Myriad : a distributed machine vision application framework

This thesis examines the potential for the application of distributed computing frameworks to industrial and also lightweight consumer-level Machine Vision (MV) applications. Traditional, stand-alone MV systems have many benefits in well-defined, tightly- controlled industrial settings, but expose limitations in interactive, de-localised and small-task applications that seek to utilise vision techniques. In these situations, single-computer solutions fail to suffice and greater flexibility in terms of system construction, interactivity and localisation are required. Network-connected and distributed vision systems are proposed as a remedy to these problems, providing dynamic, componentised systems that may optionally be independent of location, or take advantage of networked computing tools and techniques, such as web servers, databases, proxies, wireless networking, secure connectivity, distributed computing clusters, web services and load balancing. The thesis discusses a system named Myriad, a distributed computing framework for Machine Vision applications. Myriad is composed components, such as image processing engines and equipment controllers, which behave as enhanced web servers and communicate using simple HTTP requests. The roles of HTTP-based distributed computing servers in simplifying rapid development of networked applications and integrating those applications with existing networked tools and business processes are explored. Prototypes of Myriad components, written in Java, along with supporting PHP, Perl and Prolog scripts and user interfaces in C , Java, VB and C++/Qt are examined. Each component includes a scripting language named MCS, enabling remote clients (or other Myriad components) to issue single commands or execute sequences of commands locally to the component in a sustained session. The advantages of server- side scripting in this manner for distributed computing tasks are outlined with emphasis on Machine Vision applications, as a means to overcome network connection issues and address problems where consistent processing is required. Furthermore, the opportunities to utilise scripting to form complex distributed computing network topologies and fully-autonomous federated networked applications are described, and examples given on how to achieve functionality such as clusters of image processing nodes. Through the medium of experimentation involving the remote control of a model train set, cameras and lights, the ability of Myriad to perform traditional roles of fixed, stand-alone Machine Vision systems is supported, along with discussion of opportunities to incorporate these elements into network-based dynamic collaborative inspection applications. In an example of 2D packing of remotely-acquired shapes, distributed computing extensions to Machine Vision tasks are explored, along with integration into larger business processes. Finally, the thesis examines the use of Machine Vision techniques and Myriad components to construct distributed computing applications with the addition of vision capabilities, leading to a new class of image-data-driven applications that exploit mobile computing and Pervasive Computing trends

Collaborative geographic visualization

Dissertação apresentada na Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia da Universidade Nova de Lisboa para a obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia do Ambiente, perfil Gestão e Sistemas AmbientaisThe present document is a revision of essential references to take into account when developing ubiquitous Geographical Information Systems (GIS) with collaborative visualization purposes. Its chapters focus, respectively, on general principles of GIS, its multimedia components and ubiquitous practices; geo-referenced information visualization and its graphical components of virtual and augmented reality; collaborative environments, its technological requirements, architectural specificities, and models for collective information management; and some final considerations about the future and challenges of collaborative visualization of GIS in ubiquitous environment

Performance modelling and enhancement of wireless communication protocols

In recent years, Wireless Local Area Networks(WLANs) play a key role in the data communications and networking areas, having witnessed significant research and development. WLANs are extremely popular being almost everywhere including business,office and home deployments.In order to deal with the modem Wireless connectivity needs,the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE) has developed the 802.11 standard family utilizing mainly radio transmission techniques, whereas the Infrared Data Association (IrDA) addressed the requirement for multipoint connectivity with the development of the Advanced Infrared(Alr) protocol stack. This work studies the collision avoidance procedures of the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) protocol and suggests certain protocol enhancements aiming at maximising performance. A new, elegant and accurate analysis based on Markov chain modelling is developed for the idealistic assumption of unlimited packet retransmissions as well as for the case of finite packet retry limits. Simple equations are derived for the through put efficiency, the average packet delay, the probability of a packet being discarded when it reaches the maximum retransmission limit, the average time to drop such a packet and the packet inter-arrival time for both basic access and RTS/CTS medium access schemes.The accuracy of the mathematical model is validated by comparing analytical with OPNET simulation results. An extensive and detailed study is carried out on the influence of performance of physical layer, data rate, packet payload size and several backoff parameters for both medium access mechanisms. The previous mathematical model is extended to take into account transmission errors that can occur either independently with fixed Bit Error Rate(BER) or in bursts. The dependency of the protocol performance on BER and other factors related to independent and burst transmission errors is explored. Furthermore, a simple-implement appropriate tuning of the back off algorithm for maximizing IEEE 802-11 protocol performance is proposed depending on the specific communication requirements. The effectiveness of the RTS/CTS scheme in reducing collision duration at high data rates is studied and an all-purpose expression for the optimal use of the RTS/CTS reservation scheme is derived. Moreover, an easy-to-implement backoff algorithm that significantly enhances performance is introduced and an alternative derivation is developed based on elementary conditional probability arguments rather than bi-dimensional Markov chains. Finally, an additional performance improvement scheme is proposed by employing packet bursting in order to reduce overhead costs such as contention time and RTS/CTSex changes. Fairness is explored in short-time and long-time scales for both the legacy DCF and packet bursting cases. AIr protocol employs the RTS/CTS medium reservation scheme to cope with hidden stations and CSMA/CA techniques with linear contention window (CW) adjustment for medium access. A 1-dimensional Markov chain model is constructed instead of the bi-dimensional model in order to obtain simple mathematical equations of the average packet delay.This new approach greatly simplifies previous analyses and can be applied to any CSMA/CA protocol.The derived mathematical model is validated by comparing analytical with simulation results and an extensive Alr packet delay evaluation is carried out by taking into account all the factors and parameters that affect protocol performance. Finally, suitable values for both backoff and protocol parameters are proposed that reduce average packet delay and, thus, maximize performance

