Question: Automated identification and tallying of fruits from various images.

This paper presents a novel object detection framework, focusing on the statistics of localized parts, which is adaptable for identifying faces and vehicles across various sizes, locations, and orientations. To address the challenge of object orientation variation, the framework employs a collection of specialized classifiers, each optimized for a distinct orientation range. These classifiers ascertain the presence of the object within a predefined image window at a specified size. To detect objects at any location and size, the classifiers conduct an exhaustive scan across the image. Each classifier is grounded in the statistical analysis of localized parts, which are derived from subsets of wavelet coefficients, transformed into a discrete set of values. These parts are meticulously designed to encapsulate spatial, frequency, and orientation locality. The development of each classifier involves collecting class-conditional statistics of part values from a diverse set of object and non-object images. Training is conducted to minimize classification errors on the training dataset using Adaboost with Confidence-Weighted Predictions. During detection, the classifier calculates the part values within the image window and references their associated class-conditional probabilities. A decision is made through a likelihood ratio test. For computational efficiency, the classifier evaluates the likelihood ratio in a staged manner, progressively increasing the resolution from low to high. At each stage, the classifier decides to either halt further evaluation (classifying the input as non-object) or proceed based on a threshold comparison of the partial likelihood ratio. This innovative, trainable object detection system demonstrates high reliability and efficiency in detecting human faces and passenger cars, including those with out-of-plane rotation.

The paper proposes a new method for automatic fruit recognition and counting from multiple images, utilizing a combination of image processing techniques and machine learning algorithms. The system is designed to accurately identify and enumerate various types of fruits in images taken under different lighting conditions and orientations. It begins by segmenting the images to isolate the fruits from the background, using advanced segmentation algorithms that consider color, texture, and shape information. Once the fruits are segmented, feature extraction is performed to capture the distinctive characteristics of each fruit type. These features include color histograms, texture descriptors, and geometric properties. The extracted features are then fed into a machine learning model, which is trained on a large dataset of labeled fruit images. This model is capable of recognizing different fruit types with high accuracy, even in complex scenes where fruits are partially occluded or in close proximity to each other. To count the fruits, the system employs a clustering algorithm that groups similar features together, assuming that each cluster represents a single fruit. The number of clusters is taken as the fruit

This paper presents an algorithm implemented in real time in a laboratory robot, designed to trace and detect the color of an object in an indoor environment using the Kalman filter. The image capture is done by a kinect camera installed in the robot. The algorithm is programmed into a single board computer, BeagleBone Black that uses the ROS — OpenCV system in image processing.

Autonomous vehicles, surveillance systems, face detection systems lead to the development of accurate object detection system [1]. These systems recognize, classify and localize every object in an image by drawing bounding boxes around the object [2]. These systems use existing classification models as backbone for Object Detection purpose. Object detection is the process of finding instances of real-world objects such as human faces, animals and vehicles etc., in pictures, images or in videos. An Object detection algorithm uses extracted features and learning techniques to recognize the objects in an image. In this paper, various Object Detection techniques have been studied and some of them are implemented. As a part of this paper, three algorithms for object detection in an image were implemented and their results were compared. The algorithms are “Object Detection using Deep Learning Framework by OpenCV”, “Object Detection using Tensorflow” and “Object Detection using Keras models”.

In this paper, we introduce a simple sketching method to generate a realistic 3D tree model from a single image. The user draws at least two strokes in the tree image: the first crown stroke around the tree crown to mark up the leaf region, the second branch stroke from the tree root to mark up the main trunk, and possibly few other branch strokes for refinement. The method automatically generates a 3D tree model including branches and leaves. Branches are synthesized by a growth engine from a small library of elementary subtrees that are pre-defined or built on the fly from the recovered visible branches. The visible branches are automatically traced from the drawn branch strokes according to image statistics on the strokes. Leaves are generated from the region bounded by the first crown stroke to complete the tree. We demonstrate our method on a variety of examples.

In this paper, the recognition of pollen bearing honey bees from videos of the entrance of the hive is presented. This computer vision task is a key component for the automatic monitoring of honeybees in order to obtain large scale data of their foraging behavior and task specialization. Several approaches are considered for this task, including baseline classifiers, shallow Convolutional Neural Networks, and deeper networks from the literature. The experimental comparison is based on a new dataset of images of honeybees that was manually annotated for the presence of pollen. The proposed approach, based on Convolutional Neural Networks is shown to outperform the other approaches in terms of accuracy. Detailed analysis of the results and the influence of the architectural parameters, such as the impact of dedicated color based data augmentation, provide insights into how to apply the approach to the target application.

Choosing clothes with complex patterns and colors is a challenging task for visually impaired people. Automatic clothing pattern recognition is also a challenging research problem due to rotation, scaling, illumination, and especially large intraclass pattern variations. We have developed a camera-based prototype system that recognizes clothing patterns in four categories (plaid, striped, patternless, and irregular) and identifies 11 clothing colors. The system integrates a camera, a microphone, a computer, and a Bluetooth earpiece for audio description of clothing patterns and colors. A camera mounted upon a pair of sunglasses is used to capture clothing images. The clothing patterns and colors are described to blind users verbally. This system can be controlled by speech input through microphone. To recognize clothing patterns, we propose a novel Radon Signature descriptor and a schema to extract statistical properties from wavelet subbands to capture global features of clothing patterns. They are combined with local features to recognize complex clothing patterns. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, we used the CCNY Clothing Pattern dataset. Our approach achieves 92.55% recognition accuracy which significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art texture analysis methods on clothing pattern recognition. The prototype was also used by ten visually impaired participants. Most thought such a system would support more independence in their daily life but they also made suggestions for improvements.

This paper describes a depth image based real-time skeleton fitting algorithm for the hand, using an object recognition by parts approach, and the use of this hand modeler in an American Sign Language (ASL) digit recognition application. In particular, we created a realistic 3D hand model that represents the hand with 21 different parts. Random decision forests (RDF) are trained on synthetic depth images generated by animating the hand model, which are then used to perform per pixel classification and assign each pixel to a hand part. The classification results are fed into a local mode finding algorithm to estimate the joint locations for the hand skeleton. The system can process depth images retrieved from Kinect in real-time at 30 fps. As an application of the system, we also describe a support vector machine (SVM) based recognition module for the ten digits of ASL based on our method, which attains a recognition rate of 99.9% on live depth images in real-time1.

We introduce the first visual dataset of fast foods with a total of 4,545 still images, 606 stereo pairs, 303 360° videos for structure from motion, and 27 privacy-preserving videos of eating events of volunteers. This work was motivated by research on fast food recognition for dietary assessment. The data was collected by obtaining three instances of 101 foods from 11 popular fast food chains, and capturing images and videos in both restaurant conditions and a controlled lab setting. We benchmark the dataset using two standard approaches, color histogram and bag of SIFT features in conjunction with a discriminative classifier. Our dataset and the benchmarks are designed to stimulate research in this area and will be released freely to the research community.

Now days it has become trend to follow all the celebrities as we consider them as our role models. So instead of searching the images of various celebrities in different websites we can find them in a single website by sorting all the images. Reliable database of images is essential for any image recognition system. Through Internet we find all the required images. These images will serve as samples for automatic recognition system. With these images we do face detection, face recognition, face sorting using various techniques like local binary patterns, haar cascades. We make an overall analysis of the detector. Using opencv we detect and recognize images. Similarity matching is done to check how the images are related to each other. Collection of images is based on user defined templates, which are in web browser environment. With the help of this system one can give their requirement and the image of celebrity is displayed based on that.

We assess the applicability of several popular learning methods for the problem of recognizing generic visual categories with invariance to pose, lighting, and surrounding clutter. A large dataset comprising stereo image pairs of 50 uniform-colored toys under 36 azimuths, 9 elevations, and 6 lighting conditions was collected (for a total of 194,400 individual images). The objects were 10 instances of 5 generic categories: four-legged animals, human figures, airplanes, trucks, and cars. Five instances of each category were used for training, and the other five for testing. Low-resolution grayscale images of the objects with various amounts of variability and surrounding clutter were used for training and testing. Nearest neighbor methods, support vector machines, and convolutional networks, operating on raw pixels or on PCA-derived features were tested. Test error rates for unseen object instances placed on uniform backgrounds were around 13% for SVM and 7% for convolutional nets. On a segmentation/recognition task with highly cluttered images, SVM proved impractical, while convolutional nets yielded 16/7% error. A real-time version of the system was implemented that can detect and classify objects in natural scenes at around 10 frames per second.

