Integration of perceptal grouping and depth

International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), 2000, Barcelona (España)Different data acquisition methods are tailored at extracting particular characteristics from a scene and by combining their results a more robust scene description can be created. A method to fuse perceptual groupings extracted from color-based segmentation and depth information from stereo using supervised classification is presented. The merging of data from these two acquisition modules allows for a spatially coherent blend of smooth regions and detail in an image. Depth cues are used to limit the area of interest in the scene and to improve perceptual grouping solving subsegmentation and oversegmentation of the original images. The complexity of the algorithm does not exceed that of the individual acquisition modules. The resulting scene description can then be fed to an object recognition modules for scene interpretation.This work was supported by the project 'Active vision systems based in automatic learning for industrial applications' ().Peer Reviewe

About reality and lies: a principle of little prince

A recurring concept attracted our attention in academic areas in which research is discussed. Repeatedly´, the phrase "knowing the reality" is mentioned, as one way of understanding and research and science as an academic exercise. Therefore, it´s essential to make a question to this concept: "reality," in order to reach a further understanding and, of course, to a staff position as individuals who are interested in knowledge. But also, we are interested in the social field, because we had made choices and those choices are now or they’re going to become in to professional titles. We must turn, then not to a generic conception of reality, but, ultimately, to social reality

Voltaire with Nietzsche: The Problem of the Object in Psychology

One question, for some a candid question, is positioned in the atmosphere of academic psychology, in fact, I dare say, all the programs in psychology, at least, they ought to be: what does psychology study? Immediate responses can come from many sectors, some with a pompous title of "more scientific", other than, with some suspicion scratch, for some, discredited in the categories of "pseudoscience" or, in a less dramatic way, "ideologies"

Psychotherapy and art

The psychology, in addition to his youth as a recognized discipline, presents a demarcation of its subject of study always controversial. Since the beginning of his definitive separation of philosophy, in the late nineteenth century, its object of study has mutated with the relentless steps of the psychological models: awareness, unconscious, cognitive processes, objetal relationships, the archetype, the behavior

Criticisism and education at Funlam

Among other things I concern of FUNLAM is the pedagogical aspect in a particular evaluation system, within a specific context, as in Medellin, Colombia, Latin America. This concern, ultimately, is not related to anything more than a common term, which is the center of all the concerns that have to do with the field of education: teaching models

Boosted Random ferns for object detection

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.In this paper we introduce the Boosted Random Ferns (BRFs) to rapidly build discriminative classifiers for learning and detecting object categories. At the core of our approach we use standard random ferns, but we introduce four main innovations that let us bring ferns from an instance to a category level, and still retain efficiency. First, we define binary features on the histogram of oriented gradients-domain (as opposed to intensity-), allowing for a better representation of intra-class variability. Second, both the positions where ferns are evaluated within the sliding window, and the location of the binary features for each fern are not chosen completely at random, but instead we use a boosting strategy to pick the most discriminative combination of them. This is further enhanced by our third contribution, that is to adapt the boosting strategy to enable sharing of binary features among different ferns, yielding high recognition rates at a low computational cost. And finally, we show that training can be performed online, for sequentially arriving images. Overall, the resulting classifier can be very efficiently trained, densely evaluated for all image locations in about 0.1 seconds, and provides detection rates similar to competing approaches that require expensive and significantly slower processing times. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by thorough experimentation in publicly available datasets in which we compare against state-of-the-art, and for tasks of both 2D detection and 3D multi-view estimation.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A stochastic state estimation approach to simultaneous localization and map building

This monograph covers theoretical aspects of simultaneous localization and map building for mobile robots, such as estimation stability, nonlinear models for the propagation of uncertainties, temporal landmark compatibility, as well as issues pertaining the coupling of control and SLAM. One of the most relevant topics covered in this monograph is the theoretical formalism of partial observability in SLAM. The authors show that the typical approach to SLAM using a Kalman filter results in marginal filter stability, making the final reconstruction estimates dependent on the initial vehicle estimates. However, by anchoring the map to a fixed landmark in the scene, they are able to attain full observability in SLAM, with reduced covariance estimates. This result earned the first author the EURON Georges Giralt Best PhD Award in its fourth edition, and has prompted the SLAM community to think in new ways to approach the mapping problem. For example, by creating local maps anchored on a landmark, or on the robot initial estimate itself, and then using geometric relations to fuse local maps globally. This monograph is appropriate as a text for an introductory estimation-theoretic approach to the SLAM problem, and as a reference book for people who work in mobile robotics research in general.This work was supported by projects: 'Supervised learning of industrial scenes by means of an active vision equipped mobile robot.' (J-00063), 'Integration of robust perception, learning, and navigation systems in mobile robotics' (J-0929).Peer Reviewe