Satellite Networks: Architectures, Applications, and Technologies

Since global satellite networks are moving to the forefront in enhancing the national and global information infrastructures due to communication satellites' unique networking characteristics, a workshop was organized to assess the progress made to date and chart the future. This workshop provided the forum to assess the current state-of-the-art, identify key issues, and highlight the emerging trends in the next-generation architectures, data protocol development, communication interoperability, and applications. Presentations on overview, state-of-the-art in research, development, deployment and applications and future trends on satellite networks are assembled

An Improved Active Network Concept and Architecture for Distributed and Dynamic Streaming Multimedia Environments with Heterogeneous Bandwidths

A problem in todays Internet infrastructure may occur when a streaming multimedia application is to take place. The information content of video and audio signals that contain moving or changing scenes may simply be too great for Internet clients with low bandwidth capacity if no adaptation is performed. In order to satisfactorily reach clients with various bandwidth capacities some works such as receiver-driven multicast and resilient overlay networks (RON) have been developed. However these efforts mainly call for modification on router level management or place additional layer to the Internet structure, which is not recommended in the nearest future due to the highly acceptance level and widely utilization of the current Internet structure, and the lengthy and tiring standardization process for a new structure or modification to be accepted. We have developed an improved active network approach for distributed and dynamic streaming multimedia environment with heterogeneous bandwidth, such as the case of the Internet. Friendly active network system (FANS) is a sample of our approach. Adopting application level active network (ALAN) mechanism, FANS participants and available media are referred through its universal resource locator (url). The system intercepts traffic flowing from source to destination and performs media post-processing at an intermediate peer. The process is performed at the application level instead of at the router level, which was the original approach of active networks. FANS requires no changes in router level management and puts no additional requirement to the current Internet architecture and, hence, instantly applicable. In comparison with ALAN, FANS possesses two significant differences. From the system overview, ALAN requires three minimum elements: clients, servers, and dynamic proxy servers. FANS, on the other hand, unifies the functionalities of those three elements. Each of peers in FANS is a client, an intermediate peer, and a media server as well. Secondly, FANS members tracking system dynamically detects the existence of a newly joined computers or mobile device, given its url is available and announced. In ALAN, the servers and the middle nodes are priori known and, hence, static. The application level approach and better performance characteristics distinguished also our work with another similar work in this field, which uses router level approach. The approach offers, in general, the following improvements: FANS promotes QoS fairness, in which clients with lower bandwidth are accommodated and receive better quality of service FANS introduces a new algorithm to determine whether or not the involvement of intermediate peer(s) to perform media post-processing enhancement services is necessary. This mechanism is important and advantageous due to the fact that intermediate post-processing increases the delay and, therefore, should only be employed selectively. FANS considers the size of media data and the capacity of clients bandwidth as network parameters that determine the level of quality of service offered. By employing the above techniques, our experiments with the Internet emulator show that our approach improves the reliability of streaming media applications in such environment

