The 100 most recently published documents
Autonomous driving is one of the future visions in which many vehicle manufacturers are working with high pressure.
Nowadays, it is already supported partially by high-class vehicles. A completely autonomous journey is indeed the goal, but in cars for
the public road traffic still not available. Automatic lane keeping assistants, speed regulators as well as shield and obstacle detections
are parts or precursors on the way to completely autonomous driving.
The American vehicle manufacturer Tesla is not only known for its electric drive, but also for the fact that high-pressure work is carried out on the autonomous drive. Tesla is thus the only vehicle manufacturer to use its users as so-called beta testers for its assistance systems. The progress and the function of the currently available Model S in the field of assistance systems and autonomic driving is documented and described in this paper. It is shown how good or bad the test vehicle manages scenarios in normal road traffic situations
with the assistance systems, e.g. lane keeping assistant, speed control, lane change and distance assistant, and which scenarios can
not be managed by the vehicle itself.
Systeme zur automatisierten Bildanalyse sind vielfältig einsetzbar und gewinnen aufgrund technologischer Weiterentwicklungen und gesellschaftlicher Akzeptanz zunehmend an Bedeutung. Schwerpunkt im Bereich der "Technischen Bildverarbeitung dynamischer Szenen" ist die Entwicklung von Methoden, die bei der Interpretation von Bildern aus verschiedenen Sensordaten Verwendung finden. Dies sind neben den herkömmlichen Kamerabildern im wesentlichen Röntgen- und Radarbilder. Unter geeigneter Berücksichtigung der durch die jeweiligen Anwendungen vorgegebenen Randbedingungen werden daraus entsprechende Verfahren abgeleitet. Derzeitige Projekte beschäftigen sich mit der Analyse von Straßenverkehrsszenen, der Detektion von Sprengstoffzündern bei der Durchleuchtung von Fluggepäck, sowie mit der Bestimmung von Art und Ausdehnung von Ölverschmutzungen bei der Meeresüberwachung.
We are “not” too (young/old) to collaborate: Prominent Key Barriers to Intergenerational Innovation
(2019)
In this study, we analyzed the barriers to technology-supported intergenerational innovation to understand better how young and old can collaborate towards global innovations. Researchers in different disciplines have already identified various barriers to intergenerational collaboration. However, barriers are changing depending on the context of collaboration, and difficulties still exist to support intergenerational innovation in global settings. Therefore, we investigated the barriers that emerge when people work with someone decades older or younger. The results of our study have shown what barriers are influenced by age, what barriers exist only for senior and younger adults. The study theoretically contributes to deepening the Information Systems (IS) community's understanding of the barriers to intergenerational innovation that need to be considered when developing systems for global innovation
Systems for automated image analysis are useful for a variety of tasks and their importance is still increasing due to technological advances and an increase of social acceptance. The main focus of "Technical Image Processing of Dynamic Scenes" lies
with the development of methods for the interpretation of images derived from various sensors. Apart from conventional visual images, this involves mainly X-ray and radar images. Taking into account the requirements of the various applications, suitable methods are derived. Current projects are dealing with the analysis of traffic scenes, detection of detonators when X-raying luggage and determination of type and expansion of oil pollution in maritime surveillance.
Aktiv im Alter
(2016)
Die Prognosen für den demografischen Wandel sind eindeutig: In den kommenden Jahren wird es immer mehr Menschen über 65 Jahre geben. Damit verbunden sind große Herausforderungen für die Gesellschaft und ihre Sozialsysteme, aber auch für viele Angehörige, die ihre Verwandten im Alter pflegen. Doch nicht alle älteren Menschen leben im Kreise ihrer Familie oder können sich Fremdbetreuung durch Pflegedienste leisten. Häufig übernehmen Nachbarn oder Freunde aus der Umgebung diese Aufgabe. Für diese Menschen wird das Wohnquartier zum zentralen Gesundheitsstandort.
