Key-point based tracking for illegally parked vehicle detection

This research aims to develop a target detection and tracking system that can realize real-time video surveillance. The purpose of the research is to realize a monitoring application that can run automatically and intelligently to detect and track illegally parked vehicles. Since the application scenario of the algorithm is a real traffic environment, it must be able to adapt to complex environmental interference, such as drastic changes in lighting conditions, frequent occlusion, and long-term stable tracking. The thesis shows the detailed design process and test results of the system. This algorithm combines the target detection function based on deep learning network and the multi-object tracking algorithm based on key point matching. The method shown in the thesis focuses on detecting and tracking stationary vehicles in the no parking area. An object detection algorithm based on a deep learning network is used to recognize vehicles. Once the recognized vehicle is defined as an illegally parked vehicle through the determination of its motion state and location, an algorithm based on key-point matching is developed and tracked for this type of vehicle. If the target is still stationary in the no parking area after a period, the system will generate an alarm. The method was tested in more than 20 hours of video. The video comes from public database and our own. They all show real surveillance scenes, including different time periods of the day and different locations. The test results show that the method achieves 100% in precision (also called positive predictive value), 95% in recall (also known as sensitivity) and 97% in F1 (a measure that combines precision and recall). The results obtained also produce better detection and tracking compared to other comparable methods

Chinese-american WOMEN’S EXISTENTIAL conscience as reflected in the woman warrior written by maxine hong kingston

Thesis, entitled Chinese-American Woman Existential Conscience as Reflected in the Novel The Woman Warrior Written by Maxine Hong Kinston, is written in purpose of analyzing the facts of women subordination within the novel. And most importantly is to find out the special concept of Chinese- American woman existential conscience which is constructed by the narrator in a high complexity of sexual and racial discriminations. The theoretical approach will be historical approach, sociological approach and feminist literary approach especially of the liberal mainstream. These approaches are relevant to the study, that is to analyze women existential conscience in the historical and cultural context of the Chinese-American society. The main data of the analysis is every data in the novel, which is related to the study, and supported by the information from many other sources, such as books, articles, journals, Internet and also the result of some discussions. Narrator, as the center character of the novel, is the second generation of Chinese immigrant parents in America. In the novel she performs the experiences of her women relatives, including her mother, her two aunts and finally herself. Her rejection to the oppressive patriarchal system has strongly inspired her to reveal the facts of those women relatives’ experiences of women subordination. And the facts are varied; since the sexual harassment, physical raid of women with out of marriage pregnancy, psychological terror, women’s boundaries to play the role of only the domestic affairs, and deeper to the destruction of women’s firm consciousness of their equal existence with men in their society. Those women’s experiences proved that patriarchal system has become a subjugation mechanism of women’s freedom to explore their own individualized identity as human being with the large capacity of everything, which is equal to men. Moreover the fact of racial discrimination has also burdened those women with the more suffering of subordination. Together with Chinese immigrant men, they have to face the economic, social, cultural and political problems in the effort of mingling with the new society. And their incapability of mastering the English language has sent them to the domestic fields or to the low paid jobs, which make them cheaper than the Native Americans and the immigrant men. Challenging the sexual and racial discriminations, the narrator proposes the possibility of women and men’s sameness and equality. She refuses every pattern of discrimination conducted upon her, and at the same time constructs the idealization of being a woman. Through the Chinese legend of Fa Mu Lan she performs that women own the same and equal capability of rational thought and public achievements. Women exist as the same and equal human being to men. And narrator’s dialectical thought on women existence also sets high appreciation on femininity as the means of women’s struggle to construct women and men equality. Finally, narrator’s concept of women existential conscience lies on her desire of women’s realization of their free, active, autonomous and subjective individuality, while the feminine or masculine aspects are both the legitimate modes of being human

Automatic object classification for surveillance videos.

PhDThe recent popularity of surveillance video systems, specially located in urban scenarios, demands the development of visual techniques for monitoring purposes. A primary step towards intelligent surveillance video systems consists on automatic object classification, which still remains an open research problem and the keystone for the development of more specific applications. Typically, object representation is based on the inherent visual features. However, psychological studies have demonstrated that human beings can routinely categorise objects according to their behaviour. The existing gap in the understanding between the features automatically extracted by a computer, such as appearance-based features, and the concepts unconsciously perceived by human beings but unattainable for machines, or the behaviour features, is most commonly known as semantic gap. Consequently, this thesis proposes to narrow the semantic gap and bring together machine and human understanding towards object classification. Thus, a Surveillance Media Management is proposed to automatically detect and classify objects by analysing the physical properties inherent in their appearance (machine understanding) and the behaviour patterns which require a higher level of understanding (human understanding). Finally, a probabilistic multimodal fusion algorithm bridges the gap performing an automatic classification considering both machine and human understanding. The performance of the proposed Surveillance Media Management framework has been thoroughly evaluated on outdoor surveillance datasets. The experiments conducted demonstrated that the combination of machine and human understanding substantially enhanced the object classification performance. Finally, the inclusion of human reasoning and understanding provides the essential information to bridge the semantic gap towards smart surveillance video systems

