Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
Displaying 31 - 40 of 181
Filtering by
- Creators: Turaga, Pavan
- Creators: Kashiwagi, Dean
Description
Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common cause of blindness occurring due to prolonged presence of diabetes. The risk of developing DR or having the disease progress is increasing over time. Despite advances in diabetes care over the years, DR remains a vision-threatening complication and one of the leading causes of blindness among American adults. Recent studies have shown that diagnosis based on digital retinal imaging has potential benefits over traditional face-to-face evaluation. Yet there is a dearth of computer-based systems that can match the level of performance achieved by ophthalmologists. This thesis takes a fresh perspective in developing a computer-based system aimed at improving diagnosis of DR images. These images are categorized into three classes according to their severity level. The proposed approach explores effective methods to classify new images and retrieve clinically-relevant images from a database with prior diagnosis information associated with them. Retrieval provides a novel way to utilize the vast knowledge in the archives of previously-diagnosed DR images and thereby improve a clinician's performance while classification can safely reduce the burden on DR screening programs and possibly achieve higher detection accuracy than human experts. To solve the three-class retrieval and classification problem, the approach uses a multi-class multiple-instance medical image retrieval framework that makes use of spectrally tuned color correlogram and steerable Gaussian filter response features. The results show better retrieval and classification performances than prior-art methods and are also observed to be of clinical and visual relevance.
ContributorsChandakkar, Parag Shridhar (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Frakes, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
Description
As global competition continues to grow more disruptive, organizational change is an ever-present reality that affects companies in all industries at both the operational and strategic level. Organizational change capabilities have become a necessary aspect of existence for organizations in all industries worldwide. Research suggests that more than half of all organizational change efforts fail to achieve their original intended results, with some studies quoting failure rates as high as 70 percent. Exasperating this problem is the fact that no single change methodology has been universally accepted. This thesis examines two aspect of organizational change: the implementation of tactical and strategic initiatives, primarily focusing on successful tactical implementation techniques. This research proposed that tactical issues typically dominate the focus of change agents and recipients alike, often to the detriment of strategic level initiatives that are vital to the overall value and success of the organizational change effort. The Delphi method was employed to develop a tool to facilitate the initial implementation of organizational change such that tactical barriers were minimized and available resources for strategic initiatives were maximized. Feedback from two expert groups of change agents and change facilitators was solicited to develop the tool and evaluate its impact. Preliminary pilot testing of the tool confirmed the proposal and successfully served to minimize tactical barriers to organizational change.
ContributorsLines, Brian (Author) / Sullivan, Kenneth T. (Thesis advisor) / Badger, William (Committee member) / Kashiwagi, Dean (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
Description
Image segmentation is of great importance and value in many applications. In computer vision, image segmentation is the tool and process of locating objects and boundaries within images. The segmentation result may provide more meaningful image data. Generally, there are two fundamental image segmentation algorithms: discontinuity and similarity. The idea behind discontinuity is locating the abrupt changes in intensity of images, as are often seen in edges or boundaries. Similarity subdivides an image into regions that fit the pre-defined criteria. The algorithm utilized in this thesis is the second category.
This study addresses the problem of particle image segmentation by measuring the similarity between a sampled region and an adjacent region, based on Bhattacharyya distance and an image feature extraction technique that uses distribution of local binary patterns and pattern contrasts. A boundary smoothing process is developed to improve the accuracy of the segmentation. The novel particle image segmentation algorithm is tested using four different cases of particle image velocimetry (PIV) images. The obtained experimental results of segmentations provide partitioning of the objects within 10 percent error rate. Ground-truth segmentation data, which are manually segmented image from each case, are used to calculate the error rate of the segmentations.
This study addresses the problem of particle image segmentation by measuring the similarity between a sampled region and an adjacent region, based on Bhattacharyya distance and an image feature extraction technique that uses distribution of local binary patterns and pattern contrasts. A boundary smoothing process is developed to improve the accuracy of the segmentation. The novel particle image segmentation algorithm is tested using four different cases of particle image velocimetry (PIV) images. The obtained experimental results of segmentations provide partitioning of the objects within 10 percent error rate. Ground-truth segmentation data, which are manually segmented image from each case, are used to calculate the error rate of the segmentations.
