Aircraft collision avoidance using spherical visual predictive control and single point features

This paper presents practical vision-based collision avoidance for objects approximating a single point feature. Using a spherical camera model, a visual predictive control scheme guides the aircraft around the object along a conical spiral trajectory. Visibility, state and control constraints are considered explicitly in the controller design by combining image and vehicle dynamics in the process model, and solving the nonlinear optimization problem over the resulting state space. Importantly, range is not required. Instead, the principles of conical spiral motion are used to design an objective function that simultaneously guides the aircraft along the avoidance trajectory, whilst providing an indication of the appropriate point to stop the spiral behaviour. Our approach is aimed at providing a potential solution to the See and Avoid problem for unmanned aircraft and is demonstrated through a series.

Developing media production skills for literacy in a primary school classroom : digital materials, embodied knowledge and material contexts

This chapter investigates the relationship between technical and operational skills and the development of conceptual knowledge and literacy in Media Arts learning. It argues that there is a relationship between the stories, expressions and ideas that students aim to produce with communications media, and their ability to realise these in material form through technical processes in specific material contexts. Our claim is that there is a relationship between the technical and the operational, along with material relations and the development of conceptual knowledge and literacy in media arts learning. We place more emphasis on the material aspects of literacy than is usually the case in socio-cultural accounts of media literacy. We provide examples from a current project to demonstrate that it is just as important to address the material as it is the discursive and conceptual when considering how students develop media literacy in classroom spaces.

High altitude stereo visual odometry

Stereo visual odometry has received little investigation in high altitude applications due to the generally poor performance of rigid stereo rigs at extremely small baseline-to-depth ratios. Without additional sensing, metric scale is considered lost and odometry is seen as effective only for monocular perspectives. This paper presents a novel modification to stereo based visual odometry that allows accurate, metric pose estimation from high altitudes, even in the presence of poor calibration and without additional sensor inputs. By relaxing the (typically fixed) stereo transform during bundle adjustment and reducing the dependence on the fixed geometry for triangulation, metrically scaled visual odometry can be obtained in situations where high altitude and structural deformation from vibration would cause traditional algorithms to fail. This is achieved through the use of a novel constrained bundle adjustment routine and accurately scaled pose initializer. We present visual odometry results demonstrating the technique on a short-baseline stereo pair inside a fixed-wing UAV flying at significant height (~30-100m).

Robust scale initialization for long-range stereo visual odometry

Achieving a robust, accurately scaled pose estimate in long-range stereo presents significant challenges. For large scene depths, triangulation from a single stereo pair is inadequate and noisy. Additionally, vibration and flexible rigs in airborne applications mean accurate calibrations are often compromised. This paper presents a technique for accurately initializing a long-range stereo VO algorithm at large scene depth, with accurate scale, without explicitly computing structure from rigidly fixed camera pairs. By performing a monocular pose estimate over a window of frames from a single camera, followed by adding the secondary camera frames in a modified bundle adjustment, an accurate, metrically scaled pose estimate can be found. To achieve this the scale of the stereo pair is included in the optimization as an additional parameter. Results are presented both on simulated and field gathered data from a fixed-wing UAV flying at significant altitude, where the epipolar geometry is inaccurate due to structural deformation and triangulation from a single pair is insufficient. Comparisons are made with more conventional VO techniques where the scale is not explicitly optimized, and demonstrated over repeated trials to indicate robustness.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in Australia, education and health literacy

Health literacy is a vital tool to build health knowledge and enable empowerment in health decision making at a community and individual level. There are different views of what constitutes health literacy with the most inclusive addressing broadly the skills and competencies required “to seek out, comprehend, evaluate, and use health information and concepts to make informed choices, reduce health risks, and increase quality of life” (Zarcadoolas 2005). Poor health literacy has been shown to impact health seeking behaviour, access and awareness to preventive health.

Discovering how scientific literacy has been positioned in the new Australian curriculum : science

Through the use of critical discourse analysis, this thesis investigated the perceived importance of scientific literacy in the new Australian Curriculum: Science. It was found that scientific literacy was ambiguous, and that the document did not provide detailed scope for intentional teaching for scientific literacy. To overcome this, recommendations on how to intentionally teach for scientific literacy were provided, so that Australian Science teachers can focus on improving scientific literacy outcomes for all students within this new curriculum.

