Author: Amr Ahmed

PGRs meeting and Research Presentations – January 2014

Amr Ahmed / / Uncategorized

The monthly PGRs Research Presentations was held on Wed. 8th January, 2pm, Room MC3108.

This session we had the following presentations:

Title: “Intelligent Automated System for Diabetic Retinopathy Screening“. Title:   “Crowdsourcing through Social Media: Exploring and understanding crowdsourcing techniques in social media platforms”

By: Talal Albacha

By: Obinna Ajuruchi
Abstract:Diabetic retinopathy (DR) is a common complication of diabetes. It damages the cells at the back of retina and if it is not treated, it can lead to blindness. Diabetes patients should have their eyes examined once a year for signs of damage, this periodic examination helps in early detection of the disease and protect the patient from blindness. The number of diabetes people in UK is 3,044,681 which equals around 4.6 % of UK population. This number highlights the huge cost of sponsoring the experienced ophthalmologists who can adequately grade DR of all patients across all cities in a timely manner.

Thus creating an automated system of detection and grading of DR can significantly reduce the cost and help in providing consistent service for all patients. This trend had been covered by multiple researches worldwide but still needs considerable enhancements and development especially in increasing specificity level and combination of multiple detectors in full automated and learning capable system. The aim of this research project is to build an intelligent system using image processing and machine learning techniques built-up within multi-phase analysis and scanning of the retinal image to help in increasing the accuracy level of the automated diabetic retinopathy detection and grading system; then to become a practical clinical experience

 Abstract: Crowdsourcing is the process of using large groups of unrelated people to solve a task or to analyse large amounts of data, which would otherwise take one person many hours to complete. Crowdsourcing platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk aims to use large numbers of people to achieve the same result in a much shorter time frame. Seti@home, whilst not using people per se, is an example of successful collaborative data analysis projects, with free computer CPU cycles being used to solve a task. Users of social network services have increased in recent years, as of March 2012 Facebook estimates its users at 900 million; These users are already online and are potential crowd workers. The objective of this research study is to investigate how users of social networks can be used in crowdsourcing scenarios, their motivations for doing so and the viability of existing methods.

 

 

 

 

 

PGRs Research Presentations – November 2013

Amr Ahmed / / Uncategorized

The monthly PGRs Research Presentations was held on Wed. 13th November, 2pm, Room MC0025 (Ground floor).

This session we had the following presentations:

Title: “Shaping human-aware navigation and human-robot joint motion using long-term adaptation“. Title:   “Data Analysis of Agent-based Crowd Simultion”

By: Christian Dondrup

By: Qinbing Fu
Abstract:Enabling a mobile service robot to move in a human populated environment is not only a question of safety but also of predictability, consistency, team work efficiency, and the general feeling of comfort of the human. This leads to a form of human-robot joint motion and human-aware navigation which is supposed to be most pleasant for the people involved. There are currently many approaches of solving this issue but most of them are built on constraints and static learning methods and not on long-term learning through interaction. The main focus of this thesis is therefore the creation of novel approaches to shape a robots spatial behaviour ”on-the-fly” using long-term experiences from engagements in joint movements with lay users and trying to find and understand adaptation needs and thereby create a predictable, readable and consistent robot behaviour.This first presentation will focus on state-of-the-art methods of social and human-aware navigation and a first study conducted to find gestures indicating adaptation needs to improve the feeling of comfort of human interaction partners and the likabilaty of the robot itself. Abstract: This work is based on clustering and visualizing an agent-based crowd simulation data in an airport, using K-means, Gaussian Mixture Model and Hidden Markov Model. With the help of these models, we mainly aim to verify the feasibility of our approach to analyse agents’ behaviour in the airport.

 

 

 

The meeting started by welcoming the new PGRs arrived.

After presentations and Q/A sessions, the meeting continued with:

* Congratulations Talal Al-Bacha, for his new baby girl.

* Brief information on the “Students Representative” duties/responsibilities/benefits.

* Election of the PGRs Students Representatives: 2 nominations and 2 positions available (based on a Rep for each 25 PGR).

* Students Reps for this academic year are: Christian Dondrup  and  Touseef Qureshi.

* Discussion about potential activities (social, trips,…etc.)

 

PGRs Research Presentations – October 2013

Amr Ahmed / / Uncategorized

The May’s PGRs Research Presentations was held on Wed. 9th October, 2pm, Meeting Room, MC3108 (3rd floor).

This session we had the following presentations:

Title: “Towards Verification and Validation of Crowd Simulation“. Title:   “COMPUTER VISION FOR THE FOOD INDUSTRY”

By: Oliver Szymanezyk

By: Eugenio Ivorra Martínez
Abstract:Human crowd motion is discussed to be driven by self-organising processes based on the local interaction amongst pedestrians. Despite past observations revealing the affect of social influences within pedestrian groups, they have been mostly neglected in the conceptualisation and implementation of simulated crowds. The impact of group structures on crowd dynamics is still relatively unknown, and developers are using assumptions and intuition within their models. In order to develop reliable and believable crowd simulation models that include group structures, it is necessary to use validated insights from interdisciplinary sociological and psychological research on crowds. Inspired by this need, we adapt computer vision technologies and crowd psychology research into a novel automated crowd simulation analysis tool. Our findings are implemented within an existing agent-based crowd simulation framework. The results demonstrate that the tool captures relevant quantitative data which returns insightful knowledge about the collective group movement of simulated pedestrians. Abstract: Computer vision is widely used for solve all kind of problems in the food industry (e.g. quality assurance of food products, checking the integrity of food packaging, and product manipulation).Until recently only 2D vision was used for these tasks. However, with the evolution of the technology, news fields have been opened for the industry in order to deal with unsolved problems or enhance the current solutions. Two of these fields include 3D vision and hyper-spectral imaging.

