Question: Factors facilitating and hindering the organizational adoption of sustainable business practices.

This paper delves into the multifaceted concept of generalizability in information systems research, a critical consideration for both researchers and practitioners. While statistical, sampling-based generalizability is widely recognized, it is essential to acknowledge that generalizability encompasses broader conceptions. The objective of this discourse is to elucidate the essence of generalizability through a critical analysis of its nature, examples of its application and misapplication, and the introduction of a classification framework. This framework categorizes the various forms of generalizability into four distinct types, delineated by the differentiation between empirical and theoretical statements. It affirms the validity of statistical, sampling-based generalizability within its appropriate boundaries, while also highlighting methods through which information systems researchers and others can rightfully assert generalizability, and thus enhance relevance, in inquiries that transcend the realm of sampling-based research. (Research Methodology; Positivist Research; Interpretive Research; Quantitative Research; Qualitative Research; Case Studies; Research Design; Generalizability)

**Question**: The Role of Big Data Analytics in Enhancing Cybersecurity

**Documents**: A Systematic Literature Review on Big Data Analytics for Cybersecurity
The increasing volume and velocity of cyber-attacks have led to the emergence of Big Data Analytics (BDA) as a promising solution for enhancing cybersecurity. This paper presents a systematic literature review on the application of BDA for cybersecurity, focusing on the last five years. The review includes 60 peer-reviewed articles from major databases and identifies three main themes: data sources, analytical techniques, and application areas. The results show that network traffic, system logs, and malware samples are the most common data sources. Machine learning and data mining are the most popular analytical techniques, while intrusion detection, threat intelligence, and forensic analysis are the most frequent application areas. The review also highlights the challenges and future research directions in this field.

**Similar Documents**: This systematic literature review investigates the utilization of Big Data Analytics (BDA) for enhancing cybersecurity measures, given the escalating scale and speed of cyber-attacks. Concentrating on the most recent five years of research, the review encompasses 60 scholarly articles sourced from prominent databases. It delineates three principal themes: origins of data, analytical methodologies, and areas of application. The findings reveal that network traffic, system logs, and malware specimens are the predominant data sources. Machine learning and data mining emerge as the leading analytical techniques. Intrusion detection, threat intelligence, and forensic analysis are identified as the primary application domains. The review also underscores the existing

Manuscript Type: Empirical Research Questions/Issue: This paper seeks to explore the interrelationships between corporate governance (CG) and corporate social responsibility (CSR): first, theoretically, by reviewing the literature and surveying various postulations on offer; second, empirically, by investigating the conception and interpretation of this relationship in the context of a sample of firms operating in Lebanon. Accordingly, the paper seeks to highlight the increasing cross-connects or interfaces between CG and CSR, capitalizing on fresh insights from a developing country perspective. Research Findings/Results: A qualitative interpretive research methodology was adopted, drawing on in-depth interviews with the top managers of eight corporations operating in Lebanon, with the findings suggesting that the majority of managers conceive of CG as a necessary pillar for sustainable CSR. These findings are significant and interesting, implying that recent preoccupation with CG in developing countries is starting to be counterbalanced by some interest/attention to CSR, with growing appreciation of their interdependencies and the need to move beyond CG conformance toward voluntary CSR performance. Theoretical Implications: This study makes two important contributions. First, it suggests that there is a salient two-way relationship and increasing overlap between CG and CSR. While much previous literature has researched CG and CSR independently, this paper makes the case for considering them jointly and systematically. Second, the paper outlines a number of theoretical propositions that can serve as the basis for future research on the topic, particularly in developing countries, given that the data and theoretical propositions are both derived from and tailored to developing country contexts. Practical Implications: This study can potentially alert managers to the increasing overlap between the CG and CSR agendas and the need to exert diligent systematic efforts on both fronts. CG and CSR share more in common than previously assumed, and this needs to be accounted for by practitioners. The research can also alert policy makers in developing countries to the need to increase the vigilance and capacity of the regulatory and judicial systems in the context of CG reform and to increase institutional pressures, particularly of the coercive and normative variety to enhance CSR adoption.

Type of thesis: Master Degree Project in Accounting, 30 credits University: University of Gothenburg, School of Business, Economics and Law Semester: Spring 2017 Author: Kevin Larsson & Philip Kaber Supervisor: Elisabeth Frisk Title: The Practical Use of BI Visualizations in Decision-making Background and problem: Due to the constantly altering business environment, firms are trying to find ways of combining information technology (IT) and decision-making in order to grasp information of the complex and dynamic business environment. As a solution to this strenuousness; business intelligence (BI) systems serve to conduct more efficient and reliable decisions by the means of visualizations. One existing gap in the research of BI concerns the sociotechnical effects involved in the decision-making, in which knowledge of how BI visualizations are used and may be used in practice to support the decision-making have remained limited. Research aim: The research aim of the study is to investigate how BI visualizations are and may be used to support strategic and operational decisions. Further, the study addresses how BI visualizations are used in various decision contexts. Research questions: The following questions are addressed in order to achieve the research aim: (1) How are and may BI visualizations be used in strategic and operational decisions? (1a) Which visual elements are used depending on the task and decision category? (2) How are BI visualizations used in different decision contexts? Research design: A qualitative study was made through semi-structured interviews. In-depth interviews with six people from the purchasing company were conducted in order to understand how BI and visualizations are and may be used. Two people from the consultancy company were interviewed in order to understand how BI and visualizations may be used. Discussion and conclusion: The primary purpose of BI systems in the purchasing company is to support decision-making from a strategic perspective by providing the business with new insights and monitor business processes. However, the findings in this study also suggest that BI visualizations are used for operational errands. Strategic decisions are primary based on graphical representations, whereas operational decisions are based on data derived from tables and additional calculations in Excel. By creating more interactive, initiative, and humanizing visualizations, the end-users may discover new patterns of information and enhance the cognitive fit without being overwhelmed by data. BI visualizations may also be used in a larger extent to detect errors in data. The usage depends on the decision situation, in which decisions made in the fact-based contexts domains tend to be based on intuitions and BI visualizations, before responding to the business problem. This differs from the pattern-based management domains, in which actions are done prior to the analysis as there is lack of data. Further the findings indicate that several people are often involved in the decisions. The mental model of the respondents is not entirely fit in a cognitive aspect.

Most organizations have perceived the customer relationship management (CRM) concept as a technological solution for problems in individual areas, accompanied by a great deal of uncoordinated initiatives. Nevertheless, CRM must be conceived as a strategy, due to its human, technological, and processes implications, at the time an organization decides to implement it. On this basis, the main goal stated in this research is to propose, justify, and validate a model based on critical success factors (CSFs) that will constitute a guide for companies in the implementation and diagnosis of a CRM strategy. The model is conformed by a set of 13 CSFs with their 55 corresponding metrics, which will serve as a guide for organizations wishing to apply this type of strategy. These factors cover the three key aspects of every CRM strategy (human factor, processes, and technology); giving a global focus and propitiating success in the implementation of a CRM strategy. These CSFs – and their metrics – were evaluated by a group of internationally experts allowing determining guidelines for a CRM implementation as well as the probable causes of the deWciencies in past projects.

The process of innovation depends heavily on knowledge, and the management of knowledge and human capital should be an essential element of running any type of business. Recent research indicates that organisations are not consistent in their approach to knowledge management (KM), with KM approaches being driven predominantly within an information technology (IT) or humanist framework, with little if any overlap. This paper explores the relationship between KM approaches and innovation performance through a preliminary study focusing on the manufacturing industry. The most significant implication that has emerged from the study is that managers in manufacturing firms should place more emphasis on human resource management (HRM) practices when developing innovation strategies for product and process innovations. The study shows that KM contributes to innovation performance when a simultaneous approach of “soft HRM practices” and “hard IT practices” are implemented.

