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

Recharacterising Face Recognition Deficits in Developmental Prosopagnosia.

Developmental prosopagnosia (DP) is a neurodevelopmental condition characterised by a relatively selective deficit in face recognition. Current approaches to diagnose the condition vary within the field, making comparisons across studies difficult. Furthermore, theoretical inferences rely on accurate identification of people with DP and, combined with the fact that some individuals also report moderate-to-severe psychosocial consequences of the condition, the methods used to diagnose DP have been under increasing scrutiny. Thus, the present thesis aimed to address contemporary issues relating to the diagnosis of DP. Specifically, the thesis begins by investigating the utility of self-report, and presents a list of empirically-driven hallmark symptoms of the condition which can aid the identification of DP in children and adults, both in oneself and in others. The thesis then explores objective measures of face processing; Chapter Four presents, for the first known time, the test-retest reliability for the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT) – the leading test of unfamiliar face recognition. Interestingly, this value falls just short of accepted psychometric protocols, and recommendations for using two separate tests of the same subprocess of face processing are suggested. With this in mind, Chapter Five supported the diagnostic utility of repeat assessment for face perception. We present a new test of face matching and, in combination with the original Benton Facial Recognition Test, advocate the use of identifying face perception deficits in DP by administering two separate tests. Finally, we come away from behavioural measures to consider more nuanced means of dissociating DP from other developmental conditions that are commonly associated with face recognition difficulties. For instance, many people with autistic spectrum conditions (ASCs) struggle with face recognition, and many DPs avoid social situations – an outward symptom that may be confused with ASCs. Given face recognition difficulties likely have different underpinnings in the two conditions, Chapter Six employs eye-tracking methods to differentially diagnose face recognition impairments in DP versus ASCs. Whilst sample size is low due to the interruption of data collection by COVID- 19, we find that those with ASC look more towards non-social stimuli than DP participants, particularly when the scene is more social and interactive. Those with DP look more towards extrafacial information, such as hair and bodies, than ASC participants. The thesis concludes with a summary of recommendations for the future diagnosis of DP

Proceedings of the 2009 Joint Workshop of Fraunhofer IOSB and Institute for Anthropomatics, Vision and Fusion Laboratory

The joint workshop of the Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation IOSB, Karlsruhe, and the Vision and Fusion Laboratory (Institute for Anthropomatics, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT)), is organized annually since 2005 with the aim to report on the latest research and development findings of the doctoral students of both institutions. This book provides a collection of 16 technical reports on the research results presented on the 2009 workshop

Privacy-Protecting Techniques for Behavioral Data: A Survey

Our behavior (the way we talk, walk, or think) is unique and can be used as a biometric trait. It also correlates with sensitive attributes like emotions. Hence, techniques to protect individuals privacy against unwanted inferences are required. To consolidate knowledge in this area, we systematically reviewed applicable anonymization techniques. We taxonomize and compare existing solutions regarding privacy goals, conceptual operation, advantages, and limitations. Our analysis shows that some behavioral traits (e.g., voice) have received much attention, while others (e.g., eye-gaze, brainwaves) are mostly neglected. We also find that the evaluation methodology of behavioral anonymization techniques can be further improved

