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Description
Digital sound synthesis allows the creation of a great variety of sounds. Focusing on interesting or ecologically valid sounds for music, simulation, aesthetics, or other purposes limits the otherwise vast digital audio palette. Tools for creating such sounds vary from arbitrary methods of altering recordings to precise simulations of vibrating

Digital sound synthesis allows the creation of a great variety of sounds. Focusing on interesting or ecologically valid sounds for music, simulation, aesthetics, or other purposes limits the otherwise vast digital audio palette. Tools for creating such sounds vary from arbitrary methods of altering recordings to precise simulations of vibrating objects. In this work, methods of sound synthesis by re-sonification are considered. Re-sonification, herein, refers to the general process of analyzing, possibly transforming, and resynthesizing or reusing recorded sounds in meaningful ways, to convey information. Applied to soundscapes, re-sonification is presented as a means of conveying activity within an environment. Applied to the sounds of objects, this work examines modeling the perception of objects as well as their physical properties and the ability to simulate interactive events with such objects. To create soundscapes to re-sonify geographic environments, a method of automated soundscape design is presented. Using recorded sounds that are classified based on acoustic, social, semantic, and geographic information, this method produces stochastically generated soundscapes to re-sonify selected geographic areas. Drawing on prior knowledge, local sounds and those deemed similar comprise a locale's soundscape. In the context of re-sonifying events, this work examines processes for modeling and estimating the excitations of sounding objects. These include plucking, striking, rubbing, and any interaction that imparts energy into a system, affecting the resultant sound. A method of estimating a linear system's input, constrained to a signal-subspace, is presented and applied toward improving the estimation of percussive excitations for re-sonification. To work toward robust recording-based modeling and re-sonification of objects, new implementations of banded waveguide (BWG) models are proposed for object modeling and sound synthesis. Previous implementations of BWGs use arbitrary model parameters and may produce a range of simulations that do not match digital waveguide or modal models of the same design. Subject to linear excitations, some models proposed here behave identically to other equivalently designed physical models. Under nonlinear interactions, such as bowing, many of the proposed implementations exhibit improvements in the attack characteristics of synthesized sounds.
ContributorsFink, Alex M (Author) / Spanias, Andreas S (Thesis advisor) / Cook, Perry R. (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Tsakalis, Konstantinos (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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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
Motion capture using cost-effective sensing technology is challenging and the huge success of Microsoft Kinect has been attracting researchers to uncover the potential of using this technology into computer vision applications. In this thesis, an upper-body motion analysis in a home-based system for stroke rehabilitation using novel RGB-D camera -

Motion capture using cost-effective sensing technology is challenging and the huge success of Microsoft Kinect has been attracting researchers to uncover the potential of using this technology into computer vision applications. In this thesis, an upper-body motion analysis in a home-based system for stroke rehabilitation using novel RGB-D camera - Kinect is presented. We address this problem by first conducting a systematic analysis of the usability of Kinect for motion analysis in stroke rehabilitation. Then a hybrid upper body tracking approach is proposed which combines off-the-shelf skeleton tracking with a novel depth-fused mean shift tracking method. We proposed several kinematic features reliably extracted from the proposed inexpensive and portable motion capture system and classifiers that correlate torso movement to clinical measures of unimpaired and impaired. Experiment results show that the proposed sensing and analysis works reliably on measuring torso movement quality and is promising for end-point tracking. The system is currently being deployed for large-scale evaluations.
ContributorsDu, Tingfang (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Rikakis, Thanassis (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
In this thesis, we consider the problem of fast and efficient indexing techniques for time sequences which evolve on manifold-valued spaces. Using manifolds is a convenient way to work with complex features that often do not live in Euclidean spaces. However, computing standard notions of geodesic distance, mean etc. can