Definitions of business process given in much of the literature on Business Process Management are limited in depth and their related models of business processes are correspondingly constrained. After giving a brief history of the progress of business process modeling techniques from production systems to the office environment, this paper proposes that most definitions are based on machine metaphor type explorations of a process. While these techniques are often rich and illuminating it is suggested that they are too limited to express the true nature of business processes that need to develop and adapt to today’s challenging environment.

In this paper we present a method for systematically defining the process architecture of any organization. We begin by presenting a detailed interpretation of the upper levels of Zachman’s framework, providing an answer to the cell formed by the intersection of the perspective of the Planner (row 1) and the dimension of Function (column 2). Our method consists of four steps: capturing the organizational structure; exhaustively analyzing the flow of information between the different organizational units, customers, and providers, allowing for a high-level understanding of the organization’s operation; identifying and modeling the configuration of value that best adapts itself to the creation of value for the organization (value chain, workshop, or network); and, given the specified value configuration, identifying, defining, and interrelating the different essential processes.

This paper summarizes the first phase of the Stanford Innovation Project, a long-term study of U.S. industrial innovation. As part of this initial phase, begun in 1982, two surveys were conducted: 1) an open-ended survey of 158 new products in the electronics industry, followed by 2) a structured survey of 118 of the original products. Both surveys used a pairwise comparison methodology. Our research identified eight broad areas that appear to be important for new product success in a high-technology environment: 1) market knowledge gained through frequent and intense customer interaction, which leads to high benefit-to-cost products; 2) and 3) planning and coordination of the new product process, especially the R&D phase; 4) emphasis on marketing and sales; 5) management support for the product throughout the development and launch stages; 6) the contribution margin of the product; 7) early market entry; 8) proximity of the new product technologies and markets to the existing strengths of the developing unit. Based on these results, a preliminary model of the new product process is proposed in the concluding section. There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system. Niccolo Machiavelli.

This paper presents a currently ongoing single case study on adopting and scaling Scrum in a large software development project distributed across four sites. The data was gathered by 19 semi-structured interviews of project personnel, including managers, architects, developers and testers. At the time of the interviews the project had grown in size during the past 2,5 years from two collocated Scrum teams to 20 teams located in four countries and employing over 170 persons. In this paper we first describe our research approach and goals. Then we briefly summarize the preliminary results of this ongoing study: we explain how Scrum practices were scaled, as well as discuss the successes and challenges experienced when adopting the agile practices and scaling them, while at the same time growing the project size at a fast pace. Even though this project has been very successful from the business point of view, it has experienced a lot of problems in applying Scrum, especially related to scaling the agile practices. Thus, it seems that adapting Scrum practices to work well in a large distributed setting is challenging.

Knowledge management is a relatively young topic to other older strategic tools, and it has been attracting the attention of researchers and academics over the past decade or so. In this regard globalization is already in many countries including Malaysia like many other developing countries, Malaysia is also striving to fulfil its vision of becoming a developed nation. It is a fast growing country in terms of both economy and technology. However, obstacles for successful knowledge management initiatives will be there for this country, as well. Thus, exploration of the potential barriers is essential before any Malaysian company embarks on a knowledge management journey. This research has shed light to some of the important issues and challenges with reference to knowledge management in Malaysia by providing a more thorough and clear picture of the knowledge management status amongst Malaysian organizations. This could in turn help top managers and decision makers to develop a more insightful agenda to ensure success for their respective knowledge management initiatives.

The present study has evaluated the effect of TQM practices on business performance of manufacturing firms in Pakistan. A sample of 65 managers working in the quality assurance department was taken from these manufacturing firms and their responses were collected using a structured questionnaire. Descriptive statistics were used to demonstrate the effect of different levels of TQM practices on business performance in terms of financial performance, product quality performance, customer satisfaction. The study had also considered organizational level variables like size of firm, year of existence, top management commitment as moderating variables, the results have shown that TQM was implemented only at the first three levels i.e. quality control ,quality assurance and continuous improvement in the selected firms and that top management commitment is the most important variable effecting on TQM implementation which then directly effect on business performance in these manufacturing firms.


Question: Investigating the advantages and potential deployment strategies for automated explosive detection in airport security X-ray screening of carry-on luggage.

This study presents an initial simulation aimed at optimizing Explosive Detection Systems (EDS) for cabin baggage screening, focusing on throughput enhancement. Air travel security hinges on the effective screening of passenger carry-on items, a process currently dominated by human operators analyzing X-ray images. The integration of EDS into cabin baggage screening protocols holds significant security benefits. However, the false alarm rate, influenced by both the EDS machine and its operational settings, can pose a challenge, potentially reducing throughput. To address this, a discrete event simulation was employed to explore how various EDS machine configurations, operator expertise, and the duration required to resolve alarms using Explosives Trace Detection (ETD) impact the throughput of a cabin baggage screening process. Model parameters and screening behavior under EDS were derived from a human-machine interaction experiment and a work analysis. Subsequently, the simulation tested specific modifications for their capacity to mitigate the throughput impact of EDS. The findings suggest that moderate increases in the false alarm rate can be effectively managed by employing more skilled and better-trained X-ray screeners. Conversely, significant increases in false alarms necessitate a swift resolution process and additional resources dedicated to manual searches.

Advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs), and particularly pedestrian protection systems (PPSs), have become an active research area aimed at improving traffic safety. The major challenge of PPSs is the development of reliable on-board pedestrian detection systems. Due to the varying appearance of pedestrians (e.g., different clothes, changing size, aspect ratio, and dynamic shape) and the unstructured environment, it is very difficult to cope with the demanded robustness of this kind of system. Two problems arising in this research area are the lack of public benchmarks and the difficulty in reproducing many of the proposed methods, which makes it difficult to compare the approaches. As a result, surveying the literature by enumerating the proposals one--after-another is not the most useful way to provide a comparative point of view. Accordingly, we present a more convenient strategy to survey the different approaches. We divide the problem of detecting pedestrians from images into different processing steps, each with attached responsibilities. Then, the different proposed methods are analyzed and classified with respect to each processing stage, favoring a comparative viewpoint. Finally, discussion of the important topics is presented, putting special emphasis on the future needs and challenges.

Early residential fire detection is important for prompt extinguishing and reducing damages and life losses. To detect fire, one or a combination of sensors and a detection algorithm are needed. The sensors might be part of a wireless sensor network (WSN) or work independently. The previous research in the area of fire detection using WSN has paid little or no attention to investigate the optimal set of sensors as well as use of learning mechanisms and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques. They have only made some assumptions on what might be considered as appropriate sensor or an arbitrary AI technique has been used. By closing the gap between traditional fire detection techniques and modern wireless sensor network capabilities, in this paper we present a guideline on choosing the most optimal sensor combinations for accurate residential fire detection. Additionally, applicability of a feed forward neural network (FFNN) and Naïve Bayes Classifier is investigated and results in terms of detection rate and computational complexity are analyzed.