This research work exposes the novel approach of analysis at existing works based on machine vision system for the identification of the visual symptoms of Cotton crop diseases, from RGB images. Diseases regions of cotton crops are revealed in digital pictures, Which were amended and segmented. In this work Proposed Enhanced PSO feature selection method adopts Skew divergence method and user features like Edge,Color,Texture variances to extract the features. Set of features was extracted from each of them. The extracted feature was input to the SVM, Back propagation neural network (BPN),Fuzzy with Edge CYMK color feature and GA feature selection. Tests were performed to identify the best classification model. It has been hypothesized that from the given characteristics of the images, there should be a subset of features more informative of the image domain.To test this hypothesis, three classification models were assessed via crossvalidation. To Evaluate its efficiency of six types of diseases have been accurately classified like Bacterial Blight, Fusariumwilt, Leaf Blight, Root rot, Micro Nurient, Verticilium Wilt.The Experimental results obtained show that the robust feature vector set which is an Enhancement of a feature extraction method (EPSO) has been afforded the performance assessment of this system. Keywords— SVM, BPN, Fuzzy, CMYK and Edge Features, Genetic Algorithm, Cotton leaf data sets., Enhance Particle swarm optimization, Skew divergences features. I. Introduct ion Data mining is the process of extracting patterns from the data and to transform raw data into information.. It is commonly utilized in a broad range of profiling practices, such as marketing, surveillance, fraud detection, agriculture environment and scientific discovery. Among other things, the most prominent features of data mining techniques are clustering and predictive. The benefits of data mining are its capability to gain deeper perceptive of the patterns using current available exposure capabilities . In this work categorization of the cotton leaf diseases are done using data mining with image processing techniques. The main target is to identify the disease in the leaf spot of the cotton crops. In this regard, It is discussed that about 80 to 90 percentage disease on the Cotton crops are on its leaf spot [1]. Consequently areas of interest is that identifying the leaf of the cotton tree rather than whole cotton plant the cotton leaf is mostly suffered from diseases like fungus, virus, Foliar leaf spot of cotton, Alternaria leaf spot of cotton. The machine visualization system right now is usually contained on computer, digital camera and application software. Various kinds of algorithms are incorporated in the application software. Image processing analysis is one significant method that helps to segment the image into objects and background. One of the key steps in image analysis is feature detection.Plant disease reduces the production and quality of food, fiber and biofuel crops. Image processing has fascinated many researchers in the area of pattern recognition and technique combined with data mining are applied to trace out the leaf spots from the of plant leaves, which helps in diagnosing the cotton leaf spot diseases accurately The image processing techniques are extensively applied to agricultural science, and it has great perspective, especially in the plant protection field, which ultimately leads to crop management. Image analysis can be applied for the following purposes: 1. To detect diseased leaf, stem, fruit, root 2. To enumerate affected area by disease. 3. To find the boundaries of the affected area. A moreover leaf spot is a major component of the crops [2]. The diseases can be easily recognized with the help of the polluted vicinity of the crop. Usually the leaves will naturally going to focus the impure part in a clear way which can be easily identified. Generally by naked eyes we can easily identify the infected region. So we can say the transform in the crop color is the imperative feature for the notification. When the health of the crop is in good stage then the color of the crop is dissimilar but as soon as the crop is going to affected by some harming pathogens, the color transforms automatically. Crop diseases have turned into a dilemma because it may cause a diminution in productivity [3]. In this research work described that goal of identifying foliar diseases in cotton plantations. The primary goal of the developed system has been to identify the existence of pathogens in cotton fillers. Once a disease is identified it has to be automatically classified through further processing of the corresponding image. A survey conducted in one of south zone particular Tamil Nadu at Andhiyur district. During the investigation congregate from the farmers' side gathered the suggestion about the cotton crop diseases details. In this work organized about the Section 2. Literature survey, Section 3. Motivation, Problem Analysis, Section 4. Material and Methods, Section 5. Comparative studies, Section 6. Result and Discussion, Section 7. Conclusion and Acknowledgment, References. II. Literature Survey The proposed work describes about the diagnosis of cotton leaves using various approaches suggesting that the various implementation ways as illustrated and discussed below. Hui Li et al., in the year 2011 has been implemented the Web-Based Intelligent Diagnosis System for Cotton Diseases Control system the author proposed a BP neural network for his system. International Journal of Scientific Engineering and Technology (ISSN : 2277-1581) Volume No.3, Issue No.1 pp : 22-30 1 Jan 2014 IJSET@2014 Page 23 A research scheme was designed for the system test, in which 80 samples, including 8 main species of diseases, 10 samples in each sort were included. The result showed the rate of correctness that system could identify the symptom was 89.5% in average, and the average running time for a diagnosis was 900ms [4].Yan Cheng Zhang et al., ( 2007 ) proposed fuzzy feature selection approach fuzzy curves (FC) and fuzzy surfaces (FS) – to select features and classification of cotton disease levels. [5]. Syed A. Health et al., In this research work discussed about the automated system that can identify the pest and disease affecting parts such as cotton leaf, boll or flower. In this work proposed a CMYK based image cleaning technique to remove shadows, hands and other impurities from images. The outcomes are tested over a database consisting of 600 images to classify the presented image as a leaf, boll or flower [6]. Bernardes A. A. et al., ( 2011) proposed method for automatic classification of cotton diseases through feature extraction of leaf symptoms from digital images. Wavelet transform energy has been used for feature extraction while SVM has been used for classification. The image set of supposedly adulterated leaves was classified within one of the four other sub-classes, namely: MA, RA, AS, and NONE. Finally obtained were: 96.2% accuracy for the SA class, 97.1% accuracy for the MA class, 80% accuracy for the RA class, and 71.4% accuracy for the AS class [7]. Meunkaewjinda. A, et al., (2008). In his work the cotton leaf disease segmentation is performed using modified self organizing feature map with genetic algorithms for optimization and support vector machines for classification. Finally, the resulting segmented image is filtered by Gabor wavelet which allows the system to analyze leaf disease color features more efficiently [8]. Gulhane. V. A et al. (2011) This work described Self organizing feature map together with a back-propagation neural network is used to recognize the color of the image. Finally find out the classification of the cotton diseases [9]. Viraj A. Gulhane. e tal., (2012).This proposed work addresses about the disease analysis is possible for the cotton leaf disease recognition, the analysis of the various diseases present on the cotton leaves can be effectively detected in the early stage before it will injure the whole crops, initially we can be able to detect three types of diseases of the cotton leaves by the methodology of Eigen feature regularization and extraction technique. In this method 90% of detection of Red spot i.e. fungal disease is detected, it is most dangerous disease; it can highly affect the productivity of the cotton crop in more extent. And if it detects in early stage we can say that, we able to make better manufacture [10]. Qinghai He et al., (2013). In this paper the author described RGB color model, HIS color model, and YCbCr color model for extracting the injured image from cotton leaf images were developed.. The ratio of damage (γ) was chosen as feature to measure the degree of damage which caused by diseases or pests. In this work shows the comparison of the results obtained by implementing in different color models, the comparison of outcomes shows good accuracy in both color models and YCbCr color space is considered as the best color model for extracting the damaged image [11]. III. Motivation This research work address on solving various problems like boosting up the precision rates and diminish the error rates using the Proposed Enhanced PSO which make use of Skew divergences to calculate the features correctly from the image.This method increases the accuracy and reduce the information gap to farmers. Creating a complicated agricultural environment to support the farmers to easily identify the diseases and get control of it using the Pest Recommendation module.  Deployed the automatic disease classification processes using advanced Data mining and Image processing techniques.  Augment the profit and safety of the farmer’s life and diminish their burden.  Time consuming (less).  Enhance the economic status of our country. Problem Credentials  Ancient days crop disease identification process through the laboratory condition.  However, this requires continuou


Question: Automated fruit identification and tallying from various images.