In this thesis, we consider the problem of fast and efficient indexing techniques for time sequences which evolve on manifold-valued spaces. Using manifolds is a convenient way to work with complex features that often do not live in Euclidean spaces. However, computing standard notions of geodesic distance, mean etc. can get very involved due to the underlying non-linearity associated with the space. As a result a complex task such as manifold sequence matching would require very large number of computations making it hard to use in practice. We believe that one can device smart approximation algorithms for several classes of such problems which take into account the geometry of the manifold and maintain the favorable properties of the exact approach. This problem has several applications in areas of human activity discovery and recognition, where several features and representations are naturally studied in a non-Euclidean setting. We propose a novel solution to the problem of indexing manifold-valued sequences by proposing an intrinsic approach to map sequences to a symbolic representation. This is shown to enable the deployment of fast and accurate algorithms for activity recognition, motif discovery, and anomaly detection. Toward this end, we present generalizations of key concepts of piece-wise aggregation and symbolic approximation for the case of non-Euclidean manifolds. Experiments show that one can replace expensive geodesic computations with much faster symbolic computations with little loss of accuracy in activity recognition and discovery applications. The proposed methods are ideally suited for real-time systems and resource constrained scenarios.
ContributorsAnirudh, Rushil (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Recent advances in camera architectures and associated mathematical representations now enable compressive acquisition of images and videos at low data-rates. While most computer vision applications of today are composed of conventional cameras, which collect a large amount redundant data and power hungry embedded systems, which compress the collected data for

Recent advances in camera architectures and associated mathematical representations now enable compressive acquisition of images and videos at low data-rates. While most computer vision applications of today are composed of conventional cameras, which collect a large amount redundant data and power hungry embedded systems, which compress the collected data for further processing, compressive cameras offer the advantage of direct acquisition of data in compressed domain and hence readily promise to find applicability in computer vision, particularly in environments hampered by limited communication bandwidths. However, despite the significant progress in theory and methods of compressive sensing, little headway has been made in developing systems for such applications by exploiting the merits of compressive sensing. In such a setting, we consider the problem of activity recognition, which is an important inference problem in many security and surveillance applications. Since all successful activity recognition systems involve detection of human, followed by recognition, a potential fully functioning system motivated by compressive camera would involve the tracking of human, which requires the reconstruction of atleast the initial few frames to detect the human. Once the human is tracked, the recognition part of the system requires only the features to be extracted from the tracked sequences, which can be the reconstructed images or the compressed measurements of such sequences. However, it is desirable in resource constrained environments that these features be extracted from the compressive measurements without reconstruction. Motivated by this, in this thesis, we propose a framework for understanding activities as a non-linear dynamical system, and propose a robust, generalizable feature that can be extracted directly from the compressed measurements without reconstructing the original video frames. The proposed feature is termed recurrence texture and is motivated from recurrence analysis of non-linear dynamical systems. We show that it is possible to obtain discriminative features directly from the compressed stream and show its utility in recognition of activities at very low data rates.
ContributorsKulkarni, Kuldeep Sharad (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Frakes, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
This thesis presents robust and novel solutions using knowledge distillation with geometric approaches and multimodal data that can address the current challenges in deep learning, providing a comprehensive understanding of the learning process involved in knowledge distillation. Deep learning has attained significant success in various applications, such as health and

This thesis presents robust and novel solutions using knowledge distillation with geometric approaches and multimodal data that can address the current challenges in deep learning, providing a comprehensive understanding of the learning process involved in knowledge distillation. Deep learning has attained significant success in various applications, such as health and wellness promotion, smart homes, and intelligent surveillance. In general, stacking more layers or increasing the number of trainable parameters causes deep networks to exhibit improved performance. However, this causes the model to become large, resulting in an additional need for computing and power resources for training, storage, and deployment. These are the core challenges in incorporating such models into small devices with limited power and computational resources. In this thesis, robust solutions aimed at addressing the aforementioned challenges are presented. These proposed methodologies and algorithmic contributions enhance the performance and efficiency of deep learning models. The thesis encompasses a comprehensive exploration of knowledge distillation, an approach that holds promise for creating compact models from high-capacity ones, while preserving their performance. This exploration covers diverse datasets, including both time series and image data, shedding light on the pivotal role of augmentation methods in knowledge distillation. The effects of these methods are rigorously examined through empirical experiments. Furthermore, the study within this thesis delves into the efficient utilization of features derived from two different teacher models, each trained on dissimilar data representations, including time-series and image data. Through these investigations, I present novel approaches to knowledge distillation, leveraging geometric techniques for the analysis of multimodal data. These solutions not only address real-world challenges but also offer valuable insights and recommendations for modeling in new applications.
ContributorsJeon, Eunsom (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Lee, Hyunglae (Committee member) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
Generative models are deep neural network-based models trained to learn the underlying distribution of a dataset. Once trained, these models can be used to sample novel data points from this distribution. Their impressive capabilities have been manifested in various generative tasks, encompassing areas like image-to-image translation, style transfer, image editing,

