From ImageNet to mining: Adapting visual object detection with minimal supervision

This paper presents visual detection and classification of light vehicles and personnel on a mine site.We capitalise on the rapid advances of ConvNet based object recognition but highlight that a naive black box approach results in a significant number of false positives. In particular, the lack of domain specific training data and the unique landscape in a mine site causes a high rate of errors. We exploit the abundance of background-only images to train a k-means classifier to complement the ConvNet. Furthermore, localisation of objects of interest and a reduction in computation is enabled through region proposals. Our system is tested on over 10km of real mine site data and we were able to detect both light vehicles and personnel. We show that the introduction of our background model can reduce the false positive rate by an order of magnitude.

The impact of simulated astigmatism on functional measures of visual performance

Uncorrected refractive error, including astigmatism, is a leading cause of reversible visual impairment. While the ability to perform vision-related daily activities is reduced when people are not optimally corrected, only limited research has investigated the impact of uncorrected astigmatism. Given the capacity to perform vision-related daily activities involves integration of a range of visual and cognitive cues, this research examined the impact of simulated astigmatism on visual tasks that also involved cognitive input. The research also examined whether the higher levels of complexity inherent in Chinese characters makes them more susceptible to the effects of astigmatism. The effects of different powers of astigmatism, as well as astigmatism at different axes were investigated in order to determine the minimum level of astigmatism that resulted in a decrement in visual performance.

Fear of falling in vision impairment

Falls are the leading cause of injury-related morbidity and mortality among older adults. In addition to the resulting physical injury and potential disability after a fall, there are also important psychological consequences, including depression, anxiety, activity restriction, and fear of falling. Fear of falling affects 20 to 43% of community-dwelling older adults and is not limited to those who have previously experienced a fall. About half of older adults who experience fear of falling subsequently restrict their physical and everyday activities, which can lead to functional decline, depression, increased falls risk, and reduced quality of life. Although there is clear evidence that older adults with visual impairment have higher falls risk, only a limited number of studies have investigated fear of falling in older adults with visual impairment and the findings have been mixed. Recent studies suggest increased levels of fear of falling among older adults with various eye conditions, including glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration, whereas other studies have failed to find differences. Interventions, which are still in their infancy in the general population, are also largely unexplored in those with visual impairment. The major aims of this review were to provide an overview of the literature on fear of falling, its measurement, and risk factors among older populations, with specific focus on older adults with visual impairment, and to identify directions for future research in this area.

Local Commons: A visual approach to collective city making through situated community engagement

Due to the numerous possibilities of voicing concerns and the flood of data we are exposed to, local issues are sometimes at risk of being overlooked. This study explores Local Commons, a design intervention in public space that combines situated digital and tangible media in order to engage communities in contributing and debating different perspectives on a given local issue. The intervention invited the community to submit images of their perspectives on the issue, which were displayed on a public screen. Via tangible buttons in front of the screen, community members then agree or disagree on the displayed perspectives, creating a space for deliberation. In a user study, we were specifically interested in testing three aspects of our intervention, which are discussed in this paper: The difference that situatedness, visual content, and tangible interaction can make to urban community engagement.

The subcortical confinement hypothesis: A neurological model for schizotypal hallucinations

Introduction Different types of hallucinations are symptomatic of different conditions. Schizotypal hallucinations are unique in that they follow existing delusional narrative patterns: they are often bizarre, they are generally multimodal, and they are particularly vivid (the experience of a newsreader abusing you personally over the TV is both visual and aural. Patients who feel and hear silicone chips under their skin suffer from haptic hallucinations as well as aural ones, etc.) Although there are a number of hypotheses for hallucinations, few cogently grapple the sheer bizarreness of the ones experienced in schizotypal psychosis. Methods A review-based hypothesis, traversing theory from the molecular level to phenomenological expression as a distinct and recognizable symptomatology. Conclusion Hallucinations appear to be caused by a two-fold dysfunction in the mesofrontal dopamine pathway, which is considered here to mediate attention of different types: in the anterior medial frontal lobe, the receptors (largely D1 type) mediate declarative awareness, whereas the receptors in the striatum (largely D2 type) mediate latent awareness of known schemata. In healthy perception, most of the perceptual load is performed by the latter: by the top-down predictive and mimetic engine, with the bottom-up mechanism being used as a secondary tool to bring conscious deliberation to stimuli that fails to match up against expectations. In schizophrenia, the predictive mode is over-stimulated, while the bottom-up feedback mechanism atrophies. The dysfunctional distribution pattern effectively confines dopamine activity to the striatum, thereby stimulating the structural components of thought and behaviour: well-learned routines, narrative structures, lexica, grammar, schemata, archetypes, and other procedural resources. Meanwhile, the loss of activity in the frontal complex reduces the capacity for declarative awareness and for processing anything that fails to meet expectations.