Im besten Fall können sie dort ihren Alltag noch lange selbstständig bewältigen und ihre sozialen Kontakte aufrechterhalten. Das soll bald eine App unterstützen. Sie ist Teil eines Trainingsprogramms, das die Hochschule für Gesundheit (hsg) im Verbund mit der Hochschule Ruhr West erarbeitet. Der Name des Projekts ist Programm: „Quartier agil – Aktiv vor Ort“. Mit Übungen zum kognitiven und körperlichen Training, Angeboten für Gruppenaktivitäten, Kommunikationsforen und Funktionen zur Selbstkontrolle wollen die Forscherinnen und Forscher
ältere Menschen fit halten.
In der vorliegenden Arbeit wird ein Verfahren vorgestellt, welches textur- und konturbasierte Verfahren zur Segmentierung fusioniert. Als Kopplungsmatrix wird eine selbstorganisierte Karte nach Kohonen verwendet. Eine verbesserte Objekt- zu Hintergrundtrennung im Vergleich zu Einzelalgorithmen wird demonstriert.
Für das sichere Führen von Fahrzeugen im Straßenverkehr ist ein hohes Maß an Informationsverarbeitung notwendig, um aus den zur Verfügung stehenden Informationen, Handlungen für die Fahrzeugsteuerung abzuleiten. Der Mensch löst diese Aufgabe hauptsächlich auf der Basis visueller Informationen. Durch die Arbeitsweise des menschlichen Gehirns motiviert, wird am Institut für Neuroinformatik der Ruhr-Universität Bochum an einer Fahrzeugführung mittels Computer Vision gearbeitet. Fortlaufend oder zumindest in kurzen Abständen müssen hierbei Verkehrsteilnehmer aus den visuellen Informationen extrahiert und danach weiter attributiert werden. Wichtige Eigenschaften sind hierbei: Objektklasse (PKW, LKW, Fußgänger etc.), Abstand, Geschwindigkeit, Bewegungsrichtung und das Gefahrenpotential bezüglich der eigenen Ortsveränderung. Die Vielzahl der durch die Umwelt aufgestellten Randbedingungen und das aus der Aufgabenstellung implizierte hohe Maß an Sicherheit bedingen ein robustes und flexibles Gesamtsystem. Dieses Gesamtsystem besteht zum einen aus Basis-Algorithmen zur Vorverarbeitung der Eingabedaten und Extraktion von Bildmerkmalen und zum anderen aus darauf aufbauenden Verfahren zur Segmentierung, Klassifizierung und Verfolgung von Fahrzeugen.
Technical Report
(2016)
This internal report discusses the theoretical and practical aspects of the cluster management framework SimpleHydra, which was developed in order to allow researchers the quick setup of classical small to mid-scale computation clusters while being as lightweight and platform independent as possible. We motivate crucial design choices with a theoretical analysis in the aspect of time and space complexity, furthermore we give a comprehensive introduction regarding the frameworks usage (which includes examples and detailed description of fundamental concepts as well as data structures). In addition to that we illustrate application scenarios with complete source code examples. Furthermore we hope that this document proves valuable not only as a development report but also as a practical manual for SimpleHydra.
We present a study on 3D based hand pose recognition using a new generation of low-cost ToF sensors. As signal quality is impaired compared to Kinect-type sensors, we study several ways to improve performance when a large number of gesture classes is involved. We investigate the performance of different 3D descriptors, as well as the fusion of two ToF sensor streams by means of a neural network and obtain, for certain descriptors and fusion strategies, a very satisfactory recognition performance.
