Spatial Pyramid Context-Aware Moving Object Detection and Tracking for Full Motion Video and Wide Aerial Motion Imagery

A robust and fast automatic moving object detection and tracking system is essential to characterize target object and extract spatial and temporal information for different functionalities including video surveillance systems, urban traffic monitoring and navigation, robotic. In this dissertation, I present a collaborative Spatial Pyramid Context-aware moving object detection and Tracking system. The proposed visual tracker is composed of one master tracker that usually relies on visual object features and two auxiliary trackers based on object temporal motion information that will be called dynamically to assist master tracker. SPCT utilizes image spatial context at different level to make the video tracking system resistant to occlusion, background noise and improve target localization accuracy and robustness. We chose a pre-selected seven-channel complementary features including RGB color, intensity and spatial pyramid of HoG to encode object color, shape and spatial layout information. We exploit integral histogram as building block to meet the demands of real-time performance. A novel fast algorithm is presented to accurately evaluate spatially weighted local histograms in constant time complexity using an extension of the integral histogram method. Different techniques are explored to efficiently compute integral histogram on GPU architecture and applied for fast spatio-temporal median computations and 3D face reconstruction texturing. We proposed a multi-component framework based on semantic fusion of motion information with projected building footprint map to significantly reduce the false alarm rate in urban scenes with many tall structures. The experiments on extensive VOTC2016 benchmark dataset and aerial video confirm that combining complementary tracking cues in an intelligent fusion framework enables persistent tracking for Full Motion Video and Wide Aerial Motion Imagery.Comment: PhD Dissertation (162 pages

Development of procedures for assessment and documentation of odorous impacts on a community.

Dept. of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis1981 .P668. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 40-07, page: . Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 1981

Epidemiology of eye disease in the UK: the Bridlington Eye Assessment Project

Purpose; To determine the prevalence of and impact of eye disease in an elderly population and the diagnostic accuracy of a novel artificial intelligence algorithm for the detection of glaucoma Design; population based, cross sectional study Participants; 3549 Caucasian individuals over the age of 65 years Methods: A directed general and ophthalmic history was obtained from all subjects. Slit lamp eye examination including applanation tonometry and dilated examination of the fundus was performed by one of four specially trained optometrists and supplemented with fundus photography, visual field testing and Heidelberg Retinal Tomography (HRT). Those with reduced vision, raised intraocular pressure, visual field defects or other abnormalities were referred for further assessment by a consultant ophthalmologist and followed longitudinally until a definitive diagnosis was made. All diagnoses of glaucoma were made retrospectively using at least 5 years of longitudinal data to determine status at incident examination. All fundus photographs were reviewed by a single ophthalmologist for signs of age related macula degeneration (AMD) and other retinal disease. HRT outputs were analysed using the device’s proprietary software which produced results for normative based Moorfield’s regression analysis (MRA) and the shape analysis tool Glaucoma Probability Score (GPS). We used a bespoke Matlab based machine learning classifier to providing two further measures based on shape analysis which were termed shape abnormality score (SAS) and abnormal disc score (ADS). Statistical Analysis: Outcomes and associations were explored using t-tests, chi- squared tests and Mantal Haenzel methods. Linear and logistic regression was sed for multivariate analysis. Agreement was measured using kappa, intraclass correlation coefficient and concordance correlation coefficient and plotted using Bland Altman plots. Covariate effects on diagnostic performance were examined using a combination of maximum likelihood probit models and bootstrap analysis. All data analysis was performed using Stata v14 Results; Cataract; Significant lens opacities were present in 45% of individuals of whom 12% went on to have cataract surgery. Women were 29% more likely to have significant cataract than men. 9.5% of eyes showed signs of previous cataract surgery of which 17% either required or had received treatment for subsequent posterior capsular opacification. In the absence of thresholds for surgery 18 cataract operations per thousand ( 95% CI 14 – 23 ) were required for those aged 65-75 years old. For those over 75 years, 76 cataract operations per thousand ( 95% CI 66 – 86 ) were required AMD; Geographic atrophy (grade 4a) occurred in 2.5%, and neovascular AMD (grade 4b) in 1.8% of eyes. Prevalence increased with age with grade 4 (advanced) AMD in 2.2% of those aged 65–69 years, 15.8% for those aged 85– 90 years, and 21.2% for over 90 years. There was significant asymmetry between eyes of individuals with advanced AMD (P<0.001). After correction for age and co-pathology, those with advanced AMD in the better eye were 4 times more likely to be disattisified with their vision. Glaucoma; For tests with a specificity of > 90% for new OAG, intraocular pressure was the least sensitive (48%), while clinical CDR ≥ 0.7 was the most sensitive (76%) test. Optometric impression showed the best specificity (98%) with acceptable sensitivity (51%) but may have been subject to verification bias since final diagnosis was based on clinical impression albeit with the reference to longitudinal results. Because of the low relative prevalence of new glaucoma, the test specificity of 98% still resulted in referral of nearly twice as many false positives as new patients with glaucoma. There was moderate agreement between individual optometrists and the HRT in measuring CDR but wide limits of agreement precluding effective comparison between approaches. Of the disc based measures, SAS and optometric assessment were found to be the most specific but MRA showed the best overall performance. In our subgroup analysis, we found a drop in sensitivity for detection of new disease by HRT using automated shape analysis and by optometrist using Jonas criteria. MRA performed well across all groups and showed similar sensitivity in detection of new and previously diagnosed glaucoma