NASA Ames Research Center, in cooperation with the FAA, has completed research and development of a proof-ofconcept Surface Management System (SMS). This paper reports on two recent SMS field tests as well as final performance and benefits analyses. Field tests and analysis support the conclusion that substantial portions of SMS technology are ready for transfer to the FAA and deployment throughout the National Airspace System (NAS). Other SMS capabilities were accepted in concept but require additional refinement for inclusion in subsequent development spirals. SMS is a decision support tool that helps operational specialists at Air Traffic Control (ATC) and NAS user facilities to collaboratively manage the movements of aircraft on the surface of busy airports, thereby improving capacity, efficiency, and flexibility. SMS provides accurate predictions of the future demand and how that demand will affect airport resources – information that is not currently available. The resulting shared awareness enables the Air Traffic Control Tower (ATCT), Terminal Radar Approach Control (TRACON), Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC), and air carriers to coordinate traffic management decisions. Furthermore, SMS uses its ability to predict how future demand will play out on the surface to evaluate the effect of various traffic management decisions in advance of implementing them, to plan and advise surface operations. The SMS concept, displays, and algorithms were evaluated through a series of field tests at Memphis International Airport (MEM). An operational trial in September, 2003 evaluated SMS traffic management components, such as runway configuration change planning; shadow testing in January, 2004 tested tactical components (e.g., Approval Request (APREQ) coordination, sequencing for departure, and Expected Departure Clearance Time (EDCT) compliance). Participants in these evaluations rated the SMS concept and many of the traffic management displays very positively. Local and Ground controller displays will require integration with other automation systems. Feedback from FAA and NAS user participants support the conclusion that SMS algorithms currently provide information that has acceptable and beneficial accuracy for traffic management applications. Performance analysis results document the current accuracy of SMS algorithms. Benefits/cost analysis of delay cost reduction due to SMS provides the business case for SMS deployment.

Ship detection is an important application of global monitoring of environment and security. In order to overcome the limitations by other systems, surveillance with satellite synthetic aperture radar (SAR) is used because of its possibility to provide ship detection at high resolution over wide swaths and in all weather conditions. A new X-band radar onboard the TerraSAR-X (TS-X) satellite gives access to spatial resolution as fine as 1 m. In this paper, first results on the combined use of TS-X ship detection, automatic identification system (AIS), and satellite AIS (SatAIS) is presented. The AIS system is an effective terrestrial method for tracking vessels in real time typically up to 40 km off the coast. SatAIS, as a space-based system, allows almost global coverage for monitoring of ships since not all ships operate their AIS and smaller ships are not equipped with AIS. The system is considered to be of cooperative nature. In this paper, the quality of TS-X images with respect to ship detection is evaluated, and a first assessment of its performance for ship detection is given. The velocity of a moving ship is estimated using complex TS-X data. As test cases, images were acquired over the North Sea, Baltic Sea, Atlantic Ocean, and Pacific Ocean in Stripmap mode with a resolution of 3 m at a coverage of 30 km 100 km. Simultaneous information on ship positions was available from TS-X and terrestrial as well as SatAIS. First results on the simultaneous superposition of SatAIS and high-resolution radar images are presented.

The last few decades witnessed the birth and growth of a new sensibility to transportation efficiency. In particular, the need for efficient and improved people and goods mobility pushed researchers to address the problem of intelligent transportation systems. This paper surveys the most advanced approaches to the (partial) customization of road following task, using on-board systems based on artificial vision. The functionalities of lane detection, obstacle detection and pedestrian detection are described and classified, and their possible application on future road vehicles is discussed.

The recent DARPA-sponsored automated vehicle "Challenges" have generated strong interest in both the research community and the general public, raising consciousness about the possibilities for vehicle automation. Driverless vehicles make good subjects for the visually-oriented media, and they pose enough interesting research challenges to occupy generations of graduate students. However, automated vehicles also have the potential to help solve a variety of real-world problems. Engineers need to think carefully about which of those problems we are actually solving.A well-engineered system should be designed to satisfy specific needs, and those needs should be reflected in the definition of system requirements. Alternative technological approaches can then be evaluated and traded off based on their ability to meet the requirements. The article describes the rather different needs of the public road transportation system and the military transportation system, and then shows how those needs influence the requirements for automated vehicle systems. These requirements point toward significantly different technical approaches, but it is possible to find some limited areas of technical commonality.

In augmented reality displays, X-Ray visualization techniques make hidden objects visible through combining the physical view with an artificial rendering of the hidden information. An important step in X-Ray visualization is to decide which parts of the physical scene should be kept and which should be replaced by overlays. The combination should provide users with essential perceptual cues to understand the relationship of depth between hidden information and the physical scene. In this paper we present an approach that addresses this decision in unknown environments by analyzing camera images of the physical scene and using the extracted information for occlusion management. Pixels are grouped into perceptually coherent image regions and a set of parameters is determined for each region. The parameters change the X-Ray visualization for either preserving existing structures or generating synthetic structures. Finally, users can customize the overall opacity of foreground regions to adapt the visualization.

Humans detect and identify faces in a scene with little or no effort . However, building an automated system that accomplishes this task is very difficult . There are several related Subproblems : detection of a pattern as a face . identification of the face, analysis of facial expressions, and classification based on physical features of the face . A system that performs these operations will find many applications, e .g . criminal identification, authentication in secure systems, etc . Most of the work to date has been in identification . This paper surveys the past work in solving these problems . The capability of the human visual system with respect to these problems is also discussed . It is meant to serve as a guide for an automated system . Some new approaches to these problems are also briefly discussed . Face detection Face identification Facial expressions Classification Facial features

Recently, automated robotic systems have become very efficient, thanks to improved coupling between sensor systems and algorithms, of which the latter have been gaining significance thanks to the increase in computing power over the past few decades. However, intelligent automated chemistry platforms for discovery orientated tasks need to be able to cope with the unknown, which is a profoundly hard problem. In this Outlook, we describe how recent advances in the design and application of algorithms, coupled with the increased amount of chemical data available, and automation and control systems may allow more productive chemical research and the development of chemical robots able to target discovery. This is shown through examples of workflow and data processing with automation and control, and through the use of both well-used and cutting-edge algorithms illustrated using recent studies in chemistry. Finally, several algorithms are presented in relation to chemical robots and chemical intelligence for knowledge discovery.

Application of high level fusion approaches demonstrate a sequence of significant advantages in multi sensor data fusion and automotive safety fusion systems are no exception to this. High level fusion can be applied to automotive sensor networks with complementary or/and redundant field of views. The advantage of this approach is that it ensures system modularity and allows benchmarking, as it does not permit feedbacks and loops inside the processing. In this paper two specific high level data fusion approaches are described including a brief architectural and algorithmic presentation. These approaches differ mainly in their data association part: (a) track level fusion approach solves it with the point to point association with emphasis on object continuity and multidimensional assignment, and (b) grid based fusion approach that proposes a generic way to model the environment and to perform sensor data fusion. The test case for these approaches is a multi sensor equipped PReVENT/ProFusion2 truck demonstrator vehicle.


Question: Investigating the advantages and practical application of automated explosive detection in the context of airport security screening for carry-on luggage.

This paper explores the impact of adaptive computer-based training (CBT) on enhancing the on-the-job performance of X-ray screeners in aviation security settings. Given the heightened concern over terrorist activities in recent times, ensuring robust aviation security has become a top priority for both policymakers and the general populace. A critical component of this security framework is the efficient and accurate screening of passenger baggage through advanced X-ray systems. The success of this screening process hinges significantly on the capabilities of security personnel, as they are tasked with the crucial decision-making process of identifying and differentiating between safe and potentially hazardous items within passenger bags. The task of recognizing prohibited or dangerous items in X-ray images requires a high level of skill and attention to detail, making it a challenging cognitive exercise. To address this, the effectiveness of CBT in improving X-ray detection abilities was rigorously evaluated using a combination of computer-based assessments and practical on-the-job performance indicators, such as threat image projection (TIP) tests. The findings revealed that adaptive CBT serves as a potent tool for augmenting the detection performance and operational efficiency of screeners when interpreting X-ray images. Notably, the enhanced skills acquired through training were successfully transferred to real-world scenarios, as evidenced by improved detection rates in TIP tests, not only for items that were part of the training regimen but also for new, untrained items. These outcomes underscore the significant potential of CBT as a strategic intervention to bolster airport security from a human factors standpoint, thereby contributing to the overall safety and efficiency of aviation security protocols.