Multimodaler Sensor zur Fahrzeugführung: Teilprojekt: Architektur, Rundumsicht und Objekterkennung
(1997)
Analyse dynamischer Szenen
(1999)
In diesem Artikel wird die Analyse dynamischer Szenen im Rahmen einer flexiblen Architektur zur Lösung von Fahrerassistenzaufgaben in Kraftfahrzeugen vorgestellt. Die Lösung unterschiedlicher Aufgaben mit verwandten Ansätzen bedingt einen hohen Grad an Modularität und Flexibilität. Nur so können die gestellten Aufgaben mit den vorhandenen Algorithmen optimal gelöst werden. In der vorgestellten Architektur wird eine objektbezogene Analyse von Sensordaten, eine verhaltensbasierte Szeneninterpretation und eine Verhaltensplanung durchgeführt. Eine globale Wissensbasis, auf der jedes einzelne Modul arbeitet, beinhaltet die Beschreibung physikalischer Zusammenhänge, Verhaltensregeln für den Straßenverkehr, sowie Objekt- und Szenenwissen.
Externes Wissen (z.B. GPS – Global Positioning System) kann ebenfalls in die Wissensbasis eingebunden werden. Als Anwendungsbeispiel der Verhaltensplanung ist ein intelligenter Tempomat realisiert.
For face recognition from video streams speed and accuracy are vital aspects. The first decision whether a preprocessed image region represents a human face or not is often made by a feed-forward neural network (NN), e.g. in the Viisage-FaceFINDER® video surveillance system. We describe the optimisation of such a NN by a hybrid algorithm combining evolutionary multi-objective optimisation (EMO) and gradient-based learning. The evolved solutions perform considerably faster than an expert-designed architecture without loss of accuracy. We compare an EMO and a single objective approach, both with online search strategy adaptation. It turns out that EMO is preferable to the single objective approach in several respects.
Das kEFIR‐Projekt untersucht die praktische Anwendung von thermographischen Verfahren zur Analyse der strukturellen Integrität von Windkraftrotorblättern. Das Projekt entstand in Zusammenarbeit der Hochschule Ruhr West (HRW) mit der IQbis Consulting GmbH im Rahmen eines ZIM‐Förderprojekts des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft und Energie (BMWi). Hintergrund ist die zunehmende Anzahl von Windkraftanlagen (WKA) und der somit steigende Wartungsaufwand. Um einen reibungslosen Betrieb dieser Anlagen zu gewährleisten und damit den besonderen Anforderungen an die Verfügbarkeit energieerzeugender Anlagen sicherzustellen, ist ein Bedarf an qualitativ hochwertigen Fehleranalysesystemen für im Betrieb befindlicher WKA von besonderer Bedeutung. Erfahrungsgemäß ist der Zeitaufwand für diese Inspektionen mit aktuellen Mitteln sehr groß und wird üblicherweise mit mehreren Arbeitstagen kalkuliert. Die Reproduzierbarkeit der gewonnenen Daten ist bei den derzeitigen Methoden meist nicht gewährleistet. Um frühzeitig auf Instabilitäten oder Schäden in den Rotorblättern einer WKA aufmerksam zu werden, ist die Entwicklung eines schnellen und qualitativ hoch wertigen Fehleranalysesystems von zentraler Bedeutung. Ein Forschungsschwerpunkt in diesem Zusammenhang ist die Entwicklung von geeigneten bildgebenden und berührungslosen Verfahren, welche bei den Inspektionen eingesetzt werden können. Beispielsweise erlaubt der Einsatz thermographischer Sensoren eine Analyse nicht nur der Rotorblattoberfläche, sondern auch ihrer inneren Struktur. Weiterhin ist aufgrund des schnell wachsenden Marktes bei unbemannten Luftfahrzeugen, wie beispielsweise positionsstabiler Quatrocoptersysteme, eine zusätzliche Möglichkeit gegeben, die Inspektion von Windenergieanlagen mit Hilfe mobiler, kompakter und fliegender Analysesysteme zu unterstützen.
