This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students. 

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Description
We solve the problem of activity verification in the context of sustainability. Activity verification is the process of proving the user assertions pertaining to a certain activity performed by the user. Our motivation lies in incentivizing the user for engaging in sustainable activities like taking public transport or recycling. Such

We solve the problem of activity verification in the context of sustainability. Activity verification is the process of proving the user assertions pertaining to a certain activity performed by the user. Our motivation lies in incentivizing the user for engaging in sustainable activities like taking public transport or recycling. Such incentivization schemes require the system to verify the claim made by the user. The system verifies these claims by analyzing the supporting evidence captured by the user while performing the activity. The proliferation of portable smart-phones in the past few years has provided us with a ubiquitous and relatively cheap platform, having multiple sensors like accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone etc. to capture this evidence data in-situ. In this research, we investigate the supervised and semi-supervised learning techniques for activity verification. Both these techniques make use the data set constructed using the evidence submitted by the user. Supervised learning makes use of annotated evidence data to build a function to predict the class labels of the unlabeled data points. The evidence data captured can be either unimodal or multimodal in nature. We use the accelerometer data as evidence for transportation mode verification and image data as evidence for recycling verification. After training the system, we achieve maximum accuracy of 94% when classifying the transport mode and 81% when detecting recycle activity. In the case of recycle verification, we could improve the classification accuracy by asking the user for more evidence. We present some techniques to ask the user for the next best piece of evidence that maximizes the probability of classification. Using these techniques for detecting recycle activity, the accuracy increases to 93%. The major disadvantage of using supervised models is that it requires extensive annotated training data, which expensive to collect. Due to the limited training data, we look at the graph based inductive semi-supervised learning methods to propagate the labels among the unlabeled samples. In the semi-supervised approach, we represent each instance in the data set as a node in the graph. Since it is a complete graph, edges interconnect these nodes, with each edge having some weight representing the similarity between the points. We propagate the labels in this graph, based on the proximity of the data points to the labeled nodes. We estimate the performance of these algorithms by measuring how close the probability distribution of the data after label propagation is to the probability distribution of the ground truth data. Since labeling has a cost associated with it, in this thesis we propose two algorithms that help us in selecting minimum number of labeled points to propagate the labels accurately. Our proposed algorithm achieves a maximum of 73% increase in performance when compared to the baseline algorithm.
ContributorsDesai, Vaishnav (Author) / Sundaram, Hari (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Image understanding has been playing an increasingly crucial role in vision applications. Sparse models form an important component in image understanding, since the statistics of natural images reveal the presence of sparse structure. Sparse methods lead to parsimonious models, in addition to being efficient for large scale learning. In sparse

Image understanding has been playing an increasingly crucial role in vision applications. Sparse models form an important component in image understanding, since the statistics of natural images reveal the presence of sparse structure. Sparse methods lead to parsimonious models, in addition to being efficient for large scale learning. In sparse modeling, data is represented as a sparse linear combination of atoms from a "dictionary" matrix. This dissertation focuses on understanding different aspects of sparse learning, thereby enhancing the use of sparse methods by incorporating tools from machine learning. With the growing need to adapt models for large scale data, it is important to design dictionaries that can model the entire data space and not just the samples considered. By exploiting the relation of dictionary learning to 1-D subspace clustering, a multilevel dictionary learning algorithm is developed, and it is shown to outperform conventional sparse models in compressed recovery, and image denoising. Theoretical aspects of learning such as algorithmic stability and generalization are considered, and ensemble learning is incorporated for effective large scale learning. In addition to building strategies for efficiently implementing 1-D subspace clustering, a discriminative clustering approach is designed to estimate the unknown mixing process in blind source separation. By exploiting the non-linear relation between the image descriptors, and allowing the use of multiple features, sparse methods can be made more effective in recognition problems. The idea of multiple kernel sparse representations is developed, and algorithms for learning dictionaries in the feature space are presented. Using object recognition experiments on standard datasets it is shown that the proposed approaches outperform other sparse coding-based recognition frameworks. Furthermore, a segmentation technique based on multiple kernel sparse representations is developed, and successfully applied for automated brain tumor identification. Using sparse codes to define the relation between data samples can lead to a more robust graph embedding for unsupervised clustering. By performing discriminative embedding using sparse coding-based graphs, an algorithm for measuring the glomerular number in kidney MRI images is developed. Finally, approaches to build dictionaries for local sparse coding of image descriptors are presented, and applied to object recognition and image retrieval.
ContributorsJayaraman Thiagarajan, Jayaraman (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Frakes, David (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Effective modeling of high dimensional data is crucial in information processing and machine learning. Classical subspace methods have been very effective in such applications. However, over the past few decades, there has been considerable research towards the development of new modeling paradigms that go beyond subspace methods. This dissertation focuses

