Nonstationary feature extraction techniques for automatic classification of impact acoustic signals

Condition monitoring of wooden railway sleepers applications are generallycarried out by visual inspection and if necessary some impact acoustic examination iscarried out intuitively by skilled personnel. In this work, a pattern recognition solutionhas been proposed to automate the process for the achievement of robust results. Thestudy presents a comparison of several pattern recognition techniques together withvarious nonstationary feature extraction techniques for classification of impactacoustic emissions. Pattern classifiers such as multilayer perceptron, learning cectorquantization and gaussian mixture models, are combined with nonstationary featureextraction techniques such as Short Time Fourier Transform, Continuous WaveletTransform, Discrete Wavelet Transform and Wigner-Ville Distribution. Due to thepresence of several different feature extraction and classification technqies, datafusion has been investigated. Data fusion in the current case has mainly beeninvestigated on two levels, feature level and classifier level respectively. Fusion at thefeature level demonstrated best results with an overall accuracy of 82% whencompared to the human operator.

Face Detection and Facial Feature Localization for multi-pose faces and complex backgroundimages

The objective of this thesis work, is to propose an algorithm to detect the faces in a digital image with complex background. A lot of work has already been done in the area of face detection, but drawback of some face detection algorithms is the lack of ability to detect faces with closed eyes and open mouth. Thus facial features form an important basis for detection. The current thesis work focuses on detection of faces based on facial objects. The procedure is composed of three different phases: segmentation phase, filtering phase and localization phase. In segmentation phase, the algorithm utilizes color segmentation to isolate human skin color based on its chrominance properties. In filtering phase, Minkowski addition based object removal (Morphological operations) has been used to remove the non-skin regions. In the last phase, Image Processing and Computer Vision methods have been used to find the existence of facial components in the skin regions.This method is effective on detecting a face region with closed eyes, open mouth and a half profile face. The experiment’s results demonstrated that the detection accuracy is around 85.4% and the detection speed is faster when compared to neural network method and other techniques.

Une comparaison de films africains postcoloniaux et de leurs metteurs en scène

Denna uppsats handlar om afrikansk film och dess relation till sina forna kolonisatörer. Eftersom filmen är ett ungt konstuttryck som dessutom är dyrt och tekniskt avancerat, så har många gånger utbildning av regissörer och finansiering skett i eller kommit från det land som länderna frigjort sig ifrån.Syftet med uppsatsen är att belysa den komplexa post-koloniala relationen mellan de gamla kolonierna och dess gamla kolonisatörer, i skapandet av afrikansk film. Jag valde ut tre afrikanska filmer vid filmfestivalen CinemAfrica i februari i Stockholm, som visar ett urval av nyproducerad afrikansk film.Uppsatsen innehåller också en överblick över hur den afrikanska filmen utvecklats fram till idag. Olika genres, innehåll och stilar beskrivs.Resultatet av studien visar att i de tre filmerna som jag har studerat, är det väldigt tydligt att regissörens bakgrund och nuvarande situation i hög grad speglar sig i filmerna. Den som utbildat sig i och fortfarande lever i Afrika har gjort en film som känns afrikansk och handlar om afrikanska problem. De andra två som levt och verkat till stor del i Europa, och finansierats av europeiska bolag, har en annan målgrupp. Deras filmer är också en blandning av afrikanskt och europeiskt innehåll och stämning.

Identification of cause of impairment in spiral drawings, using non-stationary feature extraction approach

Parkinson’s disease is a clinical syndrome manifesting with slowness and instability. As it is a progressive disease with varying symptoms, repeated assessments are necessary to determine the outcome of treatment changes in the patient. In the recent past, a computer-based method was developed to rate impairment in spiral drawings. The downside of this method is that it cannot separate the bradykinetic and dyskinetic spiral drawings. This work intends to construct the computer method which can overcome this weakness by using the Hilbert-Huang Transform (HHT) of tangential velocity. The work is done under supervised learning, so a target class is used which is acquired from a neurologist using a web interface. After reducing the dimension of HHT features by using PCA, classification is performed. C4.5 classifier is used to perform the classification. Results of the classification are close to random guessing which shows that the computer method is unsuccessful in assessing the cause of drawing impairment in spirals when evaluated against human ratings. One promising reason is that there is no difference between the two classes of spiral drawings. Displaying patients self ratings along with the spirals in the web application is another possible reason for this, as the neurologist may have relied too much on this in his own ratings.

Movies, Mind and Meaning : Studying Audience and Favourite Films

Construction of identity and meaning is becoming increasingly important in both media studies and religion scholarship. (Lövheim, 2004) Meaning construction outside traditional religion has become more interesting for religious studies and what individuals in the audience do with all messages circulated through media in everyday life has attended increasing interest within media studies (Stout and Buddenbaum, 2001). Motion pictures, soap operas and advertising are all examples of media contents which generate ideas among its audience which to a various degree are used as resources within the construction of identity (Jansson, 2001). The investigation of what modern humankind’s world views look like and what components they are composed of, in this context seems to be an important topic of investigation (Holm and Björkqvist, 1996). The ways in which the development of media has effected the daily lives of individuals is interest as is the nature of the self and the ways in which the process of self-formation is affected by the profusion of mediated materials (Thompson, 1995). Film and religion are my interest within this larger frame. The topic is not exactly new but the combination of film and religion has during the last ten years resulted in a rapidly growing number of books by scholars interested in this field (Lyden, 2003). One growing focus is on the role that films can and do play within the emerging and developing valuesystem of people in the West today (Marsh, 2004). The British theologian Clive Marsh’s point of departure is very similar to my own. Viewers bring to a film life-experience, immediate concerns and worldviews and the exploration of this interplay between movies and the interpreting process of meaning making is the very focus in this paper. Theoretically, the semeiological model of Alf Linderman is combined with cultural cognitive approaches used by a number of Scandinavian media scholars developing perspectives in audience theory (Linderman, 1996, Höijer and Werner, 1998). 13 individuals, their favourite movie and what it means to them in their life My aim is to examine how individuals comprehend film and what the meaning process look like. In this paper I present the outcome of 13 interviews with young people about their favourite film. I suggest how it is possible to interpret how they interrelate film comprehension with their personal beliefs and their culturally constructed worldview from a sociocognitive point of view. Examples of films chosen range from Disneys Lion King (1994), sciencefiction and fantasy successes like The Matrix (1999) and Lord of the Rings (2001) or the next best movie ever according to www.IMdb.com The Shawshank Redemption (1994) as well as the Swedish blockbuster Så som i himmelen (2004), aka “As in Heaven”.