This study compares the performances of various techniques for the differentiation and localization of commonly encountered features in indoor environments, such as planes, corners, edges, and cylinders, possibly with different surface properties, using simple infrared sensors. The intensity measurements obtained from such sensors are highly dependent on the location, geometry, and surface properties of the reflecting feature in a way that cannot be represented by a simple analytical relationship, therefore complicating the localization and differentiation process. The techniques considered include rule-based, template-based, and neural network-based target differentiation, parametric surface differentiation, and statistical pattern recognition techniques such as parametric density estimation, various linear and quadratic classifiers, mixture of normals, kernel estimator, k-nearest neighbor, artificial neural network, and support vector machine classifiers. The geometrical properties of the targets are more distinctive than their surface properties, and surface recognition is the limiting factor ...

The spectral signatures of the materials contained in hyperspectral images, also called endmembers (EMs), can be significantly affected by variations in atmospheric, illumination or environmental conditions typically occurring within an image. Traditional spectral unmixing (SU) algorithms neglect the spectral variability of the endmembers, what propagates significant mismodeling errors throughout the whole unmixing process and compromises the quality of the estimated abundances. Therefore, significant effort have been recently dedicated to mitigate the effects of spectral variability in SU. However, many challenges still remain in how to best explore a priori information about the problem in order to improve the quality, the robustness and the efficiency of SU algorithms that account for spectral variability. In this thesis, new strategies are developed to address spectral variability in SU. First, an (over)-segmentation-based multiscale regularization strategy is proposed to explore spatial information about the abundance ...

Earth observation and land-cover analysis became a reality in the last 2-3 decades thanks to NASA airborne and spacecrafts such as Landsat. Inclusion of Hyperspectral Imaging (HSI) technology in some of these platforms has made possible acquiring large data sets, with high potential in analytical tasks but at the cost of advanced signal processing. In this thesis, effective/efficient feature extraction methods are proposed. Initially, contributions are introduced for efficient computation of the covariance matrix widely used in data reduction methods such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA). By taking advantage of the cube structure in HSI, onsite and real-time covariance computation is achieved, reducing memory requirements as well. Furthermore, following the PCA algorithm, a novel method called Folded-PCA (Fd-PCA) is proposed for efficiency while extracting both global and local features within the spectral pixels, achieved by folding the spectral samples from ...

During the past two decades, image compression has developed from a mostly academic Rate-Distortion (R-D) field, into a highly commercial business. Various lossless and lossy image coding techniques have been developed. This thesis represents an interdisciplinary work between the field of astronomy and digital image processing and brings new aspects into both of the fields. In fact, image compression had its beginning in an American space program for efficient data storage. The goal of this research work is to recognize and develop new methods for space observatories and software tools to incorporate compression in space astronomy standards. While the astronomers benefit from new objective processing and analysis methods and improved efficiency and quality, for technicians a new field of application and research is opened. For validation of the processing results, the case of InfraRed (IR) astronomy has been specifically analyzed. ...

The large number of practical applications involving digital images has motivated a significant interest towards restoration solutions that improve the visual quality of the data under the presence of various acquisition and compression artifacts. Digital images are the results of an acquisition process based on the measurement of a physical quantity of interest incident upon an imaging sensor over a specified period of time. The quantity of interest depends on the targeted imaging application. Common imaging sensors measure the number of photons impinging over a dense grid of photodetectors in order to produce an image similar to what is perceived by the human visual system. Different applications focus on the part of the electromagnetic spectrum not visible by the human visual system, and thus require different sensing technologies to form the image. In all cases, even with the advance of ...

Hyperspectral (HS) imaging, which consists of acquiring a same scene in several hundreds of contiguous spectral bands (a three dimensional data cube), has opened a new range of relevant applications, such as target detection [MS02], classification [C.-03] and spectral unmixing [BDPD+12]. However, while HS sensors provide abundant spectral information, their spatial resolution is generally more limited. Thus, fusing the HS image with other highly resolved images of the same scene, such as multispectral (MS) or panchromatic (PAN) images is an interesting problem. The problem of fusing a high spectral and low spatial resolution image with an auxiliary image of higher spatial but lower spectral resolution, also known as multi-resolution image fusion, has been explored for many years [AMV+11]. From an application point of view, this problem is also important as motivated by recent national programs, e.g., the Japanese next-generation space-borne ...

