MScMS-II: an innovative IR-based indoor coordinate measuring system for large-scale metrology applications

According to the current great interest concerning large-scale metrology applications in many different fields of manufacturing industry, technologies and techniques for dimensional measurement have recently shown a substantial improvement. Ease-of-use, logistic and economic issues, as well as metrological performance are assuming a more and more important role among system requirements. This paper describes the architecture and the working principles of a novel infrared (IR) optical-based system, designed to perform low-cost and easy indoor coordinate measurements of large-size objects. The system consists of a distributed network-based layout, whose modularity allows fitting differently sized and shaped working volumes by adequately increasing the number of sensing units. Differently from existing spatially distributed metrological instruments, the remote sensor devices are intended to provide embedded data elaboration capabilities, in order to share the overall computational load. The overall system functionalities, including distributed layout configuration, network self-calibration, 3D point localization, and measurement data elaboration, are discussed. A preliminary metrological characterization of system performance, based on experimental testing, is also presente

Improving the Efficacy of Context-Aware Applications

In this dissertation, we explore methods for enhancing the context-awareness capabilities of modern computers, including mobile devices, tablets, wearables, and traditional computers. Advancements include proposed methods for fusing information from multiple logical sensors, localizing nearby objects using depth sensors, and building models to better understand the content of 2D images. First, we propose a system called Unagi, designed to incorporate multiple logical sensors into a single framework that allows context-aware application developers to easily test new ideas and create novel experiences. Unagi is responsible for collecting data, extracting features, and building personalized models for each individual user. We demonstrate the utility of the system with two applications: adaptive notification filtering and a network content prefetcher. We also thoroughly evaluate the system with respect to predictive accuracy, temporal delay, and power consumption. Next, we discuss a set of techniques that can be used to accurately determine the location of objects near a user in 3D space using a mobile device equipped with both depth and inertial sensors. Using a novel chaining approach, we are able to locate objects farther away than the standard range of the depth sensor without compromising localization accuracy. Empirical testing shows our method is capable of localizing objects 30m from the user with an error of less than 10cm. Finally, we demonstrate a set of techniques that allow a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) to learn resolution-invariant representations of 2D images, including the proposal of an MCMC-based technique to improve the selection of pixels for mini-batches used for training. We also show that a deep convolutional encoder could be trained to output a resolution-independent representation in constant time, and we discuss several potential applications of this research, including image resampling, image compression, and security