The world in which we live is becoming more and more automated, exemplified by the numerous robots, or autonomous vehicles, that operate in air, on land, or in water. These robots perform a wide array of different tasks, ranging from the dangerous, such as underground mining, to the boring, such as vacuum cleaning. In common for all different robots is that they must possess a certain degree of awareness, both of themselves and of the world in which they operate. This thesis considers aspects of two research problems associated with this, more specifically the Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) problem and the Multiple Target Tracking (MTT) problem. The SLAM problem consists of having the robot create a map of an environment and simultaneously localize itself in the same map. One way to reduce the effect of small errors that inevitably ...

Vision and infrared sensors are very common in surveillance and security applications, and there are numerous examples where a critical infrastructure, e.g. a harbor, an airport, or a military camp, is monitored by video surveillance systems. There is a need for automatic processing of sensor data and intelligent control of the sensor in order to obtain efficient and high performance solutions that can support a human operator. This thesis considers two subparts of the complex sensor fusion system; namely target tracking and sensor control.The multiple target tracking problem using particle filtering is studied. In particular, applications where road constrained targets are tracked with an airborne video or infrared camera are considered. By utilizing the information about the road network map it is possible to enhance the target tracking and prediction performance. A dynamic model suitable for on-road target tracking with ...

An adaptive edge-enhanced correlation based robust and real-time visual tracking framework, and two machine vision systems based on the framework are proposed. The visual tracking algorithm can track any object of interest in a video acquired from a stationary or moving camera. It can handle the real-world problems, such as noise, clutter, occlusion, uneven illumination, varying appearance, orientation, scale, and velocity of the maneuvering object, and object fading and obscuration in low contrast video at various zoom levels. The proposed machine vision systems are an active camera tracking system and a vision based system for a UGV (unmanned ground vehicle) to handle a road intersection. The core of the proposed visual tracking framework is an Edge Enhanced Back-propagation neural-network Controlled Fast Normalized Correlation (EE-BCFNC), which makes the object localization stage efficient and robust to noise, object fading, obscuration, and uneven ...

The interest for the intelligent vehicle field has been increased during the last years, must probably due to an important number of road accidents. Many accidents could be avoided if a device attached to the vehicle would assist the driver with some warnings when dangerous situations are about to appear. In recent years, leading car developers have recorded significant efforts and support research works regarding the intelligent vehicle field where they propose solutions for the existing problems, especially in the vision domain. Road detection and following, pedestrian or vehicle detection, recognition and tracking, night vision, among others are examples of applications which have been developed and improved recently. Still, a lot of challenges and unsolved problems remain in the intelligent vehicle domain. Our purpose in this thesis is to design an Obstacle Recognition system for improving the road security by ...

This thesis deals with estimation of states and parameters in nonlinear and non-Gaussian dynamic systems. Sequential Monte Carlo methods are mainly used to this end. These methods rely on models of the underlying system, motivating some developments of the model concept. One of the main reasons for the interest in nonlinear estimation is that problems of this kind arise naturally in many important applications. Several applications of nonlinear estimation are studied. The models most commonly used for estimation are based on stochastic difference equations, referred to as state-space models. This thesis is mainly concerned with models of this kind. However, there will be a brief digression from this, in the treatment of the mathematically more intricate differential-algebraic equations. Here, the purpose is to write these equations in a form suitable for statistical signal processing. The nonlinear state estimation problem is ...

Outdoor maps and navigation information delivered by modern services and technologies like Google Maps and Garmin navigators have revolutionized the lifestyle of many people. Motivated by the desire for similar navigation systems for indoor usage from consumers, advertisers, emergency rescuers/responders, etc., many indoor environments such as shopping malls, museums, casinos, airports, transit stations, offices, and schools need to be mapped. Typically, the environment is first reconstructed by capturing many point clouds from various stations and defining their spatial relationships. Currently, there is a lack of an accurate, rigorous, and speedy method for relating point clouds in indoor, urban, satellite-denied environments. This thesis presents a novel and automatic way for fusing calibrated point clouds obtained using a terrestrial laser scanner and the Microsoft Kinect by integrating them with a low-cost inertial measurement unit. The developed system, titled the Scannect, is the ...

Statistical robustness and collaborative inference in a distributed sensor network are two challenging requirements posed on many modern signal processing applications. This dissertation aims at solving these tasks jointly by providing generic algorithms that are applicable to a wide variety of real-world problems. The first part of the thesis is concerned with sequential detection---a branch of detection theory that is focused on decision-making based on as few measurements as possible. After reviewing some fundamental concepts of statistical hypothesis testing, a general formulation of the Consensus+Innovations Sequential Probability Ratio Test for sequential binary hypothesis testing in distributed networks is derived. In a next step, multiple robust versions of the algorithm based on two different robustification paradigms are developed. The functionality of the proposed detectors is verified in simulations, and their performance is examined under different network conditions and outlier concentrations. Subsequently, ...