PersoNER: Persian named-entity recognition

© 1963-2018 ACL. Named-Entity Recognition (NER) is still a challenging task for languages with low digital resources. The main difficulties arise from the scarcity of annotated corpora and the consequent problematic training of an effective NER pipeline. To abridge this gap, in this paper we target the Persian language that is spoken by a population of over a hundred million people world-wide. We first present and provide ArmanPerosNERCorpus, the first manually-annotated Persian NER corpus. Then, we introduce PersoNER, an NER pipeline for Persian that leverages a word embedding and a sequential max-margin classifier. The experimental results show that the proposed approach is capable of achieving interesting MUC7 and CoNNL scores while outperforming two alternatives based on a CRF and a recurrent neural network

Multi-Scale Spatially Weighted Local Histograms in O(1)

Weighting pixel contribution considering its location is a key feature in many fundamental image processing tasks including filtering, object modeling and distance matching. Several techniques have been proposed that incorporate Spatial information to increase the accuracy and boost the performance of detection, tracking and recognition systems at the cost of speed. But, it is still not clear how to efficiently ex- tract weighted local histograms in constant time using integral histogram. This paper presents a novel algorithm to compute accurately multi-scale Spatially weighted local histograms in constant time using Weighted Integral Histogram (SWIH) for fast search. We applied our spatially weighted integral histogram approach for fast tracking and obtained more accurate and robust target localization result in comparison with using plain histogram.Comment: 5 pages, 7 figure