Generative models are deep neural network-based models trained to learn the underlying distribution of a dataset. Once trained, these models can be used to sample novel data points from this distribution. Their impressive capabilities have been manifested in various generative tasks, encompassing areas like image-to-image translation, style transfer, image editing, and more. One notable application of generative models is data augmentation, aimed at expanding and diversifying the training dataset to augment the performance of deep learning models for a downstream task. Generative models can be used to create new samples similar to the original data but with different variations and properties that are difficult to capture with traditional data augmentation techniques. However, the quality, diversity, and controllability of the shape and structure of the generated samples from these models are often directly proportional to the size and diversity of the training dataset. A more extensive and diverse training dataset allows the generative model to capture overall structures present in the data and generate more diverse and realistic-looking samples. In this dissertation, I present innovative methods designed to enhance the robustness and controllability of generative models, drawing upon physics-based, probabilistic, and geometric techniques. These methods help improve the generalization and controllability of the generative model without necessarily relying on large training datasets. I enhance the robustness of generative models by integrating classical geometric moments for shape awareness and minimizing trainable parameters. Additionally, I employ non-parametric priors for the generative model's latent space through basic probability and optimization methods to improve the fidelity of interpolated images. I adopt a hybrid approach to address domain-specific challenges with limited data and controllability, combining physics-based rendering with generative models for more realistic results. These approaches are particularly relevant in industrial settings, where the training datasets are small and class imbalance is common. Through extensive experiments on various datasets, I demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods over conventional approaches.
ContributorsSingh, Rajhans (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Jayasuriya, Suren (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Fazli, Pooyan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
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Description
Severe forms of mental illness, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are debilitating conditions that negatively impact an individual's quality of life. Additionally, they are often difficult and expensive to diagnose and manage, placing a large burden on society. Mental illness is typically diagnosed by the use of clinical interviews

Severe forms of mental illness, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, are debilitating conditions that negatively impact an individual's quality of life. Additionally, they are often difficult and expensive to diagnose and manage, placing a large burden on society. Mental illness is typically diagnosed by the use of clinical interviews and a set of neuropsychiatric batteries; a key component of nearly all of these evaluations is some spoken language task. Clinicians have long used speech and language production as a proxy for neurological health, but most of these assessments are subjective in nature. Meanwhile, technological advancements in speech and natural language processing have grown exponentially over the past decade, increasing the capacity of computer models to assess particular aspects of speech and language. For this reason, many have seen an opportunity to leverage signal processing and machine learning applications to objectively assess clinical speech samples in order to automatically compute objective measures of neurological health. This document summarizes several contributions to expand upon this body of research. Mainly, there is still a large gap between the theoretical power of computational language models and their actual use in clinical applications. One of the largest concerns is the limited and inconsistent reliability of speech and language features used in models for assessing specific aspects of mental health; numerous methods may exist to measure the same or similar constructs and lead researchers to different conclusions in different studies. To address this, a novel measurement model based on a theoretical framework of speech production is used to motivate feature selection, while also performing a smoothing operation on features across several domains of interest. Then, these composite features are used to perform a much wider range of analyses than is typical of previous studies, looking at everything from diagnosis to functional competency assessments. Lastly, potential improvements to address practical implementation challenges associated with the use of speech and language technology in a real-world environment are investigated. The goal of this work is to demonstrate the ability of speech and language technology to aid clinical practitioners toward improvements in quality of life outcomes for their patients.
ContributorsVoleti, Rohit Nihar Uttam (Author) / Berisha, Visar (Thesis advisor) / Liss, Julie M (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
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Description
Statistical Shape Modeling is widely used to study the morphometrics of deformable objects in computer vision and biomedical studies. There are mainly two viewpoints to understand the shapes. On one hand, the outer surface of the shape can be taken as a two-dimensional embedding in space. On the other hand,

