Mobility and Aging: Older Drivers’ Visual Searching, Lane Keeping and Coordination

This thesis examined older drivers’ mobility and behaviour through comprehensive measurements of driver-vehicle-environment interaction and investigated the associations between driving behaviour and cognitive functions. Data were collected and analysed for 50 older drivers using eye tracking, GNSS tracking, and GIS. Results showed that poor selective attention, spatial ability and executive function in older drivers adversely affect lane keeping, visual search and coordination. Visual-motor coordination measure is sensitive and effective for driving assessment in older drivers

Factors Limiting Abundance and Productivity of Piping Plovers (Charadrius melodus) in New Jersey

Successful recovery of endangered species requires an understanding of factors that limit population size and growth rate. Regulatory protection and management interventions for piping plovers have been largely successful in recovering populations throughout the breeding range; however, some subpopulations have not recovered, including the New Jersey population. The goal of this study was to understand how predators, foraging habitat, and management actions affect piping plover population dynamics in New Jersey. Using resighting data, we found that adult survival between 2012–2019 ranged from 0.62 [95% CI = 0.48, 0.74] to 0.85 [0.74, 0.92] for females and 0.65 [0.51, 0.78] to 0.89 [0.80, 0.94] for males and juvenile survival ranged from 0.40 [0.30, 0.51] to 0.70 [0.57, 0.80]. Abandoned nests were associated with lower survival rates, particularly for males. Daily chick survival rates increased with age (days since hatching), decreased with daily precipitation, and were lower when bayside foraging access was not available. Using predator tracking surveys and occupancy modeling, we found that mink occupancy was higher when red foxes were absent (0.787 [95% CI = 0.14, 0.98]) than when they were present (0.05 [0.01, 0.26]). Daily nest predation was similar at sites with red foxes (0.45 ± 0.11 SD) and without red foxes (0.43 ± 0.10) for nests not protected by predator exclosures, but predation rates were higher for exclosed nests at sites without red foxes (0.20 ± 0.08) than sites with red foxes (0.06 ± 0.04). We found evidence that red fox habitat use decreased as the distance to the nearest primary dune increased and that habitat use remained constant throughout the course of the nesting season. Our results will lead to more comprehensive recommendations for predation management and restoration to land managers within New Jersey that will simultaneously reduce predation pressures and create suitable habitat to begin recovery within the state

Automated Guided Vehicle utilising thermal signatures for Human identification and tracking

Published ThesisIndustry requires the development of sophisticated autonomous guided vehicles (AGV) with sensory and software capabilities to allow a vision-based awareness of surrounding objects. To achieve this, a closely integrated control system for the AGV together with machine vision capabilities needs to be developed to efficiently and reliably detect objects of interest. Industry application of AGVs require detection of humans and to support that requirement thermal imaging cameras offer a broad set of advantages. The aim of the study is to develop an AGV that uses a thermal imaging camera to detect a human in its environment. To achieve this, a literature study was done to determine the best type of components that should be used, reveal design issues and what characteristics the system must adhere to. LabVIEW was used to simulate AGV movement and operation together with the control system, develop machine vision capable of background noise filtering and verify the machine vision identification and tracking processes. Based on simulated results, the physical system was built and small modificationsmade to accommodate real world variables. The results indicate that a vision-based approach to detect, track and identify a person on a mobile robot in real time is achievable. It was found that LabVIEW is an excellent tool and platform for building the integrated system and expedites design and implementation. A key implication of this study is to show the versatility of thermal imaging as a method to extract a person from its background independently from current light conditions and in situations where full-colour cameras will fail

The Application of Physiological Metrics in Validating User Experience Evaluation on Automotive Human Machine Interface Systems