Workplace experiences of information literacy

The idea of information literacy, broadly deÞned as the ability to recognise information needs and identify, evaluate and use information e¤ectively, has been of growing concern in the education sectors for a number of years; whilst in the workplace, employers and managers have perhaps attended more to the need for computer and information technology skill. New descriptions of information literacy, that may be of value to the business sector, are now beginning to appear as a result of qualitative research into how professional employees experience the e¤ective use of information. This paper summarises the outcomes of an investigation into the experience of information literacy amongst various types of professionals; and explores the possible di¤erences and interrelations between individual and organisational information literacy suggested by these outcomes. Seven di¤erent ways of experiencing information literacy were identiÞed. These experiences are closely related to important workplace processes such as environmental scanning, information management, corporate memory, and research and development; conÞrming that information literacy should be considered a signiÞcant part of the character of learning organisations as well as being a key characteristic of the organisationÕs employees. Implications of individual and organisational information literacy for beginning and continuing professional education are explored.

Rethinking the literacy capabilities of pre-service primary teachers in testing times

As a group of committed literacy teacher educators from five universities across three Australian states, the authors bring professional critique to the problematic issue of what counts in current and possible future measures of pre-service teachers’ literacy capacity. In times when normalising models of literacy assessment ignore innovative developments in technologies, we provide an example of what is happening at the ‘chalk-face’ of literacy teacher education. This paper describes a study that demonstrates how responsible alignment of teacher accreditation requirements with a scholarly impetus to incorporate digital literacies to prepare pre-service teachers will help address changing educational needs and practices (AITSL 2012; Gillen & Barton 2010; Hattie 2003; Johnson, Smith, Willis, Levine & Haywood 2011; Klein 2006; Masny & Cole 2012; OECD 2011).

Information literacy : a theoretical framework for higher education

Information literacy has been a significant issue in the library community for many years. It is now being recognised as an important issue by the higher education community. This theoretical framework draws together important elements of the information literacy agenda specifically for tertiary educators and administrators. The frame-work examines three areas of primary concern: the possible outcomes of information literacy education (through outlining the characteristics of information literate people); the nature of information literacy education; and the potential role of stake-holders (including information services, faculty, staff developers and learning counsellors) in helping staff and students to be information literate. This theoretical framework forms part of the Griffith University Information Literacy Blueprint. The Blueprint was designed between June and August of 1994. The project, a quality initiative of the Division of Information Services, was led by Janice Rickards, University Librarian.

Visual guidance for fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles using feature tracking : application to power line inspection

This thesis presents novel vision based control solutions that enable fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles to perform tasks of inspection over infrastructure including power lines, pipe lines and roads. This is achieved through the development of techniques that combine visual servoing with alternate manoeuvres that assist the UAV in both following and observing the feature from a downward facing camera. Control designs are developed through techniques of Image Based Visual Servoing to utilise sideslip through Skid-to-Turn and Forward-Slip manoeuvres. This allows the UAV to simultaneously track and collect data over the length of infrastructure, including straight segments and the transition where these meet.

Agreement to and compliance with advice on removing mats or rugs by older people with visual impairments

The article presents a study which investigated the reasons why advice related to the removal of mats or rags by older people with visual impairments had a low rate of acceptance. The researchers speculated that it may have been due to older people's need to maintain a sense of control and autonomy and to arrange their environments in a way that they decided or a belief that the recommended modification would not reduce the risk of falling. A telephone survey of subsample of the participants was conducted in the Visually Impaired Persons (VIP) Trial. All 30 interviewees had rugs or mats in their homes. Of the 30 participants, 20 had moved the rugs or mats as a result of recommendations, and 10 had not.

Visual front-end wars : Viola-Jones face detector vs Fourier Lucas-Kanade

The performance of visual speech recognition (VSR) systems are significantly influenced by the accuracy of the visual front-end. The current state-of-the-art VSR systems use off-the-shelf face detectors such as Viola- Jones (VJ) which has limited reliability for changes in illumination and head poses. For a VSR system to perform well under these conditions, an accurate visual front end is required. This is an important problem to be solved in many practical implementations of audio visual speech recognition systems, for example in automotive environments for an efficient human-vehicle computer interface. In this paper, we re-examine the current state-of-the-art VSR by comparing off-the-shelf face detectors with the recently developed Fourier Lucas-Kanade (FLK) image alignment technique. A variety of image alignment and visual speech recognition experiments are performed on a clean dataset as well as with a challenging automotive audio-visual speech dataset. Our results indicate that the FLK image alignment technique can significantly outperform off-the shelf face detectors, but requires frequent fine-tuning.