Effective modeling of high dimensional data is crucial in information processing and machine learning. Classical subspace methods have been very effective in such applications. However, over the past few decades, there has been considerable research towards the development of new modeling paradigms that go beyond subspace methods. This dissertation focuses on the study of sparse models and their interplay with modern machine learning techniques such as manifold, ensemble and graph-based methods, along with their applications in image analysis and recovery. By considering graph relations between data samples while learning sparse models, graph-embedded codes can be obtained for use in unsupervised, supervised and semi-supervised problems. Using experiments on standard datasets, it is demonstrated that the codes obtained from the proposed methods outperform several baseline algorithms. In order to facilitate sparse learning with large scale data, the paradigm of ensemble sparse coding is proposed, and different strategies for constructing weak base models are developed. Experiments with image recovery and clustering demonstrate that these ensemble models perform better when compared to conventional sparse coding frameworks. When examples from the data manifold are available, manifold constraints can be incorporated with sparse models and two approaches are proposed to combine sparse coding with manifold projection. The improved performance of the proposed techniques in comparison to sparse coding approaches is demonstrated using several image recovery experiments. In addition to these approaches, it might be required in some applications to combine multiple sparse models with different regularizations. In particular, combining an unconstrained sparse model with non-negative sparse coding is important in image analysis, and it poses several algorithmic and theoretical challenges. A convex and an efficient greedy algorithm for recovering combined representations are proposed. Theoretical guarantees on sparsity thresholds for exact recovery using these algorithms are derived and recovery performance is also demonstrated using simulations on synthetic data. Finally, the problem of non-linear compressive sensing, where the measurement process is carried out in feature space obtained using non-linear transformations, is considered. An optimized non-linear measurement system is proposed, and improvements in recovery performance are demonstrated in comparison to using random measurements as well as optimized linear measurements.
ContributorsNatesan Ramamurthy, Karthikeyan (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Tsakalis, Konstantinos (Committee member) / Karam, Lina (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
Many learning models have been proposed for various tasks in visual computing. Popular examples include hidden Markov models and support vector machines. Recently, sparse-representation-based learning methods have attracted a lot of attention in the computer vision field, largely because of their impressive performance in many applications. In the literature, many

Many learning models have been proposed for various tasks in visual computing. Popular examples include hidden Markov models and support vector machines. Recently, sparse-representation-based learning methods have attracted a lot of attention in the computer vision field, largely because of their impressive performance in many applications. In the literature, many of such sparse learning methods focus on designing or application of some learning techniques for certain feature space without much explicit consideration on possible interaction between the underlying semantics of the visual data and the employed learning technique. Rich semantic information in most visual data, if properly incorporated into algorithm design, should help achieving improved performance while delivering intuitive interpretation of the algorithmic outcomes. My study addresses the problem of how to explicitly consider the semantic information of the visual data in the sparse learning algorithms. In this work, we identify four problems which are of great importance and broad interest to the community. Specifically, a novel approach is proposed to incorporate label information to learn a dictionary which is not only reconstructive but also discriminative; considering the formation process of face images, a novel image decomposition approach for an ensemble of correlated images is proposed, where a subspace is built from the decomposition and applied to face recognition; based on the observation that, the foreground (or salient) objects are sparse in input domain and the background is sparse in frequency domain, a novel and efficient spatio-temporal saliency detection algorithm is proposed to identify the salient regions in video; and a novel hidden Markov model learning approach is proposed by utilizing a sparse set of pairwise comparisons among the data, which is easier to obtain and more meaningful, consistent than tradition labels, in many scenarios, e.g., evaluating motion skills in surgical simulations. In those four problems, different types of semantic information are modeled and incorporated in designing sparse learning algorithms for the corresponding visual computing tasks. Several real world applications are selected to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods, including, face recognition, spatio-temporal saliency detection, abnormality detection, spatio-temporal interest point detection, motion analysis and emotion recognition. In those applications, data of different modalities are involved, ranging from audio signal, image to video. Experiments on large scale real world data with comparisons to state-of-art methods confirm the proposed approaches deliver salient advantages, showing adding those semantic information dramatically improve the performances of the general sparse learning methods.
ContributorsZhang, Qiang (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Wang, Yalin (Committee member) / Ye, Jieping (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Motion estimation is a core task in computer vision and many applications utilize optical flow methods as fundamental tools to analyze motion in images and videos. Optical flow is the apparent motion of objects in image sequences that results from relative motion between the objects and the imaging perspective. Today,

