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Description
Audio signals, such as speech and ambient sounds convey rich information pertaining to a user’s activity, mood or intent. Enabling machines to understand this contextual information is necessary to bridge the gap in human-machine interaction. This is challenging due to its subjective nature, hence, requiring sophisticated techniques. This dissertation presents

Audio signals, such as speech and ambient sounds convey rich information pertaining to a user’s activity, mood or intent. Enabling machines to understand this contextual information is necessary to bridge the gap in human-machine interaction. This is challenging due to its subjective nature, hence, requiring sophisticated techniques. This dissertation presents a set of computational methods, that generalize well across different conditions, for speech-based applications involving emotion recognition and keyword detection, and ambient sounds-based applications such as lifelogging.

The expression and perception of emotions varies across speakers and cultures, thus, determining features and classification methods that generalize well to different conditions is strongly desired. A latent topic models-based method is proposed to learn supra-segmental features from low-level acoustic descriptors. The derived features outperform state-of-the-art approaches over multiple databases. Cross-corpus studies are conducted to determine the ability of these features to generalize well across different databases. The proposed method is also applied to derive features from facial expressions; a multi-modal fusion overcomes the deficiencies of a speech only approach and further improves the recognition performance.

Besides affecting the acoustic properties of speech, emotions have a strong influence over speech articulation kinematics. A learning approach, which constrains a classifier trained over acoustic descriptors, to also model articulatory data is proposed here. This method requires articulatory information only during the training stage, thus overcoming the challenges inherent to large-scale data collection, while simultaneously exploiting the correlations between articulation kinematics and acoustic descriptors to improve the accuracy of emotion recognition systems.

Identifying context from ambient sounds in a lifelogging scenario requires feature extraction, segmentation and annotation techniques capable of efficiently handling long duration audio recordings; a complete framework for such applications is presented. The performance is evaluated on real world data and accompanied by a prototypical Android-based user interface.

The proposed methods are also assessed in terms of computation and implementation complexity. Software and field programmable gate array based implementations are considered for emotion recognition, while virtual platforms are used to model the complexities of lifelogging. The derived metrics are used to determine the feasibility of these methods for applications requiring real-time capabilities and low power consumption.
ContributorsShah, Mohit (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
Description
As the application of interactive media systems expands to address broader problems in health, education and creative practice, they fall within a higher dimensional space for which it is inherently more complex to design. In response to this need an emerging area of interactive system design, referred to as experiential

As the application of interactive media systems expands to address broader problems in health, education and creative practice, they fall within a higher dimensional space for which it is inherently more complex to design. In response to this need an emerging area of interactive system design, referred to as experiential media systems, applies hybrid knowledge synthesized across multiple disciplines to address challenges relevant to daily experience. Interactive neurorehabilitation (INR) aims to enhance functional movement therapy by integrating detailed motion capture with interactive feedback in a manner that facilitates engagement and sensorimotor learning for those who have suffered neurologic injury. While INR shows great promise to advance the current state of therapies, a cohesive media design methodology for INR is missing due to the present lack of substantial evidence within the field. Using an experiential media based approach to draw knowledge from external disciplines, this dissertation proposes a compositional framework for authoring visual media for INR systems across contexts and applications within upper extremity stroke rehabilitation. The compositional framework is applied across systems for supervised training, unsupervised training, and assisted reflection, which reflect the collective work of the Adaptive Mixed Reality Rehabilitation (AMRR) Team at Arizona State University, of which the author is a member. Formal structures and a methodology for applying them are described in detail for the visual media environments designed by the author. Data collected from studies conducted by the AMRR team to evaluate these systems in both supervised and unsupervised training contexts is also discussed in terms of the extent to which the application of the compositional framework is supported and which aspects require further investigation. The potential broader implications of the proposed compositional framework and methodology are the dissemination of interdisciplinary information to accelerate the informed development of INR applications and to demonstrate the potential benefit of generalizing integrative approaches, merging arts and science based knowledge, for other complex problems related to embodied learning.
ContributorsLehrer, Nicole (Author) / Rikakis, Thanassis (Committee member) / Olson, Loren (Committee member) / Wolf, Steven L. (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
In the sport of competitive water skiing, the skill of a human boat driver can affect athletic performance. Driver influence is not necessarily inhibitive to skiers, however, it reduces the fairness and credibility of the sport overall. In response to the stated problem, this thesis proposes a vision-based real-time control