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 ...

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 ...

The use of low-cost CubeSats in the context of satellite formation flying appears favourable due to their small size, relatively low launch cost, short development cycle and utilisation of commercial off the shelf components. However, the task of managing complex formations using a large number of satellites in Earth orbit is not a trivial one, and is further exacerbated by low-power and processing constraints in CubeSats. With this in mind, a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based system has been developed to provide next generation on-board computing capability. The features and functionality provided by this on-board computer, as well as the steps taken to ensure reliability, including design processes and mitigation techniques are presented in this work and compared to state of the art technology. Coupling reliable formation flying capabilities with the possibility of producing complex patterns using spacecraft will ...

In today's society, we are flooded with massive volumes of data in the order of a billion gigabytes on a daily basis from pervasive sensors. It is becoming increasingly challenging to locally store and transport the acquired data to a central location for signal/data processing (i.e., for inference). To alleviate these problems, it is evident that there is an urgent need to significantly reduce the sensing cost (i.e., the number of expensive sensors) as well as the related memory and bandwidth requirements by developing unconventional sensing mechanisms to extract as much information as possible yet collecting fewer data. The first aim of this thesis is to develop theory and algorithms for data reduction. We develop a data reduction tool called sparse sensing, which consists of a deterministic and structured sensing function (guided by a sparse vector) that is optimally designed ...

The field of Life Science Engineering (LSE) is rapidly expanding and predicted to grow strongly in the next decades. It covers areas of food and medical research, plant and pests’ research, and environmental research. In each research area, engineers try to find equations that model a certain life science problem. Once found, they research different numerical techniques to solve for the unknown variables of these equations. Afterwards, solution improvement is examined by adopting more accurate conventional techniques, or developing novel algorithms. In particular, signal and image processing techniques are widely used to solve those LSE problems require pattern recognition. However, due to the continuous evolution of the life science problems and their natures, these solution techniques can not cover all aspects, and therefore demanding further enhancement and improvement. The thesis presents numerical algorithms of digital signal and image processing to ...

Thermal imaging technology has significantly evolved during the last couple of decades, mostly thanks to thermal cameras having become more affordable and user friendly. However, and given that the exploration of thermal imagery is reasonably new, only a few public databases are available to the research community. This limitation consequently prevents the impact of deep learning technologies from generating improved and reliable face biometric systems that operate in the thermal spectrum. A possible solution relates to the development of technologies that bridge the gap between the visible and thermal spectrum. In attempting to respond to this necessity, the research presented in this dissertation aims to explore interspectral synthesis as a direction for efficient and prompt integration of thermal technology in already deployed face biometric systems. As a first contribution, a new database, containing paired visible and thermal face images acquired ...

Monitoring of vital signs is a key tool in medical diagnostics to asses the onset and the evolution of several diseases. Among fundamental vital parameters, such as the hearth rate, blood pressure and body temperature, the Respiratory Rate (RR) plays an important role. For this reason, respiration needs to be carefully monitored in order to detect potential signs or events indicating possible changes of health conditions. Monitoring of the respiration is generally carried out in hospital and clinical environments by the use of expensive devices with several sensors connected to the patient's body. A new research trend, in order to reduce healthcare service costs and make monitoring of vital signs more comfortable, is the development of low-cost systems which may allow remote and contactless monitoring; in such a context, an appealing method is to rely on video processing-based solutions. In ...

This dissertation is the combination of three manuscripts –either published in or submitted to journals– on compressive sensing of propeller noise for detection, identification and localization of water crafts. Propeller noise, as a result of rotating blades, is broadband and radiates through water dominating underwater acoustic noise spectrum especially when cavitation develops. Propeller cavitation yields cyclostationary noise which can be modeled by amplitude modulation, i.e., the envelope-carrier product. The envelope consists of the so-called propeller tonals representing propeller characteristics which is used to identify water crafts whereas the carrier is a stationary broadband process. Sampling for propeller noise processing yields large data sizes due to Nyquist rate and multiple sensor deployment. A compressive sensing scheme is proposed for efficient sampling of second-order cyclostationary propeller noise since the spectral correlation function of the amplitude modulation model is sparse as shown in ...

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 ...