Epidemiology of eye disease in the UK: the Bridlington Eye Assessment Project

Purpose; To determine the prevalence of and impact of eye disease in an elderly population and the diagnostic accuracy of a novel artificial intelligence algorithm for the detection of glaucoma Design; population based, cross sectional study Participants; 3549 Caucasian individuals over the age of 65 years Methods: A directed general and ophthalmic history was obtained from all subjects. Slit lamp eye examination including applanation tonometry and dilated examination of the fundus was performed by one of four specially trained optometrists and supplemented with fundus photography, visual field testing and Heidelberg Retinal Tomography (HRT). Those with reduced vision, raised intraocular pressure, visual field defects or other abnormalities were referred for further assessment by a consultant ophthalmologist and followed longitudinally until a definitive diagnosis was made. All diagnoses of glaucoma were made retrospectively using at least 5 years of longitudinal data to determine status at incident examination. All fundus photographs were reviewed by a single ophthalmologist for signs of age related macula degeneration (AMD) and other retinal disease. HRT outputs were analysed using the device’s proprietary software which produced results for normative based Moorfield’s regression analysis (MRA) and the shape analysis tool Glaucoma Probability Score (GPS). We used a bespoke Matlab based machine learning classifier to providing two further measures based on shape analysis which were termed shape abnormality score (SAS) and abnormal disc score (ADS). Statistical Analysis: Outcomes and associations were explored using t-tests, chi- squared tests and Mantal Haenzel methods. Linear and logistic regression was sed for multivariate analysis. Agreement was measured using kappa, intraclass correlation coefficient and concordance correlation coefficient and plotted using Bland Altman plots. Covariate effects on diagnostic performance were examined using a combination of maximum likelihood probit models and bootstrap analysis. All data analysis was performed using Stata v14 Results; Cataract; Significant lens opacities were present in 45% of individuals of whom 12% went on to have cataract surgery. Women were 29% more likely to have significant cataract than men. 9.5% of eyes showed signs of previous cataract surgery of which 17% either required or had received treatment for subsequent posterior capsular opacification. In the absence of thresholds for surgery 18 cataract operations per thousand ( 95% CI 14 – 23 ) were required for those aged 65-75 years old. For those over 75 years, 76 cataract operations per thousand ( 95% CI 66 – 86 ) were required AMD; Geographic atrophy (grade 4a) occurred in 2.5%, and neovascular AMD (grade 4b) in 1.8% of eyes. Prevalence increased with age with grade 4 (advanced) AMD in 2.2% of those aged 65–69 years, 15.8% for those aged 85– 90 years, and 21.2% for over 90 years. There was significant asymmetry between eyes of individuals with advanced AMD (P<0.001). After correction for age and co-pathology, those with advanced AMD in the better eye were 4 times more likely to be disattisified with their vision. Glaucoma; For tests with a specificity of > 90% for new OAG, intraocular pressure was the least sensitive (48%), while clinical CDR ≥ 0.7 was the most sensitive (76%) test. Optometric impression showed the best specificity (98%) with acceptable sensitivity (51%) but may have been subject to verification bias since final diagnosis was based on clinical impression albeit with the reference to longitudinal results. Because of the low relative prevalence of new glaucoma, the test specificity of 98% still resulted in referral of nearly twice as many false positives as new patients with glaucoma. There was moderate agreement between individual optometrists and the HRT in measuring CDR but wide limits of agreement precluding effective comparison between approaches. Of the disc based measures, SAS and optometric assessment were found to be the most specific but MRA showed the best overall performance. In our subgroup analysis, we found a drop in sensitivity for detection of new disease by HRT using automated shape analysis and by optometrist using Jonas criteria. MRA performed well across all groups and showed similar sensitivity in detection of new and previously diagnosed glaucoma

Clinical risk stratification in glaucoma

Glaucoma is the leading cause of preventable sight loss in the United Kingdom and the provision of timely glaucoma care has been highlighted as a significant challenge in recent years. Following a recent high-profile investigation, The Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch recommended the validation of risk stratification models to safeguard the vision-related quality of life of glaucoma patients. There continues to be no nationally agreed evidence-based risk stratification model for glaucoma care across the United Kingdom. Some models have used simple measures of disease staging such as visual field mean deviation as surrogates for risk, but more refined, individualised risk stratification models should include factors related to both visual impairment and visual disability. Candidate tools should also incorporate both ocular and systemic co-morbidities, rate of disease progression, visual needs and driving status and undergo clinical refinement and validation to justify implementation. The disruption to routine glaucoma care caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has only highlighted the importance of such risk stratification models and has accelerated their development, application and evaluation. This review aims to critically appraise the available evidence underpinning current approaches for glaucoma risk stratification and to discuss how these may be applied to contemporary glaucoma care within the United Kingdom. Further research will be essential to justify and validate the utility of glaucoma risk stratification models in everyday clinical practice

DEVELOPMENT OF A STRATEGY FOR QUANTIFYING THE IMPACT OF ODOROUS EMISSIONS FROM STATIONARY SOURCES ON THE SURROUNDING COMMUNITIES.

Regulatory agencies are expected to deal routinely with community odor problems yet they have no objective methods for assessing the effects of odorous sources. A three step strategy has been developed for quantifying the impacts of existing or proposed stationary odorous sources on their surrounding communities. Successful implementation of the proposed protocols would establish: (1) whether there is a recognizable odor problem in the community; (2) how bad the odor is; (3) how much odor there is. A public attitude survey has been designed to aid in the confirmation of recognizable odor problems in the community. Quantification of odors with respect to how bad is done through an evaluation of the degree of offensiveness (DO) as the product of: (1) intensity; expressed as maximum dilution level at 100 percent probability of complaint..

Skin metastasis as the initial manifestation of poorly differentiated thyroid carcinoma

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