Statistical Filtering for Multimodal Mobility Modeling in Cyber Physical Systems

A Cyber-Physical System integrates computations and dynamics of physical processes. It is an engineering discipline focused on technology with a strong foundation in mathematical abstractions. It shares many of these abstractions with engineering and computer science, but still requires adaptation to suit the dynamics of the physical world. In such a dynamic system, mobility management is one of the key issues against developing a new service. For example, in the study of a new mobile network, it is necessary to simulate and evaluate a protocol before deployment in the system. Mobility models characterize mobile agent movement patterns. On the other hand, they describe the conditions of the mobile services. The focus of this thesis is on mobility modeling in cyber-physical systems. A macroscopic model that captures the mobility of individuals (people and vehicles) can facilitate an unlimited number of applications. One fundamental and obvious example is traffic profiling. Mobility in most systems is a dynamic process and small non-linearities can lead to substantial errors in the model. Extensive research activities on statistical inference and filtering methods for data modeling in cyber-physical systems exist. In this thesis, several methods are employed for multimodal data fusion, localization and traffic modeling. A novel energy-aware sparse signal processing method is presented to process massive sensory data. At baseline, this research examines the application of statistical filters for mobility modeling and assessing the difficulties faced in fusing massive multi-modal sensory data. A statistical framework is developed to apply proposed methods on available measurements in cyber-physical systems. The proposed methods have employed various statistical filtering schemes (i.e., compressive sensing, particle filtering and kernel-based optimization) and applied them to multimodal data sets, acquired from intelligent transportation systems, wireless local area networks, cellular networks and air quality monitoring systems. Experimental results show the capability of these proposed methods in processing multimodal sensory data. It provides a macroscopic mobility model of mobile agents in an energy efficient way using inconsistent measurements

Nonlinear Gaussian Filtering : Theory, Algorithms, and Applications

By restricting to Gaussian distributions, the optimal Bayesian filtering problem can be transformed into an algebraically simple form, which allows for computationally efficient algorithms. Three problem settings are discussed in this thesis: (1) filtering with Gaussians only, (2) Gaussian mixture filtering for strong nonlinearities, (3) Gaussian process filtering for purely data-driven scenarios. For each setting, efficient algorithms are derived and applied to real-world problems

Dynamic Scene Reconstruction and Understanding

Traditional approaches to 3D reconstruction have achieved remarkable progress in static scene acquisition. The acquired data serves as priors or benchmarks for many vision and graphics tasks, such as object detection and robotic navigation. Thus, obtaining interpretable and editable representations from a raw monocular RGB-D video sequence is an outstanding goal in scene understanding. However, acquiring an interpretable representation becomes significantly more challenging when a scene contains dynamic activities; for example, a moving camera, rigid object movement, and non-rigid motions. These dynamic scene elements introduce a scene factorization problem, i.e., dividing a scene into elements and jointly estimating elements’ motion and geometry. Moreover, the monocular setting brings in the problems of tracking and fusing partially occluded objects as they are scanned from one viewpoint at a time. This thesis explores several ideas for acquiring an interpretable model in dynamic environments. Firstly, we utilize synthetic assets such as floor plans and object meshes to generate dynamic data for training and evaluation. Then, we explore the idea of learning geometry priors with an instance segmentation module, which predicts the location and grouping of indoor objects. We use the learned geometry priors to infer the occluded object geometry for tracking and reconstruction. While instance segmentation modules usually have a generalization issue, i.e., struggling to handle unknown objects, we observed that the empty space information in the background geometry is more reliable for detecting moving objects. Thus, we proposed a segmentation-by-reconstruction strategy for acquiring rigidly-moving objects and backgrounds. Finally, we present a novel neural representation to learn a factorized scene representation, reconstructing every dynamic element. The proposed model supports both rigid and non-rigid motions without pre-trained templates. We demonstrate that our systems and representation improve the reconstruction quality on synthetic test sets and real-world scans