In the sport of competitive water skiing, the skill of a human boat driver can affect athletic performance. Driver influence is not necessarily inhibitive to skiers, however, it reduces the fairness and credibility of the sport overall. In response to the stated problem, this thesis proposes a vision-based real-time control system designed specifically for tournament waterski boats. The challenges addressed in this thesis include: one, the segmentation of floating objects in frame sequences captured by a moving camera, two, the identification of segmented objects which fit a predefined model, and three, the accurate and fast estimation of camera position and orientation from coplanar point correspondences. This thesis discusses current ideas and proposes new methods for the three challenges mentioned. In the end, a working prototype is produced.
ContributorsWalker, Collin (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Claveau, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
As a promising solution to the problem of acquiring and storing large amounts of image and video data, spatial-multiplexing camera architectures have received lot of attention in the recent past. Such architectures have the attractive feature of combining a two-step process of acquisition and compression of pixel measurements in a

As a promising solution to the problem of acquiring and storing large amounts of image and video data, spatial-multiplexing camera architectures have received lot of attention in the recent past. Such architectures have the attractive feature of combining a two-step process of acquisition and compression of pixel measurements in a conventional camera, into a single step. A popular variant is the single-pixel camera that obtains measurements of the scene using a pseudo-random measurement matrix. Advances in compressive sensing (CS) theory in the past decade have supplied the tools that, in theory, allow near-perfect reconstruction of an image from these measurements even for sub-Nyquist sampling rates. However, current state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms suffer from two drawbacks -- They are (1) computationally very expensive and (2) incapable of yielding high fidelity reconstructions for high compression ratios. In computer vision, the final goal is usually to perform an inference task using the images acquired and not signal recovery. With this motivation, this thesis considers the possibility of inference directly from compressed measurements, thereby obviating the need to use expensive reconstruction algorithms. It is often the case that non-linear features are used for inference tasks in computer vision. However, currently, it is unclear how to extract such features from compressed measurements. Instead, using the theoretical basis provided by the Johnson-Lindenstrauss lemma, discriminative features using smashed correlation filters are derived and it is shown that it is indeed possible to perform reconstruction-free inference at high compression ratios with only a marginal loss in accuracy. As a specific inference problem in computer vision, face recognition is considered, mainly beyond the visible spectrum such as in the short wave infra-red region (SWIR), where sensors are expensive.
ContributorsLohit, Suhas Anand (Author) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Spanias, Andreas (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015
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Description
Feature representations for raw data is one of the most important component in a machine learning system. Traditionally, features are \textit{hand crafted} by domain experts which can often be a time consuming process. Furthermore, they do not generalize well to unseen data and novel tasks. Recently, there have been many

Feature representations for raw data is one of the most important component in a machine learning system. Traditionally, features are \textit{hand crafted} by domain experts which can often be a time consuming process. Furthermore, they do not generalize well to unseen data and novel tasks. Recently, there have been many efforts to generate data-driven representations using clustering and sparse models. This dissertation focuses on building data-driven unsupervised models for analyzing raw data and developing efficient feature representations.

Simultaneous segmentation and feature extraction approaches for silicon-pores sensor data are considered. Aggregating data into a matrix and performing low rank and sparse matrix decompositions with additional smoothness constraints are proposed to solve this problem. Comparison of several variants of the approaches and results for signal de-noising and translocation/trapping event extraction are presented. Algorithms to improve transform-domain features for ion-channel time-series signals based on matrix completion are presented. The improved features achieve better performance in classification tasks and in reducing the false alarm rates when applied to analyte detection.

Developing representations for multimedia is an important and challenging problem with applications ranging from scene recognition, multi-media retrieval and personal life-logging systems to field robot navigation. In this dissertation, we present a new framework for feature extraction for challenging natural environment sounds. Proposed features outperform traditional spectral features on challenging environmental sound datasets. Several algorithms are proposed that perform supervised tasks such as recognition and tag annotation. Ensemble methods are proposed to improve the tag annotation process.