In this presentation I will introduce these fields and some solutions that we have developed. Our works are related mainly to quality assurance using non-destructive methods. This includes two works using hyperspectral imaging in which we have measured the food’s freshness, one for chicken breasts and another for smoked salmon.  In other work, we compared two different methods of capturing 3D images (time-of-flight and structured light) for scanning food. In addition, I will talk about the on-going and future work.

 

 

 

The Q/A was followed by a brief cath-up meeting, welcoming new PGRs arrivals and updates on the latest procedures.

 

PGRs Research Presentations – September 2013

Amr Ahmed / / Uncategorized

The May’s PGRs Research Presentations was held on Wed. 11th September, 2pm, Meeting Room, MC3108 (3rd floor).

This session we had the following presentations:

Title: “Simultaneous Localisation and Dense Mapping“. Title:   “Cue-based Aggregation with a Mobile Robot Swarm using a Novel Fuzzy-based Method”

By: Farhad Bazyari

By: Farshad Arvin
Abstract:Simultaneous Localisation and Dense Mapping.  Starting with introducing SLAM systems, then talking about dense mapping techniques and some of my work on this subject and autonomous exploration. Time permitting, I will very briefly mention ‘factor graphs’ as well. In addition to gaining massive popularity in SLAM community, factor graphs are extremely flexible structures that can be used in a wide field of research. So hopefully people whose research field are far from mine will also get something out of the talk. Abstract: In this work, we proposed a novel fuzzy-based method for cue-based aggregation with a mobile robot swarm. Our method is based on the state-of-the-art BEECLUST method that is inspired from thermotactic behavior of honeybee swarms. We assumed to have a sound source as the cue and designed a fuzzy-based controller with four microphone inputs and the output as the predicted direction of the sound source. We used 2 standard triangular membership functions, 12 fuzzy rules (3 for each microphone input) and centroid defuzzification method. We also proposed different variants of BEECLUST method, namely Naive and Vector-averaging methods. We compared the performance of our fuzzy-based method with BEECLUST and these methods using both Player/Stage simulator and custom-built autonomous robots (AMiR). Experiments were performed in two different settings: static and dynamic arenas.  In all the experiments, the fuzzy-based method performed better in terms of aggregation time.

 

 

 

The Q/A was followed by a brief catch-up meeting.

 

PGRs Research Presentations – July 2013

Amr Ahmed / / Uncategorized

The May’s PGRs Research Presentations was held on Wed. 10th July, 2pm, Meeting Room, MC3108 (3rd floor).

This session we had the following presentations:

Title: “Using anisotropic spatiotemporal smoothing to reduce blurring in images under low light conditions“. Title:   “Automated Robot Control with Behaviour Selection, Object Classification and Background Subtraction”

By: Gabriel Zahi

By: Daniel Pashley & Sean Walton
Abstract:Improving images in low light involves the process of summing neighbouring pixels locally in space and time to improve the reliability of the intensity of each pixel and to reduced the effect of noise acquired when capturing images under low light conditions. The summation process is stronger among neighbourhood pixels closer to the central pixel and reduces as the pixels are further away from the central pixel. Though the summation process is an effective way of improving the reliability of  low light images, it has an adverse effect of blurring the image. This presentation introduces the use of the gradient as an anisotropic method to reduce the noise in the images as well as reducing the blurring caused by the summation method. Using the gradient in the three dimension (x,y,t),  we can channel the summation process to lean more towards homogenous pixels and less along non-homogenous pixels. This new approach has proven to reduce the blurring while preserving structures and details.. Abstract: Our research aims to try and tackle some common risks and issues in traditional search and rescue methods by providing an alternative method by which search and rescue can be carried out.  We show how automated ground and air based robots can be used to reduce risk and cost but in turn increase speed of searching.  To do this, cost differences between current search and rescue methods and commercial robotic platforms that can be used in place of traditional methods are shown.  Along with this, we present how search methods can be improved by replacing one or two helicopters with forty ground and air robots laid out in an efficient pattern that allows the fastest search method.  We also show how we can utilise these robots through a central system and use all images and data provided by each of the connected robots to perform background removal and face detection, then use the data in a finite state machine based control system to send control commands back to the robots.  Finally, we present a series of experiments along with their results to prove the validity of this solution.

 

 

Additional presentation by Oliver Szymanezyk , titled:

“Brief on the Masters Prizes and his experience of the event”

 

The Q/A was followed by a brief cath-up meeting.