This paper introduces an efficient method for real-time object detection, specifically designed for "smart" vehicles, utilizing a shape-based approach grounded in Distance Transforms. The proposed system employs a template hierarchy to encompass the diverse shapes of objects, with efficient hierarchies being pre-generated offline using stochastic optimization methods, such as simulated annealing, tailored to specific shape distributions. In real-time operation, the method employs a simultaneous coarse-to-fine strategy across the shape hierarchy and transformation parameters, achieving significant speed improvements over brute-force methods, with measured gains spanning several orders of magnitude. We showcase the method's effectiveness through real-world experiments, including the real-time detection of traffic signs and pedestrians from a moving vehicle. Given the critical time constraints of these vision tasks, we also explore hardware-specific optimizations, particularly in the context of SIMD (Single Instruction, Multiple Data) parallelism, to further enhance performance.

**Question**: A Comparative Analysis of Machine Learning Techniques in Financial Market Prediction

**Documents**: Comparative Study of Machine Learning Techniques for Stock Market Prediction
This paper presents a comparative study of various machine learning techniques for stock market prediction. We consider three popular techniques: Support Vector Machines (SVM), Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), and Random Forests (RF). These models are trained and tested on historical stock data from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The performance of each technique is evaluated in terms of accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. Our results show that SVM outperforms both ANN and RF in terms of accuracy and F1-score. However, RF has the highest precision and recall. We also analyze the impact of different feature sets on the performance of these models. Our findings suggest that incorporating technical indicators as features significantly improves the performance of all three models. Finally, we discuss the limitations of our study and suggest directions for future research.

**Similar Documents**: This study conducts a comparative analysis of prominent machine learning algorithms for stock market prediction, focusing on Support Vector Machines (SVM), Artificial Neural Networks (ANN), and Random Forests (RF). These methodologies are rigorously evaluated using historical stock data sourced from the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). Performance metrics, including accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score, are employed to assess the efficacy of each technique. Our findings reveal that SVM excels over ANN and RF in terms of accuracy and F1-score, whereas RF exhibits superior precision and recall. Moreover, the study explores the influence of diverse feature sets on model performance, indicating that the inclusion of technical indicators as features markedly enhances the predictive

A novel approach is proposed in this paper for automatic forest fire detection from video. Based on 3D point cloud of the collected sample fire pixels, Gaussian mixture model is built and helps segment some possible flame regions in single image. Then the new specific flame pattern is defined for forest, and three types of fire colors are labeled accordingly. With 11 static features including color distributions, texture parameters and shape roundness, the static SVM classifier is trained and filters the segmented results. Using defined overlapping degree and varying degree, the remained candidate regions are matched among consecutive frames. Subsequently the variations of color, texture, roundness, area, contour are computed, then the average and the mean square deviation of them are obtained. Together with the flickering frequency from temporal wavelet based Fourier descriptors analysis of flame contour, 27 dynamic features are used to train the dynamic SVM classifier, which is applied for final decision. Our approach has been tested with dozens of video clips, and it can detect forest fire while recognize the fire like objects, such as red house, bright light and flying flag. Except for the acceptable accuracy, our detection algorithm performs in real time, which proves its value for computer vision based forest fire surveillance.

This paper describes a mapping system that acquires 3D object models of man-made indoor environments such as kitchens. The system segments and geometrically reconstructs cabinets with doors, tables, drawers, and shelves, objects that are important for robots retrieving and manipulating objects in these environments. The system also acquires models of objects of daily use such glasses, plates, and ingredients. The models enable the recognition of the objects in cluttered scenes and the classification of newly encountered objects. Key technical contributions include (1) a robust, accurate, and efficient algorithm for constructing complete object models from 3D point clouds constituting partial object views, (2) feature-based recognition procedures for cabinets, tables, and other task-relevant furniture objects, and (3) automatic inference of object instance and class signatures for objects of daily use that enable robots to reliably recognize the objects in cluttered and real task contexts. We present results from the sensor-based mapping of a real kitchen.

Camera traps (remote, automatic cameras) are revolutionizing large-scale studies in ecology. The Serengeti Lion Project has used camera traps to produce over 1.5 million pictures of animals in the Serengeti. To analyze these pictures, the Project created Snapshot Serengeti, a citizen science website where volunteers can help classify animals. To increase accuracy, each photo is shown to multiple users and a critical step is aggregating individual classifications. In this paper, we present a new aggregation algorithm which achieves an accuracy of 98.6%, better than many human experts. Our algorithm also requires fewer users per photo than existing methods. The algorithm is intuitive and designed so that nonexperts can understand the end results. Ecology seeks to understand the interrelationships of species with one another and with their environment. Monitoring many species of animals simultaneously has traditionally been very difficult. Camera traps (remote, automatic cameras) are revolutionizing ecological research by providing a non-invasive, cost-effective approach for large-scale monitoring. Ecologists are currently using these traps in the Serengeti National Park, one of the world’s last large intact natural areas, to understand the dynamics of its dozens of large mammals (Swanson et al. 2014). As of November 2013, the ecologists have spent 3 years using more than 200 cameras spread over 1,125 square kilometers to take more than 1.5 million photos. In order to process so many images, the ecologists, along with Zooniverse (a citizen science platform), created Snapshot Serengeti, a web site where over 35,000 volunteers helped classify the species in the photos (Zooniverse 2014a). Since volunteers can make mistakes, each photo is shown to multiple users. A critical step is to combine these classifications into one aggregate classification: e.g., if 4 out of 5 users classify a photo as containing a zebra, we might ⇤These authors are part of the Zooniverse project, funded in part by MICO. Copyright c 2015, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved. decide that the photo does indeed contain a zebra. In this paper, we develop an aggregation algorithm for Snapshot Serengeti. Classification aggregation is an active area in machine learning; however, we show that much of the existing literature is based on assumptions which do not apply to Snapshot Serengeti, and must therefore develop a novel approach. 1 In addition, current machine learning work on classification aggregation often draws on ideas such as expectation maximization and Bayesian reasoning. While powerful, these methods obscure the connection between input and results, making it hard for non-machine learning experts to understand the end results. Thus, our algorithm must be both accurate and intuitive. Our paper proceeds as follows. We begin by discussing Snapshot Serengeti and previous machine learning literature on classifier aggregation. We then discuss why much of this existing work is not applicable to Snapshot Serengeti. We next introduce a new classifier aggregation algorithm for Snapshot Serengeti and compare it against the current algorithm. Finally, we conclude and discuss possible future work.

This paper presents the study on identification and classification of food grains using different color models such as L*a*b, HSV, HSI and YCbCr by combining color and texture features without performing preprocessing. The K-NN and minimum distance classifier are used to identify and classify the different types of food grains using local and global features. Texture and color features are the important features used in the classification of different objects. The local features like Haralick features are computed from co-occurrence matrix as texture features and global features from cumulative histogram are computed along with color features. The experiment was carried out on different food grains classes. The non-uniformity of RGB color space is eliminated by L*a*b, HSV, HSI and YCbCr color space. The correct classification result achieved for different color models is quite good. KeywordsFeature Extraction; co-occurrence matrix; texture information; Global Features; cumulative histogram; RGB, L*a*b, HSV, HSI and YCbCr color model.

The quintessence of the diagnosis in traditional Chinese medicine is syndrome differentiation and treatment. Syndrome differentiation consists of four methods: observing, hearing as well as smelling, asking, and touching. The examination of the observing is the most important procedure in the method of "tongue." In recent years, numerous medical studies have identified the close relations between sublingual veins and human organs. Therefore, sublingual pathological symptoms, as well as demographical information of patients, imply pathological changes in the organs, and early diagnosis is beneficial for early treatment. However, the diagnosis of sublingual pathological symptoms is usually influenced by the doctor's subjective interpretation, experience, and environmental factors. The results can easily be limited by subjective factors such as knowledge, experience, mentality, diagnostic techniques, color perception and interpretation. Different doctors may make different judgments on the same tongue, presenting less than desirable repeatability. Therefore, assisting doctors' diagnoses with scientific methods and standardizing the differentiating process to obtain reliable diagnoses and enhance the clinical applicability of Chinese medicine is an important issue. In its wake, this study aims to construct an Automatic Sublingual Vein Feature Extraction System based on image processing technologies to allow objective and quantified computer readings. The extraction of sublingual vein features mainly captures the back of the tongue and extract the sublingual vein area for feature expression analysis. Firstly, the patient's back of the tongue is photographed and color-graded to compensate for color distortion, and then the tongue-back area is extracted. This study extracts tongue-back imagery by analyzing the RGB color expression of the back of the tongue, lips, teeth and skin, translating it into the HSI color space easily perceived by the human eye, along with skin area removal, rectangle detection, teeth area removal, black area removal and control point detection. The captured tongue-back image goes through histogram equalization and hue shift to enhance color contrast. Sublingual veins are extracted through analyzing RGB color component shift, hues, saturation and brightness. Then the sublingual vein color information and positioning are used to differentiate hues, lengths and branches. Thinning analysis is used to determine the presence of varicose veins. At the same time, the surrounding features of sublingual veins, such as columnar vein, bubbly vein, petechiae and bloodshot, are extracted. The information regarding features and lingual vein conditions are integrated and analyzed for doctors' clinical reference. This study utilizes 199 lingual images for statistic testing and three lingual diagnostic experts in Chinese medicine for lingual reading. The accuracy for the extractions are: tongue back 86%, sublingual vein 80%, varicose veins 90%, branches 87%, and the accuracy rates for columnar veins and bubbly veins are 87%, 88% and 73% respectively.

Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) is an image-processing technology that identifies vehicles by their number plates without direct human intervention. It is an application of computer vision and important area of research due to its many applications. The main process of ANPR is divided into four stages. This paper presents a simple and efficient method for the extraction of number plate from the vehicle image based on morphological operations, thresholding and sobel edge detection, and the connected component analysis.

Automated detection and quantification of plant diseases would enable more rapid gains in plant breeding and faster scouting of farmers’ fields. However, it is difficult for a simple algorithm to distinguish between the target disease and other sources of dead plant tissue in a typical field, especially given the many variations in lighting and orientation. Training a machine learning algorithm to accurately detect a given disease from images taken in the field requires a massive amount of human-generated training data. This data set contains images of maize (Zea mays L.) leaves taken in three ways: by a hand-held camera, with a camera mounted on a boom, and with a camera mounted on a small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS, commonly known as a drone). Lesions of northern leaf blight (NLB), a common foliar disease of maize, were annotated in each image by one of two human experts. The three data sets together contain 18,222 images annotated with 105,705 NLB lesions, making this the largest publicly available image set annotated for a single plant disease.

Daily increasing underwater visual data makes automatic object detection and recognition a great demand and challenging task. In this paper, we adopt a region proposal network to accelerate underwater object detection and recognition from Faster R-CNN. This process implement detection acceleration by using convolutional networks to generate high-quality object candidates, and by sharing these networks with original detection networks. Applied to a real-world fish dataset, which includes 24,277 ImageCLEF fish images belonging to 12 classes, this automatic detection and recognition system has a nearly real-time frame rate of 9.8 ftps, while yielding 15.1% higher Mean Average Precision (mAP) than the Deformable Parts Model (DPM) baseline.

In this paper, we describe how to establish an embedded framework for real-time top-view people counting. The development of our system consists of two parts, i.e. establishing an embedded signal processing platform and designing a people counting algorithm for the embedded system. For the hardware platform construction, we use Kinect as the camera and exploit NVIDIA Jetson TK1 board as the embedded processing platform. We describe how to build a channel to make Kinect for windows version 2.0 communicate with Jetson TK1. Based on the embedded system, we adapt a water filling based scheme for top-view people counting, which integrates head detection based on water drop, people tracking and counting. Gaussian Mixture Model is used to construct and update the background model. The moving people in each video frame are extracted using background subtraction method. Additionally, the water filling algorithm is used to segment head area as Region Of Interest(ROI). Tracking and counting people are performed by calculating the distance of ROI center point before and after the frame. The whole framework is flexible and practical for real-time application.

I ncreasingly powerful integrated circuits are making an entire range of new applications possible. Complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) sensors, for example, have made the digital camera a commonplace consumer item. These light-sensitive chips, positioned where film would normally be, capture images as reusable digital files that users can upload to their computer, manipulate with software, and distribute electronically. Recent technological advances are enabling a new generation of smart cameras that represent a quantum leap in sophistication. While today's digital cameras capture images, smart cameras capture high-level descriptions of the scene and analyze what they see. These devices could support a wide variety of applications including human and animal detection, surveillance, motion analysis, and facial identification. Video processing has an insatiable demand for real-time performance. Fortunately, Moore's law provides an increasing pool of available computing power to apply to real-time analysis. Smart cameras leverage very large-scale integration (VLSI) to provide such analysis in a low-cost, low-power system with substantial memory. Moving well beyond pixel processing and compression, these systems run a wide range of algorithms to extract meaning from streaming video. Because they push the design space in so many dimensions, smart cameras are a leading-edge application for embedded system research. has developed a first-generation smart camera system that can detect people and analyze their movement in real time. Although there are many approaches to real-time video analysis, we chose to focus initially on human gesture recognition—identifying whether a subject is walking, standing, waving his arms, and so on. Because much work remains to be done on this problem, we sought to design an embedded system that can incorporate future algorithms as well as use those we created exclusively for this application. As Figure 1 shows, our algorithms use both low-level and high-level processing. The low-level component identifies different body parts and categorizes their movement in simple terms. The high-level component, which is application-dependent, uses this information to recognize each body part's action and the person's overall activity based on scenario parameters. The system captures images from the video input, which can be either uncompressed or compressed (MPEG and motion JPEG), and applies four different algorithms to detect and identify human body parts. Region extraction. The first algorithm transforms the pixels of an image, like that shown in Figure 2a, into an M × N bitmap and eliminates the background. It then detects the body part's skin area using a YUV …


Question: Automated fruit identification and tallying from various images.

This paper presents an in-depth evaluation of various local descriptors in the context of computer vision tasks, particularly focusing on their performance in recognizing and counting fruits from multiple images. Unlike previous studies that have primarily concentrated on generic object recognition, this work specifically targets the agricultural domain, where accurate fruit detection and enumeration are critical. The evaluation encompasses a comprehensive range of descriptors, including SIFT (Scale-Invariant Feature Transform), SURF (Speeded-Up Robust Features), and ORB (Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF), among others. These descriptors are assessed based on their robustness to changes in illumination, viewpoint, and occlusion, which are common challenges in fruit recognition scenarios. The experimental setup involves a dataset of images featuring a variety of fruits under different environmental conditions. The performance of each descriptor is quantified using metrics such as precision, recall, and the number of false positives. Furthermore, the computational efficiency of the descriptors is also considered, as real-time processing is often required in practical applications. The results of this evaluation not only highlight the strengths and weaknesses of each descriptor but also provide valuable insights into the design of effective fruit recognition systems. This study is a significant contribution to the field of agricultural computer vision, aiming to bridge the gap between theoretical descriptor analysis and practical fruit counting and recognition tasks.

Machine intelligence is a developing technology which has made its way to various fields of engineering and technology. Robots are slowly being implemented in the field of agriculture, very soon AgriBots are to take over the agricultural fields and be used for various difficult and tiresome tasks involving agriculture. They have become the inevitable future of agriculture. This paper proposes an idea that will help in effective cultivation of vast areas of land left uncultivated or barren. Numerous farmers are dying during hill farming mainly due to falling from heights, which can be reduced by this technological effort. The proposed work will help in cultivation in remote areas and increase green cover as well as help farmers in harsh environments. The Agricultural Aid to Seed Cultivation (AASC) robot will be an unmanned aerial vehicle equipped with a camera, a digital image processing unit and a seed cultivation unit. A quadcopter is chosen as an aerial vehicle is independent of the form and shape of the ground and is not deterred by these factors while providing high mobility and reliability. The research aims about the new technology which can be suitable for any kind of remote farming.

Autonomous vehicles, surveillance systems, face detection systems lead to the development of accurate object detection system [1]. These systems recognize, classify and localize every object in an image by drawing bounding boxes around the object [2]. These systems use existing classification models as backbone for Object Detection purpose. Object detection is the process of finding instances of real-world objects such as human faces, animals and vehicles etc., in pictures, images or in videos. An Object detection algorithm uses extracted features and learning techniques to recognize the objects in an image. In this paper, various Object Detection techniques have been studied and some of them are implemented. As a part of this paper, three algorithms for object detection in an image were implemented and their results were compared. The algorithms are “Object Detection using Deep Learning Framework by OpenCV”, “Object Detection using Tensorflow” and “Object Detection using Keras models”.

