Structure-aware image denoising, super-resolution, and enhancement methods

Denoising, super-resolution and structure enhancement are classical image processing applications. The motive behind their existence is to aid our visual analysis of raw digital images. Despite tremendous progress in these fields, certain difficult problems are still open to research. For example, denoising and super-resolution techniques which possess all the following properties, are very scarce: They must preserve critical structures like corners, should be robust to the type of noise distribution, avoid undesirable artefacts, and also be fast. The area of structure enhancement also has an unresolved issue: Very little efforts have been put into designing models that can tackle anisotropic deformations in the image acquisition process. In this thesis, we design novel methods in the form of partial differential equations, patch-based approaches and variational models to overcome the aforementioned obstacles. In most cases, our methods outperform the existing approaches in both quality and speed, despite being applicable to a broader range of practical situations.Entrauschen, Superresolution und Strukturverbesserung sind klassische Anwendungen der Bildverarbeitung. Ihre Existenz bedingt sich in dem Bestreben, die visuelle Begutachtung digitaler Bildrohdaten zu unterstützen. Trotz erheblicher Fortschritte in diesen Feldern bedürfen bestimmte schwierige Probleme noch weiterer Forschung. So sind beispielsweise Entrauschungsund Superresolutionsverfahren, welche alle der folgenden Eingenschaften besitzen, sehr selten: die Erhaltung wichtiger Strukturen wie Ecken, Robustheit bezüglich der Rauschverteilung, Vermeidung unerwünschter Artefakte und niedrige Laufzeit. Auch im Gebiet der Strukturverbesserung liegt ein ungelöstes Problem vor: Bisher wurde nur sehr wenig Forschungsaufwand in die Entwicklung von Modellen investieret, welche anisotrope Deformationen in bildgebenden Verfahren bewältigen können. In dieser Arbeit entwerfen wir neue Methoden in Form von partiellen Differentialgleichungen, patch-basierten Ansätzen und Variationsmodellen um die oben erwähnten Hindernisse zu überwinden. In den meisten Fällen übertreffen unsere Methoden nicht nur qualitativ die bisher verwendeten Ansätze, sondern lösen die gestellten Aufgaben auch schneller. Zudem decken wir mit unseren Modellen einen breiteren Bereich praktischer Fragestellungen ab

Deep Learning-Based Robotic Perception for Adaptive Facility Disinfection

Hospitals, schools, airports, and other environments built for mass gatherings can become hot spots for microbial pathogen colonization, transmission, and exposure, greatly accelerating the spread of infectious diseases across communities, cities, nations, and the world. Outbreaks of infectious diseases impose huge burdens on our society. Mitigating the spread of infectious pathogens within mass-gathering facilities requires routine cleaning and disinfection, which are primarily performed by cleaning staff under current practice. However, manual disinfection is limited in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency, as it is labor-intensive, time-consuming, and health-undermining. While existing studies have developed a variety of robotic systems for disinfecting contaminated surfaces, those systems are not adequate for intelligent, precise, and environmentally adaptive disinfection. They are also difficult to deploy in mass-gathering infrastructure facilities, given the high volume of occupants. Therefore, there is a critical need to develop an adaptive robot system capable of complete and efficient indoor disinfection. The overarching goal of this research is to develop an artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled robotic system that adapts to ambient environments and social contexts for precise and efficient disinfection. This would maintain environmental hygiene and health, reduce unnecessary labor costs for cleaning, and mitigate opportunity costs incurred from infections. To these ends, this dissertation first develops a multi-classifier decision fusion method, which integrates scene graph and visual information, in order to recognize patterns in human activity in infrastructure facilities. Next, a deep-learning-based method is proposed for detecting and classifying indoor objects, and a new mechanism is developed to map detected objects in 3D maps. A novel framework is then developed to detect and segment object affordance and to project them into a 3D semantic map for precise disinfection. Subsequently, a novel deep-learning network, which integrates multi-scale features and multi-level features, and an encoder network are developed to recognize the materials of surfaces requiring disinfection. Finally, a novel computational method is developed to link the recognition of object surface information to robot disinfection actions with optimal disinfection parameters

User serviceable parts: Practice, technology, sociality and method in live electronic musicking

In live electronic musical research there is a need to confront the interrelationships between the social and the technological in order to understand our music as practice. These interrelationships form a complex and dynamic ecosystem that not only forms the context to, but is constitutive of practice. I interrogate from a variety of perspectives the musical practice that has formed over the course of this research in order to reveal the dispositions towards technology, the social situatedness and the musical approach that underlies my work. By taking a disposition towards musical practice-led research that is non-hierarchical, performative, ecological, phenomenological and pragmatic, I place into wider context compositional and technological decisions, in terms of their relationships to improvising, skill, design, performance and research. This work contributes both new theories of live electronic musical practice and new suggestions for practice-led methods aimed at investigating the interplay of social and material factors in musicking, and at interrogating the disciplinary status of our field vis-a-vis musical and technical disciplines