Das kEFIR‐Projekt untersucht die praktische Anwendung von thermographischen Verfahren zur Analyse der strukturellen Integrität von Windkraftrotorblättern. Das Projekt entstand in Zusammenarbeit der Hochschule Ruhr West (HRW) mit der IQbis Consulting GmbH im Rahmen eines ZIM‐Förderprojekts des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft und Energie (BMWi). Hintergrund ist die zunehmende Anzahl von Windkraftanlagen (WKA) und der somit steigende Wartungsaufwand. Um einen reibungslosen Betrieb dieser Anlagen zu gewährleisten, und damit den besonderen Anforderungen an die Verfügbarkeit energieerzeugender Anlagen sicherzustellen, ist ein Bedarf an qualitativ hochwertigen Fehleranalysesystemen für im Betrieb befindlicher WKA von besonderer Bedeutung. Erfahrungsgemäß ist der Zeitaufwand für diese Inspektionen mit aktuellen Mitteln sehr groß und wird üblicherweise mit mehreren Arbeitstagen kalkuliert. Die Reproduzierbarkeit der gewonnenen Daten ist bei den derzeitigen Methoden meist nicht gewährleistet. Um frühzeitig auf Instabilitäten oder Schäden in den Rotorblättern einer WKA aufmerksam zu werden, ist die Entwicklung eines schnellen und qualitativ hochwertigen Fehleranalysesystems von zentraler Bedeutung. Ein Forschungsschwerpunkt in diesem Zusammenhang ist die Entwicklung von geeigneten bildgebenden und berührungslosen Verfahren, welche bei den Inspektionen eingesetzt werden können. Beispielsweise erlaubt der Einsatz thermographischer Sensoren eine Analyse nicht nur der Rotorblattoberfläche, sondern auch ihrer inneren Struktur. Weiterhin ist aufgrund des schnell wachsenden Marktes bei unbemannten Luftfahrzeugen, wie beispielsweise positionsstabiler Quatrocoptersysteme, eine zusätzliche Möglichkeit gegeben, die Inspektion von Windenergieanlagen mit Hilfe mobiler, kompakter und fliegender Analysesysteme zu unterstützen.
Es ist eine alltägliche Erfahrung, daß wir Urteile über gut oder schlecht, bzw. qualitativ hochwertig oder minderwertig eines Gegenstandes mit der Wahrnehmung des emittierten Geräuschschalls in Verbindung bringen. Der Geräuschlaut ist deshalb ein wichtiges Entscheidungskriterium bei der Auswahl eines Produktes, welches wahrnehmbaren Schall erzeugt. Die Fragestellung hinsichtlich der Geräuschqualität und des Geräuschdesigns stellt daher hohe Anforderungen an den Akustik-Ingenieur. Zum heutigen Zeitpunkt ist es jedoch nicht möglich, mit einer instrumentellen Meßtechnik Aussagen über die Eignung eines Geräuschschalls für ein Produkt zu machen. Es ist nicht möglich, kognitive Faktoren über eine instrumentelle Meßtechnik zu messen. Es reicht nicht aus, eine Geräuschgüte mit Bewertungsschemata wie dem A-bewerteten Schalldruckpegel
oder Lautheitsmodellen zu definieren. Diese lassen allein keine eindeutigen Aussagen über die Wahrnehmung von Geräuschen zu. Der vorliegende Beitrag ist als Ansatz für das Soundengineering von Fahrzeuginnengeräuschen zu sehen. Es wird anhand von Hörversuchen mit Fahrzeuginnengeräuschen ein objektiver Beschreibungskatalog ermittelt, der eine Aussage über die jeweilige Hörempfindung zuläßt.
We propose a new approach to object detection based on data fusion of texture and edge information. A self organizing Kohonen map is used as the coupling element of the different representations. Therefore, an extension of the proposed architecture incorporating other features, even features not derived from vision modules, is straight forward. It simplifies to a redefinition of the local feature vectors and a retraining of the network structure. The resulting hypotheses of object locations generated by the detection process are finally inspected by a neural network classifier based on co-occurence matrices.