Now days it has become trend to follow all the celebrities as we consider them as our role models. So instead of searching the images of various celebrities in different websites we can find them in a single website by sorting all the images. Reliable database of images is essential for any image recognition system. Through Internet we find all the required images. These images will serve as samples for automatic recognition system. With these images we do face detection, face recognition, face sorting using various techniques like local binary patterns, haar cascades. We make an overall analysis of the detector. Using opencv we detect and recognize images. Similarity matching is done to check how the images are related to each other. Collection of images is based on user defined templates, which are in web browser environment. With the help of this system one can give their requirement and the image of celebrity is displayed based on that.

We seek to build a large collection of images with ground truth labels to be used for object detection and recognition research. Such data is useful for supervised learning and quantitative evaluation. To achieve this, we developed a web-based tool that allows easy image annotation and instant sharing of such annotations. Using this annotation tool, we have collected a large dataset that spans many object categories, often containing multiple instances over a wide variety of images. We quantify the contents of the dataset and compare against existing state of the art datasets used for object recognition and detection. Also, we show how to extend the dataset to automatically enhance object labels with WordNet, discover object parts, recover a depth ordering of objects in a scene, and increase the number of labels using minimal user supervision and images from the web.

This paper presents the study on identification and classification of food grains using different color models such as L*a*b, HSV, HSI and YCbCr by combining color and texture features without performing preprocessing. The K-NN and minimum distance classifier are used to identify and classify the different types of food grains using local and global features. Texture and color features are the important features used in the classification of different objects. The local features like Haralick features are computed from co-occurrence matrix as texture features and global features from cumulative histogram are computed along with color features. The experiment was carried out on different food grains classes. The non-uniformity of RGB color space is eliminated by L*a*b, HSV, HSI and YCbCr color space. The correct classification result achieved for different color models is quite good. KeywordsFeature Extraction; co-occurrence matrix; texture information; Global Features; cumulative histogram; RGB, L*a*b, HSV, HSI and YCbCr color model.

Automated visual assessment of plant condition, specifically foliage wilting, reflectance and growth parameters, using machine vision has potential use as input for real-time variable-rate irrigation and fertigation systems in precision agriculture. This paper reviews the research literature for both outdoor and indoor applications of machine vision of plants, which reveals that different environments necessitate varying levels of complexity in both apparatus and nature of plant measurement which can be achieved. Deployment of systems to the field environment in precision agriculture applications presents the challenge of overcoming image variation caused by the diurnal and seasonal variation of sunlight. From the literature reviewed, it is argued that augmenting a monocular RGB vision system with additional sensing techniques potentially reduces image analysis complexity while enhancing system robustness to environmental variables. Therefore, machine vision systems with a foundation in optical and lighting design may potentially expedite the transition from laboratory and research prototype to robust field tool.

We posit that visually descriptive language offers computer vision researchers both information about the world, and information about how people describe the world. The potential benefit from this source is made more significant due to the enormous amount of language data easily available today. We present a system to automatically generate natural language descriptions from images that exploits both statistics gleaned from parsing large quantities of text data and recognition algorithms from computer vision. The system is very effective at producing relevant sentences for images. It also generates descriptions that are notably more true to the specific image content than previous work.

Mobile computer-vision technology will soon become as ubiquitous as touch interfaces.

This paper presents an algorithm implemented in real time in a laboratory robot, designed to trace and detect the color of an object in an indoor environment using the Kalman filter. The image capture is done by a kinect camera installed in the robot. The algorithm is programmed into a single board computer, BeagleBone Black that uses the ROS — OpenCV system in image processing.

Information on weed distribution within the field is necessary to implement spatially variable herbicide application. This paper deals with the development of near-ground image capture and processing techniques in order to detect broad leaf weeds in cereal crops, under actual field conditions. The proposed methods use both colour and shape analysis techniques for discriminating crop, weeds and soil. The performance of algorithms was assessed by comparing the results with a human classification, providing a good success rate. The study shows the potential of using image processing techniques to generate weed maps.


Question: A self-adhesive, capacitive carbon nanotube-based electrode for recording electroencephalograph signals from hairy scalp regions.

This study investigates the efficacy of dry and noncontact electroencephalographic (EEG) sensors as a key advancement for practical, real-world brain-computer interface (BCI) systems. The focus is on comparing traditional wet electrodes with innovative dry and noncontact electrodes within a steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) BCI framework. The design of a dry contact electrode, featuring specialized contact posts and active buffering circuitry, is detailed. Moreover, a novel noncontact, capacitive electrode is introduced, which incorporates a custom-designed, high-impedance analog front-end. Offline testing on ten participants evaluates the signal quality from various electrode types and confirms the capability to capture low-amplitude SSVEP signals, even through hair, using the new noncontact sensor. Online BCI trials illustrate that the information transfer rate (ITR) with dry electrodes is on par with wet electrodes, significantly, without the need for gel or conductive substances. Remarkably, data from the noncontact electrode, positioned above the hair, achieves an ITR exceeding 19 bits/min at 100% accuracy (compared to 29.2 bits/min for wet electrodes and 34.4 bits/min for dry electrodes), an unprecedented level of performance. These findings indicate that both dry and noncontact electrodes, with ongoing refinement, hold promise as essential tools for future mobile BCI applications and general EEG use.

A tactile sensor is developed with the aim of covering a robot's entire structure, while reducing wiring requirement and ensuring high-speed response. The sensor detects the center point of load distribution on 2-D surfaces as well as the overall load. There are only four signal wires from the sensor. The sensor response time is nearly constant (within 1 ms) regardless of the number of detection elements, their placements or sensor areas. In this paper, the principles behind the operation of this sensor and the results of experiments using the sensor are described.

A low-cost sensor array system for banana ripeness monitoring is presented. The sensors are constructed by employing a graphite line-patterning technique (LPT) to print interdigitated graphite electrodes on tracing paper and then coating the printed area with a thin film of polyaniline (PANI) by in-situ polymerization as the gas-sensitive layer. The PANI layers were used for the detection of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including ethylene, emitted during ripening. The influence of the various acid dopants, hydrochloric acid (HCl), methanesulfonic acid (MSA), p-toluenesulfonic acid (TSA) and camphorsulfonic acid (CSA), on the electrical properties of the thin film of PANI adsorbed on the electrodes was also studied. The extent of doping of the films was investigated by UV-Vis absorption spectroscopy and tests showed that the type of dopant plays an important role in the performance of these low-cost sensors. The array of three sensors, without the PANI-HCl sensor, was able to produce a distinct pattern of signals, taken as a signature (fingerprint) that can be used to characterize bananas ripeness.

In this paper, a new approach in human identification is investigated. For this purpose, a standard 12-lead electrocardiogram (ECG) recorded during rest is used. Selected features extracted from the ECG are used to identify a person in a predetermined group. Multivariate analysis is used for the identification task. Experiments show that it is possible to identify a person by features extracted from one lead only. Hence, only three electrodes have to be attached on the person to be identified. This makes the method applicable without too much effort.

Human body communication (HBC) is a promising wireless technology that uses the human body as part of the communication channel. HBC operates in the near-field of the high frequency (HF) band and in the lower frequencies of the very high frequency (VHF) band, where the electromagnetic field has the tendency to be confined inside the human body. Electromagnetic interference poses a serious reliability issue in HBC; consequently, it has been given increasing attention in regard to adapting techniques to curtail its degrading effect. Nevertheless, there is a gap in knowledge on the mechanism of HBC interference that is prompted when the human body is exposed to electromagnetic fields as well as the effect of the human body as an antenna on HBC. This paper narrows the gap by introducing the mechanisms of HBC interference caused by electromagnetic field exposure of human body. We derived analytic expressions for induced total axial current in the body and associated fields in the vicinity of the body when an imperfectly conducting cylindrical antenna model of the human body is illuminated by a vertically polarized plane wave within the 1–200 MHz frequency range. Also, fields in the vicinity of the human body model from an on-body HBC transmitter are calculated. Furthermore, conducted electromagnetic interference on externally embedded HBC receivers is also addressed. The results show that the maximum HBC gain near 50 MHz is due to whole-body resonance, and the maximum at 80 MHz is due to the resonance of the arm. Similarly, the results also suggest that the magnitude of induced axial current in the body due to electromagnetic field exposure of human body is higher near 50MHz.

