Concurrent Viola Jones classifiers on a portable Beowulf cluster : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Engineering in Mechatronics at Massey University

Real-time Computer Vision is an interesting application for supercomputing, real-time applications (vision processing in particular) employ special purpose hardware such as DSPs to achieve high performance. This thesis explores parallel computers particularly commodity general purpose hardware. We also build a prototype to better understand the economics of supercomputing, specifically related to mobile computing - low power, rugged design by building a mobile computer. A new communication layer is built, where by the nature of the locality of the nodes allows one to optimise the protocols to reduce the latency comparably. Finally a study and in depth results of the algorithm, the Viola Jones Object detector in parallel are presented followed by reflection and future work based on the current results and platform

Analyzing structural characteristics of object category representations from their semantic-part distributions

Studies from neuroscience show that part-mapping computations are employed by human visual system in the process of object recognition. In this work, we present an approach for analyzing semantic-part characteristics of object category representations. For our experiments, we use category-epitome, a recently proposed sketch-based spatial representation for objects. To enable part-importance analysis, we first obtain semantic-part annotations of hand-drawn sketches originally used to construct the corresponding epitomes. We then examine the extent to which the semantic-parts are present in the epitomes of a category and visualize the relative importance of parts as a word cloud. Finally, we show how such word cloud visualizations provide an intuitive understanding of category-level structural trends that exist in the category-epitome object representations

IPR scenario and factors for promoting IPR culture: a post-TRIPS period analysis of selected pharmaceutical firms in North India

Different shades of World Trade Organization (WTO) agreement on trade-related intellectual property rights (TRIPS) are reflected in the Indian pharmaceutical industry, but small and medium-scale pharmaceutical firms are slowly increasing their product innovation, process innovation and research and development (R&D) intensity. Analysis of variance results highlight a significant difference in performance of sole proprietorship/partnership, private limited and public limited firms vis-à-vis product innovation, process innovation, increased range of goods and services, R&D intensity, new technology adoption and adaptation. Factor analysis results indicated that developing intellectual property rights (IPR), technological measures and marketing practices explained 80.256% of variation. Policy initiative factor is dominating and SMEs are still relying heavily on support from government