Visual demands of modern primary classrooms and the impact of refractive anomalies on academic performance

This research investigated the visual demands in modern primary school classrooms and also the impact of common refractive anomalies on a child's ability to perform academic-related tasks. The results showed that relatively high levels of visual acuity, contrast demand and sustained accommodative-convergence are required to perform optimally in the modern classroom environment. It was also demonstrated that relatively low magnitudes of uncorrected refractive error may have a detrimental impact on children's ability to perform academic-related activities at school, with sustained near work further exacerbating this effect. These findings have important implications for both eye care practitioners and education authorities.

Translating Management Storylines: developing a visual strategy to communicate science to stakeholder community, a case for Mackay, QLD

This project developed a visual strategy and graphic outcomes to communicate the results of a scientific collaborative project to the Mackay community. During 2013 and 2014 a team from CSIRO engaged with the community in Mackay to collaboratively develop a set of strategies to improve the management of the Great Barrier Reef. The result of this work was a 300+ page scientific report that needed to be translated and summarised to the general community. The aim of this project was to strategically synthesise information contained in the report and to design and produce an outcome to be distributed to the participant community. By working with the CISRO researchers, an action toolkit was developed, with twelve cards and a booklet. Each card represented the story behind a certain local management issue and the actions that the participants suggested should be taken in order to improve management of The Reef. During the design synthesis it was identified that for all management issues there was a reference to the need to develop some sort of "educational campaign" to the area. That was then translated as an underlying action to support all other actions proposed in the toolkit.

The short-term accommodation response to aniso-accommodative stimuli in isometropia

Purpose There have been only a limited number of studies examining the accommodative response that occurs when the two eyes are provided with disparate accommodative stimuli, and the results from these studies to date have been equivocal. In this study, we therefore aimed to examine the capacity of the visual system to aniso-accommodate by objectively measuring the interocular difference in the accommodation response between fellow dominant and non-dominant eyes under controlled monocular and binocular viewing conditions during short-term exposure to aniso-accommodative stimuli. Methods The accommodative response of each eye of sixteen young isometropic adults (mean age 22 ± 2 years) with normal binocular vision was measured using an open-field autorefractor during a range of testing conditions; monocularly (accommodative demands ranging from 1.32 to 4.55 D) and binocularly while altering the accommodation demand for each eye (aniso-accommodative stimuli ranging from 0.24 to 2.05 D). Results Under monocular viewing conditions, the dominant and non-dominant eyes displayed a highly symmetric accommodative response; mean interocular difference in spherical equivalent 0.01 ± 0.06 D (relative) and 0.22 ± 0.06 D (absolute) (p>0.05). During binocular viewing, the dominant eye displayed a greater accommodative response (0.11 ± 0.34 D relative and 0.24 ± 0.26 D absolute) irrespective of whether the demand of the dominant or non-dominant eye was altered (p = 0.01). Astigmatic power vectors J0 and J45 did not vary between eyes or with increasing accommodation demands under monocular or binocular viewing conditions (p>0.05). Conclusion The dominant and non-dominant eyes of young isometropic individuals display a similar consensual lag of accommodation under both monocular and binocular viewing conditions, with the dominant eye showing a small but significantly greater (by 0.12 to 0.25 D) accommodative response. Evidence of short-term aniso-accommodation in response to asymmetric accommodation demands was not observed.

Prediction of shrinkage and porosity during drying: Considering both material properties and process conditions

Drying of food materials offers a significant increase in the shelf life of food materials, along with the modification of quality attributes due to simultaneous heat and mass transfer. Shrinkage and variations in porosity are the common micro and microstructural changes that take place during the drying of mostly the food materials. Although extensive research has been carried out on the prediction of shrinkage and porosity over the time of drying, no single model exists which consider both material properties and process condition in the same model. In this study, an attempt has been made to develop and validate shrinkage and porosity models of food materials during drying considering both process parameters and sample properties. The stored energy within the sample, elastic potential energy, glass transition temperature and physical properties of the sample such as initial porosity, particle density, bulk density and moisture content have been taken into consideration. Physical properties and validation have been made by using a universal testing machine ( Instron 2kN), a profilometer (Nanovea) and a pycnometer. Apart from these, COMSOL Multiphysics 4.4 has been used to solve heat and mass transfer physics. Results obtained from models of shrinkage and porosity is quite consistent with the experimental data. Successful implementation of these models would ensure the use of optimum energy in the course of drying and better quality retention of dried foods.

Visual control of an electrohydraulic manipulator for underground mining applications

A large range of underground mining equipment makes use of compliant hydraulic arms for tasks such as rock-bolting, rock breaking, explosive charging and shotcreting. This paper describes a laboratory model electo-hydraulic manipulator which is used to prototype novel control and sensing techniques. The research is aimed at improving the safety and productivity of these mining tasks through automation, in particular the application of closed-loop visual positioning of the machine's end-effector.