ContributorsHan, Dongmin (Author) / Frakes, David (Thesis advisor) / Adrian, Ronald (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
Computer Vision as a eld has gone through signicant changes in the last decade.
The eld has seen tremendous success in designing learning systems with hand-crafted
features and in using representation learning to extract better features. In this dissertation
some novel approaches to representation learning and task learning are studied.
Multiple-instance learning which is generalization of supervised learning, is one
example of task learning that is discussed. In particular, a novel non-parametric k-
NN-based multiple-instance learning is proposed, which is shown to outperform other
existing approaches. This solution is applied to a diabetic retinopathy pathology
detection problem eectively.
In cases of representation learning, generality of neural features are investigated
rst. This investigation leads to some critical understanding and results in feature
generality among datasets. The possibility of learning from a mentor network instead
of from labels is then investigated. Distillation of dark knowledge is used to eciently
mentor a small network from a pre-trained large mentor network. These studies help
in understanding representation learning with smaller and compressed networks.
The eld has seen tremendous success in designing learning systems with hand-crafted
features and in using representation learning to extract better features. In this dissertation
some novel approaches to representation learning and task learning are studied.
Multiple-instance learning which is generalization of supervised learning, is one
example of task learning that is discussed. In particular, a novel non-parametric k-
NN-based multiple-instance learning is proposed, which is shown to outperform other
existing approaches. This solution is applied to a diabetic retinopathy pathology
detection problem eectively.
In cases of representation learning, generality of neural features are investigated
rst. This investigation leads to some critical understanding and results in feature
generality among datasets. The possibility of learning from a mentor network instead
of from labels is then investigated. Distillation of dark knowledge is used to eciently
mentor a small network from a pre-trained large mentor network. These studies help
in understanding representation learning with smaller and compressed networks.
ContributorsVenkatesan, Ragav (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
The performance of most of the visual computing tasks depends on the quality of the features extracted from the raw data. Insightful feature representation increases the performance of many learning algorithms by exposing the underlying explanatory factors of the output for the unobserved input. A good representation should also handle anomalies in the data such as missing samples and noisy input caused by the undesired, external factors of variation. It should also reduce the data redundancy. Over the years, many feature extraction processes have been invented to produce good representations of raw images and videos.
The feature extraction processes can be categorized into three groups. The first group contains processes that are hand-crafted for a specific task. Hand-engineering features requires the knowledge of domain experts and manual labor. However, the feature extraction process is interpretable and explainable. Next group contains the latent-feature extraction processes. While the original feature lies in a high-dimensional space, the relevant factors for a task often lie on a lower dimensional manifold. The latent-feature extraction employs hidden variables to expose the underlying data properties that cannot be directly measured from the input. Latent features seek a specific structure such as sparsity or low-rank into the derived representation through sophisticated optimization techniques. The last category is that of deep features. These are obtained by passing raw input data with minimal pre-processing through a deep network. Its parameters are computed by iteratively minimizing a task-based loss.
In this dissertation, I present four pieces of work where I create and learn suitable data representations. The first task employs hand-crafted features to perform clinically-relevant retrieval of diabetic retinopathy images. The second task uses latent features to perform content-adaptive image enhancement. The third task ranks a pair of images based on their aestheticism. The goal of the last task is to capture localized image artifacts in small datasets with patch-level labels. For both these tasks, I propose novel deep architectures and show significant improvement over the previous state-of-art approaches. A suitable combination of feature representations augmented with an appropriate learning approach can increase performance for most visual computing tasks.
The feature extraction processes can be categorized into three groups. The first group contains processes that are hand-crafted for a specific task. Hand-engineering features requires the knowledge of domain experts and manual labor. However, the feature extraction process is interpretable and explainable. Next group contains the latent-feature extraction processes. While the original feature lies in a high-dimensional space, the relevant factors for a task often lie on a lower dimensional manifold. The latent-feature extraction employs hidden variables to expose the underlying data properties that cannot be directly measured from the input. Latent features seek a specific structure such as sparsity or low-rank into the derived representation through sophisticated optimization techniques. The last category is that of deep features. These are obtained by passing raw input data with minimal pre-processing through a deep network. Its parameters are computed by iteratively minimizing a task-based loss.
