U.S. Law of the Sea Cruise to Map the Southern Flank of the Kingman Reef-Palmyra Atoll section of the Line Islands, Equatorial Pacific Ocean

U.S. Law of the Sea Cruise to Map the Southern Flank of the Kingman Reef-Palmyra Atoll section of the Line Islands, Equatorial Pacific Ocean CRUISE KM1009 May 17, to June 16, 2010 Pago Pago, American Samoa to Honolulu, H

Gaze Controlled Human-Computer Interface

The goal of the Gaze Controlled Human Computer Interface project is to design and construct a non-invasive gaze-tracking system that will determine where a user is looking on a computer screen in real time. To accomplish this, a fixed illumination source consisting of Infrared (IR) Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) is used to produce corneal reflections on the user’s eyes. These reflections are captured with a video camera and compared to the relative location of the user’s pupils. From this comparison, a correlation matrix can be created and the approximate location of the screen that the user is looking at can be determined. The final objective is to allow the user to manipulate a cursor on the computer screen simply by looking at different boxes in a grid on the monitor. The project includes design of the hardware setup to provide a suitable environment for glint detection, image processing of the user’s eyes to determine pupil location, the implementation of a probabilistic algorithm to determine an appropriate matrix transformation, and performance analysis on various users

A novel parallel algorithm for surface editing and its FPGA implementation

A thesis submitted to the University of Bedfordshire in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of PhilosophySurface modelling and editing is one of important subjects in computer graphics. Decades of research in computer graphics has been carried out on both low-level, hardware-related algorithms and high-level, abstract software. Success of computer graphics has been seen in many application areas, such as multimedia, visualisation, virtual reality and the Internet. However, the hardware realisation of OpenGL architecture based on FPGA (field programmable gate array) is beyond the scope of most of computer graphics researches. It is an uncultivated research area where the OpenGL pipeline, from hardware through the whole embedded system (ES) up to applications, is implemented in an FPGA chip. This research proposes a hybrid approach to investigating both software and hardware methods. It aims at bridging the gap between methods of software and hardware, and enhancing the overall performance for computer graphics. It consists of four parts, the construction of an FPGA-based ES, Mesa-OpenGL implementation for FPGA-based ESs, parallel processing, and a novel algorithm for surface modelling and editing. The FPGA-based ES is built up. In addition to the Nios II soft processor and DDR SDRAM memory, it consists of the LCD display device, frame buffers, video pipeline, and algorithm-specified module to support the graphics processing. Since there is no implementation of OpenGL ES available for FPGA-based ESs, a specific OpenGL implementation based on Mesa is carried out. Because of the limited FPGA resources, the implementation adopts the fixed-point arithmetic, which can offer faster computing and lower storage than the floating point arithmetic, and the accuracy satisfying the needs of 3D rendering. Moreover, the implementation includes Bézier-spline curve and surface algorithms to support surface modelling and editing. The pipelined parallelism and co-processors are used to accelerate graphics processing in this research. These two parallelism methods extend the traditional computation parallelism in fine-grained parallel tasks in the FPGA-base ESs. The novel algorithm for surface modelling and editing, called Progressive and Mixing Algorithm (PAMA), is proposed and implemented on FPGA-based ES’s. Compared with two main surface editing methods, subdivision and deformation, the PAMA can eliminate the large storage requirement and computing cost of intermediated processes. With four independent shape parameters, the PAMA can be used to model and edit freely the shape of an open or closed surface that keeps globally the zero-order geometric continuity. The PAMA can be applied independently not only FPGA-based ESs but also other platforms. With the parallel processing, small size, and low costs of computing, storage and power, the FPGA-based ES provides an effective hybrid solution to surface modelling and editing

Cross Hallway Detection and Indoor Localization Using Flash Laser Detection and Ranging

A flash LADAR is investigated as a source of navigation information to support cross-hallway detection and relative localization. To accomplish this, a dynamic, flexible simulation was developed that simulated the LADAR and the noise of a LADAR system. Using simulated LADAR data, algorithms were developed that were shown to be effective at detecting cross hallways in simulated ideal environments and in simulated environments with noise. Relative position was determined in the same situations. A SwissRanger SR4000 flash LADAR was then used to collect real data and to verify algorithm performance in real environments. Hallway detection was shown to be possible in all real data sets, and the relative position-finding algorithm was shown to be accurate when compared to the absolute accuracy of the LADAR. Thus, flash LADAR is concluded to be an effective source for indoor navigation information

An Exploration of MPEG-7 Shape Descriptors

The Multimedia Content Description Interface (ISO/IEC 15938), commonly known to as MPEG-7, became a standard as of September of 2001. Unlike its predecessors, MPEG- 7 standardizes multimedia metadata description. By providing robust descriptors and an effective system for storing them, MPEG-7 is designed to provide a means of navigation through audio-visual content. In particular, MPEG-7 provides two two-dimensional shape descriptors, the Angular Radial Transform (ART) and Curvature Scaled Space (CSS), for use in image and video annotation and retrieval. Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have a very general structure and are made up of programmable switches that allow the end-user, rather than the manufacturer, to configure these switches for whatever design is needed by their application. This flexibly has led to the use of FPGAs for prototyping and implementing circuit designs as well as their use being suggesting as part of reconfigurable computing. For this work, an FPGA based ART extractor was designed and simulated for a Xilinx Virtex-E XCV300e in order to provide a speedup over software based extraction. The design created is capable of processing over 69,4400 pixels a minute. This design utilizes 99% of the FPGA\u27s logical resources and operates at a clock rate of 25 MHz. Along with the proposed design, the MPEG-7 shape descriptors were explored as to how well they retrieved similar objects and how these objects matched up to what a human would expect. Results showed that the majority of the retrievals made using the MPEG-7 shape descriptors returned visually acceptable results. It should be noted that even the human results had a high amount of variance. Finally, this thesis briefly explored the potential of utilizing the ART descriptor for optical character recognition (OCR) in the context of image retrieval from databases. It was demonstrated that the ART has potential for use in OCR, however there is still research to be performed in this area

Star Imager For Nanosatellite Applications

This research examines the feasibility of Commercial-off-the-shelf Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor image sensors for use on nanosatellites as a star imager. An emphasis is placed on method selection and implementation of the star imager algorithm: Centroiding, Identification and Attitude Determination. The star imager algorithm makes use of the Lost-in-Space condition to provide attitude knowledge for each image. Flat Field, Checker Board and Point Spread Function calibration methods were employed to characterize the star imager. Finally, feasibility testing of the star imager is accomplished through simulations and night sky images