Human Motion Analysis Based on Sequential Modeling of Radar Signal and Stereo Image Features

Falls are one of the greatest threats to elderly health in their daily living routines and activities. Therefore, it is very important to detect falls of an elderly in a timely and accurate manner, so that immediate response and proper care can be provided, by sending fall alarms to caregivers. Radar is an effective non-intrusive sensing modality which is well suited for this purpose, which can detect human motions in all types of environments, penetrate walls and fabrics, preserve privacy, and is insensitive to lighting conditions. Micro-Doppler features are utilized in radar signal corresponding to human body motions and gait to detect falls using a narrowband pulse-Doppler radar. Human motions cause time-varying Doppler signatures, which are analyzed using time-frequency representations and matching pursuit decomposition (MPD) for feature extraction and fall detection. The extracted features include MPD features and the principal components of the time-frequency signal representations. To analyze the sequential characteristics of typical falls, the extracted features are used for training and testing hidden Markov models (HMM) in different falling scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm and method achieve fast and accurate fall detections. The risk of falls increases sharply when the elderly or patients try to exit beds. Thus, if a bed exit can be detected at an early stage of this motion, the related injuries can be prevented with a high probability. To detect bed exit for fall prevention, the trajectory of head movements is used for recognize such human motion. A head detector is trained using the histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) features of the head and shoulder areas from recorded bed exit images. A data association algorithm is applied on the head detection results to eliminate head detection false alarms. Then the three dimensional (3D) head trajectories are constructed by matching scale-invariant feature transform (SIFT) keypoints in the detected head areas from both the left and right stereo images. The extracted 3D head trajectories are used for training and testing an HMM based classifier for recognizing bed exit activities. The results of the classifier are presented and discussed in the thesis, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed stereo vision based bed exit detection approach.

Sea lions, sacrifice, and ritual : The symbolism of Moche Island imagery

The Mochica, or Moche (c. 100-800 AD) culture, flourished along the northern Peruvian coast. The Moche did not have a formal written language; as such, contemporary scholars base their analysis on Moche iconography and archaeological burial remains. Especially renown for their ceramic artistry, Moche vessels exhibit a wide range of subject matter, including animal and enigmatic figural representations that evoke terrestrial, marine and possibly, spiritual realms. While research has focused on political organization and the interrelationship between sacrifice and warfare, many marine themes have not been fully explored in the discourse. An exploration of sea lion imagery and sacrifice themes suggests that the marine mammals were ritually hunted. A careful iconographic analysis of island scenes demonstrates ritual and gender affiliations held by the Moche about sea lions. In a multi-disciplinary approach, scientific, archaeological and ethnographic resources substantiate this claim.

Graveyards to Glamour : Development of Sexualized Angel Imagery in American Art and Advertising

Images of female angels in American art and advertisements have been sexualized in the late twentieth and early twenty-­‐first centuries. Companies such as Victoria’s Secret have appropriated the image of female angels, which first appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and clothed them in lingerie in order to sell a product. This Masters Research Paper explores the evolution of female angelic imagery in the United States in order to understand how and when the image of angels began to be sexualized and used in advertising. Angels in art have been studied extensively; however, there has been no work done which examines how the angels in art and advertising have been sexualized. Nor has any work been done to map the evolution of female angelic imagery in American art. This Masters Research Paper will fill that gap in scholarship.