Recently Electronic Textile (E-Textile) technology enables the weaving computation and communication components into the clothes that we wear and objects that we interact with every day. E-Textile enables the design and development of a broad range of pervasive sensing systems such as smart bed sheets for sleep posture monitoring, insoles in medical shoes for monitoring plantar pressure distribution, smart garments and sensing gloves. However the low cost of E-Textiles come at the cost of accuracy. In this work we propose an actuator-based method that increases the accuracy of E-Textiles by means of enabling real-time calibration. Our proposed system increases system accuracy by 38.55% on average (maximum 58.4%).

To achieve sensitivity, comfort, and durability in vital sign monitoring, this study explores the use of radar technologies in wearable devices. The study first detected the respiratory rates and heart rates of a subject at a one-meter distance using a self-injection-locked (SIL) radar and a conventional continuous-wave (CW) radar to compare the sensitivity versus power consumption between the two radars. Then, a pulse rate monitor was constructed based on a bistatic SIL radar architecture. This monitor uses an active antenna that is composed of a SIL oscillator (SILO) and a patch antenna. When attached to a band worn on the subject's wrist, the active antenna can monitor the pulse on the subject's wrist by modulating the SILO with the associated Doppler signal. Subsequently, the SILO's output signal is received and demodulated by a remote frequency discriminator to obtain the pulse rate information.

Emerging biomedical applications require realistic phantoms for validation and testing of prototype systems. These phantoms require stable and flexible tissue-mimicking materials with realistic dielectric properties in order to properly model human tissues. To create a tissue-mimicking material to fulfill these needs, carbon powder and urethane rubber mixtures were created, and the dielectric properties were measured using a dielectric probe. Both graphite and carbon black were tested. Mixtures of graphite and urethane (0% to 50% by weight) provided relatively low permittivity and conductivity, suitable for mimicking fatty tissues. Mixtures of carbon black and urethane (0% to 15% by weight) provided a broad range of suitable properties. Samples with 15% carbon black had permittivity and conductivity similar to higher-water-content tissues, however the cured samples were not mechanically suitable for moulding into complex shapes. Finally, mixtures of graphite, carbon black, and urethane were created. These exhibited a range of dielectric properties and can be used to mimic a variety of soft tissues. The mechanical properties of these samples were tested and presented properties that exceed typical phantom requirements. This tissue-mimicking material will be useful when creating thin, flexible, and robust structures such as skin layers.

A textile pressure sensor has been designed for measuring pressure distribution on the human body. Electrodes built with conductive textiles are arranged on both sides of a compressible spacer, forming a variable capacitor. The use of textiles makes unobtrusive, comfortable, lightweight, and washable sensors possible. This simplifies the goal to integrate such sensors into clothing in the future, to be simple, and fast to mount just as getting dressed. Hysteresis induced by the spacer of the sensor has been modeled with the Preisach model to reduce the measurement error from 24% to 5% on average and the maximal error from above 50% to below 10%. Standard textiles that are not specially optimized for low hysteresis can be used for designing the sensor due to the modeling. The model may also be used for other pressure or even strain sensors to reduce their hysteresis. The modeling enhances the accuracy of the textile sensor to those of commercial, nontextile pressure sensing mats. Furthermore, we used the sensor system for the classification of sitting postures in a chair. The data of nine subjects have been classified with Naive Bayes classifier, achieving an average recognition rate of 82%. We show that the textile sensor performs similarly to a commercial, nontextile pressure sensing mat for this application.

A novel ECG classification algorithm is proposed for continuous cardiac monitoring on wearable devices with limited processing capacity. The proposed solution employs a novel architecture consisting of wavelet transform and multiple LSTM recurrent neural networks (Fig. 1). Experimental evaluations show superior ECG classification performance compared to previous works. Measurements on different hardware platforms show the proposed algorithm meets timing requirements for continuous and real-time execution on wearable devices. In contrast to many compute-intensive deep-learning based approaches, the proposed algorithm is lightweight, and therefore, brings continuous monitoring with accurate LSTM-based ECG classification to wearable devices. The source code is available online [1].

This book provides, for the first time, a broad and deep treatment of the fields of both ultra low power electronics and bioelectronics. It discusses fundamental principles and circuits for ultra low power electronic design and their applications in biomedical systems. It also discusses how ultra energy-efficient cellular and neural systems in biology can inspire revolutionary low power architectures in mixed-signal and RF electronics. The book presents a unique, unifying view of ultra low power analog and digital electronics and emphasizes the use of the ultra energy-efficient subthreshold regime of transistor operation in both. Chapters on batteries, energy harvesting, and the future of energy provide an understanding of fundamental relationships between energy use and energy generation at small scales and at large scales. A wealth of insights and examples from brain implants, cochlear implants, biomolecular sensing, cardiac devices, and bio-inspired systems make the book useful and engaging for students and practicing engineers.


Question: A self-adhesive, capacitive carbon nanotube-based electrode for acquiring electroencephalograph signals from hairy scalp regions.

This paper introduces a novel, non-invasive technique for measuring electrocardiogram (ECG) signals, designed for seamless integration into everyday life, particularly for long-term monitoring. The proposed method eliminates the need for direct conductive contact with the skin, enabling subjects to remain comfortably seated in a chair while dressed in regular attire. The system comprises electrodes affixed to the rear of the chair, high-input-impedance amplifiers positioned directly on these electrodes, and a substantial ground-plane located on the chair's seat. To assess the efficacy of this method, ECG signals were recorded under various clothing conditions and compared to those acquired through traditional means, employing Ag-AgCl electrodes. The study also scrutinized the impact of routine desk activities on signal quality, revealing the potential for this technique to facilitate continuous, unobtrusive ECG monitoring suitable for daily use.

Emerging biomedical applications require realistic phantoms for validation and testing of prototype systems. These phantoms require stable and flexible tissue-mimicking materials with realistic dielectric properties in order to properly model human tissues. To create a tissue-mimicking material to fulfill these needs, carbon powder and urethane rubber mixtures were created, and the dielectric properties were measured using a dielectric probe. Both graphite and carbon black were tested. Mixtures of graphite and urethane (0% to 50% by weight) provided relatively low permittivity and conductivity, suitable for mimicking fatty tissues. Mixtures of carbon black and urethane (0% to 15% by weight) provided a broad range of suitable properties. Samples with 15% carbon black had permittivity and conductivity similar to higher-water-content tissues, however the cured samples were not mechanically suitable for moulding into complex shapes. Finally, mixtures of graphite, carbon black, and urethane were created. These exhibited a range of dielectric properties and can be used to mimic a variety of soft tissues. The mechanical properties of these samples were tested and presented properties that exceed typical phantom requirements. This tissue-mimicking material will be useful when creating thin, flexible, and robust structures such as skin layers.

A liquid leakage sensor on adhesive tape with alarming function has been developed. The film sensor tape consists of three layers: a base film layer, a substrate film layer, and a protective film layer. Three conductive lines and one resistive line are printed on the substrate film layer with a nano-sized silver conductive ink by the electronic gravure printing method. The location of liquid leakage has been found to be monitored accurately by applying the pulse voltage to the conductive and resistance lines in a periodic polarity switching mode. The leakage tests for various electrolyte liquids have been performed and the accuracy of leakage error position has been achieved to be about 0.25% on 200 meter long tape length.

Gallium and several of its alloys are liquid metals at or near room temperature. Gallium has low toxicity, essentially no vapor pressure, and a low viscosity. Despite these desirable properties, applications calling for liquid metal often use toxic mercury because gallium forms a thin oxide layer on its surface. The oxide interferes with electrochemical measurements, alters the physicochemical properties of the surface, and changes the fluid dynamic behavior of the metal in a way that has, until recently, been considered a nuisance. Here, we show that this solid oxide "skin" enables many new applications for liquid metals including soft electrodes and sensors, functional microcomponents for microfluidic devices, self-healing circuits, shape-reconfigurable conductors, and stretchable antennas, wires, and interconnects.

