Order statistic filters for image matching

The rank and census are two filters based on order statistics which have been applied to the image matching problem for stereo pairs. Advantages of these filters include their robustness to radiometric distortion and small amounts of random noise, and their amenability to hardware implementation. In this paper, a new matching algorithm is presented, which provides an overall framework for matching, and is used to compare the rank and census techniques with standard matching metrics. The algorithm was tested using both real stereo pairs and a synthetic pair with ground truth. The rank and census filters were shown to significantly improve performance in the case of radiometric distortion. In all cases, the results obtained were comparable to, if not better than, those obtained using standard matching metrics. Furthermore, the rank and census have the additional advantage that their computational overhead is less than these metrics. For all techniques tested, the difference between the results obtained for the synthetic stereo pair, and the ground truth results was small

An experiment in improving engagement with students in lectures and tutorials

The aim of this study was to experiment with activities that can be done during lectures and tutorials to improve engagement with students. The various activities took place during lectures and tutorials of ENB240 – Introduction to Electronics, a second year Electrical Engineering subject. In the first stage of the project, students were asked what could be done to both improve engagement in lectures and tutorials and to assist with their learning. Based on student responses, various activities were undertaken during the semester including: online quizzes; worked examples on the document camera; using an audience response system with keypads; and passing around physical devices in class. At the end of the semester, "Worked examples on the document camera" was reported by the most students as assisting with their learning, while "Use of keypads" was reported by the most as improving engagement in the lecture

The Spartan-3E tutorial 3 : using the LCD display [version 1.0]

This tutorial is designed to assist users who wish to use the LCD screen on the Spartan-3E board. In this tutorial, the PicoBlaze microcontroller is used to control the LCD. The tutorial is organised into three Parts. In Part A, code is written to display the message "Hello World" on the LCD. Part B demonstrates how to define and display custom characters. Finally, Part C shows how the display can be shifted and flashed. Shifting is done by using a delay in the main PicoBlaze program loop, while flashing is done using the PicoBlaze interrupt. The slider switches can be used to select the shifting direction, and to turn shifting and flashing on and off

The Effect of Manipulatives on Students\u27 Understanding of Chemistry Concepts

The purpose of this study was to assess the effectiveness of manipulatives on chemistry concepts. Manipulative activities were designed for four chemistry topics: Dimensional Analysis, Ionic Formulas, Molecular Shapes, and Stoichiometry. Seventy-five high school students were divided into a control or experimental group. The control group solved problems in small groups, while the experimental group used manipulatives to complete a guided activity. Students in the control group scored significantly higher on the posttest for the Dimensional Analysis and Ionic Formulas activities. There was no significant difference in the posttest scores for the Molecular Shapes and Stoichiometry posttest. While manipulatives can be an effective learning strategy to increase student achievement, it does not have the same effectiveness of peer collaboration in small groups

A generic implementation framework for stereo matching algorithms

Traditional area-based matching techniques make use of similarity metrics such as the Sum of Absolute Differences(SAD), Sum of Squared Differences (SSD) and Normalised Cross Correlation (NCC). Non-parametric matching algorithms such as the rank and census rely on the relative ordering of pixel values rather than the pixels themselves as a similarity measure. Both traditional area-based and non-parametric stereo matching techniques have an algorithmic structure which is amenable to fast hardware realisation. This investigation undertakes a performance assessment of these two families of algorithms for robustness to radiometric distortion and random noise. A generic implementation framework is presented for the stereo matching problem and the relative hardware requirements for the various metrics investigated

Analysis of micro-structural changes and measurement of their parameters of a food material

Food microstructure represents the way their elements arrangement and their interaction. Researchers in this field benefit from identifying new methods of examination of the microstructure and analysing the images. Experiments were undertaken to study micro-structural changes of food material during drying. Micro-structural images were obtained for potato samples of cubical shape at different moisture contents during drying using scanning electron microscopy. Physical parameters such as cell wall perimeter, and area were calculated using an image identification algorithm, based on edge detection and morphological operators. The algorithm was developed using Matlab

Fostering a Technologically Innovative Teaching Culture

[EN] UTS:Insearch is a pathways provider preparing students from diverse language and learning backgrounds for study in Australia, particularly at UTS. With education increasingly moving towards technology enhanced delivery we identified the need to use these approaches with our students, however as a starting point realised that for this to be successfully embedded into our subjects we would have to create a technologically innovative teaching culture amongst our teaching staff.In fostering this culture the organisation needed to clearly articulate the concept of ‘blended learning’ to our teaching staff. Following this a suite of strategies to engage teaching staff with diverse understandings of technology enhanced teaching and the opportunities it offers for improving students’ learning experiences and understanding were implemented. The strategies that were most successful were those that were ‘hands on’ and employed blended learning approaches where teaching staff could experience first-hand how students could be engaged with content through the appropriate and meaningful use of technologies. While the project is on-going, the approach has led to 76% of the learning strategies in our subjects either well progressed or fully compliant with a blended learning approach within a yearBanks, J.; Cheng, J.; Payne, S. (2015). Fostering a Technologically Innovative Teaching Culture. En 1ST INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON HIGHER EDUCATION ADVANCES (HEAD' 15). Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAd15.2015.28622