We Come. We Work. We Relate. The Migrant Labourers in Penang

The PhD-project looks at the everyday work and lives of labour migrants in Penang. They are women and men from Indonesia, Vietnam, Nepal, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and The Philippines. The research employed a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods. However, the data collection relied mainly on the ethnographic research method, which enriched and enhanced the understanding of¬ workers’ daily activities. This thesis departs from the diagnosis that how migration is studied in Asia and for Malaysia, follows the old scientific divide – either they focus more on structural issues constraining migrants (perspective from ‘above’) or the agency of the migrants themselves (from ‘below’). In consequence, the thesis aims to reconcile the strengths of both scientific camps by taking their respective perspectives on life realities of labour migrants as point of departure for an empirically based synthesis. To capture the experiences and activities of labour migrants in and outside their workplace as detailed as possible, the conceptual framework takes everyday practices as guiding lens. The principal argument deriving from the findings is that, despite the exploitative labour regime, migrant workers seek to translate their aspirations to ‘live a normal life’ and integrate in the receiving society through relational practices that connect them to people, places and certain ideas. My approach to a reconciliation of ‘from-above’ and ‘from-below’ approaches allows me to make sense of how migrants negotiate both aspects of their lives – the exploitative practices in the workplace, and the social activities they pursue in their free time after work. To attempt a synthesis by looking at migrants’ activities is the overarching point of this study. It should not only enable new empirical insights about how labour migration as a process is being experienced from the perspective of the migrants themselves, but also contribute to develop more appropriate analytical tools on a theoretical-scientific level to understand labour migration in its different dimensions and its ramifications better. The concept of relational practices which the thesis employs as analytical lens allows to focus on mundane aspects of the migrants’ life-worlds and to portray them as ordinary denizens with multiple aspirations concerning their life in Penang (and not ‘back home’), plus efforts for self-realisation and achieving satisfaction in everyday life. As a result, the migrant labourers appear neither one-dimensionally to be victims of an exploitative regime, nor permanent activists who seek close network ties with members of their own communal (ethnic) background in order to cope abroad. Moreover, the empirical insights the thesis derived at, allow portraying labour migrants as ordinary inhabitants of Penang, whose everyday life does not substantially differ from that of citizens. In this sense, the thesis also contributes to draw a more realistic picture of the everyday life experiences of migrant workers than scholars have done so far. It was revealed how workers are de facto integrated in local society and self-determined members of urban mainstream society of Penang – sharing similar ambitions and concerns in everyday life

Acculturation in marriage institutions in India.

Thesis (M.A.)--Boston Universit

Activity understanding and unusual event detection in surveillance videos

PhDComputer scientists have made ceaseless efforts to replicate cognitive video understanding abilities of human brains onto autonomous vision systems. As video surveillance cameras become ubiquitous, there is a surge in studies on automated activity understanding and unusual event detection in surveillance videos. Nevertheless, video content analysis in public scenes remained a formidable challenge due to intrinsic difficulties such as severe inter-object occlusion in crowded scene and poor quality of recorded surveillance footage. Moreover, it is nontrivial to achieve robust detection of unusual events, which are rare, ambiguous, and easily confused with noise. This thesis proposes solutions for resolving ambiguous visual observations and overcoming unreliability of conventional activity analysis methods by exploiting multi-camera visual context and human feedback. The thesis first demonstrates the importance of learning visual context for establishing reliable reasoning on observed activity in a camera network. In the proposed approach, a new Cross Canonical Correlation Analysis (xCCA) is formulated to discover and quantify time delayed pairwise correlations of regional activities observed within and across multiple camera views. This thesis shows that learning time delayed pairwise activity correlations offers valuable contextual information for (1) spatial and temporal topology inference of a camera network, (2) robust person re-identification, and (3) accurate activity-based video temporal segmentation. Crucially, in contrast to conventional methods, the proposed approach does not rely on either intra-camera or inter-camera object tracking; it can thus be applied to low-quality surveillance videos featuring severe inter-object occlusions. Second, to detect global unusual event across multiple disjoint cameras, this thesis extends visual context learning from pairwise relationship to global time delayed dependency between regional activities. Specifically, a Time Delayed Probabilistic Graphical Model (TD-PGM) is proposed to model the multi-camera activities and their dependencies. Subtle global unusual events are detected and localised using the model as context-incoherent patterns across multiple camera views. In the model, different nodes represent activities in different decomposed re3 gions from different camera views, and the directed links between nodes encoding time delayed dependencies between activities observed within and across camera views. In order to learn optimised time delayed dependencies in a TD-PGM, a novel two-stage structure learning approach is formulated by combining both constraint-based and scored-searching based structure learning methods. Third, to cope with visual context changes over time, this two-stage structure learning approach is extended to permit tractable incremental update of both TD-PGM parameters and its structure. As opposed to most existing studies that assume static model once learned, the proposed incremental learning allows a model to adapt itself to reflect the changes in the current visual context, such as subtle behaviour drift over time or removal/addition of cameras. Importantly, the incremental structure learning is achieved without either exhaustive search in a large graph structure space or storing all past observations in memory, making the proposed solution memory and time efficient. Forth, an active learning approach is presented to incorporate human feedback for on-line unusual event detection. Contrary to most existing unsupervised methods that perform passive mining for unusual events, the proposed approach automatically requests supervision for critical points to resolve ambiguities of interest, leading to more robust detection of subtle unusual events. The active learning strategy is formulated as a stream-based solution, i.e. it makes decision on-the-fly on whether to request label for each unlabelled sample observed in sequence. It selects adaptively two active learning criteria, namely likelihood criterion and uncertainty criterion to achieve (1) discovery of unknown event classes and (2) refinement of classification boundary. The effectiveness of the proposed approaches is validated using videos captured from busy public scenes such as underground stations and traffic intersections