On Pseudorelatives and Human Sentence Parsing

The debate over whether universal parsing mechanisms are necessary to explain sentence comprehension is clearly a fundamental one for cognitive science. This dissertation focuses on the relation between syntactic ambiguity and principles of economy in the parsing of ambiguous Pseudo Relative (PR)/ Relative Clause (RC) strings. While the principles of locality would predict local attachment in (exclusive) RC contexts, PR-first Hypothesis (Grillo & Costa, 2014) predicts high attachment (corresponding to a PR parse) in ambiguous PR/RC contexts. We test the offline and online effects of PR availability in Spanish using a variety of research methods (eye-tracking while reading, sentence completion task, forced-choice questionnaire, acceptability judgement), while also looking at the interaction with other factors such as aspectual properties of the embedded predicate. The results reported here are robust across studies and show an influence of PRs on the parsing of RCs: when PRs are not a confound, and relevant factors are controlled (e.g. length of the clauses), locality principles apply to RC attachment; when PRs are available, attachment preferences shift toward the non-local option. These results support the universality of parsing principles and suggest that crosslinguistic variation in RC attachment is epiphenomenal and largely attributable to the asymmetric availability of PRs across languages. This dissertation also provides a detailed description on PR-licensing contexts that might be useful for future research on RC attachment preferences to avoid the PR confound.O debate sobre se os mecanismos de análise universal são necessários para explicar a compreensão de frases é claramente fundamental para a Ciência Cognitiva. Esta dissertação centra-se na relação entre ambiguidade sintática e princípios de economia na análise de estruturaspseudorelativas (PR)/ orações relativas (OR) ambíguas. Enquanto os princípios de localidade prediriam a ligação local em contextos (exclusivos) das OR, a PR-first Hypothesis (Grillo & Costa, 2014) prevê uma alta ligação (correspondente a uma análise da PR) em contextos PR/OR ambíguos. Nesta tese testamos os efeitos offline e online da disponibilidade das PRs em Espanhol, utilizando uma variedade de métodos de investigação (técnica de registo dos comportamentos oculares (eye-tracking) durante a leitura, tarefa de preenchimento de frases, questionários, julgamento da aceitabilidade), ao mesmo tempo que também analisamos a interação com as propriedades aspetuais do predicado encaixado. Os resultados obtidos nesta dissertação mostram uma influência das PRs na análise das ORs: quando as PRs estão disponíveis e os fatores relevantes são controlados (por exemplo, o comprimento das orações), os princípios da localidade aplicam-se à adjunção das ORs; quando as PRs estão disponíveis, as preferências de adjunção mudam para a opção não-local. Estes resultados apoiam a universalidade dos princípios de análise e sugerem que a variação linguística na adjunção da OR é epifenomenal e amplamente atribuível à disponibilidade assimétrica das PRs entre línguas. Esta dissertação também fornece uma descrição detalhada dos contextos de licenciamento da PR, que podem ser úteis para evitar a ambiguidade PR/OR em futuras pesquisas sobre as preferências da ligação da OR

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

Change blindness: eradication of gestalt strategies

Arrays of eight, texture-defined rectangles were used as stimuli in a one-shot change blindness (CB) task where there was a 50% chance that one rectangle would change orientation between two successive presentations separated by an interval. CB was eliminated by cueing the target rectangle in the first stimulus, reduced by cueing in the interval and unaffected by cueing in the second presentation. This supports the idea that a representation was formed that persisted through the interval before being 'overwritten' by the second presentation (Landman et al, 2003 Vision Research 43149–164]. Another possibility is that participants used some kind of grouping or Gestalt strategy. To test this we changed the spatial position of the rectangles in the second presentation by shifting them along imaginary spokes (by ±1 degree) emanating from the central fixation point. There was no significant difference seen in performance between this and the standard task [F(1,4)=2.565, p=0.185]. This may suggest two things: (i) Gestalt grouping is not used as a strategy in these tasks, and (ii) it gives further weight to the argument that objects may be stored and retrieved from a pre-attentional store during this task

Space-variant picture coding

PhDSpace-variant picture coding techniques exploit the strong spatial non-uniformity of the human visual system in order to increase coding efficiency in terms of perceived quality per bit. This thesis extends space-variant coding research in two directions. The first of these directions is in foveated coding. Past foveated coding research has been dominated by the single-viewer, gaze-contingent scenario. However, for research into the multi-viewer and probability-based scenarios, this thesis presents a missing piece: an algorithm for computing an additive multi-viewer sensitivity function based on an established eye resolution model, and, from this, a blur map that is optimal in the sense of discarding frequencies in least-noticeable- rst order. Furthermore, for the application of a blur map, a novel algorithm is presented for the efficient computation of high-accuracy smoothly space-variant Gaussian blurring, using a specialised filter bank which approximates perfect space-variant Gaussian blurring to arbitrarily high accuracy and at greatly reduced cost compared to the brute force approach of employing a separate low-pass filter at each image location. The second direction is that of artifi cially increasing the depth-of- field of an image, an idea borrowed from photography with the advantage of allowing an image to be reduced in bitrate while retaining or increasing overall aesthetic quality. Two synthetic depth of field algorithms are presented herein, with the desirable properties of aiming to mimic occlusion eff ects as occur in natural blurring, and of handling any number of blurring and occlusion levels with the same level of computational complexity. The merits of this coding approach have been investigated by subjective experiments to compare it with single-viewer foveated image coding. The results found the depth-based preblurring to generally be significantly preferable to the same level of foveation blurring