Systems for automated image analysis are useful for a variety of tasks and their importance is still increasing due to technological advances and an increase of social acceptance. Especially in the field of driver assistance systems the progress in science has reached a level of high performance. Fully or partly autonomously guided vehicles, particularly for road-based traffic, pose high demands on the development of reliable algorithms due to the conditions imposed by natural environments. At the Institut fur Neuroinformatik, methods for analyzing driving relevant scenes by computer vision are developed in cooperation with several partners from the automobile industry. We introduce a system which extracts the important information from an image taken by a CCD camera installed at the rear view mirror in a car. The approach consists of a sequential and a parallel sensor and information processing. Three main tasks namely the initial segmentation (object detection), the object tracking and the object classification are realized by integration in the sequential branch and by fusion in the parallel branch. The main gain of this approach is given by the integrative coupling of different algorithms providing partly redundant information.
Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird ein hochsprachenprogrammierbares System zur schritthaltenden Vollbild-Interpretation natürlich beleuchteter Szenenfolgen im Videotakt vorgestellt. Im einzelnen werden folgende Teilmodule und Subsysteme beschrieben: eine hochdynamische, pixellokal autoadaptive CMOS-Kamera mit ca. 120 dB Helligkeitsdynamik (20Bits/Pixel) ein hochsprachenprogrammierbarer Systolic Array Prozessor (für die pixelbezogenen Verarbeitungsmodule) im PCI-Kartenformat, samt optimierendem Compiler, Simulator und Emulator Systemprozeßgerüste unter Linux auf den für die Echtzeit-Anwendungen eingesetzten Hostrechnern (z.B. DEC/Alpha oder Intel/ Pentium)eine prototypische Anwendung zur bildverarbeitungsbasierten Eigenbewegungsbeobachtung (Translationsrichtung, Eotationsraten)eine prototypische, automotive Anwendung zur schritthalt enden Detektion und Kartierung des Straßen- und Spurverlaufs unter partieller monokularer 3D-Rekonstruktion, sowie prototypische Anwendungen zur Klassifikation verkehrsrelevanter Hindernisse (Verkehrsteilnehmer)
Das vorliegende Paper gibt einen Überblick über das Verhalten von modernen, autonom navigierenden Fahrzeugen in Baustellen. Dabei werden besondere Herausforderungen für die autonome Navigation im Baustellenbereich benannt. Außerdem wird ein Überblick über die Sensorausstattung und die Fahrerassistenzsysteme von modernen Fahrzeugen gegeben und es werden Technologien vorgestellt, die für eine Verbesserung der autonomen Navigation durch Baustellen genutzt werden können. Es wird ein Versuch durchgeführt, der aufzeigt, wie zuverlässig moderne Fahrzeuge durch Baustellensituationen navigieren können. Dabei werden Schwachstellen, wie bspw. die mangelnde Verfügbarkeit von Fahrerassistenzsystemen bei niedrigen Geschwindigkeiten, aufgedeckt.
Derzeitige Projekte am Institut für Neuroinformatik in Bochum beschäftigen sich mit der Analyse von Straßenverkehrsszenen mittels Computer Vision [12]. Dies impliziert, wegen der durch die natürliche Umwelt aufgestellten Randbedingungen, hohe Anforderungen an die zu entwickelnden Algorithmen. Im speziellen wird versucht, Verkehrsteilnehmer aus Videobildern zu extrahieren und die so gewonnenen Objekthypothesen weiter zu attributieren (z.B. Objektklasse, Abstand, Geschwindigkeit, Gefahrenpotential hinsichtlich der beabsichtigten Eigentrajektorie etc.), um im Hinblick auf den Einsatz in Assistenzsystemen in Fahrzeugen eine möglichst genaue Beschreibung der Umwelt zu erreichen. Nicht nur die große Vielfalt der unterschiedlichen Umweltszenarien, sondern auch das hohe Maß an Sicherheit, das die gestellte Aufgabe erfordert, bedingen ein breitbandiges und flexibles Gesamtsystem [6]. Ein Lösungsvorschlag wird im folgenden behandelt.