Statistical Shape Modeling is widely used to study the morphometrics of deformable objects in computer vision and biomedical studies. There are mainly two viewpoints to understand the shapes. On one hand, the outer surface of the shape can be taken as a two-dimensional embedding in space. On the other hand, the outer surface along with its enclosed internal volume can be taken as a three-dimensional embedding of interests. Most studies focus on the surface-based perspective by leveraging the intrinsic features on the tangent plane. But a two-dimensional model may fail to fully represent the realistic properties of shapes with both intrinsic and extrinsic properties. In this thesis, severalStochastic Partial Differential Equations (SPDEs) are thoroughly investigated and several methods are originated from these SPDEs to try to solve the problem of both two-dimensional and three-dimensional shape analyses. The unique physical meanings of these SPDEs inspired the findings of features, shape descriptors, metrics, and kernels in this series of works. Initially, the data generation of high-dimensional shapes, here, the tetrahedral meshes, is introduced. The cerebral cortex is taken as the study target and an automatic pipeline of generating the gray matter tetrahedral mesh is introduced. Then, a discretized Laplace-Beltrami operator (LBO) and a Hamiltonian operator (HO) in tetrahedral domain with Finite Element Method (FEM) are derived. Two high-dimensional shape descriptors are defined based on the solution of the heat equation and Schrödinger’s equation. Considering the fact that high-dimensional shape models usually contain massive redundancies, and the demands on effective landmarks in many applications, a Gaussian process landmarking on tetrahedral meshes is further studied. A SIWKS-based metric space is used to define a geometry-aware Gaussian process. The study of the periodic potential diffusion process further inspired the idea of a new kernel call the geometry-aware convolutional kernel. A series of Bayesian learning methods are then introduced to tackle the problem of shape retrieval and classification. Experiments of every single item are demonstrated. From the popular SPDE such as the heat equation and Schrödinger’s equation to the general potential diffusion equation and the specific periodic potential diffusion equation, it clearly shows that classical SPDEs play an important role in discovering new features, metrics, shape descriptors and kernels. I hope this thesis could be an example of using interdisciplinary knowledge to solve problems.
ContributorsFan, Yonghui (Author) / Wang, Yalin (Thesis advisor) / Lepore, Natasha (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
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Description
This dissertation presents novel solutions for improving the generalization capabilities of deep learning based computer vision models. Neural networks are known to suffer a large drop in performance when tested on samples from a different distribution than the one on which they were trained. The proposed solutions, based on latent

This dissertation presents novel solutions for improving the generalization capabilities of deep learning based computer vision models. Neural networks are known to suffer a large drop in performance when tested on samples from a different distribution than the one on which they were trained. The proposed solutions, based on latent space geometry and meta-learning, address this issue by improving the robustness of these models to distribution shifts. Through the use of geometrical alignment, state-of-the-art domain adaptation and source-free test-time adaptation strategies are developed. Additionally, geometrical alignment can allow classifiers to be progressively adapted to new, unseen test domains without requiring retraining of the feature extractors. The dissertation also presents algorithms for enabling in-the-wild generalization without needing access to any samples from the target domain. Other causes of poor generalization, such as data scarcity in critical applications and training data with high levels of noise and variance, are also explored. To address data scarcity in fine-grained computer vision tasks such as object detection, novel context-aware augmentations are suggested. While the first four chapters focus on general-purpose computer vision models, strategies are also developed to improve robustness in specific applications. The efficiency of training autonomous agents for visual navigation is improved by incorporating semantic knowledge, and the integration of domain experts' knowledge allows for the realization of a low-cost, minimally invasive generalizable automated rehabilitation system. Lastly, new tools for explainability and model introspection using counter-factual explainers trained through interval-based uncertainty calibration objectives are presented.
ContributorsThopalli, Kowshik (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Thiagarajan, Jayaraman J (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023