Appellate Settlement Conference Programs: A Case Study

The 1990s may be the decade in which the courts bring alternative dispute resolution in house. Professor Owen Fiss\u27 nightmare that private settlement will rob courts of cases for the dispensation of justice and the furtherance of societal goals3 has become Professor Carrie Menkel-Meadow\u27s foreboding that the courts will co-opt and drain the life from true alternative dispute resolution (ADR) processes.4 It may be argued that appellate court-sponsored settlement programs dodge both of these criticisms because parties have had a day in court, the process is a form of mediation, and the settlement is thus final only if the parties agree to settle and because appellate settlement programs may in fact provide a much-needed education for attorneys about the workings and benefits of ADR

Projective Bundle Adjustment from Arbitrary Initialization Using the Variable Projection Method

Bundle adjustment is used in structure-from-motion pipelines as final refinement stage requiring a sufficiently good initialization to reach a useful local mininum. Starting from an arbitrary initialization almost always gets trapped in a poor minimum. In this work we aim to obtain an initialization-free approach which returns global minima from a large proportion of purely random starting points. Our key inspiration lies in the success of the Variable Projection (VarPro) method for affine factorization problems, which have close to 100% chance of reaching a global minimum from random initialization. We find empirically that this desirable behaviour does not directly carry over to the projective case, and we consequently design and evaluate strategies to overcome this limitation. Also, by unifying the affine and the projective camera settings, we obtain numerically better conditioned reformulations of original bundle adjustment algorithms

Robust tracking for augmented reality

In this paper a method for improving a tracking algorithm in an augmented reality application is presented. This method addresses several issues to this particular application, like marker-less tracking and color constancy with low quality cameras, or precise tracking with real-time constraints. Due to size restrictions some of the objects are tracked using color information. To improve the quality of the detection, a color selection scheme is proposed to increase color distance between different objects in the scene. Moreover, a new color constancy method based in a diagonal-offset model and k-means is presented. Finally, some real images are used to show the improvement with this new method.Universidad de Málaga, Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. Ministry of Education of Spain (TIN2013-42253P), Junta de Andalucía of Spain (TIC-1692

Projective Bundle Adjustment from Arbitrary Initialization Using the Variable Projection Method

Bundle adjustment is used in structure-from-motion pipelines as final refinement stage requiring a sufficiently good initialization to reach a useful local mininum. Starting from an arbitrary initialization almost always gets trapped in a poor minimum. In this work we aim to obtain an initialization-free approach which returns global minima from a large proportion of purely random starting points. Our key inspiration lies in the success of the Variable Projection (VarPro) method for affine factorization problems, which have close to 100% chance of reaching a global minimum from random initialization. We find empirically that this desirable behaviour does not directly carry over to the projective case, and we consequently design and evaluate strategies to overcome this limitation. Also, by unifying the affine and the projective camera settings, we obtain numerically better conditioned reformulations of original bundle adjustment algorithms

Assessment of the Harmonic Balance Method for Rotor Blade Performance Predictions

This paper presents an assessment of the harmonic balance method for rotor blade performance predictions. The harmonic balance method within the HMB3 solver of Glasgow University has been extended to the use with overset grids, and results are presented for the PSP and AH-64A rotor blades in hover and forward flight. The predictions are compared with results from steady-state and time marching simulations. In particular, the harmonic balance method is assessed for capturing key flow features, such as the strength of the advancing blade shockwave and retreating side blade dynamic stall. The limitations of the method are also discussed. The findings show that the harmonic balance method is a promising alternative to time-marching simulations due to a significant reduction in computational costs, leading to the potential use of high-fidelity Navier-Stokes methods in optimisation studies

Detection of elliptical shapes via cross-entropy clustering

The problem of finding elliptical shapes in an image will be considered. We discuss the solution which uses cross-entropy clustering. The proposed method allows the search for ellipses with predefined sizes and position in the space. Moreover, it works well for search of ellipsoids in higher dimensions