Elliptical higher-order-spectra periocular code

The periocular region has recently emerged as a standalone biometric trait, promising attractive trade-off between the iris alone and the entire face, especially for cases where neither the iris nor a full facial image can be acquired. This advantage provides another dimension for implementing a robust biometric system, performed in non-ideal conditions. Global features (LBP, HOG) and local features (SIFT) have been introduced; however, the performance of these features can deteriorate for images captured in unconstrained and less-cooperative conditions. A particular set of Higher Order Spectral (HOS) features have been proved to be invariant to translation, scale, rotation, brightness level shift and contrast change. These properties are desirable in the periocular recognition problem to deal with the non-ideal imaging conditions. This paper investigates the HOS features in different configurations for the periocular recognition problem under non-ideal conditions. Especially, we introduce a new sampling approach for the periocular region based on an elliptical coordinate. This non-linear sampling approach is then combined with the robustness of the HOS features for encoding the periocular region. In addition, we also propose a new technique for combining left and right periocular. The proposed feature-level fusion approach bases on state-of-the-art bilinear pooling technique to allow efficient interaction between the features of both perioculars. We show the validity of the proposed approach in encoding discriminant features, outperforming or comparing favorably with the state-of-the-art features on the two popular datasets: FRGC and JAFFE

A comparison of laboratory and in situ methods to determine soil thermal conductivity for energy foundations and other ground heat exchanger applications

Soil thermal conductivity is an important factor in the design of energy foundations and other ground heat exchanger systems. It can be determined by a field thermal response test, which is both costly and time consuming, but tests a large volume of soil. Alternatively, cheaper and quicker laboratory test methods may be applied to smaller soil samples. This paper investigates two different laboratory methods: the steady-state thermal cell and the transient needle probe. U100 soil samples were taken during the site investigation for a small diameter test pile, for which a thermal response test was later conducted. The thermal conductivities of the samples were measured using the two laboratory methods. The results from the thermal cell and needle probe were significantly different, with the thermal cell consistently giving higher values for thermal conductivity. The main difficulty with the thermal cell was determining the rate of heat flow, as the apparatus experiences significant heat losses. The needle probe was found to have fewer significant sources of error, but tests a smaller soil sample than the thermal cell. However, both laboratory methods gave much lower values of thermal conductivity compared to the in situ thermal response test. Possible reasons for these discrepancies are discussed, including sample size, orientation and disturbance

CoastColour Round Robin data sets: A database to evaluate the performance of algorithms for the retrieval of water quality parameters in coastal waters

The use of in situ measurements is essential in the validation and evaluation of the algorithms that provide coastal water quality data products from ocean colour satellite remote sensing. Over the past decade, various types of ocean colour algorithms have been developed to deal with the optical complexity of coastal waters. Yet there is a lack of a comprehensive intercomparison due to the availability of quality checked in situ databases. The CoastColour Round Robin (CCRR) project, funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), was designed to bring together three reference data sets using these to test algorithms and to assess their accuracy for retrieving water quality parameters. This paper provides a detailed description of these reference data sets, which include the Medium Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MERIS) level 2 match-ups, in situ reflectance measurements, and synthetic data generated by a radiative transfer model (HydroLight). These data sets, representing mainly coastal waters, are available from doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.841950. The data sets mainly consist of 6484 marine reflectance (either multispectral or hyperspectral) associated with various geometrical (sensor viewing and solar angles) and sky conditions and water constituents: total suspended matter (TSM) and chlorophyll a (CHL) concentrations, and the absorption of coloured dissolved organic matter (CDOM). Inherent optical properties are also provided in the simulated data sets (5000 simulations) and from 3054 match-up locations. The distributions of reflectance at selected MERIS bands and band ratios, CHL and TSM as a function of reflectance, from the three data sets are compared. Match-up and in situ sites where deviations occur are identified. The distributions of the three reflectance data sets are also compared to the simulated and in situ reflectances used previously by the International Ocean Colour Coordinating Group (IOCCG, 2006) for algorithm testing, showing a clear extension of the CCRR data which covers more turbid waters