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 …

Future autonomous automobiles will require extremely reliable radar sensors to guarantee the safety of road users. This requires test environments to verify that automotive radars work properly even in complex traffic situations. Radar target simulators can generate virtual scattering centers in front of the radar sensor and are therefore a promising verification technique. However, currently available systems only offer a very basic approach to manipulating scattering centers. With the workflow presented in this publication it becomes possible to decompose high-level descriptions of traffic scenarios into parameters required for radar target simulation. The workflow can therefore be used to generate realistic traffic scenarios and thus increases the reliability of automotive radar sensor tests.

Many different demands can be made of intrusion detection systems. An important requirement is that an intrusion detection system be effective; that is, it should detect a substantial percentage of intrusions into the supervised system, while still keeping the false alarm rate at an acceptable level. This article demonstrates that, for a reasonable set of assumptions, the false alarm rate is the limiting factor for the performance of an intrusion detection system. This is due to the base-rate fallacy phenomenon, that in order to achieve substantial values of the Bayesian detection rate P(Intrusion***Alarm), we have to achieve a (perhaps in some cases unattainably) low false alarm rate. A selection of reports of intrusion detection performance are reviewed, and the conclusion is reached that there are indications that at least some types of intrusion detection have far to go before they can attain such low false alarm rates.

Automated anomaly detection in surveillance system demands to address various problems of real-time monitoring. Due to these challenges, the researchers from computer vision community focused on automation of the surveillance system. The research carried out in this domain has been proposed many datasets which are suitable for different applications. Though many prominent datasets are available, there is lack of description and categorization of these datasets according to the application demand. A survey on anomaly detection video datasets is necessary for researchers to understand and progress in this domain. This paper presents various datasets description briefly.

Pedestrian detection is a rapidly evolving area in computer vision with key applications in intelligent vehicles, surveillance, and advanced robotics. The objective of this paper is to provide an overview of the current state of the art from both methodological and experimental perspectives. The first part of the paper consists of a survey. We cover the main components of a pedestrian detection system and the underlying models. The second (and larger) part of the paper contains a corresponding experimental study. We consider a diverse set of state-of-the-art systems: wavelet-based AdaBoost cascade, HOG/linSVM, NN/LRF, and combined shape-texture detection. Experiments are performed on an extensive data set captured onboard a vehicle driving through urban environment. The data set includes many thousands of training samples as well as a 27-minute test sequence involving more than 20,000 images with annotated pedestrian locations. We consider a generic evaluation setting and one specific to pedestrian detection onboard a vehicle. Results indicate a clear advantage of HOG/linSVM at higher image resolutions and lower processing speeds, and a superiority of the wavelet-based AdaBoost cascade approach at lower image resolutions and (near) real-time processing speeds. The data set (8.5 GB) is made public for benchmarking purposes.

Vehicle parking monitoring and management has become a big challenge for educational institutions with increasing enrollments, high percentage of vehicle ownership and decreasing parking supply which in result triggering blockage of vehicle, congestion, wastage of time and money. In university campuses particularly in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, vehicle parking monitoring and management problem is getting worse and more frustrating due to the fact that majority of students, faculty and staff members own cars and drive through them to the university campuses. These common problems include finding out people (evidence) who are responsible for the damages (hitting, scraping, scratching and dents) to other cars and the blockage of car due to wrong car parking which takes much time to locate the owner of the car. Moreover, locating or forgetting their car park location another difficulty that is often faced by the students, faculty and staff members. The existing cameras located at the parking lots are only for video surveillance and cannot help in such situations as there is a lack of proper vehicle parking monitoring and management system. To cope with above mentioned problems and to ensure a better parking experience by accommodating increasing number of vehicles in a proper convenient manner, we propose a smart vehicle parking monitoring and management system called CampusSense. In CampusSense, Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) cameras and android based mobile application is developed to efficiently monitor, manage and protect the parking facilities at university campuses. Parking problems around the university campus faced by the students, faculty and staff members are analyzed by conducting a survey.

Modern vehicles are evolving with more electronic components than ever before (In this paper, “vehicle” means “automotive vehicle.” It is also equal to “car.”) One notable example is graphical processing unit (GPU), which is a key component to implement a digital cluster. To implement the digital cluster that displays all the meters (such as speed and fuel gauge) together with infotainment services (such as navigator and browser), the GPU needs to be virtualized; however, GPU virtualization for the digital cluster has not been addressed yet. This paper presents a Virtualized Automotive DIsplay (VADI) system to virtualize a GPU and its attached display device. VADI manages two execution domains: one for the automotive control software and the other for the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) software. Through GPU virtualization, VADI provides GPU rendering to both execution domains, and it simultaneously displays their images on a digital cluster. In addition, VADI isolates GPU from the IVI software in order to protect it from potential failures of the IVI software. We implement VADI with Vivante GC2000 GPU and perform experiments to ensure requirements of International Standard Organization (ISO) safety standards. The results show that VADI guarantees 30 frames per second (fps), which is the minimum frame rate for digital cluster mandated by ISO safety standards even with the failure of the IVI software. It also achieves 60 fps in a synthetic workload.

Modern teaching paradigms promote active student participation, encouraging teachers to adapt the teaching process to involve more practical work. In the introductory programming course at the Faculty of Computer and Information Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, homework assignments contribute approximately one half to the total grade, requiring a significant investment of time and human resources in the assessment process. This problem was alleviated by the automated assessment of homework assignments. In this paper, we introduce an automated assessment system for programming assignments that includes dynamic testing of student programs, plagiarism detection, and a proper presentation of the results. We share our experience and compare the introduced system with the manual assessment approach used before.

Critical Infrastructures (CIs) use Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems for remote control and monitoring. Sophisticated security measures are needed to address malicious intrusions, which are steadily increasing in number and variety due to the massive spread of connectivity and standardisation of open SCADA protocols. Traditional Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs) cannot detect attacks that are not already present in their databases. Therefore, in this paper, we assess Machine Learning (ML) for intrusion detection in SCADA systems using a real data set collected from a gas pipeline system and provided by the Mississippi State University (MSU). The contribution of this paper is two-fold: 1) The evaluation of four techniques for missing data estimation and two techniques for data normalization, 2) The performances of Support Vector Machine (SVM), and Random Forest (RF) are assessed in terms of accuracy, precision, recall and F 1 score for intrusion detection. Two cases are differentiated: binary and categorical classifications. Our experiments reveal that RF detect intrusions effectively, with an F_1 score of respectively > 99%.

This paper briefly explains ISO 26262, the new automotive standard for functional safety. The standard is for electrical/electronic systems mounted on series of passenger cars. In the standard, Automotive Safety Integrity Level (ASIL) is classified into four levels according to the required safety level. Each of the ASIL has its own process and steps for item development. This paper focuses on the item development at hardware level, especially for ASIL C and D. The hardware development procedure includes the calculation of single point metric and latent fault metric. Furthermore, we present overall calculation steps of controlling random hardware failure.


Question: Investigating the advantages and practical application of automated explosives detection in airport security X-ray screening for carry-on luggage.