Analysis of dynamic scenes
(2000)
In this paper the proposed architecture for a dynamic scene analysis is illustrated by a driver assistance system. To reduce the number of traffic accidents and to increase the drivers comfort, the thought of designing driver assistance systems rose in the past years. Principal problems are caused by having a moving observer (ego motion) in predominantly natural surroundings. In this paper we present a solution for a flexible architecture for a driver assistance system. The architecture can be subdivided into four different parts: the object-related analysis, the knowledge base, the behavior-based scene interpretation, and the behavior planning unit. The object-related analysis is fed with data by the sensors (vision, radar). The sensor data are preprocessed (flexible sensor fusion) and evaluated (saliency map) searching for object-related information (positions, types of objects, etc.). The knowledge base is represented by static and dynamic knowledge. It consists of a set of rules (traffic rules, physical laws), additional information (GPS, lane-information) and it is implicitly used by algorithms in the system. The scene interpretation combines the information extracted by the
object-related analysis and inspects the information for contradictions. It is strongly connected to the behavior planning using only information needed for the actual task. In the scene interpretation consistent representations (i.e., bird’s eye view) are organized and interpreted as well as a scene analysis is performed. The results of the scene interpretation are used for decision making in behavior planning, which is controlled by the actual task.
Handgesten im Automobil haben das Potenzial einer Kombination von gut sichtbaren Displays nahe der Windschutzscheibe und einer als intuitiv empfundenen Gestensteuerung, wie sie berührungsgesteuert von Smartphones aber auch berührungslos von einigen Fernsehgeräten bekannt ist. Bei entsprechender Positionierung der Sensoren können so die Augen auf der Straße und die Hände am Lenkrad oder zumindest sehr nahe dazu verbleiben. Der hier beschriebene frühe Demonstrator zeigt die Machbarkeit dieser Technologie mit einem neuartigen Erkennungsverfahren.
Ziel des Verbundprojektes APFel (Projektlaufzeit: 01.01.2010 ‐ 31.03.2014)war eine zeitlich vorwärts‐ und rückwärtsgerichtete Lokalisation von Personen innerhalb eines Kameranetzwerkes aus sich nicht überlappenden Kameras in Hyperechtzeit zu ermöglichen. Einsatzbereiche dieses Szenarios sind kritische Infrastrukturen wie Flughäfen und Flugplätze. Zunächst fokussierte das Projekt APFel auf die Lokalisation einer einzelnen Zielperson. Weiterführend wurden die entwickelten Verfahren auf die Analyse von Gruppen erweitert, um Personen als Teil einer Gruppe lokalisieren zu können.
We present a novel approach of distributing matrix multiplications among GPU-equipped nodes in a cluster system. In this context we discuss the induced challenges and possible solutions. Additionally we state an algorithm which outperforms optimized GPU BLAS libraries for small matrices. Furthermore we provide a novel theoretical model for distributing algorithms within homogeneous computation systems with multiple hierarchies. In the context of this model we develop an algorithm which can find the optimal distribution parameters for each involved subalgorithm. We provide a detailed analysis of the algorithms space and time complexities and justify its use with a structured evaluation within a small GPU-equipped Beowulf cluster.
We present a novel method to perform multi-class pattern classification with neural networks and test it on a challenging 3D hand gesture recognition problem. Our method consists of a standard one-against-all (OAA) classification, followed by another network layer classifying the resulting class scores, possibly augmented by the original raw input vector. This allows the network to disambiguate hard-to-separate classes as the distribution of class scores carries considerable information as well, and is in fact often used for assessing the confidence of a decision. We show that by this approach we are able to significantly boost our results, overall as well as for particular difficult cases, on the hard 10-class gesture classification task.