In this dissertation, I present four pieces of work where I create and learn suitable data representations. The first task employs hand-crafted features to perform clinically-relevant retrieval of diabetic retinopathy images. The second task uses latent features to perform content-adaptive image enhancement. The third task ranks a pair of images based on their aestheticism. The goal of the last task is to capture localized image artifacts in small datasets with patch-level labels. For both these tasks, I propose novel deep architectures and show significant improvement over the previous state-of-art approaches. A suitable combination of feature representations augmented with an appropriate learning approach can increase performance for most visual computing tasks.
ContributorsChandakkar, Parag Shridhar (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
Description
Recent studies have identified that contractors in the Saudi construction industry are not the main party that cause risks as owners and other parties have the major share of causing risks. However, with the identification that risks out of contractors’ control are a leading cause of low performance, there is a lack of efficient risk mitigation practices in Saudi to manage these risks. The main aim of this dissertation is to assess the current practices applied by contractors to minimize risk out of their control and develop a risk mitigation model to manage these risks. The main objectives of the study are: investigating the risks that are out of contractors’ control, assessing the contractors’ current risk mitigation and performance measurement practices, and finally developing and validating a risk mitigation model to minimize risks out of contractors’ control and measure performance of involved project parties. To achieve the study aim, a mixed methodological approach was adopted. Theoretical approaches were utilized to review previous research and to develop a conceptual risk mitigation framework followed by a practical approach that is considered with collecting data from contractors. The quantitative method was mainly used to meet the study objectives through distributing a survey in the form of a questionnaire. As a consolidation of the study findings, the top ranked risks that are out of contractors’ control were identified. Furthermore, the results identified that the contractors’ current risk management and performance measurement practices are not effective in minimizing projects risks caused by other parties and ineffective in measuring performance of all parties. The developed model focuses on increasing accountability of project parties through mitigating project parties’ activities and risks with measuring the deviations and identifying sources of deviations. Transparency is utilized in the model through sharing weekly updates of the activities and risks combined with updated information of performance measurements of all project parties. The study results showed that project risks can be minimized and projects’ performance can be increased if contractors shift their focus using the developed model from only managing their own activities and risks to managing all project parties’ activities and risks.
ContributorsAlgahtany, Mohammed (Author) / Sullivan, Kenneth (Thesis advisor) / Kashiwagi, Dean (Committee member) / Badger, William (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Generating real-world content for VR is challenging in terms of capturing and processing at high resolution and high frame-rates. The content needs to represent a truly immersive experience, where the user can look around in 360-degree view and perceive the depth of the scene. The existing solutions only capture and offload the compute load to the server. But offloading large amounts of raw camera feeds takes longer latencies and poses difficulties for real-time applications. By capturing and computing on the edge, we can closely integrate the systems and optimize for low latency. However, moving the traditional stitching algorithms to battery constrained device needs at least three orders of magnitude reduction in power. We believe that close integration of capture and compute stages will lead to reduced overall system power.
We approach the problem by building a hardware prototype and characterize the end-to-end system bottlenecks of power and performance. The prototype has 6 IMX274 cameras and uses Nvidia Jetson TX2 development board for capture and computation. We found that capturing is bottlenecked by sensor power and data-rates across interfaces, whereas compute is limited by the total number of computations per frame. Our characterization shows that redundant capture and redundant computations lead to high power, huge memory footprint, and high latency. The existing systems lack hardware-software co-design aspects, leading to excessive data transfers across the interfaces and expensive computations within the individual subsystems. Finally, we propose mechanisms to optimize the system for low power and low latency. We emphasize the importance of co-design of different subsystems to reduce and reuse the data. For example, reusing the motion vectors of the ISP stage reduces the memory footprint of the stereo correspondence stage. Our estimates show that pipelining and parallelization on custom FPGA can achieve real time stitching.
We approach the problem by building a hardware prototype and characterize the end-to-end system bottlenecks of power and performance. The prototype has 6 IMX274 cameras and uses Nvidia Jetson TX2 development board for capture and computation. We found that capturing is bottlenecked by sensor power and data-rates across interfaces, whereas compute is limited by the total number of computations per frame. Our characterization shows that redundant capture and redundant computations lead to high power, huge memory footprint, and high latency. The existing systems lack hardware-software co-design aspects, leading to excessive data transfers across the interfaces and expensive computations within the individual subsystems. Finally, we propose mechanisms to optimize the system for low power and low latency. We emphasize the importance of co-design of different subsystems to reduce and reuse the data. For example, reusing the motion vectors of the ISP stage reduces the memory footprint of the stereo correspondence stage. Our estimates show that pipelining and parallelization on custom FPGA can achieve real time stitching.