This investigation delves into the misuse of automated decision support systems, specifically focusing on complacency and automation bias, and evaluates the impact of a training program designed to mitigate these issues. The study explores how complacency, manifested as inadequate monitoring and verification of automated functions, can lead to commission errors when interacting with a decision aid in a process control environment. Commission errors occur when operators follow automated recommendations that are incorrect. Despite theoretical assertions, empirical evidence linking complacency to commission errors has been scarce. To address this gap, a controlled laboratory experiment (N = 24) was conducted using a process control simulation. Participants interacted with an automated decision aid designed to assist in fault diagnosis and management. Complacency was quantified by measuring the participants' information-seeking behavior, or the extent to which they sought to verify the automated recommendations. Commission errors were assessed when the aid provided erroneous advice. The findings substantiate the presence of complacency, as participants insufficiently verified the automated recommendations, and commission errors were indeed correlated with high levels of complacency. While commission errors appear to be a potential, though not inevitable, result of complacency, the study also reveals that exposing operators to rare automation failures during training can effectively reduce complacency. This intervention significantly lessens the risk of complacency, although it may not completely eliminate it. The implications of this research are far-reaching, particularly in the context of developing training protocols aimed at preventing the misuse of automated decision aids in various operational scenarios. The insights gained can inform the design of more effective training programs to enhance the safe and efficient use of automation in decision-making processes.

Question: Automation in airport security X-ray screening of cabin baggage: Examining benefits and possible implementations of automated explosives detection.

Similar Documents: A comprehensive analysis of the benefits and potential implementations of automation in airport security X-ray screening for cabin baggage is presented here. The focus is on the integration of advanced automated explosives detection systems. The study evaluates the advantages of automation in enhancing security, improving efficiency, and reducing human error in the screening process. It also explores various implementation strategies for these automated systems, considering factors such as cost, passenger throughput, and the integration with existing airport infrastructure. The analysis includes a review of current technologies and their performance, as well as an assessment of future trends in automated explosives detection. Additionally, the document discusses the potential impact of automation on the overall airport security ecosystem, including the roles of human operators and the need for retraining or upskilling to adapt to the new technologies. The study concludes with recommendations for a phased implementation

As the automobile industry has recently adopted information technologies, the latter are being used to replace mechanical systems with electronically-controlled systems. Moreover, automobiles are evolving into smart cars or connected cars as they are connected to various IT devices and networks such as VANET (Vehicular Ad hoc NETwork). Although there were no concerns about the hacking of automobiles in the past, various security threats are now emerging as electronic systems are gradually filling up the interiors of many automobiles, which are in turn being connected to external networks. As such, researchers have begun studying smart car security, leading to the disclosure of security threats through the testing or development of various automobile security technologies. However, the security threats facing smart cars do not occur frequently and, practically speaking, it is unrealistic to attempt to cope with every possible security threat when considering such factors as performance, compatibility, and so forth. Moreover, the excessive application of security technology will increase the overall vehicle cost and lower the effectiveness of investment. Therefore, smart car security risks should be assessed and prioritized to establish efficient security measures. To that end, this study constructed a security risk assessment framework in a bid to establish efficient measures for smart car security. The proposed security risk assessment framework configured the assessment procedure based on the conventional security risk analysis model GMITS (ISO13335) and utilized 'attack tree analysis' to assess the threats and vulnerabilities.

Automated guided vehicles (AGVs) are now becoming popular in automated materials handling systems, flexible manufacturing systems and even containers handling applications at seaports. Its performance affects the efficiency of the entire system. Deadlock formation is a serious problem as it stalls the AGVS. The objective of this paper is to develop an efficient AGV deadlock prediction and avoidance algorithm for container port operations. Deadlock in a broad sense is a situation in which at least a part of the system stalls. There are a lot of situations in which the system may stall and most of these situations can be avoided through the control and navigation system. This paper discusses the development of an efficient strategy for predicting and avoiding the deadlocks in a large scale AGVS A variety of deadlock-detecting algorithms are available, but these methods work mainly for manufacturing system where the network layout is simple and uses only a small number of AGVs. The AGVS under study has complex layout and involves close to 80 AGVs. The proposed solution is implemented using the Automod simulation software, and the performance of the technique is presented. Simulation shows that all the potential deadlock situations can be detected and avoided via this methodology. Also, the proposed strategy is computationally efficient and is able to provide the movement decision to the vehicles within the 1.5-s sampling time. r 2002 Published by Elsevier Science B.V.

The 3-D reconstruction involves the construction of a 3-D model from a set of images. The 3-D reconstruction has varied uses that include 3-D printing, the generation of 3-D models that can be shared through social media, and more. The 3-D reconstruction involves complex computations in mobile phones that must determine the pose estimation. The pose estimation involves the process of transforming a 2-D object into 3-D space. Once the pose estimation is done, then the mesh generation is performed using the graphics processing unit. This helps render the 3-D object. The competitive advantages of using hardware processors are to accelerate the intensive computation using graphics processors and digital signal processors. The stated problem that this technical paper addresses is the need for a reliable automated test for the 3-D reconstruction feature. The solution to this problem involved the design and development of an automated test system using a programmable robotic arm and rotor for precisely testing the quality of 3-D reconstruction features. The 3-D reconstruction testing involves using a robotic arm lab to accurately test the algorithmic integrity and end-to-end validation of the generated 3-D models. The robotic arm can move the hardware at different panning speeds, specific angles, fixed distances from the object, and more. The ability to reproduce the scanning at a fixed distance and the same panning speed helps to generate test results that can be benchmarked by different software builds. The 3-D reconstruction also requires a depth sensor to be mounted onto the device under examination. We use this robotic arm lab for functional, high performance, and stable validation of the 3-D reconstruction feature. This paper addresses the computer vision use case testing for 3-D reconstruction features and how we have used the robotic arm lab for automating these use cases.

Modern vehicles are evolving with more electronic components than ever before (In this paper, “vehicle” means “automotive vehicle.” It is also equal to “car.”) One notable example is graphical processing unit (GPU), which is a key component to implement a digital cluster. To implement the digital cluster that displays all the meters (such as speed and fuel gauge) together with infotainment services (such as navigator and browser), the GPU needs to be virtualized; however, GPU virtualization for the digital cluster has not been addressed yet. This paper presents a Virtualized Automotive DIsplay (VADI) system to virtualize a GPU and its attached display device. VADI manages two execution domains: one for the automotive control software and the other for the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) software. Through GPU virtualization, VADI provides GPU rendering to both execution domains, and it simultaneously displays their images on a digital cluster. In addition, VADI isolates GPU from the IVI software in order to protect it from potential failures of the IVI software. We implement VADI with Vivante GC2000 GPU and perform experiments to ensure requirements of International Standard Organization (ISO) safety standards. The results show that VADI guarantees 30 frames per second (fps), which is the minimum frame rate for digital cluster mandated by ISO safety standards even with the failure of the IVI software. It also achieves 60 fps in a synthetic workload.

In this paper a new approach to lane marker detection problem is introduced as a significant complement for a semi/fully autonomous driver assistance system. The method incorporates advance line detection using multilayer fractional Fourier transform (MLFRFT) and the state-of-the-art advance lane detector (ALD). Experimental results have shown a considerable reduction in computational complexity.