To facilitate the use of large datasets, fast implementations are developed for sparse coding, the key component in our algorithms. Several strategies to speed-up Orthogonal Matching Pursuit algorithm using CUDA kernel on a GPU are proposed. Implementations are also developed for a large scale image retrieval system. Image-based "exact search" and "visually similar search" using the image patch sparse codes are performed. Results demonstrate large speed-up over CPU implementations and good retrieval performance is also achieved.
ContributorsSattigeri, Prasanna S (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Thornton, Trevor (Committee member) / Goryll, Michael (Committee member) / Tsakalis, Konstantinos (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Fisheye cameras are special cameras that have a much larger field of view compared to

conventional cameras. The large field of view comes at a price of non-linear distortions

introduced near the boundaries of the images captured by such cameras. Despite this

drawback, they are being used increasingly in many applications of computer

Fisheye cameras are special cameras that have a much larger field of view compared to

conventional cameras. The large field of view comes at a price of non-linear distortions

introduced near the boundaries of the images captured by such cameras. Despite this

drawback, they are being used increasingly in many applications of computer vision,

robotics, reconnaissance, astrophotography, surveillance and automotive applications.

The images captured from such cameras can be corrected for their distortion if the

cameras are calibrated and the distortion function is determined. Calibration also allows

fisheye cameras to be used in tasks involving metric scene measurement, metric

scene reconstruction and other simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms.

This thesis presents a calibration toolbox (FisheyeCDC Toolbox) that implements a collection of some of the most widely used techniques for calibration of fisheye cameras under one package. This enables an inexperienced user to calibrate his/her own camera without the need for a theoretical understanding about computer vision and camera calibration. This thesis also explores some of the applications of calibration such as distortion correction and 3D reconstruction.
ContributorsKashyap Takmul Purushothama Raju, Vinay (Author) / Karam, Lina (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
The ability to identify unoccupied resources in the radio spectrum is a key capability for opportunistic users in a cognitive radio environment. This paper draws upon and extends geometrically based ideas in statistical signal processing to develop estimators for the rank and the occupied subspace in a multi-user environment from

The ability to identify unoccupied resources in the radio spectrum is a key capability for opportunistic users in a cognitive radio environment. This paper draws upon and extends geometrically based ideas in statistical signal processing to develop estimators for the rank and the occupied subspace in a multi-user environment from multiple temporal samples of the signal received at a single antenna. These estimators enable identification of resources, such as the orthogonal complement of the occupied subspace, that may be exploitable by an opportunistic user. This concept is supported by simulations showing the estimation of the number of users in a simple CDMA system using a maximum a posteriori (MAP) estimate for the rank. It was found that with suitable parameters, such as high SNR, sufficient number of time epochs and codes of appropriate length, the number of users could be correctly estimated using the MAP estimator even when the noise variance is unknown. Additionally, the process of identifying the maximum likelihood estimate of the orthogonal projector onto the unoccupied subspace is discussed.
ContributorsBeaudet, Kaitlyn (Author) / Cochran, Douglas (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Berisha, Visar (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
In this thesis we consider the problem of facial expression recognition (FER) from video sequences. Our method is based on subspace representations and Grassmann manifold based learning. We use Local Binary Pattern (LBP) at the frame level for representing the facial features. Next we develop a model to represent the

In this thesis we consider the problem of facial expression recognition (FER) from video sequences. Our method is based on subspace representations and Grassmann manifold based learning. We use Local Binary Pattern (LBP) at the frame level for representing the facial features. Next we develop a model to represent the video sequence in a lower dimensional expression subspace and also as a linear dynamical system using Autoregressive Moving Average (ARMA) model. As these subspaces lie on Grassmann space, we use Grassmann manifold based learning techniques such as kernel Fisher Discriminant Analysis with Grassmann kernels for classification. We consider six expressions namely, Angry (AN), Disgust (Di), Fear (Fe), Happy (Ha), Sadness (Sa) and Surprise (Su) for classification. We perform experiments on extended Cohn-Kanade (CK+) facial expression database to evaluate the expression recognition performance. Our method demonstrates good expression recognition performance outperforming other state of the art FER algorithms. We achieve an average recognition accuracy of 97.41% using a method based on expression subspace, kernel-FDA and Support Vector Machines (SVM) classifier. By using a simpler classifier, 1-Nearest Neighbor (1-NN) along with kernel-FDA, we achieve a recognition accuracy of 97.09%. We find that to process a group of 19 frames in a video sequence, LBP feature extraction requires majority of computation time (97 %) which is about 1.662 seconds on the Intel Core i3, dual core platform. However when only 3 frames (onset, middle and peak) of a video sequence are used, the computational complexity is reduced by about 83.75 % to 260 milliseconds at the expense of drop in the recognition accuracy to 92.88 %.
ContributorsYellamraju, Anirudh (Author) / Chakrabarti, Chaitali (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Thesis advisor) / Karam, Lina (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
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Description
Great advances have been made in the construction of photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules, but array level management remains much the same as it has been in previous decades. Conventionally, the PV array is connected in a fixed topology which is not always appropriate in the presence of faults in

Great advances have been made in the construction of photovoltaic (PV) cells and modules, but array level management remains much the same as it has been in previous decades. Conventionally, the PV array is connected in a fixed topology which is not always appropriate in the presence of faults in the array, and varying weather conditions. With the introduction of smarter inverters and solar modules, the data obtained from the photovoltaic array can be used to dynamically modify the array topology and improve the array power output. This is beneficial especially when module mismatches such as shading, soiling and aging occur in the photovoltaic array. This research focuses on the topology optimization of PV arrays under shading conditions using measurements obtained from a PV array set-up. A scheme known as topology reconfiguration method is proposed to find the optimal array topology for a given weather condition and faulty module information. Various topologies such as the series-parallel (SP), the total cross-tied (TCT), the bridge link (BL) and their bypassed versions are considered. The topology reconfiguration method compares the efficiencies of the topologies, evaluates the percentage gain in the generated power that would be obtained by reconfiguration of the array and other factors to find the optimal topology. This method is employed for various possible shading patterns to predict the best topology. The results demonstrate the benefit of having an electrically reconfigurable array topology. The effects of irradiance and shading on the array performance are also studied. The simulations are carried out using a SPICE simulator. The simulation results are validated with the experimental data provided by the PACECO Company.
ContributorsBuddha, Santoshi Tejasri (Author) / Spanias, Andreas (Thesis advisor) / Tepedelenlioğlu, Cihan (Thesis advisor) / Zhang, Junshan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Advancements in computer vision and machine learning have added a new dimension to remote sensing applications with the aid of imagery analysis techniques. Applications such as autonomous navigation and terrain classification which make use of image classification techniques are challenging problems and research is still being carried out to find

Advancements in computer vision and machine learning have added a new dimension to remote sensing applications with the aid of imagery analysis techniques. Applications such as autonomous navigation and terrain classification which make use of image classification techniques are challenging problems and research is still being carried out to find better solutions. In this thesis, a novel method is proposed which uses image registration techniques to provide better image classification. This method reduces the error rate of classification by performing image registration of the images with the previously obtained images before performing classification. The motivation behind this is the fact that images that are obtained in the same region which need to be classified will not differ significantly in characteristics. Hence, registration will provide an image that matches closer to the previously obtained image, thus providing better classification. To illustrate that the proposed method works, naïve Bayes and iterative closest point (ICP) algorithms are used for the image classification and registration stages respectively. This implementation was tested extensively in simulation using synthetic images and using a real life data set called the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) Learning Applied to Ground Robots (LAGR) dataset. The results show that the ICP algorithm does help in better classification with Naïve Bayes by reducing the error rate by an average of about 10% in the synthetic data and by about 7% on the actual datasets used.
ContributorsMuralidhar, Ashwini (Author) / Saripalli, Srikanth (Thesis advisor) / Papandreou-Suppappola, Antonia (Committee member) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011