164 research outputs found
An elliptical cover problem in drone delivery network design and its solution algorithms
Given n demand points in a geographic area, the elliptical cover problem is to determine the location of p depots (anywhere in the area) so as to minimize the maximum distance of an economical delivery trip in which a delivery vehicle starts from the nearest depot to a demand point, visits the demand point and then returns to the second nearest depot to that demand point. We show that this problem is NP-hard, and adapt Cooper’s alternating locate-allocate heuristic to find locally optimal solutions for both the point-coverage and area-coverage scenarios. Experiments show that most locally optimal solutions perform similarly well, suggesting their sufficiency for practical use. The one-dimensional variant of the problem, in which the service area is reduced to a line segment, permits recursive algorithms that are more efficient than mathematical optimization approaches in practical cases. The solution also provides the best-known lower bound for the original problem at a negligible computational cost
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Localization from semantic observations via the matrix permanent
Most approaches to robot localization rely on low-level geometric features such as points, lines, and planes. In this paper, we use object recognition to obtain semantic information from the robot’s sensors and consider the task of localizing the robot within a prior map of landmarks, which are annotated with semantic labels. As object recognition algorithms miss detections and produce false alarms, correct data association between the detections and the landmarks on the map is central to the semantic localization problem. Instead of the traditional vector-based representation, we propose a sensor model, which encodes the semantic observations via random finite sets and enables a unified treatment of missed detections, false alarms, and data association. Our second contribution is to reduce the problem of computing the likelihood of a set-valued observation to the problem of computing a matrix permanent. It is this crucial transformation that allows us to solve the semantic localization problem with a polynomial-time approximation to the set-based Bayes filter. Finally, we address the active semantic localization problem, in which the observer’s trajectory is planned in order to improve the accuracy and efficiency of the localization process. The performance of our approach is demonstrated in simulation and in real environments using deformable-part-model-based object detectors. Robust global localization from semantic observations is demonstrated for a mobile robot, for the Project Tango phone, and on the KITTI visual odometry dataset. Comparisons are made with the traditional lidar-based geometric Monte Carlo localization
Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Spontaneous Speech with Microphone Arrays
Accurate detection, localization and tracking of multiple moving speakers permits a wide spectrum of applications. Techniques are required that are versatile, robust to environmental variations, and not constraining for non-technical end-users. Based on distant recording of spontaneous multiparty conversations, this thesis focuses on the use of microphone arrays to address the question Who spoke where and when?. The speed, the versatility and the robustness of the proposed techniques are tested on a variety of real indoor recordings, including multiple moving speakers as well as seated speakers in meetings. Optimized implementations are provided in most cases. We propose to discretize the physical space into a few sectors, and for each time frame, to determine which sectors contain active acoustic sources (Where? When?). A topological interpretation of beamforming is proposed, which permits both to evaluate the average acoustic energy in a sector for a negligible cost, and to locate precisely a speaker within an active sector. One additional contribution that goes beyond the eld of microphone arrays is a generic, automatic threshold selection method, which does not require any training data. On the speaker detection task, the new approach is dramatically superior to the more classical approach where a threshold is set on training data. We use the new approach into an integrated system for multispeaker detection-localization. Another generic contribution is a principled, threshold-free, framework for short-term clustering of multispeaker location estimates, which also permits to detect where and when multiple trajectories intersect. On multi-party meeting recordings, using distant microphones only, short-term clustering yields a speaker segmentation performance similar to that of close-talking microphones. The resulting short speech segments are then grouped into speaker clusters (Who?), through an extension of the Bayesian Information Criterion to merge multiple modalities. On meeting recordings, the speaker clustering performance is signicantly improved by merging the classical mel-cepstrum information with the short-term speaker location information. Finally, a close analysis of the speaker clustering results suggests that future research should investigate the effect of human acoustic radiation characteristics on the overall transmission channel, when a speaker is a few meters away from a microphone
Spectral and spatial methods for the classification of urban remote sensing data
Lors de ces travaux, nous nous sommes intéressés au problème de la classification supervisée d'images satellitaires de
zones urbaines. Les données traitées sont des images optiques à très hautes résolutions spatiales: données panchromatiques à très haute résolution spatiale (IKONOS, QUICKBIRD, simulations PLEIADES) et des images hyperspectrales (DAIS, ROSIS).