Convolutional neural network (CNN)-based systems are increasingly used in autonomous vehicles for detecting obstacles. CNN-based object detection and per-pixel classification (semantic segmentation) algorithms are trained for detecting and classifying a predefined set of object types. These algorithms have difficulties in detecting distant and heavily occluded objects and are, by definition, not capable of detecting unknown object types or unusual scenarios. The visual characteristics of an agriculture field is homogeneous, and obstacles, like people, animals and other obstacles, occur rarely and are of distinct appearance compared to the field. This paper introduces DeepAnomaly, an algorithm combining deep learning and anomaly detection to exploit the homogenous characteristics of a field to perform anomaly detection. We demonstrate DeepAnomaly as a fast state-of-the-art detector for obstacles that are distant, heavily occluded and unknown. DeepAnomaly is compared to state-of-the-art obstacle detectors including "Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks" (RCNN). In a human detector test case, we demonstrate that DeepAnomaly detects humans at longer ranges (45-90 m) than RCNN. RCNN has a similar performance at a short range (0-30 m). However, DeepAnomaly has much fewer model parameters and (182 ms/25 ms =) a 7.28-times faster processing time per image. Unlike most CNN-based methods, the high accuracy, the low computation time and the low memory footprint make it suitable for a real-time system running on a embedded GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).

medical fields has led to the automated processing ofpictorial data. Here, a device called the cytocomputer searches for genetic mutations. A computer revolution has occurred not only in technical fields but also in medicine, where vast amounts of information must be processed quickly and accurately. Nowhere is the need for image processing techniques more apparent than in clinical diagnosis or mass screening applications where data take the form of digital images. New high-resolution scanning techniques such as computed tomography, nuclear magnetic resonance, po-sitron emission tomography, and digital radiography produce images containing immense amounts of relevant information for medical analysis. But as these scanning techniques become more vital to clinical diagnosis, the work for specialists who must visually examine the resultant images increases. In many cases, quantitative data in the form of measurements and counts are needed to supplement nonimage patient data, and the manual extraction of these data is a time-consuming and costly step in an otherwise automated process. Furthermore, subtle variants of shade and shape can be the earliest clues to a diagnosis, placing the additional burden of complete thoroughness on the examining specialist. For the last five years, the University of Michigan and the Environmental Research Institute of Michigan have conducted a unique series of studies that involve the processing of biomedical imagery on a highly parallel computer specifically designed for image processing. System designers have incorporated the requirements of extracting a verifiable answer from an image in a reasonable time into an integrated approach to hardware and software design. The system includes a parallel pipelined image processor, called a cytocomputer, and a high-level language specifically created for image processing, C-3PL, the cytocomputer parallel picture processing language. These studies have involved a great many people from both the medical and engineering communities and have highlighted the interdisciplinary aspects of biomedical image processing. The methods have been tested in anatomy, developmental biology, nuclear medicine, car-diology, and transplant rejection. The general consensus is that quantification by automated image analysis not only increases diagnostic accuracy but also provides significant data not obtainable from qualitative analysis alone. One study in particular, on which descriptions in this article are based, involves a joint effort by the University of Michigan's human genetics and electrical and computer engineering departments and is supported by a grant from the National Cancer Institute. Basically, automated image analysis is being applied via sophisticated biochemical and computer techniques to derive …

What machine learning (ML) technique is used for system intelligence implementation in ADAS (advanced driving assistance system)? This paper tries to answer this question. This paper analyzes ADAS and ML independently and then relate which ML technique is applicable to what ADAS component and why. The paper gives a good grasp of the current state-of-the-art. Sample works in supervised, unsupervised, deep and reinforcement learnings are presented; their strengths and rooms for improvements are also discussed. This forms part of the basics in understanding autonomous vehicle. This work is a contribution to the ongoing research in ML aimed at reducing road traffic accidents and fatalities, and the invocation of safe driving.

The paper describes a neural-network-based system for the computer aided detection of lung nodules in chest radiograms. Our approach is based on multiscale processing and artificial neural networks (ANNs). The problem of nodule detection is faced by using a two-stage architecture including: 1) an attention focusing subsystem that processes whole radiographs to locate possible nodular regions ensuring high sensitivity; 2) a validation subsystem that processes regions of interest to evaluate the likelihood of the presence of a nodule, so as to reduce false alarms and increase detection specificity. Biologically inspired filters (both LoG and Gabor kernels) are used to enhance salient image features. ANNs of the feedforward type are employed, which allow an efficient use of a priori knowledge about the shape of nodules, and the background structure. The images from the public JSRT database, including 247 radiograms, were used to build and test the system. We performed a further test by using a second private database with 65 radiograms collected and annotated at the Radiology Department of the University of Florence. Both data sets include nodule and nonnodule radiographs. The use of a public data set along with independent testing with a different image set makes the comparison with other systems easier and allows a deeper understanding of system behavior. Experimental results are described by ROC/FROC analysis. For the JSRT database, we observed that by varying sensitivity from 60 to 75% the number of false alarms per image lies in the range 4-10, while accuracy is in the range 95.7-98.0%. When the second data set was used comparable results were obtained. The observed system performances support the undertaking of system validation in clinical settings.

The system design of an integrated microwave imaging radar for the diagnostic screening of breasts cancer is presented. A custom integrated circuit implemented in a 65-nm CMOS technology and a pair of patch antennas realized on a planar laminate are proposed as the basic module of the imaging antenna array. The radar operates on the broad frequency range from 2 to 16 GHz with a dynamic range of 107 dB. Imaging experiments carried out on a realistic breast phantom show that the system is capable of detecting tumor targets with a resolution of 3 mm.


Question: Investigating the advantages and potential deployment strategies for automated explosives detection in the context of airport security X-ray screening for carry-on luggage.

This study delves into the proficiency of 5,717 airport security personnel in identifying prohibited items within passenger baggage x-ray images over a four-year timeframe. The assessment of their performance was based on the X-Ray Competency Assessment Test (X-Ray CAT), with results gathered annually. In the intervals between assessments, the screeners engaged in diverse levels of training for prohibited item detection, facilitated by an adaptive computer-based system known as X-Ray Tutor (XRT). The prohibited items were classified into four categories: guns, knives, improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and miscellaneous prohibited items. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses were conducted on the training and testing data. The findings from both analyses underscored a significant enhancement in X-Ray CAT performance as a consequence of XRT training, observed across all four item categories. These results suggest that the competence of security screeners in detecting prohibited items within passenger baggage x-ray images can be significantly bolstered through regular XRT training sessions. This research highlights the potential benefits and implications of incorporating advanced training methodologies in enhancing airport security screening, particularly in the context of automated explosives detection systems.

Autonomous driving requires precise detection of the environment and correct classification of all targets. W-band radar technology provides high accuracy object detection in all weather conditions, both day and night. Target classification can be improved by evaluating polarimetric scattering information, where it is in particular promising to work with cicularly polarized waves. Both circular polarizations, left-handed circular (LHC) and right-handed circular (RHC), are necessary with a high cross polarization discrimination (XPD). A particularly high XPD can be achieved by hollow waveguide technology. For that purpose, a radar-frontend with corrugated horn antennas has been designed, manufactured and tested. LHC and RHC data is then entered into an algorithm which takes into account switched transmitter technology, fast-ramp frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) and digital beamforming. Polarimetric radar images are generated, allowing for discrimination and classification of different targets.

In augmented reality displays, X-Ray visualization techniques make hidden objects visible through combining the physical view with an artificial rendering of the hidden information. An important step in X-Ray visualization is to decide which parts of the physical scene should be kept and which should be replaced by overlays. The combination should provide users with essential perceptual cues to understand the relationship of depth between hidden information and the physical scene. In this paper we present an approach that addresses this decision in unknown environments by analyzing camera images of the physical scene and using the extracted information for occlusion management. Pixels are grouped into perceptually coherent image regions and a set of parameters is determined for each region. The parameters change the X-Ray visualization for either preserving existing structures or generating synthetic structures. Finally, users can customize the overall opacity of foreground regions to adapt the visualization.