In this dissertation a notional multi-sensor system acting in a maritime border control scenario for Homeland Security (HS) is analyzed, modelled, and simulated. The functions performed by the system are the detection, tracking, identification and classification of naval targets that enter a sea region, the evaluation of their threat level and the selection of a suitable reaction to them. The emulated system is composed of two platforms carrying multiple sensors: a land based platform, located on the coast, and an air platform, moving on an elliptic trajectory in front of the coast. The land based platform is equipped with a Vessel Traffic Service (VTS) radar, an infrared camera (IR) and a station belonging to an Automatic Identification System (AIS). The air platform carries an Airborne Early Warning Radar (AEWR) that can operate on a spotlight Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) mode, ...

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 small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), reducing in this way the risk for one's own troops. In order to be operated from small, even unmanned, aircrafts, such systems must consume little power and be small enough to fulfill the usually strict payload requirements. Moreover, to be of interest for the civil market, cost effectiveness is mandatory. Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar systems are generally compact and relatively cheap to purchase and to exploit. They consume little power and, due to the fact that they are ...

In this PhD thesis the problem of detection and classification of stationary targets in Through-the-Wall Radar Imaging is considered. A multiple-view framework is used in which a 3D scene of interest is imaged from a set of vantage points. By doing so, clutter and noise is strongly suppressed and target detectability increased. In target detection, centralized as well as decentralized frameworks for simultaneous image fusion and detection are examined. The practical case when no prior knowledge on image statistics is available and all inference must be drawn from the data at hand is specifically considered. An adaptive detection scheme is proposed which iteratively adapts in a non-stationary environment. Optimal configurations for this scheme are derived based on morphological operations which allow for automatic and reliable target detection. In a decentralized framework, local decisions are transmitted to a fusion center to ...

This dissertation presents the outcome of investigations which envisaged to develop improved state and ‘combined state and parameter’ estimation algorithms for nonlinear signal models (during the contingent situations) where the complete knowledge of process and/or measurement noise covariance are not available. Variants of “adaptive nonlinear estimators” capable of providing satisfactory estimation results in the face of unknown noise covariance have been proposed in this dissertation. The proposed adaptive nonlinear estimators incorporate adaptation algorithms with which they can implicitly or explicitly, estimate unknown noise covariances along with estimation of states and parameters. Adaptation algorithms have been mathematically derived following different methods of adaptation which include Maximum Likelihood Estimation (MLE), Covariance Matching method and Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) method. The adaptive nonlinear estimators which have been proposed in this dissertation are formulated with the help of a general framework for adaptive nonlinear ...

In the last few years Homeland Security (HS) has gained a considerable interest in the research community. From a scientific point of view, it is a difficult task to provide a definition of this research area and to exactly draw up its boundaries. In fact, when we talk about the security and the surveillance, several problems and aspects must be considered. In particular, the following factors play a crucial role and define the complexity level of the considered application field: the number of potential threats can be high and uncertain; the threat detection and identification can be made more complicated by the use of camouflaging techniques; the monitored area is typically wide and it requires a large and heterogeneous sensor network; the surveillance operation is strongly related to the operational scenario, so that it is not possible to define a ...

Wireless sensor networks consist in a collection of battery-powered sensors able to gather, process and send data. They are typically used to monitor various phenomenons, in a plethora of fields, from environmental studies to smart logistics. Their wireless connectivity and relatively small size allow them to be deployed practically anywhere, even underwater or embedded in everyday clothing, and possibly capture data over a large area for extended periods of time. Their usefulness is therefore tied to their ability to work autonomously, with as little human intervention as possible. This functional requirement directly translates into two design constraints: (i) bandwidth and on-board compute must be used sparingly, in order to extend battery-life as much as possible, and (ii) the system must be resilient to node failures and changing environment. Due to their limited computing capabilities, data processing is usually performed by ...

In this thesis, advanced robust estimation methodologies for signal processing are developed and analyzed. The developed methodologies solve problems concerning multi-sensor data, robust model selection as well as robustness for dependent data. The work has been applied to solve practical signal processing problems in different areas of biomedical and array signal processing. In particular, for univariate independent data, a robust criterion is presented to select the model order with an application to corneal-height data modeling. The proposed criterion overcomes some limitations of existing robust criteria. For real-world data, it selects the radial model order of the Zernike polynomial of the corneal topography map in accordance with clinical expectations, even if the measurement conditions for the videokeratoscopy, which is the state-of-the-art method to collect corneal-height data, are poor. For multi-sensor data, robust model order selection selection criteria are proposed and applied ...

In recent years, inertial sensors have undergone major developments. The quality of their measurements has improved while their cost has decreased, leading to an increase in availability. They can be found in stand-alone sensor units, so-called inertial measurement units, but are nowadays also present in for instance any modern smartphone, in Wii controllers and in virtual reality headsets. The term inertial sensor refers to the combination of accelerometers and gyroscopes. These measure the external specific force and the angular velocity, respectively. Integration of their measurements provides information about the sensor’s position and orientation. However, the position and orientation estimates obtained by simple integration suffer from drift and are therefore only accurate on a short time scale. In order to improve these estimates, we combine the inertial sensors with additional sensors and models. To combine these different sources of information, also ...