A light-weight real-time ap- plicable hand gesture recognition system for automotive applications
(2015)
We present a novel approach for improved hand-gesture recognition by a single time-of-flight(ToF) sensor in an automotive environment. As the sensor's lateral resolution is comparatively low, we employ a learning approach comprising multiple processing steps, including PCA-based cropping, the computation of robust point cloud descriptors and training of a Multilayer perceptron (MLP) on a large database of samples. A sophisticated temporal fusion technique boosts the overall robustness of recognition by taking into account data coming from previous classification steps. Overall results are very satisfactory when evaluated on a large benchmark set of ten different hand poses, especially when it comes to generalization on previously unknown persons.
We present a system for efficient dynamic hand gesture recognition based on a single time-of-flight sensor. As opposed to other approaches, we simply rely on depth data to interpret user movement with the hand in mid-air. We set up a large database to train multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) which are subsequently used for classification of static hand poses that define the targeted dynamic gestures. In order to remain robust against noise and to balance the low sensor resolution, PCA is used for data cropping and highly descriptive features, obtainable in real-time, are presented. Our simple yet efficient definition of a dynamic hand gesture shows how strong results are achievable in an automotive environment allowing for interesting and sophisticated applications to be realized.
We present a novel hierarchical approach to multi-class classification which is generic in that it can be applied to different classification models (e.g., support vector machines, perceptrons), and makes no explicit assumptions about the probabilistic structure of the problem as it is usually done in multi-class classification. By adding a cascade of additional classifiers, each of which receives the previous classifier's output in addition to regular input data, the approach harnesses unused information that manifests itself in the form of, e.g., correlations between predicted classes. Using multilayer perceptrons as a classification model, we demonstrate the validity of this approach by testing it on a complex ten-class 3D gesture recognition task.
Utilizing biometrie traits for privacy- and security-applications is receiving an increasing attention. Applications such as personal identification, access control, forensics appli-cations, e-banking, e-government, e-health and recently person-alized human-smart-home and human-robot interaction present some examples. In order to offer person-specific services for/of specific person a pre-identifying step should be done in the run-up. Using biometric in such application is encountered by diverse challenges. First, using one trait and excluding the others depends on the application aimed to. Some applications demand directly touch to biometric sensors, while others don't. Second challenge is the reliability of used biometric arrangement. Civilized application demands lower reliability comparing to the forensics ones. And third, for biometric system could only one trait be used (uni-modal systems) or multiple traits (Bi- or Multi-modal systems). The latter is applied, when systems with a relative high reliability are expected. The main aim of this paper is providing a comprehensive view about biometric and its application. The above mentioned challenges will be analyzed deeply. The suitability of each biometric sensor according to the aimed application will be deeply discussed. Detailed com-parison between uni-modal and Multi-modal biometric system will present which system where to be utilized. Privacy and security issues of biometric systems will be discussed too. Three scenarios of biometric application in home-environment, human-robot-interaction and e-health will be presented.
As smart homes are being more and more popular, the needs of finding assisting systems which interface between users and home environments are growing. Furthermore, for people living in such homes, elderly and disabled people in particular and others in general, it is totally important to develop devices, which can support and aid them in their ordinary daily life. We focused in this work on sustaining privacy issues of the user during a real interaction with the surrounding home environment. A smart person-specific assistant system for services in home environment is proposed. The role of this system is the assisting of persons by controlling home activities and guiding the adaption of Smart-Home-Human interface towards the needs of the considered person. At the same time the system sustains privacy issues of it’s interaction partner. As a special case of medical assisting the system is so implemented, that it provides for elderly or disabled people person-specific medical assistance . The system has the ability of identifying its interaction partner using some biometric features. According to the recognized ID the system, first, adopts towards the needs of recognized person. Second the system represents person-specific list of medicines either visually or auditive. And third the system gives an alarm in the case of taking medicament either later or earlier as normal taking time.
