This collection includes most of the ASU Theses and Dissertations from 2011 to present. ASU Theses and Dissertations are available in downloadable PDF format; however, a small percentage of items are under embargo. Information about the dissertations/theses includes degree information, committee members, an abstract, supporting data or media.
In addition to the electronic theses found in the ASU Digital Repository, ASU Theses and Dissertations can be found in the ASU Library Catalog.
Dissertations and Theses granted by Arizona State University are archived and made available through a joint effort of the ASU Graduate College and the ASU Libraries. For more information or questions about this collection contact or visit the Digital Repository ETD Library Guide or contact the ASU Graduate College at gradformat@asu.edu.
Huge advancements have been made over the years in terms of modern image-sensing hardware and visual computing algorithms (e.g. computer vision, image processing, computational photography). However, to this day, there still exists a current gap between the hardware and software design in an imaging system, which silos one research domain…
Huge advancements have been made over the years in terms of modern image-sensing hardware and visual computing algorithms (e.g. computer vision, image processing, computational photography). However, to this day, there still exists a current gap between the hardware and software design in an imaging system, which silos one research domain from another. Bridging this gap is the key to unlocking new visual computing capabilities for end applications in commercial photography, industrial inspection, and robotics. This thesis explores avenues where hardware-software co-design of image sensors can be leveraged to replace conventional hardware components in an imaging system with software for enhanced reconfigurability. As a result, the user can program the image sensor in a way best suited to the end application. This is referred to as software-defined imaging (SDI), where image sensor behavior can be altered by the system software depending on the user's needs. The scope of this thesis covers the development and deployment of SDI algorithms for low-power computer vision. Strategies for sparse spatial sampling have been developed in this thesis for power optimization of the vision sensor. This dissertation shows how a hardware-compatible state-of-the-art object tracker can be coupled with a Kalman filter for energy gains at the sensor level. Extensive experiments reveal how adaptive spatial sampling of image frames with this hardware-friendly framework offers attractive energy-accuracy tradeoffs. Another thrust of this thesis is to demonstrate the benefits of reinforcement learning in this research avenue. A major finding reported in this dissertation shows how neural-network-based reinforcement learning can be exploited for the adaptive subsampling framework to achieve improved sampling performance, thereby optimizing the energy efficiency of the image sensor. The last thrust of this thesis is to leverage emerging event-based SDI technology for building a low-power navigation system. A homography estimation pipeline has been proposed in this thesis which couples the right data representation with a differential scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) module to extract rich visual cues from event streams. Positional encoding is leveraged with a multilayer perceptron (MLP) network to get robust homography estimation from event data.