Deux stratégies ont été proposées.
La première stratégie consiste en une phase d'extraction de caractéristiques spatiales et spectrales suivie d'une phase de classification. Ces caractéristiques sont extraites par filtrages morphologiques : ouvertures et fermetures géodésiques et filtrages surfaciques auto-complémentaires. La classification est réalisée avec les machines à vecteurs supports (SVM)
non linéaires. Nous proposons la définition d'un noyau spatio-spectral utilisant de manière conjointe l'information spatiale
et l'information spectrale extraites lors de la première phase.
La seconde stratégie consiste en une phase de fusion de données pre- ou post-classification. Lors de la fusion postclassification,
divers classifieurs sont appliqués, éventuellement sur plusieurs données issues d'une même scène (image panchromat
ique, image multi-spectrale). Pour chaque pixel, l'appartenance à chaque classe est estimée à l'aide des classifieurs. Un schéma de fusion adaptatif permettant d'utiliser l'information sur la fiabilité locale de chaque classifieur, mais aussi l'information globale disponible a priori sur les performances de chaque algorithme pour les différentes classes, est proposé.
Les différents résultats sont fusionnés à l'aide d'opérateurs flous.
Les méthodes ont été validées sur des images réelles. Des
améliorations significatives sont obtenues par rapport aux méthodes publiées dans la litterature
Inference of ventricular activation properties from non-invasive electrocardiography
The realisation of precision cardiology requires novel techniques for the
non-invasive characterisation of individual patients' cardiac function to
inform therapeutic and diagnostic decision-making. The electrocardiogram (ECG)
is the most widely used clinical tool for cardiac diagnosis. Its interpretation
is, however, confounded by functional and anatomical variability in heart and
torso. In this study, we develop new computational techniques to estimate key
ventricular activation properties for individual subjects by exploiting the
synergy between non-invasive electrocardiography and image-based
torso-biventricular modelling and simulation. More precisely, we present an
efficient sequential Monte Carlo approximate Bayesian computation-based
inference method, integrated with Eikonal simulations and torso-biventricular
models constructed based on clinical cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) imaging.
The method also includes a novel strategy to treat combined continuous
(conduction speeds) and discrete (earliest activation sites) parameter spaces,
and an efficient dynamic time warping-based ECG comparison algorithm. We
demonstrate results from our inference method on a cohort of twenty virtual
subjects with cardiac volumes ranging from 74 cm3 to 171 cm3 and considering
low versus high resolution for the endocardial discretisation (which determines
possible locations of the earliest activation sites). Results show that our
method can successfully infer the ventricular activation properties from
non-invasive data, with higher accuracy for earliest activation sites,
endocardial speed, and sheet (transmural) speed in sinus rhythm, rather than
the fibre or sheet-normal speeds.Comment: Submitted to Medical Image Analysi
Monte Carlo Method with Heuristic Adjustment for Irregularly Shaped Food Product Volume Measurement
Volume measurement plays an important role in the production and processing of food products. Various methods have been
proposed to measure the volume of food products with irregular shapes based on 3D reconstruction. However, 3D reconstruction
comes with a high-priced computational cost. Furthermore, some of the volume measurement methods based on 3D reconstruction
have a low accuracy. Another method for measuring volume of objects uses Monte Carlo method. Monte Carlo method performs
volume measurements using random points. Monte Carlo method only requires information regarding whether random points
fall inside or outside an object and does not require a 3D reconstruction. This paper proposes volume measurement using a
computer vision system for irregularly shaped food products without 3D reconstruction based on Monte Carlo method with
heuristic adjustment. Five images of food product were captured using five cameras and processed to produce binary images.
Monte Carlo integration with heuristic adjustment was performed to measure the volume based on the information extracted from
binary images. The experimental results show that the proposed method provided high accuracy and precision compared to the
water displacement method. In addition, the proposed method is more accurate and faster than the space carving method
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