Determinants of young Europeans' decision to leave the parental household

I estimated a dynamic model of departure of young people from the parental home using ECHP, BHPS, GSOEP and found that the large differences in household structure across Europe can partly be explained by income and labour market characteristics: for Southern males economic circumstances are important: current income and employment status affect departure, while potential earnings do not, and higher family income discourages departures more than in the North. Southernersí low departure rates seem to be the result of limited labour market opportunities. A model with multiple destinations is shown to be significantly better than a dichotomous one.

A multi-viewpoint feature-based re-identification system driven by skeleton keypoints

Thanks to the increasing popularity of 3D sensors, robotic vision has experienced huge improvements in a wide range of applications and systems in the last years. Besides the many benefits, this migration caused some incompatibilities with those systems that cannot be based on range sensors, like intelligent video surveillance systems, since the two kinds of sensor data lead to different representations of people and objects. This work goes in the direction of bridging the gap, and presents a novel re-identification system that takes advantage of multiple video flows in order to enhance the performance of a skeletal tracking algorithm, which is in turn exploited for driving the re-identification. A new, geometry-based method for joining together the detections provided by the skeletal tracker from multiple video flows is introduced, which is capable of dealing with many people in the scene, coping with the errors introduced in each view by the skeletal tracker. Such method has a high degree of generality, and can be applied to any kind of body pose estimation algorithm. The system was tested on a public dataset for video surveillance applications, demonstrating the improvements achieved by the multi-viewpoint approach in the accuracy of both body pose estimation and re-identification. The proposed approach was also compared with a skeletal tracking system working on 3D data: the comparison assessed the good performance level of the multi-viewpoint approach. This means that the lack of the rich information provided by 3D sensors can be compensated by the availability of more than one viewpoint

Automatic Color Inspection for Colored Wires in Electric Cables

In this paper, an automatic optical inspection system for checking the sequence of colored wires in electric cable is presented. The system is able to inspect cables with flat connectors differing in the type and number of wires. This variability is managed in an automatic way by means of a self-learning subsystem and does not require manual input from the operator or loading new data to the machine. The system is coupled to a connector crimping machine and once the model of a correct cable is learned, it can automatically inspect each cable assembled by the machine. The main contributions of this paper are: (i) the self-learning system; (ii) a robust segmentation algorithm for extracting wires from images even if they are strongly bent and partially overlapped; (iii) a color recognition algorithm able to cope with highlights and different finishing of the wire insulation. We report the system evaluation over a period of several months during the actual production of large batches of different cables; tests demonstrated a high level of accuracy and the absence of false negatives, which is a key point in order to guarantee defect-free productions

Autonomous robotic system for thermographic detection of defects in upper layers of carbon fiber reinforced polymers

Carbon Fiber Reinforced Polymers (CFRPs) are composites whose interesting properties, like high strength-to-weight ratio and rigidity, are of interest in many industrial fields. Many defects affecting their production process are due to the wrong distribution of the thermosetting polymer in the upper layers. In this work, they are effectively and efficiently detected by automatically analyzing the thermographic images obtained by Pulsed Phase Thermography (PPT) and comparing them with a defect-free reference. The flash lamp and infrared camera needed by PPT are mounted on an industrial robot so that surfaces of CFRP automotive components, car side blades in our case, can be inspected in a series of static tests. The thermographic image analysis is based on local contrast adjustment via UnSharp Masking (USM) and takes also advantage of the high level of knowledge of the entire system provided by the calibration procedures. This system could replace manual inspection leading to a substantial increase in efficiency

Toward a General-Purpose Heterogeneous Ensemble for Pattern Classification

We perform an extensive study of the performance of different classification approaches on twenty-five datasets (fourteen image datasets and eleven UCI data mining datasets). The aim is to find General-Purpose (GP) heterogeneous ensembles (requiring little to no parameter tuning) that perform competitively across multiple datasets. The state-of-the-art classifiers examined in this study include the support vector machine, Gaussian process classifiers, random subspace of adaboost, random subspace of rotation boosting, and deep learning classifiers. We demonstrate that a heterogeneous ensemble based on the simple fusion by sum rule of different classifiers performs consistently well across all twenty-five datasets. The most important result of our investigation is demonstrating that some very recent approaches, including the heterogeneous ensemble we propose in this paper, are capable of outperforming an SVM classifier (implemented with LibSVM), even when both kernel selection and SVM parameters are carefully tuned for each dataset

Ensemble of Different Approaches for a Reliable Person Re-identification System

An ensemble of approaches for reliable person re-identification is proposed in this paper. The proposed ensemble is built combining widely used person re-identification systems using different color spaces and some variants of state-of-the-art approaches that are proposed in this paper. Different descriptors are tested, and both texture and color features are extracted from the images; then the different descriptors are compared using different distance measures (e.g., the Euclidean distance, angle, and the Jeffrey distance). To improve performance, a method based on skeleton detection, extracted from the depth map, is also applied when the depth map is available. The proposed ensemble is validated on three widely used datasets (CAVIAR4REID, IAS, and VIPeR), keeping the same parameter set of each approach constant across all tests to avoid overfitting and to demonstrate that the proposed system can be considered a general-purpose person re-identification system. Our experimental results show that the proposed system offers significant improvements over baseline approaches. The source code used for the approaches tested in this paper will be available at https://www.dei.unipd.it/node/2357 and http://robotics.dei.unipd.it/reid/