ContributorsGunnam, Sridhar (Author) / LiKamWa, Robert (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
Mixture of experts is a machine learning ensemble approach that consists of individual models that are trained to be ``experts'' on subsets of the data, and a gating network that provides weights to output a combination of the expert predictions. Mixture of experts models do not currently see wide use due to difficulty in training diverse experts and high computational requirements. This work presents modifications of the mixture of experts formulation that use domain knowledge to improve training, and incorporate parameter sharing among experts to reduce computational requirements.
First, this work presents an application of mixture of experts models for quality robust visual recognition. First it is shown that human subjects outperform deep neural networks on classification of distorted images, and then propose a model, MixQualNet, that is more robust to distortions. The proposed model consists of ``experts'' that are trained on a particular type of image distortion. The final output of the model is a weighted sum of the expert models, where the weights are determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model also incorporates weight sharing to reduce the number of parameters, as well as increase performance.
Second, an application of mixture of experts to predict visual saliency is presented. A computational saliency model attempts to predict where humans will look in an image. In the proposed model, each expert network is trained to predict saliency for a set of closely related images. The final saliency map is computed as a weighted mixture of the expert networks' outputs, with weights determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model achieves better performance than several other visual saliency models and a baseline non-mixture model.
Finally, this work introduces a saliency model that is a weighted mixture of models trained for different levels of saliency. Levels of saliency include high saliency, which corresponds to regions where almost all subjects look, and low saliency, which corresponds to regions where some, but not all subjects look. The weighted mixture shows improved performance compared with baseline models because of the diversity of the individual model predictions.
First, this work presents an application of mixture of experts models for quality robust visual recognition. First it is shown that human subjects outperform deep neural networks on classification of distorted images, and then propose a model, MixQualNet, that is more robust to distortions. The proposed model consists of ``experts'' that are trained on a particular type of image distortion. The final output of the model is a weighted sum of the expert models, where the weights are determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model also incorporates weight sharing to reduce the number of parameters, as well as increase performance.
Second, an application of mixture of experts to predict visual saliency is presented. A computational saliency model attempts to predict where humans will look in an image. In the proposed model, each expert network is trained to predict saliency for a set of closely related images. The final saliency map is computed as a weighted mixture of the expert networks' outputs, with weights determined by a separate gating network. The proposed model achieves better performance than several other visual saliency models and a baseline non-mixture model.
Finally, this work introduces a saliency model that is a weighted mixture of models trained for different levels of saliency. Levels of saliency include high saliency, which corresponds to regions where almost all subjects look, and low saliency, which corresponds to regions where some, but not all subjects look. The weighted mixture shows improved performance compared with baseline models because of the diversity of the individual model predictions.
ContributorsDodge, Samuel Fuller (Author) / Karam, Lina (Thesis advisor) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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, 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.
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
Description
Human movement is a complex process influenced by physiological and psychological factors. The execution of movement is varied from person to person, and the number of possible strategies for completing a specific movement task is almost infinite. Different choices of strategies can be perceived by humans as having different degrees of quality, and the quality can be defined with regard to aesthetic, athletic, or health-related ratings. It is useful to measure and track the quality of a person's movements, for various applications, especially with the prevalence of low-cost and portable cameras and sensors today. Furthermore, based on such measurements, feedback systems can be designed for people to practice their movements towards certain goals. In this dissertation, I introduce symmetry as a family of measures for movement quality, and utilize recent advances in computer vision and differential geometry to model and analyze different types of symmetry in human movements. Movements are modeled as trajectories on different types of manifolds, according to the representations of movements from sensor data. The benefit of such a universal framework is that it can accommodate different existing and future features that describe human movements. The theory and tools developed in this dissertation will also be useful in other scientific areas to analyze symmetry from high-dimensional signals.
ContributorsWang, Qiao (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Srivastava, Anuj (Committee member) / Sha, Xin Wei (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018