Category: Uncategorized

Computer Science PGRs in the PG Conference – Lincoln

Amr Ahmed / / Conference, Uncategorized

Today, there has been a good representation from the Computer Science Postgraduate Researchers (PGRs) in the University of Lincoln Postgraduates Conference  (pgconf14.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/).

Some of the PGRs are captured in the photo, while others just missed it.

PGRs in the PG Conference, April 2014, Lincoln.
PG Conference, April 2014, Lincoln

LSoCS (Lincoln School of Computer Science) PGRs had couple of oral presentations to the conference attendees, in addition to the Posters presented.

Nice to see increasing attendance and representation from LSoCS. Thanks to all contributed. Hope you also enjoyed the food

Best wishes.

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 – 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.

 

New Conference paper Accepted to the “ World Congress on Engineering 2013”

Saddam Bekhet / / Conference, Uncategorized

New Conference paper accepted for publishing in  “World Congress on Engineering 2013“.

The paper title is “Video Matching Using DC-image and Local Features ”

Abstract:

This paper presents a suggested framework for video matching based on local features extracted from the DC-image of MPEG compressed videos, without decompression. The relevant arguments and supporting evidences are discussed for developing video similarity techniques that works directly on compressed videos, without decompression, and especially utilising small size images. Two experiments are carried to support the above. The first is comparing between the DC-image and I-frame, in terms of matching performance and the corresponding computation complexity. The second experiment compares between using local features and global features in video matching, especially in the compressed domain and with the small size images. The results confirmed that the use of DC-image, despite its highly reduced size, is promising as it produces at least similar (if not better) matching precision, compared to the full I-frame. Also, using SIFT, as a local feature, outperforms precision of most of the standard global features. On the other hand, its computation complexity is relatively higher, but it is still within the real-time margin. There are also various optimisations that can be done to improve this computation complexity.

Well done and congratulations to Saddam Bekhet .