Robust state estimation methods for robotics applications

State estimation is an integral component of any autonomous robotic system. Finding the correct position, velocity, and orientation of an agent in its environment enables it to do other tasks like mapping and interacting with the environment, and collaborating with other agents. State estimation is achieved by using data obtained from multiple sensors and fusing them in a probabilistic framework. These include inertial data from Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), images from camera, range data from lidars, and positioning data from Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) receivers. The main challenge faced in sensor-based state estimation is the presence of noisy, erroneous, and even lack of informative data. Some common examples of such situations include wrong feature matching between images or point clouds, false loop-closures due to perceptual aliasing (different places that look similar can confuse the robot), presence of dynamic objects in the environment (odometry algorithms assume a static environment), multipath errors for GNSS (signals for satellites jumping off tall structures like buildings before reaching receivers) and more. This work studies existing and new ways of how standard estimation algorithms like the Kalman filter and factor graphs can be made robust to such adverse conditions without losing performance in ideal outlier-free conditions. The first part of this work demonstrates the importance of robust Kalman filters on wheel-inertial odometry for high-slip terrain. Next, inertial data is integrated into GNSS factor graphs to improve the accuracy and robustness of GNSS factor graphs. Lastly, a combined framework for improving the robustness of non-linear least squares and estimating the inlier noise threshold is proposed and tested with point cloud registration and lidar-inertial odometry algorithms followed by an algorithmic analysis of optimizing generalized robust cost functions with factor graphs for GNSS positioning problem

A survey of traditional and deep learning-based feature descriptors for high dimensional data in computer vision

Higher dimensional data such as video and 3D are the leading edge of multimedia retrieval and computer vision research. In this survey, we give a comprehensive overview and key insights into the state of the art of higher dimensional features from deep learning and also traditional approaches. Current approaches are frequently using 3D information from the sensor or are using 3D in modeling and understanding the 3D world. With the growth of prevalent application areas such as 3D games, self-driving automobiles, health monitoring and sports activity training, a wide variety of new sensors have allowed researchers to develop feature description models beyond 2D. Although higher dimensional data enhance the performance of methods on numerous tasks, they can also introduce new challenges and problems. The higher dimensionality of the data often leads to more complicated structures which present additional problems in both extracting meaningful content and in adapting it for current machine learning algorithms. Due to the major importance of the evaluation process, we also present an overview of the current datasets and benchmarks. Moreover, based on more than 330 papers from this study, we present the major challenges and future directions. Computer Systems, Imagery and Medi

On the use of autonomous unmanned vehicles in response to hazardous atmospheric release incidents

Recent events have induced a surge of interest in the methods of response to releases of hazardous materials or gases into the atmosphere. In the last decade there has been particular interest in mapping and quantifying emissions for regulatory purposes, emergency response, and environmental monitoring. Examples include: responding to events such as gas leaks, nuclear accidents or chemical, biological or radiological (CBR) accidents or attacks, and even exploring sources of methane emissions on the planet Mars. This thesis presents a review of the potential responses to hazardous releases, which includes source localisation, boundary tracking, mapping and source term estimation. [Continues.]</div

Generalised Kernel Representations with Applications to Data Efficient Machine Learning

The universe of mathematical modelling from observational data is a vast space. It consists a cacophony of differing paths, with doors to worlds with seemingly diametrically opposed perspectives that all attempt to conjure a crystal ball of both intuitive understanding and predictive capability. Among these many worlds is an approach that is broadly called kernel methods, which, while complex in detail, when viewed from afar ultimately reduces to a rather simple question: how close is something to something else? What does it mean to be close? Specifically, how can we quantify closeness in some reasonable and principled way? This thesis presents four approaches that address generalised kernel learning. Firstly, we introduce a probabilistic framework that allows joint learning of model and kernel parameters in order to capture nonstationary spatial phenomena. Secondly, we introduce a theoretical framework based on optimal transport that enables online kernel parameter transfer. Such parameter transfer involves the ability to re-use previously learned parameters, without re-optimisation, on newly observed data. This extends the first contribution which was unable operate in real-time due to the necessity of reoptimising parameters to new observations. Thirdly, we introduce a learnable Fourier based kernel embeddings that exploits generalised quantile representations for stationary kernels. Finally, a method for input warped Fourier kernel embeddings is proposed that allows nonstationary data embeddings using simple stationary kernels. By introducing theoretically cohesive and algorithmically intuitive methods this thesis opens new doors to removing traditional assumptions that have hindered adoption of the kernel perspective. We hope that the ideas presented will demonstrate a curious and inspiring view to the potential of learnable kernel embeddings

Proceedings of the 2011 Joint Workshop of Fraunhofer IOSB and Institute for Anthropomatics, Vision and Fusion Laboratory

This book is a collection of 15 reviewed technical reports summarizing the presentations at the 2011 Joint Workshop of Fraunhofer IOSB and Institute for Anthropomatics, Vision and Fusion Laboratory. The covered topics include image processing, optical signal processing, visual inspection, pattern recognition and classification, human-machine interaction, world and situation modeling, autonomous system localization and mapping, information fusion, and trust propagation in sensor networks