A Vision-Based Automatic Safe landing-Site Detection System

An automatic safe landing-site detection system is proposed for aircraft emergency landing, based on visible information acquired by aircraft-mounted cameras. Emergency landing is an unplanned event in response to emergency situations. If, as is unfortunately usually the case, there is no airstrip or airfield that can be reached by the un-powered aircraft, a crash landing or ditching has to be carried out. Identifying a safe landing-site is critical to the survival of passengers and crew. Conventionally, the pilot chooses the landing-site visually by looking at the terrain through the cockpit. The success of this vital decision greatly depends on the external environmental factors that can impair human vision, and on the pilot\u27s flight experience that can vary significantly among pilots. Therefore, we propose a robust, reliable and efficient detection system that is expected to alleviate the negative impact of these factors. In this study, we focus on the detection mechanism of the proposed system and assume that the image enhancement for increased visibility and image stitching for a larger field-of-view have already been performed on terrain images acquired by aircraft-mounted cameras. Specifically, we first propose a hierarchical elastic horizon detection algorithm to identify ground in rile image. Then the terrain image is divided into non-overlapping blocks which are clustered according to a roughness measure. Adjacent smooth blocks are merged to form potential landing-sites whose dimensions are measured with principal component analysis and geometric transformations. If the dimensions of a candidate region exceed the minimum requirement for safe landing, the potential landing-site is considered a safe candidate and highlighted on the human machine interface. At the end, the pilot makes the final decision by confirming one of the candidates, also considering other factors such as wind speed and wind direction, etc

Learning as a Nonlinear Line of Attraction for Pattern Association, Classification and Recognition

Development of a mathematical model for learning a nonlinear line of attraction is presented in this dissertation, in contrast to the conventional recurrent neural network model in which the memory is stored in an attractive fixed point at discrete location in state space. A nonlinear line of attraction is the encapsulation of attractive fixed points scattered in state space as an attractive nonlinear line, describing patterns with similar characteristics as a family of patterns. It is usually of prime imperative to guarantee the convergence of the dynamics of the recurrent network for associative learning and recall. We propose to alter this picture. That is, if the brain remembers by converging to the state representing familiar patterns, it should also diverge from such states when presented by an unknown encoded representation of a visual image. The conception of the dynamics of the nonlinear line attractor network to operate between stable and unstable states is the second contribution in this dissertation research. These criteria can be used to circumvent the plasticity-stability dilemma by using the unstable state as an indicator to create a new line for an unfamiliar pattern. This novel learning strategy utilizes stability (convergence) and instability (divergence) criteria of the designed dynamics to induce self-organizing behavior. The self-organizing behavior of the nonlinear line attractor model can manifest complex dynamics in an unsupervised manner. The third contribution of this dissertation is the introduction of the concept of manifold of color perception. The fourth contribution of this dissertation is the development of a nonlinear dimensionality reduction technique by embedding a set of related observations into a low-dimensional space utilizing the result attained by the learned memory matrices of the nonlinear line attractor network. Development of a system for affective states computation is also presented in this dissertation. This system is capable of extracting the user\u27s mental state in real time using a low cost computer. It is successfully interfaced with an advanced learning environment for human-computer interaction

Video enhancement : content classification and model selection

The purpose of video enhancement is to improve the subjective picture quality. The field of video enhancement includes a broad category of research topics, such as removing noise in the video, highlighting some specified features and improving the appearance or visibility of the video content. The common difficulty in this field is how to make images or videos more beautiful, or subjectively better. Traditional approaches involve lots of iterations between subjective assessment experiments and redesigns of algorithm improvements, which are very time consuming. Researchers have attempted to design a video quality metric to replace the subjective assessment, but so far it is not successful. As a way to avoid heuristics in the enhancement algorithm design, least mean square methods have received considerable attention. They can optimize filter coefficients automatically by minimizing the difference between processed videos and desired versions through a training. However, these methods are only optimal on average but not locally. To solve the problem, one can apply the least mean square optimization for individual categories that are classified by local image content. The most interesting example is Kondo’s concept of local content adaptivity for image interpolation, which we found could be generalized into an ideal framework for content adaptive video processing. We identify two parts in the concept, content classification and adaptive processing. By exploring new classifiers for the content classification and new models for the adaptive processing, we have generalized a framework for more enhancement applications. For the part of content classification, new classifiers have been proposed to classify different image degradations such as coding artifacts and focal blur. For the coding artifact, a novel classifier has been proposed based on the combination of local structure and contrast, which does not require coding block grid detection. For the focal blur, we have proposed a novel local blur estimation method based on edges, which does not require edge orientation detection and shows more robust blur estimation. With these classifiers, the proposed framework has been extended to coding artifact robust enhancement and blur dependant enhancement. With the content adaptivity to more image features, the number of content classes can increase significantly. We show that it is possible to reduce the number of classes without sacrificing much performance. For the part of model selection, we have introduced several nonlinear filters to the proposed framework. We have also proposed a new type of nonlinear filter, trained bilateral filter, which combines both advantages of the original bilateral filter and the least mean square optimization. With these nonlinear filters, the proposed framework show better performance than with linear filters. Furthermore, we have shown a proof-of-concept for a trained approach to obtain contrast enhancement by a supervised learning. The transfer curves are optimized based on the classification of global or local image content. It showed that it is possible to obtain the desired effect by learning from other computationally expensive enhancement algorithms or expert-tuned examples through the trained approach. Looking back, the thesis reveals a single versatile framework for video enhancement applications. It widens the application scope by including new content classifiers and new processing models and offers scalabilities with solutions to reduce the number of classes, which can greatly accelerate the algorithm design

