Extraction of Dynamic Trajectory on Multi-Stroke Static Handwriting Images Using Loop Analysis and Skeletal Graph Model

The recovery of handwriting’s dynamic stroke is an effective method to help improve the accuracy of any handwriting’s authentication or verification system. The recovered trajectory can be considered as a dynamic feature of any static handwritten images. Capitalising on this temporal information can significantly increase the accuracy of the verification phase. Extraction of dynamic features from static handwritings remains a challenge due to the lack of temporal information as compared to the online methods. Previously, there are two typical approaches to recover the handwriting’s stroke. The first approach is based on the script’s skeleton. The skeletonisation method has highly computational efficiency whereas it often produces noisy artifacts and mismatches on the resulted skeleton. The second approach deals with the handwriting’s contour, crossing areas and overlaps using parametric representations of lines and thickness of strokes. This method can avoid the artifacts, but it requires complicated mathematical models and may lead to computational explosion. Our paper is based on the script’s extracted skeleton and provides an approach to processing static handwriting’s objects, including edges, vertices and loops, as the important aspects of any handwritten image. Our paper is also to provide analysing and classifying loops types and human’s natural writing behavior to improve the global construction of stroke order. Then, a detailed tracing algorithm on global stroke reconstruction is presented. The experimental results reveal the superiority of our method as compared with the existing ones

Subject-independent ERP-based brain-computer interface using adaptive and ensemble learning

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology.The breakthrough of deep learning in recent years opens up a wide range of applications, mostly from computer vision to brain-computer interface (BCI), which is the research topic of this thesis. In our study, we propose a unified framework of the subject-independent event-related potential (ERP) based BCI. In other words, we attempt to overcome a major challenge of discrepancies in ERP patterns across different subjects by employing a deep learning technique, accompanied with different strategies of bagging-stacking ensemble, dynamic stopping, and adaptive incremental learning. The main contributions of this thesis are summarised as follows: (1) Employ the subject-adversarial neural network (SANN) to learn the optimal representation for the original preprocessed ERP features. This network serves as a feature encoder which attempts to find a better feature space that is subject-independent for the testing procedure. (2) Employ three machine learning algorithm as base learners: support vector machine (SVM), Fisher’s discriminant analysis (FDA), and fully-connected feedforward neural network (NN). The soft scores of these base learners serves as inputs for the ensemble strategy which is comprised of two widely-used techniques: bagging and stacking. The goal of the whole ensemble strategy is to perform the binary classification problem of ERP trials with lower generalisation error and higher accuracy. (3) Employ two post-processing tasks for the P300-Speller (P3S) to enhance the information transfer rate, namely dynamic stopping (DS), and adaptive (or incremental) learning (AL). DS is performed to let the system produce the subject’s output whenever the algorithm is sufficiently confident about its decision, while AL is used to reinforce the existing classifier by analytically integrating newly-classified samples into the classifier’s decision function in real-time. The research of the thesis is motivated by the strong representative characteristics of ERP features in EEG signal. The distinctive properties of ERP, especially P300 component in this thesis, and its variability across multiple subjects, can be well-exploited bythe high complexity and employment of deep adversarial neural network framework. The robust representation features output of this network are served as learning features for the subsequent step of ensemble learning by multiple machine learning algorithms. Finally, some post-processing and enhancement methods specifically proprietary to this thesis such as dynamic stopping and incremental learning are applied to yield an additional boost in our performance

Long-Term Outcome of Thrombolytic Therapy for Massive Pulmonary Embolism in Pregnancy

A 25-year-old pregnant woman presented at 12 weeks of gestation with syncope and shortness of breath caused by massive pulmonary embolism. Due to persistent shock, fibrinolytic therapy with rtPA was administered. After fibrinolysis, clinical and hemodynamic response was excellent. No bleeding and fetal complications were recorded