With capacitive fingerprint readers being increasingly used for access control as well as for smartphone unlock and payments, there is a growing interest among metrology agencies (e.g., the National Institute of Standards and Technology) to develop standard artifacts (targets) and procedures for repeatable evaluation of capacitive readers. We present our design and fabrication procedures to create conductive 3D targets (gold fingers) for capacitive readers. Wearable 3D targets with known feature markings (e.g., fingerprint ridge flow and ridge spacing) are first fabricated using a high-resolution 3D printer. A sputter coating process is subsequently used to deposit a thin layer (~300 nm) of conductive materials (titanium and gold) on 3D printed targets. The wearable gold finger targets are used to evaluate a PIV-certified single-finger capacitive reader as well as small-area capacitive readers embedded in smartphones and access control terminals. In additional, we show that a simple procedure to create 3D printed spoofs with conductive carbon coating is able to successfully spoof a PIV-certified single-finger capacitive reader as well as a capacitive reader embedded in an access control terminal.

This paper presents a stretchable Planar Inverted-F Antenna (PIFA) based on a new metallization technique of depositing nanoscale thin (50/100nm) Au film on elastomer Polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The thin metal films can be reversibly stretched up to 20% without losing electrical conduction. The PIFA antenna made of new materials can work under a 10% strain and return to its original state after removal of an applied stress. Simulation and measurement results for the antenna performance are given.

Monitoring of the physical properties of the tissues provides valuable information for the clinical diagnosis and evaluation. However, one of the challenges of an ultrasonic method for continuous monitoring of a tissue motion using a conventional clinical ultrasonic image system could be motion artifacts due to the weight and size of its handheld ultrasonic probe employed. A wearable ultrasonic sensor, made of a polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) polymer piezoelectric film, may be able to reduce the motion artifacts due to its lightweight and flexible properties. However, the PVDF ultrasonic sensor has a relatively weak transmitting acoustic signal strength which causes poor signal-to-noise ratio of the ultrasonic signal acquired in pulse-echo measurements, particularly for the signal reflected from deeper tissue. This paper investigated an improvement of the ultrasonic performance of the WUS using double-layer PVDF films. The sensor was constructed using two 52-μm thick PVDF films. The developed double-layer WUS showed the 1.7 times greater ultrasonic signal amplitude compared to the WUS made of a single-layer PVDF having the equivalent PVDF film thickness. Thus, the developed double-layer PVDF WUS improved the depth of the ultrasonic penetration into the tissue. The developed WUS successfully demonstrated to monitor the contractions of biceps muscles in an upper arm. In addition, a cardiac tissue motion was clearly observed in the M-mode measurement corresponding with the cardiac cycles obtained from the ECG measurement.

In this paper we outline the design process of the TaSST (Tactile Sleeve for Social Touch), a touch-sensitive vibrotactile arm sleeve. The TaSST was designed to enable two people to communicate different types of touch over a distance. The touch-sensitive surface of the sleeve consists of a grid of 4×3 sensor compartments filled with conductive wool. Each compartment controls the vibration intensity of a vibration motor, located in a grid of 4×3 motors beneath the touch-sensitive layer. An initial evaluation of the TaSST revealed that it was mainly suitable for communicating protracted (e.g. pressing), and simple (e.g. poking) touches.

Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technology is one of the most rapidly developing areas of modern science; it has created numerous significant crossroads between Neuroscience and Computer Science. The goal of BCI technology is to provide a direct link between the human brain and a computerized environment. The objective of recent BCI approaches and applications have been designed to provide the information flow from the brain to the computerized periphery. The opposite or alternative direction of the flow of information (computer to brain interface, or CBI) remains almost undeveloped. The BrainPort is a CBI that offers a complementary technology designed to support a direct link from a computerized environment to the human brain - and to do so non-invasively. Currently, BrainPort research is pursuing two primary goals. One is the delivery of missing sensory information critical for normal human behavior through an additional artificial sensory channel around the damaged or malfunctioning natural sensory system. The other is to decrease the risk of sensory overload in human-machine interactions by providing a parallel and supplemental channel for information flow to the brain. In contrast, conventional CBI strategies (e.g., Virtual Reality), are usually designed to provide additional or substitution information through pre-existing sensory channels, and unintentionally aggravate the brain overload problem.

PURPOSE
The purpose of this study is to investigate the feasibility of increasing the system spatial resolution and scanning speed of Hologic Selenia Dimensions digital breast tomosynthesis (DBT) scanner by replacing the rotating mammography x-ray tube with a specially designed carbon nanotube (CNT) x-ray source array, which generates all the projection images needed for tomosynthesis reconstruction by electronically activating individual x-ray sources without any mechanical motion. The stationary digital breast tomosynthesis (s-DBT) design aims to (i) increase the system spatial resolution by eliminating image blurring due to x-ray tube motion and (ii) reduce the scanning time. Low spatial resolution and long scanning time are the two main technical limitations of current DBT technology.

METHODS
A CNT x-ray source array was designed and evaluated against a set of targeted system performance parameters. Simulations were performed to determine the maximum anode heat load at the desired focal spot size and to design the electron focusing optics. Field emission current from CNT cathode was measured for an extended period of time to determine the stable life time of CNT cathode for an expected clinical operation scenario. The source array was manufactured, tested, and integrated with a Selenia scanner. An electronic control unit was developed to interface the source array with the detection system and to scan and regulate x-ray beams. The performance of the s-DBT system was evaluated using physical phantoms.

RESULTS
The spatially distributed CNT x-ray source array comprised 31 individually addressable x-ray sources covering a 30 angular span with 1 pitch and an isotropic focal spot size of 0.6 mm at full width at half-maximum. Stable operation at 28 kV(peak) anode voltage and 38 mA tube current was demonstrated with extended lifetime and good source-to-source consistency. For the standard imaging protocol of 15 views over 14, 100 mAs dose, and 2 × 2 detector binning, the projection resolution along the scanning direction increased from 4.0 cycles/mm [at 10% modulation-transfer-function (MTF)] in DBT to 5.1 cycles/mm in s-DBT at magnification factor of 1.08. The improvement is more pronounced for faster scanning speeds, wider angular coverage, and smaller detector pixel sizes. The scanning speed depends on the detector, the number of views, and the imaging dose. With 240 ms detector readout time, the s-DBT system scanning time is 6.3 s for a 15-view, 100 mAs scan regardless of the angular coverage. The scanning speed can be reduced to less than 4 s when detectors become faster. Initial phantom studies showed good quality reconstructed images.

CONCLUSIONS
A prototype s-DBT scanner has been developed and evaluated by retrofitting the Selenia rotating gantry DBT scanner with a spatially distributed CNT x-ray source array. Preliminary results show that it improves system spatial resolution substantially by eliminating image blur due to x-ray focal spot motion. The scanner speed of s-DBT system is independent of angular coverage and can be increased with faster detector without image degration. The accelerated lifetime measurement demonstrated the long term stability of CNT x-ray source array with typical clinical operation lifetime over 3 years.

Bend sensors have been developed based on conductive ink, optical fiber, and electronic textiles. Each type has advantages and disadvantages in terms of performance, ease of use, and cost. This study proposes a new and low-cost bend sensor that can measure a wide range of accumulated bend angles with large curvatures. This bend sensor utilizes a Bowden-cable, which consists of a coil sheath and an inner wire. Displacement changes of the Bowden-cable's inner wire, when the shape of the sheath changes, have been considered to be a position error in previous studies. However, this study takes advantage of this position error to detect the bend angle of the sheath. The bend angle of the sensor can be calculated from the displacement measurement of the sensing wire using a Hall-effect sensor or a potentiometer. Simulations and experiments have shown that the accumulated bend angle of the sensor is linearly related to the sensor signal, with an R-square value up to 0.9969 and a root mean square error of 2% of the full sensing range. The proposed sensor is not affected by a bend curvature of up to 80.0 m(-1), unlike previous bend sensors. The proposed sensor is expected to be useful for various applications, including motion capture devices, wearable robots, surgical devices, or generally any device that requires an affordable and low-cost bend sensor.


Question: A self-adhesive, capacitive carbon nanotube-based electrode for recording electroencephalograph signals from hairy scalp regions.

This paper delves into the analysis of emotion recognition, exploring the effectiveness of facial expressions, speech, and multimodal information in enhancing the natural interaction between humans and computers. While numerous methods have been devised to discern human emotions through facial expressions or vocal cues, fewer studies have examined the integration of these modalities to bolster the precision and reliability of emotion detection systems. The paper scrutinizes the advantages and constraints of systems that rely solely on facial expressions or auditory data. It also evaluates two techniques for merging these modalities: decision-level and feature-level integration. To validate the findings, a dataset was compiled from an actress, featuring four distinct emotions: sadness, anger, happiness, and a neutral state. Through the use of facial markers, the actress's facial movements were meticulously recorded using motion capture technology, in tandem with audio recordings of her speech. The outcomes demonstrate that facial expression-based systems outperformed those dependent on auditory information for the emotions under consideration. Moreover, the findings underscore the complementary nature of the two modalities, highlighting that their fusion leads to a substantial improvement in the performance and robustness of emotion recognition systems.