Robust Retinal Vessel Segmentation using ELM and SVM Classifier

The diagnosis of retinal blood vessels is of much clinical importance, as they are generally examined to evaluate and monitor both the ophthalmological diseases and the non-retinal diseases. The vascular nature of retinal is very complex and the manual segmentation process is tedious. It requires more time and skill. In this paper, a novel supervised approach using Extreme Learning Machine (ELM) classifier and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifier is proposed to segment the retinal blood vessel. This approach calculates 7-D feature vector comprises of green channel intensity, Median-Local Binary Pattern (M-LBP), Stroke Width Transform (SWT) response, Weber�s Local Descriptor (WLD) measure, Frangi�s vesselness measure, Laplacian Of Gaussian (LOG) filter response and morphological bottom-hat transform. This 7-D vector is given as input to the ELM classifier to classify each pixel as vessel or non-vessel. The primary vessel map from the ELM classifier is combined with the ridges detected from the enhanced bottom-hat transformed image. Then the high-level features computed from the combined image are used for final classification using SVM. The performance of this technique was evaluated on the publically available databases like DRIVE, STARE and CHASE-DB1. The result demonstrates that the proposed approach is very fast and achieves high accuracy about 96.1% , 94.4% and 94.5% for DRIVE, STARE and CHASE-DB1 respectively

Review of Noise Reduction Methods and Estimation of their Effectiveness for Medical Endoscopic Images Processing

The paper is devoted to the analysis of the efficiency of different algorithms for noise reduction on medical images in endoscopy. The algorithms of adaptive median filtering., KNN filtering., block matching filtering (Non local means and 3DBM) are analyzed. The conclusions and the recommendations for the implementation of these algorithms in clinical decision support systems in endoscopy are given

Enhancement of Single and Composite Images Based on Contourlet Transform Approach

Image enhancement is an imperative step in almost every image processing algorithms. Numerous image enhancement algorithms have been developed for gray scale images despite their absence in many applications lately. This thesis proposes hew image enhancement techniques of 8-bit single and composite digital color images. Recently, it has become evident that wavelet transforms are not necessarily best suited for images. Therefore, the enhancement approaches are based on a new 'true' two-dimensional transform called contourlet transform. The proposed enhancement techniques discussed in this thesis are developed based on the understanding of the working mechanisms of the new multiresolution property of contourlet transform. This research also investigates the effects of using different color space representations for color image enhancement applications. Based on this investigation an optimal color space is selected for both single image and composite image enhancement approaches. The objective evaluation steps show that the new method of enhancement not only superior to the commonly used transformation method (e.g. wavelet transform) but also to various spatial models (e.g. histogram equalizations). The results found are encouraging and the enhancement algorithms have proved to be more robust and reliable

Novel Architectures and Optimization Algorithms for Training Neural Networks and Applications

The two main areas of Deep Learning are Unsupervised and Supervised Learning. Unsupervised Learning studies a class of data processing problems in which only descriptions of objects are known, without label information. Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have become among the most widely used unsupervised neural net models. GAN combines two neural nets, generative and discriminative, that work simultaneously. We introduce a new family of discriminator loss functions that adopts a weighted sum of real and fake parts, which we call adaptive weighted loss functions. Using the gradient information, we can adaptively choose weights to train a discriminator in the direction that benefits the GAN\u27s stability. Also, we propose several improvements to the GAN training schemes. One is self-correcting optimization for training a GAN discriminator on Speech Enhancement tasks, which helps avoid ``harmful\u27\u27 training directions for parts of the discriminator loss. The other improvement is a consistency loss, which targets the inconsistency in time and time-frequency domains caused by Fourier Transforms. Contrary to Unsupervised Learning, Supervised Learning uses labels for each object, and it is required to find the relationship between objects and labels. Building computing methods to interpret and represent human language automatically is known as Natural Language Processing which includes tasks such as word prediction, machine translation, etc. In this area, we propose a novel Neumann-Cayley Gated Recurrent Unit (NC-GRU) architecture based on a Neumann series-based Scaled Cayley transformation. The NC-GRU uses orthogonal matrices to prevent exploding gradient problems and enhance long-term memory on various prediction tasks. In addition, we propose using our newly introduced NC-GRU unit inside Neural Nets model to create neural molecular fingerprints. Integrating novel NC-GRU fingerprints and Multi-Task Deep Neural Networks schematics help to improve the performance of several molecular-related tasks. We also introduce a new normalization method - Assorted-Time Normalization, that helps to preserve information from multiple consecutive time steps and normalize using them in Recurrent Nets like architectures. Finally, we propose a Symmetry Structured Convolutional Neural Network (SCNN), an architecture with 2D structured symmetric features over spatial dimensions, that generates and preserves the symmetry structure in the network\u27s convolutional layers