Modern vehicles are evolving with more electronic components than ever before (In this paper, “vehicle” means “automotive vehicle.” It is also equal to “car.”) One notable example is graphical processing unit (GPU), which is a key component to implement a digital cluster. To implement the digital cluster that displays all the meters (such as speed and fuel gauge) together with infotainment services (such as navigator and browser), the GPU needs to be virtualized; however, GPU virtualization for the digital cluster has not been addressed yet. This paper presents a Virtualized Automotive DIsplay (VADI) system to virtualize a GPU and its attached display device. VADI manages two execution domains: one for the automotive control software and the other for the in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) software. Through GPU virtualization, VADI provides GPU rendering to both execution domains, and it simultaneously displays their images on a digital cluster. In addition, VADI isolates GPU from the IVI software in order to protect it from potential failures of the IVI software. We implement VADI with Vivante GC2000 GPU and perform experiments to ensure requirements of International Standard Organization (ISO) safety standards. The results show that VADI guarantees 30 frames per second (fps), which is the minimum frame rate for digital cluster mandated by ISO safety standards even with the failure of the IVI software. It also achieves 60 fps in a synthetic workload.

Pedestrians are important participants in urban traffic environments, and thus act as an interesting category of objects for autonomous cars. Automatic pedestrian detection is an essential task for protecting pedestrians from collision. In this thesis, we investigate and develop novel approaches by interpreting spatial and temporal characteristics of pedestrians, in three different aspects: shape, cognition and motion. The special up-right human body shape, especially the geometry of the head and shoulder area, is the most discriminative characteristic for pedestrians from other object categories. Inspired by the success of Haar-like features for detecting human faces, which also exhibit a uniform shape structure, we propose to design particular Haar-like features for pedestrians. Tailored to a pre-defined statistical pedestrian shape model, Haar-like templates with multiple modalities are designed to describe local difference of the shape structure. Cognition theories aim to explain how human visual systems process input visual signals in an accurate and fast way. By emulating the center-surround mechanism in human visual systems, we design multi-channel, multi-direction and multi-scale contrast features, and boost them to respond to the appearance of pedestrians. In this way, our detector is considered as a top-down saliency system. In the last part of this thesis, we exploit the temporal characteristics for moving pedestrians and then employ motion information for feature design, as well as for regions of interest (ROIs) selection. Motion segmentation on optical flow fields enables us to select those blobs most probably containing moving pedestrians; a combination of Histogram of Oriented Gradients (HOG) and motion self difference features further enables robust detection. We test our three approaches on image and video data captured in urban traffic scenes, which are rather challenging due to dynamic and complex backgrounds. The achieved results demonstrate that our approaches reach and surpass state-of-the-art performance, and can also be employed for other applications, such as indoor robotics or public surveillance.

15. Supplementary Notes Project performed in cooperation with the Texas Department of Transportation and the Federal Highway Administration. Project Title: Implementation of Automated Pavement Distress Rating Systems 16. Abstract This paper presents the image-processing algorithm customized for high-speed, real-time inspection of pavement cracking. In the algorithm, a pavement image is divided into grid cells of 8 x 8 pixels, and each cell is classified as a non-crack or crack cell using the grayscale information of the border pixels. Whether a crack cell can be regarded as a basic element (or seed) depends on its contrast to the neighboring cells. A number of crack seeds can be called a crack cluster if they fall on a linear string. A crack cluster corresponds to a dark strip in the original image that may or may not be a section of a real crack. Additional conditions to verify a crack cluster include the requirements in the contrast, width, and length of the strip. If verified crack clusters are oriented in similar directions, they will be joined to become one crack. Because many operations are performed on crack seeds rather than on the original image, crack detection can be executed simultaneously when the frame grabber is forming a new image, which permits a real-time, online pavement survey. The trial test results show good repeatability and accuracy when multiple surveys were conducted in different driving conditions.

We survey promising directions for research in the area of formal methods and its applications, including fundamental questions about the combination of formal methods and machine learning, and applications to cyberphysical systems and education.

Finding ways to automate diagnostics from medical images, has continuously been one of the most interesting areas of software development. This article presents a novel approach for detecting the presence of pneumonia clouds in chest X-rays (CXR) by using only Image processing techniques. For this, we have worked on 40 analog chest CXRs pertaining to Normal and Pneumonia infected patients. Indigenous algorithms have been developed for cropping and for extraction of the lung region from the images. To detect pneumonia clouds we have used Otsu thresholding which will segregate the healthy part of lung from the pneumonia infected cloudy regions. We are proposing to compute the ratio of area of healthy lung region to total lung region to establish a result. The task has been performed using Python and OpenCV as they are free, opensource tools and can be used by all, without any legality issues or cost implication.

Chest X-ray (CXR) is one of the most commonly prescribed medical imaging procedures, often with over 2– 10x more scans than other imaging modalities such as MRI, CT scan, and PET scans. These voluminous CXR scans place significant workloads on radiologists and medical practitioners. Organ segmentation is a crucial step to obtain effective computer-aided detection on CXR. In this work, we propose Structure Correcting Adversarial Network (SCAN) to segment lung fields and the heart in CXR images. SCAN incorporates a critic network to impose on the convolutional segmentation network the structural regularities emerging from human physiology. During training, the critic network learns to discriminate between the ground truth organ annotations from the masks synthesized by the segmentation network. Through this adversarial process the critic network learns the higher order structures and guides the segmentation model to achieve realistic segmentation outcomes. Extensive experiments show that our method produces highly accurate and natural segmentation. Using only very limited training data available, our model reaches human-level performance without relying on any existing trained model or dataset. Our method also generalizes well to CXR images from a different patient population and disease profiles, surpassing the current state-of-the-art.

A survey is given on two decades of developments in the field, encompassing an increase in computing power by four orders of magnitude. The '4-D approach' integrating expectation-based methods from systems dynamics and control engineering with methods from AI has allowed to create vehicles with unprecedented capabilities in the technical realm: Autonomous road vehicle guidance in public traffic on freeways at speeds beyond 130 km/h, on-board-autonomous landing approaches of aircraft, and landmark navigation for AGV's, for road vehicles including turn-offs onto cross-roads, and for helicopters in low-level flight (real-time, hardware-in-the-loop simulations in the latter case).

In this paper a new approach to lane marker detection problem is introduced as a significant complement for a semi/fully autonomous driver assistance system. The method incorporates advance line detection using multilayer fractional Fourier transform (MLFRFT) and the state-of-the-art advance lane detector (ALD). Experimental results have shown a considerable reduction in computational complexity.


Question: A region-centric convolutional neural network for logo recognition.

This paper delves into the Pascal Visual Object Classes (VOC) Challenge, a pivotal benchmark for visual object category recognition and detection. Since its inception in 2005, the challenge has served as a standard for evaluating object detection algorithms within the vision and machine learning communities. It offers a comprehensive dataset of annotated images alongside a set of evaluation protocols. This study outlines the dataset and the evaluation methodology. We critically assess the current state-of-the-art techniques for classification and detection, scrutinizing the statistical differences among them, identifying what these methods discern from images—be it the object itself or its contextual surroundings—and pinpointing their strengths and weaknesses. The paper culminates with insights gleaned over the three-year duration of the challenge, suggesting avenues for future enhancement and expansion. Specifically, for logo detection, the VOC challenge's dataset and methodologies provide a robust foundation for training and evaluating region-based convolutional neural networks (CNNs), enabling the identification and localization of logos within images. The challenge's evolution and the lessons learned can guide the development of more sophisticated and context-aware logo detection algorithms.

