamic model of a quadrotor is developed in Matlab/Simulink in order to support the design of control algorithms previous to real-time implementation. A dynamic inversion based control architecture is developed to minimize nonlinearities and improve robustness when the system is driven outside bounds of nominal design. The design and the implementation of the control laws are described. An immunity-based architecture is introduced for monitoring quadrotor health and its capabilities for detecting abnormal conditions are successfully demonstrated through flight testing. A vision-based navigation scheme is developed to enhance the quadrotor autonomy under GPS denied environments. An optical flow sensor and a laser range finder are used within an Extended Kalman Filter for position estimation and its estimation performance is analyzed by comparing against measurements from a GPS module. Flight testing results are presented where the performances are analyzed, showing a substantial increase of controllability and tracking when the developed algorithms are used under dynamically changing environments. Healthy flights, flights with failures, flight with GPS-denied navigation and post-failure recovery are presented

Remote applications of electric potential sensors in electrically unshielded environments

The electric potential sensor is a novel, ultra high impedance sensor, previously developed at the University of Sussex. These sensors have been applied to a range of applications, including electrophysiology, non destructive testing of composite materials and novel nuclear magnetic resonance NMR probes. Some of these measurements can be made in a strongly coupled (≥100pF) mode, where the coupling capacitance is reasonably large and well dened, and ambient noise is therefore less problematic. However for many applications, there exists a requirement for this coupling to be much weaker. This weak and poorly dened coupling creates substantial problems with ambient noise often causing sensors to saturate and become unusable. In the past, therefore, these measurements have all been made inside electrically screened rooms and enclosures. The work discussed in this thesis explores the possibility of operating these sensors outside of electrically screened environments. A number of techniques for resilience against noise are explored and experiments to fully analyse and characterise the performance of the sensors are discussed. As a result of this work, further results are then shown for a number of experiments carried out in a busy lab environment, in the presence of noise sources, and with little or minimal screening used. In this case, data is shown for the collection of remote cardiac and respiratory data, imaging of the spatial distribution of charge on insulating materials, detecting electric eld disturbances for movement sensing and early results for a microscopic XY scanning application

Visual motion processing and human tracking behavior

The accurate visual tracking of a moving object is a human fundamental skill that allows to reduce the relative slip and instability of the object's image on the retina, thus granting a stable, high-quality vision. In order to optimize tracking performance across time, a quick estimate of the object's global motion properties needs to be fed to the oculomotor system and dynamically updated. Concurrently, performance can be greatly improved in terms of latency and accuracy by taking into account predictive cues, especially under variable conditions of visibility and in presence of ambiguous retinal information. Here, we review several recent studies focusing on the integration of retinal and extra-retinal information for the control of human smooth pursuit.By dynamically probing the tracking performance with well established paradigms in the visual perception and oculomotor literature we provide the basis to test theoretical hypotheses within the framework of dynamic probabilistic inference. We will in particular present the applications of these results in light of state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms

Small business innovation research. Abstracts of completed 1987 phase 1 projects

Non-proprietary summaries of Phase 1 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) projects supported by NASA in the 1987 program year are given. Work in the areas of aeronautical propulsion, aerodynamics, acoustics, aircraft systems, materials and structures, teleoperators and robotics, computer sciences, information systems, spacecraft systems, spacecraft power supplies, spacecraft propulsion, bioastronautics, satellite communication, and space processing are covered

The NASA SBIR product catalog

The purpose of this catalog is to assist small business firms in making the community aware of products emerging from their efforts in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. It contains descriptions of some products that have advanced into Phase 3 and others that are identified as prospective products. Both lists of products in this catalog are based on information supplied by NASA SBIR contractors in responding to an invitation to be represented in this document. Generally, all products suggested by the small firms were included in order to meet the goals of information exchange for SBIR results. Of the 444 SBIR contractors NASA queried, 137 provided information on 219 products. The catalog presents the product information in the technology areas listed in the table of contents. Within each area, the products are listed in alphabetical order by product name and are given identifying numbers. Also included is an alphabetical listing of the companies that have products described. This listing cross-references the product list and provides information on the business activity of each firm. In addition, there are three indexes: one a list of firms by states, one that lists the products according to NASA Centers that managed the SBIR projects, and one that lists the products by the relevant Technical Topics utilized in NASA's annual program solicitation under which each SBIR project was selected

Scene segmentation using similarity, motion and depth based cues

Segmentation of complex scenes to aid surveillance is still considered an open research problem. In this thesis a computational model (CM) has been developed to classify a scene into foreground, moving-shadow and background regions. It has been demonstrated how the CM, with the optional use of a channel ratio test, can be applied to demarcate foreground shadow regions in indoor scenes illuminated by a fixed incandescent source of light. A combined approach, involving the CM working in tandem with a traditional motion cue based segmentation method, has also been constructed. In the combined approach, the CM is applied to segregate the foreground shaded regions in a current frame based on a binary mask generated using a standard background subtraction process (BSP). Various popular outlier detection strategies have been investigated to assess their suitabilities in generating a threshold automatically, required to develop a binary mask from a difference frame, the outcome of the BSP. To evaluate the full scope of the pixel labeling capabilities of the CM and to estimate the associated time constraints, the model is deployed for foreground scene segmentation in recorded real-life video streams. The observations made validate the satisfactory performance of the model in most cases. In the second part of the thesis depth based cues have been exploited to perform the task of foreground scene segmentation. An active structured light based depthestimating arrangement has been modeled in the thesis; the choice of modeling an active system over a passive stereovision one has been made to alleviate some of the difficulties associated with the classical correspondence problem. The model developed not only facilitates use of the set-up but also makes possible a method to increase the working volume of the system without explicitly encoding the projected structured pattern. Finally, it is explained how scene segmentation can be accomplished based solely on the structured pattern disparity information, without generating explicit depthmaps. To de-noise the difference frames, generated using the developed method, two median filtering schemes have been implemented. The working of one of the schemes is advocated for practical use and is described in terms of discrete morphological operators, thus facilitating hardware realisation of the method to speed-up the de-noising process