Advances in Character Recognition

This book presents advances in character recognition, and it consists of 12 chapters that cover wide range of topics on different aspects of character recognition. Hopefully, this book will serve as a reference source for academic research, for professionals working in the character recognition field and for all interested in the subject

ICNS Proceedings

The night has been the subject of multiple readings by the social and human sciences, as well as it has inspired multiple narratives throughout history, literature and popular culture. However, the study of nightlife, practices, and actors only gained attention in recent years. The appearance of “mayors of the night” with the intention of improving urban governance during this period and thus guaranteeing needs, rights and services is the result of a progressive change in the local political paradigm, which begins to face this space-time as a “new” opportunity for its economic, social and cultural development. We could say that the night and the activities that take place in it begin to be projected as forms of tourist attraction, whether for their leisure activities such as discos, parties or other forms of fun; or because of its cultural potential, such as the White Nights. Contemporary urban night implies having active professionals, capable of reacting to any incident, such as the case of health professionals, but also maintaining those professions – often illegal – that tend to be considered problematic or hidden as could be prostitution. Surveillance and control during this period is also a good example of active professions, such as the case of the police, surveillance companies, video-doorman, or firefighters. It has never been so easy to commute in the urban space, public transport normally meets the needs of users, and the emergence of new forms of transport resulting from the circular economy, both of people and goods, completes the demand, not without controversy. There are many different ways to approach the night, but here we collect some of the communications that participated during the I International Conference on Night Studies, that took place on-line, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, on July 2 -4, 2020. These communications are also on-line on the official account of the conference.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

More-than-human Nights:Intersecting lived experience and diurnal rhythms in the nocturnal city

The contemporary nocturnal city is characterised by the interplay of luminosity and darkness, a chiaroscuro tableau inhabited by a myriad of flora and fauna—including, of course, humans. What patterns, rhythms, and indeed disturbances can be detected in this patchwork i.e. how do humans, non-humans, and wider natural cycles and rhythms co-produce the nocturnal urban environment? How is this coexistence of light and darkness inhabited by these multiple species? In short, how is the night moved through, and how does it move through us and our non-human companions? This paper is sited at the intersection of two perspectives on the urban night—first, lived experience and the affective dimension of the nocturnal city; and second, the wider rhythms of the city and the sky above that inscribe themselves into us and our companions. It asks how we, as researchers, can be attentive to the urban night so as to bring these two perspectives together. To do this, we will discuss two methods that the authors have used to inhabit and describe the urban night—one a perambulatory autoethnography of urban edgelands described through text and photography, the other an ethnography of urban temporality using photographic and sonic field recording techniques. Together, the authors’ different approaches pay close attention to both the human and non-human dimensions of the environment. We examine the diversity of nocturnal atmospheres, ambiances, and soundscapes to better understand their meanings and uses. Furthermore, we do this in a way that is attentive to the various spatial and temporal scales of darkness and light—from the palpable immediacy of lived experience or the daily tides of rush hour traffic to the changing phases of the moon or the activities of migrating birds or foraging beetles. By bringing these methods together, our aim is to contribute to a toolkit for situated fieldwork that can be used to create a rich description of the nocturnal urban environment—particularly one that includes but does not privilege the human. Furthermore, the work aims to make such descriptions legible and accessible within and beyond academia