The main topic of this work is the study of the cohomology of Artin groups, with emphasis on a particular class of infinite type groups known as affine Artin groups.
Facial features segmentation, analysis and recognition of facial expressions by the Transferable Belief Model The aim of this work is the analysis and the classification of facial expressions. Experiments in psychology show that human is able to recognize the emotions based on the visualization of the temporal evolution of some characteristic fiducial points. Thus we…
This thesis presents a system for the interpretation of natural speech which serves as input module for a spoken dialog system. It carries out the task of extracting application-specific pieces of information from the user utterance in order to pass them to the control module of the dialog system. By following the approach of integrating…
The thesis deals with automatic interpretation of naturally spoken utterances for limited-domain applications. Specifically, the problem is examined by means of a dialogue system for an airport information application. In contrast to traditional two-stage systems, speech recognition and semantic processing are tightly coupled. This avoids interpretation errors due to early decisions. The presented one-stage decoding…
The purpose of this thesis is to describe novel signal processing methodologies and analog integrated circuit techniques for low-power biomedical systems. Physiological signals, such as the electrocardiogram (ECG the electroencephalogram (EEG) and the electromyogram (EMG) are mostly non-stationary. The main difficulty in dealing with biomedical signal processing is that the information of interest is often…
This thesis describes a visualization pipeline for sonar profiling data that show reflections of multiple sediments in the sea bottom and that cover huge survey areas with many gaps. Visualizing such data is not trivial, because they may be noisy and because data sets may be very large. The developed techniques are: (1) Quadtree interpolation…
In the field of airborne earth observation there is special attention to compact, cost effective, high resolution imaging sensors. Such sensors are foreseen to play an important role in small-scale remote sensing applications, such as the monitoring of dikes, watercourses, or highways. Furthermore, such sensors are of military interest; reconnaissance tasks could be performed with…
A key issue in understanding how the brain functions is the ability to correlate functional information with anatomical localisation. Functional information can be provided by a variety of techniques like positron emission tomography (PET functional MRI (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG) or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). All these methods provide different, but complementary, information about…
Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) is seen as one of several promising technologies aimed to help mine detection. GPR is sensitive to any inhomogeneity in the ground. Therefore any APM regardless of the metal content can be detected. On the other hand, all the inhomogeneities, which do not represent mines, show up as a clutter in…