Region-based analysis is fundamental and crucial in many geospatialrelated applications and research themes, such as trajectory analysis, human mobility study and urban planning. In this paper, we report on an image-processing-based approach to segment urban areas into regions by road networks. Here, each segmented region is bounded by the high-level road segments, covering some neighborhoods and low-level streets. Typically, road segments are classified into different levels (e.g., highways and expressways are usually high-level roads), providing us with a more natural and semantic segmentation of urban spaces than the grid-based partition method. We show that through simple morphological operators, an urban road network can be efficiently segmented into regions. In addition, we present a case study in trajectory mining to demonstrate the usability of the proposed segmentation method.

: In this paper the proposed system uses content based image retrieval (CBIR) technique for identification of seed e.g. wheat, rice, gram etc. on the basis of their features. CBIR is a technique to identify or recognize the image on the basis of features present in image. Basically features are classified in to four categories 1.color 2.Shape 3. texture 4. size .In this system we are extracting color, shape feature extraction. After that classifying images in to categories using neural network according to the weights and image displayed from the category for which neural network shows maximum weight. category1 belongs to wheat and category2 belongs to gram. Experiment was conducted on 200 images of wheat and gram by using Euclidean distance(ED) and artificial neural network techniques. From 200 images 150 are used for training purpose and 50 images are used for testing purpose. The precision rate of the system by using ED is 84.4 percent By using Artificial neural network precision rate is 95 percent.

Faster RCNN is a region proposal based object detection approach. It integrates the region proposal stage and classification stage into a single pipeline, which has both rapid speed and high detection accuracy. However, when the model is applied to the target detection of remote sensing imagery, faced with multi-scale targets, its performance is degraded. We analyze the influences of pooling operation and target size on region proposal, then a modified solution for region proposal is introduced to improve recall rate of multi-scale targets. To speed up the convergence of the region proposal networks, an improved generation strategy of foreground samples is proposed, which could suppresses the generation of non-effective foreground samples. Extensive evaluations on the remote sensing image dataset show that the proposed model can obviously improve detection accuracy for multi-scale targets, moreover the training of the model is rapid and high-efficient.

Detecting small objects is a challenging task. Existing CNN-based objection detection pipeline faces such a dilemma: using a high-resolution image as input incurs high computational cost, but using a low-resolution image as input loses the feature representation of small objects and therefore leads to low accuracy. In this work, we propose a cascade mask generation framework to tackle this issue. The proposed framework takes in multi-scale images as input and processes them in ascending order of the scale. Each processing stage outputs object proposals as well as a region-of-interest (RoI) mask for the next stage. With RoI convolution, the masked regions can be excluded from the computation in the next stage. The procedure continues until the largest scale image is processed. Finally, the object proposals generated from multiple scales are classified by a post classifier. Extensive experiments on Tsinghua-Tencent 100K traffic sign benchmark demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art small object detection performance at a significantly improved speed-accuracy tradeoff compared with previous methods.

Scene text recognition has been a hot research topic in computer vision due to its various applications. The state of the art is the attention-based encoder-decoder framework that learns the mapping between input images and output sequences in a purely data-driven way. However, we observe that existing attention-based methods perform poorly on complicated and/or low-quality images. One major reason is that existing methods cannot get accurate alignments between feature areas and targets for such images. We call this phenomenon “attention drift”. To tackle this problem, in this paper we propose the FAN (the abbreviation of Focusing Attention Network) method that employs a focusing attention mechanism to automatically draw back the drifted attention. FAN consists of two major components: an attention network (AN) that is responsible for recognizing character targets as in the existing methods, and a focusing network (FN) that is responsible for adjusting attention by evaluating whether AN pays attention properly on the target areas in the images. Furthermore, different from the existing methods, we adopt a ResNet-based network to enrich deep representations of scene text images. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks, including the IIIT5k, SVT and ICDAR datasets, show that the FAN method substantially outperforms the existing methods.

This paper proposes a novel method for offline text-independent writer identification by using convolutional neural network (CNN) and joint Bayesian, which consists of two stages, i.e. feature extraction and writer identification. In the stage of feature extraction, since a large number of data is essential to train an effective CNN model with high generalizability and the amount of handwriting is limited in writer identification, a data augmentation technique is first developed to generate thousands of handwriting images for each writer. Then a deep CNN network is designed to extract discriminative features to represent the properties of different writing styles, which is trained by using the generated handwriting images. In the stage of writer identification, the training dataset is used to train the CNN model for feature extraction and the joint Bayesian technique is employed to accomplish the task of writer identification based on the extracted CNN features. The proposed method is tested on two standard benchmark datasets, i.e. ICDAR2013 and CVL dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method gets the best performance compared to the state-of-the-art approaches.

This paper presents a novel scheme for Chinese text recognition in images and videos. It's different from traditional paradigms that binarize text images, fed the binarized text to an OCR engine and get the recognized results. The proposed scheme, named grayscale based Chinese Image Text Recognition (gCITR), implements the recognition directly on grayscale pixels via the following steps: image text over-segmentation, building recognition graph, Chinese character recognition and beam search determination. The advantages of gCITR lie in: (1) it does not heavily rely on the performance of binarization, which is not robust in practical and thus severely affects the performance of OCR, (2) grayscale image retains more information of the text thus facilitates the recognition. Experimental results on text from 13 TV news videos demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed gCITR, from which significant performance gains are observed.

We propose a method to identify and localize object classes in images. Instead of operating at the pixel level, we advocate the use of superpixels as the basic unit of a class segmentation or pixel localization scheme. To this end, we construct a classifier on the histogram of local features found in each superpixel. We regularize this classifier by aggregating histograms in the neighborhood of each superpixel and then refine our results further by using the classifier in a conditional random field operating on the superpixel graph. Our proposed method exceeds the previously published state-of-the-art on two challenging datasets: Graz-02 and the PASCAL VOC 2007 Segmentation Challenge.

Object recognition is a key function in both human and machine vision. While brain decoding of seen and imagined objects has been achieved, the prediction is limited to training examples. We present a decoding approach for arbitrary objects using the machine vision principle that an object category is represented by a set of features rendered invariant through hierarchical processing. We show that visual features, including those derived from a deep convolutional neural network, can be predicted from fMRI patterns, and that greater accuracy is achieved for low-/high-level features with lower-/higher-level visual areas, respectively. Predicted features are used to identify seen/imagined object categories (extending beyond decoder training) from a set of computed features for numerous object images. Furthermore, decoding of imagined objects reveals progressive recruitment of higher-to-lower visual representations. Our results demonstrate a homology between human and machine vision and its utility for brain-based information retrieval.

This paper proposes an effective segmentation-free approach using a hybrid neural network hidden Markov model (NN-HMM) for offline handwritten Chinese text recognition (HCTR). In the general Bayesian framework, the handwritten Chinese text line is sequentially modeled by HMMs with each representing one character class, while the NN-based classifier is adopted to calculate the posterior probability of all HMM states. The key issues in feature extraction, character modeling, and language modeling are comprehensively investigated to show the effectiveness of NN-HMM framework for offline HCTR. First, a conventional deep neural network (DNN) architecture is studied with a well-designed feature extractor. As for the training procedure, the label refinement using forced alignment and the sequence training can yield significant gains on top of the frame-level cross-entropy criterion. Second, a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN) with automatically learned discriminative features demonstrates its superiority to DNN in the HMM framework. Moreover, to solve the challenging problem of distinguishing quite confusing classes due to the large vocabulary of Chinese characters, NN-based classifier should output 19900 HMM states as the classification units via a high-resolution modeling within each character. On the ICDAR 2013 competition task of CASIA-HWDB database, DNN-HMM yields a promising character error rate (CER) of 5.24% by making a good trade-off between the computational complexity and recognition accuracy. To the best of our knowledge, DCNN-HMM can achieve a best published CER of 3.53%.