In this paper we outline the design process of the TaSST (Tactile Sleeve for Social Touch), a touch-sensitive vibrotactile arm sleeve. The TaSST was designed to enable two people to communicate different types of touch over a distance. The touch-sensitive surface of the sleeve consists of a grid of 4×3 sensor compartments filled with conductive wool. Each compartment controls the vibration intensity of a vibration motor, located in a grid of 4×3 motors beneath the touch-sensitive layer. An initial evaluation of the TaSST revealed that it was mainly suitable for communicating protracted (e.g. pressing), and simple (e.g. poking) touches.

Wireless body area networks (BANs) have drawn much attention from research community and industry in recent years. Multimedia healthcare services provided by BANs can be available to anyone, anywhere, and anytime seamlessly. A critical issue in BANs is how to preserve the integrity and privacy of a person's medical data over wireless environments in a resource efficient manner. This paper presents a novel key agreement scheme that allows neighboring nodes in BANs to share a common key generated by electrocardiogram (ECG) signals. The improved Jules Sudan (IJS) algorithm is proposed to set up the key agreement for the message authentication. The proposed ECG-IJS key agreement can secure data commnications over BANs in a plug-n-play manner without any key distribution overheads. Both the simulation and experimental results are presented, which demonstrate that the proposed ECG-IJS scheme can achieve better security performance in terms of serval performance metrics such as false acceptance rate (FAR) and false rejection rate (FRR) than other existing approaches. In addition, the power consumption analysis also shows that the proposed ECG-IJS scheme can achieve energy efficiency for BANs.

Graphene has attracted increasing attention for potential applications in biotechnology due to its excellent electronic property and biocompatibility. Here we use both Gram-positive Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) and Gram-negative Escherichia coli (E. coli) to investigate the antibacterial actions of large-area monolayer graphene film on conductor Cu, semiconductor Ge and insulator SiO2. The results show that the graphene films on Cu and Ge can surprisingly inhibit the growth of both bacteria, especially the former. However, the proliferation of both bacteria cannot be significantly restricted by the graphene film on SiO2. The morphology of S. aureus and E. coli on graphene films further confirms that the direct contact of both bacteria with graphene on Cu and Ge can cause membrane damage and destroy membrane integrity, while no evident membrane destruction is induced by graphene on SiO2. From the viewpoint of charge transfer, a plausible mechanism is proposed here to explain this phenomenon. This study may provide new insights for the better understanding of antibacterial actions of graphene film and for the better designing of graphene-based antibiotics or other biomedical applications.

This book provides, for the first time, a broad and deep treatment of the fields of both ultra low power electronics and bioelectronics. It discusses fundamental principles and circuits for ultra low power electronic design and their applications in biomedical systems. It also discusses how ultra energy-efficient cellular and neural systems in biology can inspire revolutionary low power architectures in mixed-signal and RF electronics. The book presents a unique, unifying view of ultra low power analog and digital electronics and emphasizes the use of the ultra energy-efficient subthreshold regime of transistor operation in both. Chapters on batteries, energy harvesting, and the future of energy provide an understanding of fundamental relationships between energy use and energy generation at small scales and at large scales. A wealth of insights and examples from brain implants, cochlear implants, biomolecular sensing, cardiac devices, and bio-inspired systems make the book useful and engaging for students and practicing engineers.

Electroactive polymer (EAP) actuators have been attracting the attention of researchers due to their muscle-like behaviour and unusual properties. Several modelling methods have been proposed to understand their mechanical, chemical, electrical behaviours or `electro-chemo-mechanical' behaviour. However, estimating the whole shape or configuration of the EAP actuators has always been challenging due to their highly non-linear bending behaviour. This paper reports on an effective method to estimate the whole shape deflection of the EAP actuators by employing a so-called backbone approach. Tri-layer configured polypyrrole (PPy) based EAP actuators were used as a soft and smart structure with more degrees of freedom than its input. After deriving the inverse kinematic model of the actuator, its complete shape is estimated by solving the inverse kinematic model with an angle optimization (AngleOPT) method. The experimental results and numerical results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the method in estimating the highly non-linear bending behaviour of the PPy actuators and applicability of this modelling approach to other EAP actuators.

Development and integration of physiological sensors into automotive applications is gaining importance. Assistance systems which possess knowledge about the driver's cognitive state could increase road safety. In this paper we present a flexible framework that enables the development, evaluation and verification of sensors and algorithms for automotive applications using physiological signals under realistic driving conditions. We have integrated a custom capacitive ECG measurement system into a test car and validated its performance in real world driving tests. During first test runs, the capacitive system achieved a sensitivity of up to 95.5% and a precision rate of up to 92.6%. Our system also records synchronized vehicle dynamics. We discuss the road test measurements which suggest that the driving situation highly impacts the quality of ECG signal. Therefore, information on driving dynamics could be used to improve the precision rate of future capacitive ECG measurement.

This paper discusses application of direct charge measurement (DCM) on characterizing on-chip interconnect capacitance. Measurement equipment and techniques are leveraged from Flat Panel Display testing. On-chip active device is not an essential necessity for DCM test structure and it is easy to implement parallel measurements. Femto-Farad measurement sensitivity is achieved without having on-chip active device. Measurement results of silicon and glass substrates, including parallel measurements, are presented.

Electroencephalography (EEG)-based monitoring the state of the user's brain functioning and giving her/him the visual/audio/tactile feedback is called neurofeedback technique, and it could allow the user to train the corresponding brain functions. It could provide an alternative way of treatment for some psychological disorders such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), where concentration function deficit exists, autism spectrum disorder (ASD), or dyscalculia where the difficulty in learning and comprehending the arithmetic exists. In this paper, a novel method for multifractal analysis of EEG signals named generalized Higuchi fractal dimension spectrum (GHFDS) was proposed and applied in mental arithmetic task recognition from EEG signals. Other features such as power spectrum density (PSD), autoregressive model (AR), and statistical features were analyzed as well. The usage of the proposed fractal dimension spectrum of EEG signal in combination with other features improved the mental arithmetic task recognition accuracy in both multi-channel and one-channel subject-dependent algorithms up to 97.87% and 84.15% correspondingly. Based on the channel ranking, four channels were chosen which gave the accuracy up to 97.11%. Reliable real-time neurofeedback system could be implemented based on the algorithms proposed in this paper.

Driven by the growing aging population, prevalence of chronic diseases, and continuously rising healthcare costs, the healthcare system is undergoing a fundamental transformation, from the conventional hospital-centered system to an individual-centered system. Current and emerging developments in wearable medical systems will have a radical impact on this paradigm shift. Advances in wearable medical systems will enable the accessibility and affordability of healthcare, so that physiological conditions can be monitored not only at sporadic snapshots but also continuously for extended periods of time, making early disease detection and timely response to health threats possible. This paper reviews recent developments in the area of wearable medical systems for p-Health. Enabling technologies for continuous and noninvasive measurements of vital signs and biochemical variables, advances in intelligent biomedical clothing and body area networks, approaches for motion artifact reduction, strategies for wearable energy harvesting, and the establishment of standard protocols for the evaluation of wearable medical devices are presented in this paper with examples of clinical applications of these technologies.

Traditionally, ballistocardiogram (BCG) has been measured using large and stationary devices. In this work, we demonstrate a portable and continuous BCG monitor that is wearable at the ear. The device has the form factor of a hearing aid and is wirelessly connected to a PC for data recording and analysis. With the ear as an anchoring point, the device uses a MEMS tri-axial accelerometer to measure BCG at the head. Morphological differences exist between head BCG and traditional BCG, but the principal peaks (J waves) and their vectors are preserved. The frequency of J waves corresponds to heart rate, and when used in conjunction with an electrocardiogram's (ECG) R wave, the timing of J waves yields the RJ interval. Results from our clinical study show linear correlation between the RJ interval and the heart's pre-ejection period during hemodynamic maneuvers, thus revealing important information about cardiac contractility and its regulation.