Automotive in-vehicle information systems have seen an era of continuous development within the industry and are recognised as a key differentiator for prospective customers. This presents a significant challenge for designers and engineers in producing effective next generation systems which are helpful, novel, exciting, safe and easy to use. The usability of any new human machine interface (HMI) has an implicit cost in terms of the perceived aesthetic perception and associated user experience. Achieving the next engaging automotive interface, not only has to address the user requirements but also has to incorporate established safety standards whilst considering new interaction technologies. An automotive (HMI) evaluation may combine a triad of physiological, subjective and performance-based measurements which are employed to provide relevant and valuable data for product evaluation. However, there is also a growing interest and appreciation that determining real-time quantitative metrics to drivers’ affective responses provide valuable user affective feedback. The aim of this research was to explore to what extent physiological metrics such as heart rate variability could be used to quantify or validate subjective testing of automotive HMIs. This research employed both objective and subjective metrics to assess user engagement during interactions with an automotive infotainment system. The mapping of both physiological and self-report scales was examined over a series of studies in order to provide a greater understanding of users’ responses. By analysing the data collected it may provide guidance within the early stages of in-vehicle design evaluation in terms of usability and user satisfaction. This research explored these metrics as an objective, quantitative, diagnostic measure of affective response, in the assessment of HMIs. Development of a robust methodology was constructed for the application and understanding of these metrics. Findings from the three studies point towards the value of using a combination of methods when examining user interaction with an in-car HMI. For the next generation of interface systems, physiological measures, such as heart rate variability may offer an additional dimension of validity when examining the complexities of the driving task that drivers perform every day. There appears to be no boundaries on technology advancements and with this, comes extra pressure for car manufacturers to produce similar interactive and connective devices to those that are already in use in homes. A successful in-car HMI system will be intuitive to use, aesthetically pleasing and possess an element of pleasure however, the design components that are needed for a highly usable HMI have to be considered within the context of the constraints of the manufacturing process and the risks associated with interacting with an in-car HMI whilst driving. The findings from the studies conducted in this research are discussed in relation to the usability and benefits of incorporating physiological measures that can assist in our understanding of driver interaction with different automotive HMIs

2022 SDSU Data Science Symposium Program

https://openprairie.sdstate.edu/ds_symposium_programs/1003/thumbnail.jp

Color Separation for Background Subtraction

Background subtraction is a vital step in many computer vision systems. In background subtraction, one is given two (or more) frames of a video sequence taken with a still camera. Due to the stationarity of the camera, any color change in the scene is mainly due to the presence of moving objects. The goal of background subtraction is to separate the moving objects (also called the foreground) from the stationary background. Many background subtraction approaches have been proposed over the years. They are usually composed of two distinct stages, background modeling and foreground detection. Most of the standard background subtraction techniques focus on the background modeling. In the thesis, we focus on the improvement of foreground detection performance. We formulate the background subtraction as a pixel labeling problem, where the goal is to assign each image pixel either a foreground or background labels. We solve the pixel labeling problem using a principled energy minimization framework. We design an energy function composed of three terms: the data, smoothness, and color separation terms. The data term is based on motion information between image frames. The smoothness term encourages the foreground and background regions to have spatially coherent boundaries. These two terms have been used for background subtraction before. The main contribution of this thesis is the introduction of a new color separation term into the energy function for background subtraction. This term models the fact that the foreground and background regions tend to have different colors. Thus, introducing a color separation term encourages foreground and background regions not to share the same colors. Color separation term can help to correct the mistakes made due to the data term when the motion information is not entirely reliable. We model color separation term with L1 distance, using the technique developed by Tang et.al. Color clustering is used to efficiently model the color space. Our energy function can be globally and efficiently optimized with graph cuts, which is a very effective method for solving binary energy minimization problems arising in computer vision. To prove the effectiveness of including the color separation term into the energy function for background subtraction, we conduct experiments on standard datasets. Our model depends on color clustering and background modeling. There are many possible ways to perform color clustering and background modeling. We evaluate several different combinations of popular color clustering and background modeling approaches. We find that incorporating spatial and motion information as part of the color clustering process can further improve the results. The best performance of our approach is 97% compared to the approach without color separation that achieves 90%

Rekindling Embers of the Past with Technologies of Today: Increasing LMS Adoption at an Ontario Secondary School

The motivation behind this organization improvement plan is to reap the benefits of online learning, enhance teaching and learning, and consequentially increase student achievement. This organizational improvement plan addresses a problem of practice in an Indigenous ministry inspected secondary school in Central, Canada. Indigenous people are achieving fewer and lower levels of educational attainment compared to non-Indigenious counterparts and Indigenious students in the community this OIP is situated are likewise at-risk of widening this gap (Statistics Canada, 2011; Deloitte, 2018). To narrow this gap, this school is centered on using technology to pay tribute to the past. Online learning offers organizations a variety of teaching and learning benefits. In pursuit of enhanced outcomes, more and more K-12 organizations are attempting to adopt a Learning Management System; however, instead of experiencing the promised potential of online learning, organizations are receiving frustrations and lackluster results. The leadership approach selected to drive forward change in this endeavour is the adaptive leadership approach complimented with characteristics of situational leadership. The change path model is selected as the framework for leading the process of organizational change. Additionally, the plan, do, study, act model serves as the model for change. Collectively the change path model in tandem with the plan, do, study, act model and former leadership approaches all work together to implement, evaluate, and communicate the change