Evolution of the male genitalia in Drosophila mediopunctata

Orientador: Louis Bernard KlaczkoTese (doutorado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de BiologiaResumo: O tamanho e forma do edeago de Drosophila mediopunctata foram estudados a partir de moscas oriundas de duas coletas realizadas numa população natural na Mata Santa enebra, Campinas, SP. A metodologia empregada em todo o trabalho consistiu na elaboração de dois desenhos para o edeago de cada espécime. A seguir, foram estimadas as médias e as configurações consensos para cada par de desenhos, que foram utilizadas, respectivamente, em análises estatísticas univariadas e de morfometria geométrica. Esta metodologia ermitiu obter resultados consistentes e confiáveis para analisar o tamanho e forma do edeago. Em primeiro lugar, investigamos a plasticidade fenotípica do edeago de D. mediopunctata, verificando como ele varia quando as moscas são criadas em duas temperaturas diferentes. O resultado obtido mostrou diferenças de tamanho e forma nestas duas condições experimentais: moscas criadas a 16.5°C tiveram os edeagos maiores do que as criadas a 20°C; uma área no edeago (apical) foi responsável pela maior parte da variação em forma. Em segundo lugar, comparamos a variação fenotípica do edeago com a da asa, estudada simultaneamente nos mesmos animais, os quais vieram diretamente do campo ou foram criados no laboratório; bem como a herdabilidade natural e no laboratório. A asa foi empregada como um sistema de referência para a variação de tamanho e forma do corpo; e, também, analisada com estatísticas univariadas e de morfometria geométrica. Para medidas lineares foram encontrados: coeficientes de variação, em média, maiores no edeago do que na asa entre os animais criados no laboratório; enquanto que nos animais vindos diretamente do campo não houve diferença significativa. Além disto, foram calculadas as correlações fenotípicas entre medidas dos dois órgãos. A partir de moscas oriundas do campo e laboratório detectamos herdabilidades significativas para medidas lineares do edeago. Com relação à asa identificamos apenas um traço com herdabilidade natural significativa, ao passo que no laboratório seis traços mostraram valores significativos. Nossa investigação capturou a herdabilidade ¿natural¿ para a forma da asa e variação para a forma do edeago. Contudo, valores significativos para tamanho do centróide e para o componente uniforme de ambas estruturas só foram encontrados para as estimativas de herdabilidade no laboratório. Outros dados pertinentes foram: primeiro, correlação significativa e positiva entre os tamanhos do centróide do edeago e asa; segundo, o tamanho do centróide do edeago mostrou poucas correlações com a forma da asa; terceiro, muitas correlações fenotípicas foram encontradas entre ambas estruturas, embora não consistentes. Nossos dados foram discutidos com relação a três hipóteses centrais (chave-e-fechadura, pleiotropia e seleção sexual) que tentam explicar a evolução da genitália masculina. Nossos resultados não apóiam a hipótese chave-e-fechadura, mas não nos permitem refutar as hipóteses da pleiotropia e seleção sexual. Embora este estudo tenha se concentrado exclusivamente no órgão intromitente, é recomendável analisar a contrapartida na genitália femininaAbstract: The size and shape of the aedeagus of Drosophila mediopunctata, obtained from two collections of a natural population in Mata Santa Genebra, were analyzed in this study. The methodology applied in all of the study consisted in making two drawings for each aedeagus of each specimen. Next, the averages or consensus configurations were estimated for each pair of drawings. These figures were used in univariate statistical analysis and in geometric morphometrics. This methodology resulted in consistent and reliable results to analyze the size and shape of the aedeagus. Firstly, we investigated the phenotypic plasticity of the aedeagus of D. mediopunctata, observing how it varies when the flies are reared in two different temperatures. The result obtained showed differences in size and shape in these two experimental conditions: flies reared at 16.5°C had larger aedeagus than those reared at 20°C; one area of the aedeagus (apical) accounted for most of the shape variation. Secondly, we compared the phenotypic variation of the aedeagus with the wing, studied simultaneously in the same flies which came directly from the field or were raised in the laboratory. The natural and laboratory heritability were also compared. For linear measures, the following was found: the coefficients of variation, in average, were higher in the aedeagus than in the wing. Furthermore, the phenotypic correlations between the two organs were calculated. The wing was also analyzed with univariate statistics and geometric morphometrics to provide a reference system for variation of size and shape. From field and laboratory flies, we detected significant heritabilities for linear measures of the aedeagus: five for the first and six for the second. Regarding the wing, we identified only one trait with natural heritability, whereas for the laboratory, six traits were found. Our investigation captured the natural heritability for the shape of the wing and the variation of the shape of the aedeagus. Significant data for centroid size and for the uniform component of both structures were found for the estimates of heritability in the laboratory. Other pertinent data were: first, significant and positive correlation between the centroid sizes of the aedeagus and the wing; second, the size of the centroid of the aedeagus showed few correlations with the shape of the wing; third, many phenotypic correlations were found between both structures, although not consistent. Our data was discussed with relation to three main hypotheses (lock-and-key, pleiotropy, and sexual selection) which attempt to explain the evolution of male genitalia. Our results allow us to refute the lock-and-key hypothesis, but not the hypotheses of pleiotropy and sexual selection. Although this study concentrated exclusively on the intromittent organ, further verification of the counterpart in the female genitalia is necessaryDoutoradoGenetica Animal e EvoluçãoDoutor em Genetica e Biologia Molecula

Sojourn times in Jackson networks

Jackson queuing networks have a lot of practical applications, mainly in the modelling of computation and telecommunications networks. Evidently the time that one customer - a person, a job, a message … – spends in this kind of systems, its sojourn time, is an important measure of its performance. In this work the practical known results about the sojourn time distribution are collected and presented