Improving PLDA speaker verification using WMFD and linear-weighted approaches in limited microphone data conditions

This paper proposes the addition of a weighted median Fisher discriminator (WMFD) projection prior to length-normalised Gaussian probabilistic linear discriminant analysis (GPLDA) modelling in order to compensate the additional session variation. In limited microphone data conditions, a linear-weighted approach is introduced to increase the influence of microphone speech dataset. The linear-weighted WMFD-projected GPLDA system shows improvements in EER and DCF values over the pooled LDA- and WMFD-projected GPLDA systems in inter-view-interview condition as WMFD projection extracts more speaker discriminant information with limited number of sessions/ speaker data, and linear-weighted GPLDA approach estimates reliable model parameters with limited microphone data.

Complete-linkage clustering for voice activity detection in audio and visual speech

We propose a novel technique for conducting robust voice activity detection (VAD) in high-noise recordings. We use Gaussian mixture modeling (GMM) to train two generic models; speech and non-speech. We then score smaller segments of a given (unseen) recording against each of these GMMs to obtain two respective likelihood scores for each segment. These scores are used to compute a dissimilarity measure between pairs of segments and to carry out complete-linkage clustering of the segments into speech and non-speech clusters. We compare the accuracy of our method against state-of-the-art and standardised VAD techniques to demonstrate an absolute improvement of 15% in half-total error rate (HTER) over the best performing baseline system and across the QUT-NOISE-TIMIT database. We then apply our approach to the Audio-Visual Database of American English (AVDBAE) to demonstrate the performance of our algorithm in using visual, audio-visual or a proposed fusion of these features.

Cerebral regions associated with verbal response initiation, suppression and strategy use

Cerebral activation associated with performance on a novel task involving two conditions was investigated with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). In the response initiation condition, subjects nominated the general superordinate category to which each of a series of exemplars (concrete nouns) belonged. In the response suppression condition, subjects were required to nominate a general superordinate category to which each exemplar did not belong, with the instruction that they were not to nominate the same category response twice in a row. Both conditions produced distinct patterns of activation relative to an articulation control condition employing identical stimuli. When initiation and suppression conditions were directly compared, response suppression produced activation in the right frontal pole, orbital frontal cortex and anterior cingulate, left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate, and bilaterally in the precuneus, visual association cortex and cerebellum. Response latencies were significantly longer in the suppression condition. Two broadly-defined strategies associated with the correct production of words during the suppression condition were a self-ordered selection from among the superordinate categories identified during the first section of the task and the generation of novel category responses. The neuroanatomical correlates of response initiation, suppression and strategy use are discussed, as are the respective roles of response suppression and strategy generation.

Identifying rate-limiting nodes in large-scale cortical networks for visuospatial processing: An illustration using fMRI

With the advent of functional neuroimaging techniques, in particular functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we have gained greater insight into the neural correlates of visuospatial function. However, it may not always be easy to identify the cerebral regions most specifically associated with performance on a given task. One approach is to examine the quantitative relationships between regional activation and behavioral performance measures. In the present study, we investigated the functional neuroanatomy of two different visuospatial processing tasks, judgement of line orientation and mental rotation. Twenty-four normal participants were scanned with fMRI using blocked periodic designs for experimental task presentation. Accuracy and reaction time (RT) to each trial of both activation and baseline conditions in each experiment was recorded. Both experiments activated dorsal and ventral visual cortical areas as well as dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. More regionally specific associations with task performance were identified by estimating the association between (sinusoidal) power of functional response and mean RT to the activation condition; a permutation test based on spatial statistics was used for inference. There was significant behavioral-physiological association in right ventral extrastriate cortex for the line orientation task and in bilateral (predominantly right) superior parietal lobule for the mental rotation task. Comparable associations were not found between power of response and RT to the baseline conditions of the tasks. These data suggest that one region in a neurocognitive network may be most strongly associated with behavioral performance and this may be regarded as the computationally least efficient or rate-limiting node of the network.

Employee reactions to behavioural control under conditions of stress: The moderating role of self-efficacy

Extensive research conducted in the occupational stress literature has failed to provide convincing support for the stress-buffering effects of work control on employee adjustment. Drawing on research conducted in the laboratory context, it was proposed that the stress-buffering effects of work control on employee adjustment would be more marked at high, rather than low, levels of self-efficacy. In a sample of 100 customer service representatives, a significant three-way interaction among role conflict, work control and self-efficacy (measured at Time 1) was observed on (low) depersonalization (measured at Time 2). Consistent with expectations, work control reduced the negative effects of work stress on this outcome measure only for employees who perceived high levels of self-efficacy at work. In addition, there was evidence to suggest that self-efficacy moderated the main effects of work control on job satisfaction and somatic health. These findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical contribution to the job strain model, and also in relation to workplace interventions designed to improve levels of employee adjustment.