Evolution Strategies in Optimization Problems

Evolution Strategies are inspired in biology and part of a larger research field known as Evolutionary Algorithms. Those strategies perform a random search in the space of admissible functions, aiming to optimize some given objective function. We show that simple evolution strategies are a useful tool in optimal control, permitting to obtain, in an efficient way, good approximations to the solutions of some recent and challenging optimal control problems.Comment: Partially presented at the 5th Junior European Meeting on "Control and Information Technology" (JEM'06), Sept 20-22, 2006, Tallinn, Estonia. To appear in "Proceedings of the Estonian Academy of Sciences -- Physics Mathematics

Usability studies of an innovative rehabilitation device for post-infarction patients – the perspective of rehabilitation nurses

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Usability studies of an innovative rehabilitation device for post-infarction patients – the perspective of rehabilitation nurses

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Video summary generation and coding using temporal scalability

In this paper two algorithms for video summary generation and coding are proposed. Two distortion metrics used in the video summary generation algorithm are compared and an algorithm with reduced computational complexity is presented. The paper also proposes two frame structures in the temporal domain suitable for coding using temporal scalability of the H.264/SVC

H.264/SVC ROI encoding with spatial scalability

Comunicação apresentada na International Conference on Signal Processing and Multimedia Applications, Porto, 2008.This paper proposes two H.264/AVC compliant methods for encoding Regions-of-Interest (ROI) with spatial scalability and evaluates their respective rate-distortion-complexity performance. The base layer is kept unchanged and provides lower resolution images with roughly constant quality, without identification of the ROI. In the proposed methods there is no need to encode contour information because the ROI is implicitly defined in the upper layer of the spatial resolution in a transparent way by using different encoding parameters for the ROI and its complementary region. It is shown, that spatial scalability in ROI can be efficiently used to enhance specific regions of an image sequence in both spatial resolution and quality with low coding complexity. The proposed encoding scheme is suitable for remote surveillance, medical applications and entertainment, where higher resolution and higher quality ROI is a useful functionality for object/face recognition, selective encryption, detail analysis, etc

ASO Author Reflections: Impact of a Preoperative Home-Based Exercise Program on Quality of Life After Lung Cancer Resection

Surgical resection is the cornerstone of curative treatment for patients with lung cancer. Nevertheless, it often leads to functional limitations and symptoms of pain, fatigue, and dyspnea, which have a detrimental impact on patients’ health-related quality of life (HRQoL).info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio