Abstract

Intermodal (IM) trains are typically the fastest freight trains operated in North America. The aerodynamic characteristics of many of these trains are often relatively poor resulting in high fuel consumption. However, considerable variation in fuel efficiency is possible depending on how the loads are placed on railcars in the train. Consequently, substantial potential fuel savings are possible if more attention is paid on the loading configurations of trains. A wayside machine vision (MV) system was developed to automatically scan passing IM trains and assess their aerodynamic efficiency. MV algorithms are used to analyse these images, detect and measure gaps between loads. In order to make use of the data, a scoring system was devel- oped based on two attributes – the aerodynamic coefficient and slot efficiency. The aerodynamic coefficient is calculated using the Aerodynamic Subroutine of the Train Energy Model. Slot effi- ciency represents the difference between the actual and ideal loading configuration given the particular set of railcars in the train. This system can provide IM terminal managers feedback on loading performance for trains and be integrated into the software support systems used for loading assignment.

Abstract

Enthalpy entropy compensation effect has been a debatable topic for explaining the thermodynamic parameters in chemical reactions. Kinetic data for thermal degradation of chlorophylls (a, b and total) at 105145 C in coriander and mint leaf puree at pH 5.58.5 was used for this study. By applying the modified transition state theory and Krugs unbiased statistical regression procedure, the existence of thermodynamic compensation was tested for chlorophyll degradation. Enthalpy of activation (DH) for the coriander and mint purees ranged from 2.36 to 91.99 kJ/mol while entropy (DS) ranged from 0.047 to 0.713 kJ/(mol K). Though the enthalpy and entropy val- ues exhibited an excellent linear relationship (R2> 0.96), a critical analysis of the results indicated absence of any extra-thermodynamic effect or thermodynamic compensation for chlorophylls degradation. The presence of isokinetic point was also not detected.

Abstract

Digitally recording dynamic events, such as sporting events, for experiencing in a spatio-temporally distant and arbitrary setting requires 4D capture: three dimensions for their geometry and appearance over the fourth dimension of time. Today's computer vision techniques make 4D capture possible. The virtualized reality system serves as an example on the general problem of digitizing dynamic events. In this article, we present the virtualized reality system's details from a historical perspective

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel boosted robot vision control algorithm. The method utilizes on-line boosting to produce a strong vision-based robot control starting from two weak algorithms. The notion of weak and strong algorithms has been presented in the context of robot vision control, in presence of uncertainty in the measurement process. Appropriate probabilistic error functions are defined for the weak algorithm to evaluate their suitability in the task. An on-line boosting algorithm is employed to derive a final strong algorithm starting from two weak algorithms. This strong one has superior performance both in image and Cartesian spaces. Experiments justify this claim.

Abstract

We describe the design and implementation of a vision based Intermodal Train Monitoring System(ITMS) for extracting various features like length of gaps in an intermodal(IM) train which can later be used for higher level inferences. An intermodal train is a freight train consisting of two basic types of loads - containers and trailers. Our system first captures the video of an IM train, and applies image processing and machine learning techniques developed in this work to identify the various types of loads as containers and trailers. The whole process relies on a sequence of following tasks - robust background subtraction in each frame of the video, estimation of train velocity, creation of mosaic of the whole train from the video and classification of train loads into containers and trailers. Finally, the length of gaps between the loads of the IM train is estimated and is used to analyze the aerodynamic efficiency of the loading pattern of the train, which is a critical aspect of freight trains. This paper focusses on the machine vision aspect of the whole system.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a new hybrid visual servoing algorithm for robot arm positioning task. Hybrid methods in visual servoing partially combine the 2D and 3D visual information to improve the performance of the traditional image-based and position-based visual servoing. Our algorithm is superior to the state of the art hybrid methods. The objective function has been designed to include the full 2D and 3D information available either from the CAD model or from the partial reconstruction process by decomposing the homography matrix between two views. Here, each of 2D and 3D error functions is used to control the six degrees of freedom. We call this method 5D visual servoing. The positioning task has been formulated as a minimization problem. Gradient decent as a first order approximation and Gauss-Newton as a second order approximation are considered in this paper. Simulation results show that these two methods provide an efficient solution to the camera retreat and features visibility problems. The camera trajectory in the Cartesian space is also shown to be satisfactory.

Abstract

A new probabilistic tracking framework for integrating information available from various visual cues is presented in this paper. The framework allows selection of “good” features for each cue, along with factors of their “goodness” to select the best combination form. Two particle filter based trackers, which use edge and texture features, run independently. The output of the master tracker is computed using democratic integration using the “goodness” weights. The final output is used as apriori for both tracker in the next iteration. Finally, particle filters are used to deal with non-Gaussian errors in feature extraction / prior computation. Results are shown for planar object tracking.

Abstract

This paper reports on the first Oromo-English CLIR system that is based on dictionary-based query translation techniques. The basic objective of the study is to design and develop an Oromo-English CLIR system with a view to enable Afaan Oromo speakers to access and retrieve the vast online information sources that are available in English by using their own (native) language queries. We describe the major approaches and procedures that have been used in designing and developing Oromo-English CLIR system together with the information retrieval evaluation experiments recently conducted at CLEF 2006 ad hoc track. The purpose of the current initial evaluation experiments was to assess the over all performance of the Oromo-English CLIR system by using different fields of Afaan Oromo topics. Thus we submitted three official runs (experiments) that differed in terms of utilized fields in the topic set, ie title run (OMT), title and description run (OMTD), and title, description and narration run (OMTDN) to CLEF 2006. Since appropriate online language processing resources and information retrieval tools are not available for Afaan Oromo, only limited linguistic resources such as Oromo-English dictionary and Afaan Oromo stemmer that had been designed and developed at our research center were used in conducting the experiments. Yet we found the performances of our evaluation experiments at CLEF 2006 very encouraging which is a good news for development and application of CLIR systems in other indigenous African languages.

Abstract

In this paper, we have considered a real world information synthesis task, generation of a fixed length multi document summary which satisfies a specific information need. This task was mapped to a topic-oriented, informative multi-document summarization. We also tried to estimate, given the human written reference summaries and the document set, the maximum performance (ROUGE1 scores) that can be achieved by an extraction-based summarization technique. Motivated by the observation that the current approaches are far behind the estimated maximum performance, we have looked at Information Retrieval techniques to improve the relevance scoring of sentences towards information need. Following information theoretic approach we have identified a measure to capture the notion of importance or prior of a sentence. Following a different decomposition of Probability Ranking Principle, the calculated importance/prior is incorporated into the final sentence scoring by weighted linear combination. In order to evaluate the performance, we have explored information sources like WWW and encyclopedia in computing the information measure in a set of different experiments. The t-test analysis of the improvement on DUC2 2005 data set is found to be significant (p∼ 0.05). The same system has outperformed rest of the systems at DUC 2006 challenge in terms of ROUGE scores with a significant margin over the next best system.

Abstract

This paper explores the possibility of using convex optimization to address a class of problems in visual servoing. This work is motivated by the recent success of convex optimization methods in solving geometric inference problems in computer vision. We formulate the visual servoing problem with feature visibility constraints as a convex optimization of a function of the camera position i.e. the translation of the camera. First, the path is planned using potential field method that produces unconstrained but straight line path from the initial to the desired camera position. The problem is then converted to a constrained convex optimization problem by introducing the visibility constraints to the minimization problem. The objective of the minimization process is to find for each camera position the closest alternate position from which all features are visible. This algorithm ensures that the solution is optimal. This formulation allows the introduction of more constraints, like joint limits of the arm, into the visual servoing process. The results have been illustrated in a simulation framework.