Motion estimation is a core task in computer vision and many applications utilize optical flow methods as fundamental tools to analyze motion in images and videos. Optical flow is the apparent motion of objects in image sequences that results from relative motion between the objects and the imaging perspective. Today, optical flow fields are utilized to solve problems in various areas such as object detection and tracking, interpolation, visual odometry, etc. In this dissertation, three problems from different areas of computer vision and the solutions that make use of modified optical flow methods are explained.

The contributions of this dissertation are approaches and frameworks that introduce i) a new optical flow-based interpolation method to achieve minimally divergent velocimetry data, ii) a framework that improves the accuracy of change detection algorithms in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, and iii) a set of new methods to integrate Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (1HMRSI) data into threedimensional (3D) neuronavigation systems for tumor biopsies.

In the first application an optical flow-based approach for the interpolation of minimally divergent velocimetry data is proposed. The velocimetry data of incompressible fluids contain signals that describe the flow velocity. The approach uses the additional flow velocity information to guide the interpolation process towards reduced divergence in the interpolated data.

In the second application a framework that mainly consists of optical flow methods and other image processing and computer vision techniques to improve object extraction from synthetic aperture radar images is proposed. The proposed framework is used for distinguishing between actual motion and detected motion due to misregistration in SAR image sets and it can lead to more accurate and meaningful change detection and improve object extraction from a SAR datasets.

In the third application a set of new methods that aim to improve upon the current state-of-the-art in neuronavigation through the use of detailed three-dimensional (3D) 1H-MRSI data are proposed. The result is a progressive form of online MRSI-guided neuronavigation that is demonstrated through phantom validation and clinical application.
ContributorsKanberoglu, Berkay (Author) / Frakes, David (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
The human motion is defined as an amalgamation of several physical traits such as bipedal locomotion, posture and manual dexterity, and mental expectation. In addition to the “positive” body form defined by these traits, casting light on the body produces a “negative” of the body: its shadow. We often interchangeably

The human motion is defined as an amalgamation of several physical traits such as bipedal locomotion, posture and manual dexterity, and mental expectation. In addition to the “positive” body form defined by these traits, casting light on the body produces a “negative” of the body: its shadow. We often interchangeably use with silhouettes in the place of shadow to emphasize indifference to interior features. In a manner of speaking, the shadow is an alter ego that imitates the individual.

The principal value of shadow is its non-invasive behaviour of reflecting precisely the actions of the individual it is attached to. Nonetheless we can still think of the body’s shadow not as the body but its alter ego.

Based on this premise, my thesis creates an experiential system that extracts the data related to the contour of your human shape and gives it a texture and life of its own, so as to emulate your movements and postures, and to be your extension. In technical terms, my thesis extracts abstraction from a pre-indexed database that could be generated from an offline data set or in real time to complement these actions of a user in front of a low-cost optical motion capture device like the Microsoft Kinect. This notion could be the system’s interpretation of the action which creates modularized art through the abstraction’s ‘similarity’ to the live action.

Through my research, I have developed a stable system that tackles various connotations associated with shadows and the need to determine the ideal features that contribute to the relevance of the actions performed. The implication of Factor Oracle [3] pattern interpretation is tested with a feature bin of videos. The system also is flexible towards several methods of Nearest Neighbours searches and a machine learning module to derive the same output. The overall purpose is to establish this in real time and provide a constant feedback to the user. This can be expanded to handle larger dynamic data.

In addition to estimating human actions, my thesis best tries to test various Nearest Neighbour search methods in real time depending upon the data stream. This provides a basis to understand varying parameters that complement human activity recognition and feature matching in real time.
ContributorsSeshasayee, Sudarshan Prashanth (Author) / Sha, Xin Wei (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Tinapple, David A (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016