THE EFFECT OF COMPLIANT RUNNING ON KINETICS AND JOINT KINEMATICS

This study examined the differences in joint kinematics and kinetics between normal and compliant running, to determine the potential injury prevention benefits and running technique of the latter. Twelve subjects were familiarized with compliant running and completed a full motion analysis while running at a pre-determined, self-selected pace. Distinct differences in both joint kinematics and kinetics were recorded. This was represented by an increase in knee and hip flexion of 52% and 19%, respectively, as well as a decrease in knee and ankle peak extensor/plantar flexor moments of 49% and 43%. Hip flexor moments increased by 54%

Toward automated evaluation of interactive segmentation

We previously described a system for evaluating interactive segmentation by means of user experiments (McGuinness and O’Connor, 2010). This method, while effective, is time-consuming and labor-intensive. This paper aims to make evaluation more practicable by investigating if it is feasible to automate user interactions. To this end, we propose a general algorithm for driving the segmentation that uses the ground truth and current segmentation error to automatically simulate user interactions. We investigate four strategies for selecting which pixels will form the next interaction. The first of these is a simple, deterministic strategy; the remaining three strategies are probabilistic, and focus on more realistically approximating a real user. We evaluate four interactive segmentation algorithms using these strategies, and compare the results with our previous user experiment-based evaluation. The results show that automated evaluation is both feasible and useful

Moving object path prediction in traffic scenes using contextual information

Abstract: Moving object path prediction in traffic scenes from the perspective of a moving vehicle can improve safety on the road, which is the aim of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). However, this task still remains a challenge. Work has been carried out on the use of x,y positional information of the moving objects only. However, besides positional information there is more information that surrounds a vehicle that can be leveraged in the prediction along with the x, y features. This is known as contextual information. In this work, a deep exploration of these features is carried out by evaluating different types of data, using different fusion strategies. The core architectures of this model are CNN and LSTM architectures. It is concluded that in the prediction task, not only are the features important, but the way they are fused in the developed architecture is also of importance

Thermo-visual feature fusion for object tracking using multiple spatiogram trackers

In this paper, we propose a framework that can efficiently combine features for robust tracking based on fusing the outputs of multiple spatiogram trackers. This is achieved without the exponential increase in storage and processing that other multimodal tracking approaches suffer from. The framework allows the features to be split arbitrarily between the trackers, as well as providing the flexibility to add, remove or dynamically weight features. We derive a mean-shift type algorithm for the framework that allows efficient object tracking with very low computational overhead. We especially target the fusion of thermal infrared and visible spectrum features as the most useful features for automated surveillance applications. Results are shown on multimodal video sequences clearly illustrating the benefits of combining multiple features using our framework

CONTINUOUS WAVEFORM ANALYSIS OF FORCE, VELOCITY, AND POWER ADAPTATIONS TO A PERIODIZED PLYOMETRIC TRAINING PROGRAM

This study assessed kinetic and temporal profile adaptations to the countermovement jump in response to a six week periodized plyometric training program. Twenty recreationally active women participated in the study (10 training, 10 control). Testing consisted of 3 maximal countermovement jumps on a force platform prior to and after six weeks of training. Key phases of the jumps were examined to assess differences in the profiles pre- and post-training using Analysis of Characterizing Phases. Periodized plyometric training significantly altered the profiles for force, velocity, and power (p < 0.05). A combination of greater eccentric velocity and power followed by increased concentric power enhanced the stretch shortening cycle and all three variables just before takeoff likely enhancing jump height

Word matching using single closed contours for indexing handwritten historical documents

Effective indexing is crucial for providing convenient access to scanned versions of large collections of historically valuable handwritten manuscripts. Since traditional handwriting recognizers based on optical character recognition (OCR) do not perform well on historical documents, recently a holistic word recognition approach has gained in popularity as an attractive and more straightforward solution (Lavrenko et al. in proc. document Image Analysis for Libraries (DIAL’04), pp. 278–287, 2004). Such techniques attempt to recognize words based on scalar and profile-based features extracted from whole word images. In this paper, we propose a new approach to holistic word recognition for historical handwritten manuscripts based on matching word contours instead of whole images or word profiles. The new method consists of robust extraction of closed word contours and the application of an elastic contour matching technique proposed originally for general shapes (Adamek and O’Connor in IEEE Trans Circuits Syst Video Technol 5:2004). We demonstrate that multiscale contour-based descriptors can effectively capture intrinsic word features avoiding any segmentation of words into smaller subunits. Our experiments show a recognition accuracy of 83%, which considerably exceeds the performance of other systems reported in the literature

A comparative evaluation of interactive segmentation algorithms

In this paper we present a comparative evaluation of four popular interactive segmentation algorithms. The evaluation was carried out as a series of user-experiments, in which participants were tasked with extracting 100 objects from a common dataset: 25 with each algorithm, constrained within a time limit of 2 min for each object. To facilitate the experiments, a “scribble-driven” segmentation tool was developed to enable interactive image segmentation by simply marking areas of foreground and background with the mouse. As the participants refined and improved their respective segmentations, the corresponding updated segmentation mask was stored along with the elapsed time. We then collected and evaluated each recorded mask against a manually segmented ground truth, thus allowing us to gauge segmentation accuracy over time. Two benchmarks were used for the evaluation: the well-known Jaccard index for measuring object accuracy, and a new fuzzy metric, proposed in this paper, designed for measuring boundary accuracy. Analysis of the experimental results demonstrates the effectiveness of the suggested measures and provides valuable insights into the performance and characteristics of the evaluated algorithms

Topological evaluation of volume reconstructions by voxel carving

Space or voxel carving [1, 4, 10, 15] is a technique for creating a three-dimensional reconstruction of an object from a series of two-dimensional images captured from cameras placed around the object at different viewing angles. However, little work has been done to date on evaluating the quality of space carving results. This paper extends the work reported in [8], where application of persistent homology was initially proposed as a tool for providing a topological analysis of the carving process along the sequence of 3D reconstructions with increasing number of cameras. We give now a more extensive treatment by: (1) developing the formal framework by which persistent homology can be applied in this context; (2) computing persistent homology of the 3D reconstructions of 66 new frames, including different poses, resolutions and camera orders; (3) studying what information about stability, topological correctness and influence of the camera orders in the carving performance can be drawn from the computed barcodes