Performance modelling and enhancement of wireless communication protocols

In recent years, Wireless Local Area Networks(WLANs) play a key role in the data communications and networking areas, having witnessed significant research and development. WLANs are extremely popular being almost everywhere including business,office and home deployments.In order to deal with the modem Wireless connectivity needs,the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers(IEEE) has developed the 802.11 standard family utilizing mainly radio transmission techniques, whereas the Infrared Data Association (IrDA) addressed the requirement for multipoint connectivity with the development of the Advanced Infrared(Alr) protocol stack. This work studies the collision avoidance procedures of the IEEE 802.11 Distributed Coordination Function (DCF) protocol and suggests certain protocol enhancements aiming at maximising performance. A new, elegant and accurate analysis based on Markov chain modelling is developed for the idealistic assumption of unlimited packet retransmissions as well as for the case of finite packet retry limits. Simple equations are derived for the through put efficiency, the average packet delay, the probability of a packet being discarded when it reaches the maximum retransmission limit, the average time to drop such a packet and the packet inter-arrival time for both basic access and RTS/CTS medium access schemes.The accuracy of the mathematical model is validated by comparing analytical with OPNET simulation results. An extensive and detailed study is carried out on the influence of performance of physical layer, data rate, packet payload size and several backoff parameters for both medium access mechanisms. The previous mathematical model is extended to take into account transmission errors that can occur either independently with fixed Bit Error Rate(BER) or in bursts. The dependency of the protocol performance on BER and other factors related to independent and burst transmission errors is explored. Furthermore, a simple-implement appropriate tuning of the back off algorithm for maximizing IEEE 802-11 protocol performance is proposed depending on the specific communication requirements. The effectiveness of the RTS/CTS scheme in reducing collision duration at high data rates is studied and an all-purpose expression for the optimal use of the RTS/CTS reservation scheme is derived. Moreover, an easy-to-implement backoff algorithm that significantly enhances performance is introduced and an alternative derivation is developed based on elementary conditional probability arguments rather than bi-dimensional Markov chains. Finally, an additional performance improvement scheme is proposed by employing packet bursting in order to reduce overhead costs such as contention time and RTS/CTSex changes. Fairness is explored in short-time and long-time scales for both the legacy DCF and packet bursting cases. AIr protocol employs the RTS/CTS medium reservation scheme to cope with hidden stations and CSMA/CA techniques with linear contention window (CW) adjustment for medium access. A 1-dimensional Markov chain model is constructed instead of the bi-dimensional model in order to obtain simple mathematical equations of the average packet delay.This new approach greatly simplifies previous analyses and can be applied to any CSMA/CA protocol.The derived mathematical model is validated by comparing analytical with simulation results and an extensive Alr packet delay evaluation is carried out by taking into account all the factors and parameters that affect protocol performance. Finally, suitable values for both backoff and protocol parameters are proposed that reduce average packet delay and, thus, maximize performance.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Study, Analysis and Modeling of IP Multimedia systems on next generation networks providing mobile and fixed multimedia services

Not availabl

Technology 2002: The Third National Technology Transfer Conference and Exposition, volume 2

Proceedings from symposia of the Technology 2002 Conference and Exposition, December 1-3, 1992, Baltimore, MD. Volume 2 features 60 papers presented during 30 concurrent sessions

Modelling and performances assessment of OFDM and fast-OFDM wireless communication systems.

This thesis is mainly concerned with the design, modelling and performance assessment of modulation techniques for use in wireless communication systems. The work is divided, broadly in three areas; a multimode system proposal, an assessment of a new modulation scheme and a system optimisation technique. A multimode system architecture employing GSM and EDGE systems and an Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) system is proposed. The OFDM system is designed to have similar frame structure, channel allocation and spectrum shape to those of the GSM and EDGE systems. The multimode system is evaluated under typical multipath fading environments specified for GSM/EDGE and adjacent-channel and co-channel interference. The results indicated that the proposed OFDM system can be perfectly integrated within the GSM/EDGE network core. Furthermore, a novel modulation technique is investigated. Fast-OFDM (FOFDM) is a variation of OFDM, which offers twice the bandwidth efficiency when compared to OFDM. However, the bandwidth efficiency only applies to one dimensional modulation schemes (BPSK or M-ASK). The suitability of FOFDM for wireless communications is assessed by studying its performance under receiver front-end distortions and multipath fading environments. The performance of the FOFDM system is compared with the performance of a similar OFDM system. The results indicated that under small distortion conditions, the performance of FOFDM and OFDM is comparable. Finally, the effect of interpolation filtering on OFDM systems in noise limited and interference limited environments is investigated. The aim of this study is to highlight that interference should be taken into consideration when designing systems for wireless communications. In addition, this study can be utilised in software defined radio schemes, offering optimised performance. Overall, this thesis presents work over a range of research areas, providing system proposals, modulation comparisons and system optimisation techniques that can be used by developers of future mobile systems