SURGICAL NAVIGATION AND AUGMENTED REALITY FOR MARGINS CONTROL IN HEAD AND NECK CANCER

I tumori maligni del distretto testa-collo rappresentano un insieme di lesioni dalle diverse caratteristiche patologiche, epidemiologiche e prognostiche. Per una porzione considerevole di tali patologie, l’intervento chirurgico finalizzato all’asportazione completa del tumore rappresenta l’elemento chiave del trattamento, quand’anche esso includa altre modalità quali la radioterapia e la terapia sistemica. La qualità dell’atto chirurgico ablativo è pertanto essenziale al fine di garantire le massime chance di cura al paziente. Nell’ambito della chirurgia oncologica, la qualità delle ablazioni viene misurata attraverso l’analisi dello stato dei margini di resezione. Oltre a rappresentare un surrogato della qualità della resezione chirurgica, lo stato dei margini di resezione ha notevoli implicazioni da un punto di vista clinico e prognostico. Infatti, il coinvolgimento dei margini di resezione da parte della neoplasia rappresenta invariabilmente un fattore prognostico sfavorevole, oltre che implicare la necessità di intensificare i trattamenti postchirurgici (e.g., ponendo indicazione alla chemioradioterapia adiuvante), comportando una maggiore tossicità per il paziente. La proporzione di resezioni con margini positivi (i.e., coinvolti dalla neoplasia) nel distretto testa-collo è tra le più elevate in ambito di chirurgia oncologica. In tale contesto si pone l’obiettivo del dottorato di cui questa tesi riporta i risultati. Le due tecnologie di cui si è analizzata l’utilità in termini di ottimizzazione dello stato dei margini di resezione sono la navigazione chirurgica con rendering tridimensionale e la realtà aumentata basata sulla videoproiezione di immagini. Le sperimentazioni sono state svolte parzialmente presso l’Università degli Studi di Brescia, parzialmente presso l’Azienda Ospedale Università di Padova e parzialmente presso l’University Health Network (Toronto, Ontario, Canada). I risultati delle sperimentazioni incluse in questo elaborato dimostrano che l'impiego della navigazione chirurgica con rendering tridimensionale nel contesto di procedure oncologiche ablative cervico-cefaliche risulta associata ad un vantaggio significativo in termini di riduzione della frequenza di margini positivi. Al contrario, le tecniche di realtà aumentata basata sulla videoproiezione, nell'ambito della sperimentazione preclinica effettuata, non sono risultate associate a vantaggi sufficienti per poter considerare tale tecnologia per la traslazione clinica.Head and neck malignancies are an heterogeneous group of tumors. Surgery represents the mainstay of treatment for the large majority of head and neck cancers, with ablation being aimed at removing completely the tumor. Radiotherapy and systemic therapy have also a substantial role in the multidisciplinary management of head and neck cancers. The quality of surgical ablation is intimately related to margin status evaluated at a microscopic level. Indeed, margin involvement has a remarkably negative effect on prognosis of patients and mandates the escalation of postoperative treatment by adding concomitant chemotherapy to radiotherapy and accordingly increasing the toxicity of overall treatment. The rate of margin involvement in the head and neck is among the highest in the entire field of surgical oncology. In this context, the present PhD project was aimed at testing the utility of 2 technologies, namely surgical navigation with 3-dimensional rendering and pico projector-based augmented reality, in decreasing the rate of involved margins during oncologic surgical ablations in the craniofacial area. Experiments were performed in the University of Brescia, University of Padua, and University Health Network (Toronto, Ontario, Canada). The research activities completed in the context of this PhD course demonstrated that surgical navigation with 3-dimensional rendering confers a higher quality to oncologic ablations in the head and neck, irrespective of the open or endoscopic surgical technique. The benefits deriving from this implementation come with no relevant drawbacks from a logistical and practical standpoint, nor were major adverse events observed. Thus, implementation of this technology into the standard care is the logical proposed step forward. However, the genuine presence of a prognostic advantage needs longer and larger study to be formally addressed. On the other hand, pico projector-based augmented reality showed no sufficient advantages to encourage translation into the clinical setting. Although observing a clear practical advantage deriving from the projection of osteotomy lines onto the surgical field, no substantial benefits were measured when comparing this technology with surgical navigation with 3-dimensional rendering. Yet recognizing a potential value of this technology from an educational standpoint, the performance displayed in the preclinical setting in terms of surgical margins optimization is not in favor of a clinical translation with this specific aim