Forschung an Hochschulen
(2015)
In diesem Aufsatz soll die Forschung an Fachhochschulen beispielhaft aus dem Blickwinkel des Instituts Informatik der in 2009 gegründeten Hochschule Ruhr West betrachtet werden. Am Institut Informatik ist es das Ziel Lehre und Forschung geeignet zu verknüpfen, um Studierenden, wissenschaftlichen Mitarbeiterinnen und Mitarbeitern und auch Lehrenden ein attraktives Angebot in Forschung und Lehre im Bereich der Informatik zu liefern. Dabei bilden neben der Durchführung interessanter Lehrveranstaltungen, welche durch aktuelle Forschungsfragestellungen angereichert werden, das kooperative Bearbeiten von gesellschaftlich relevanten und zukunftsweisenden Forschungsaufgaben, die Teilnahme an Forschungsverbünden, bilaterale Forschungsaktivitäten mit Partnern aus der Wirtschaft und das Einwerben von externen Mitteln, die Basis der Arbeit am Institut.
This contribution presents a novel approach of utilizing Time-of-Flight (ToF) technology for mid-air hand gesture recognition on mobile devices. ToF sensors are capable of providing depth data at high frame rates independent of illumination making any kind of application possible for in- and outdoor situations. This comes at the cost of precision regarding depth measurements and comparatively low lateral resolution. We present a novel feature generation technique based on a rasterization of the point clouds which
realizes fixed-sized input making Deep Learning approaches applicable using Convolutional Neural Networks. In order to increase precision we introduce several methods to reduce noise and normalize the input to overcome difficulties in scaling. Backed by a large-scale database of about half
a million data samples taken from different individuals our
contribution shows how hand gesture recognition is realiz-
able on commodity tablets in real-time at frame rates of up to 17Hz. A leave-one out cross-validation experiment
demonstrates the feasibility of our approach with classification errors as low as 1,5% achieved persons unknown to the model.
We present a light-weight real-time applicable 3D-gesture recognition system on mobile devices for improved Human-Machine Interaction. We utilize time-of-flight data coming from a single sensor and implement the whole gesture recognition pipeline on two different devices outlining the potential of integrating these sensors onto mobile devices. The main components are responsible for cropping the data to the essentials, calculation of meaningful features, training and classifying via neural networks and realizing a GUI on the device. With our system we achieve recognition rates of up to 98% on a 10-gesture set with frame rates reaching 20Hz, more than sufficient for any real-time applications.
We present a publicly available benchmark database for the problem of hand posture recognition from noisy depth data and fused RGB-D data obtained from low-cost time-of-flight (ToF) sensors. The database is the most extensive database of this kind containing over a million data samples (point clouds) recorded from 35 different individuals for ten different static hand postures. This captures a great amount of variance, due to person-related factors, but also scaling, translation and rotation are explicitly represented. Benchmark results achieved with a standard classification algorithm are computed by cross-validation both over samples and persons, the latter implying training on all persons but one and testing on the remaining one. An important result using this database is that cross-validation performance over samples (which is the standard procedure in machine learning) is systematically higher than cross-validation performance over persons, which is to our mind the true application-relevant measure of generalization performance.
Touch versus mid-air gesture interfaces in road scenarios-measuring driver performance degradation
(2016)
We present a study aimed at comparing the degradation of the driver's performance during touch gesture vs mid-air gesture use for infotainment system control. To this end, 17 participants were asked to perform the Lane Change Test. This requires each participant to steer a vehicle in a simulated driving environment while interacting with an infotainment system via touch and mid-air gestures. The decrease in performance is measured as the deviation from an optimal baseline. This study concludes comparable deviations from the baseline for the secondary task of infotainment interaction for both interaction variants. This is significant as all participants are experienced in touch interaction, however have had no experience at all with mid-air gesture interaction, favoring mid-air gestures for the long-term scenario.
Given the success of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) during recent years in numerous object recognition tasks, it seems logical to further extend their applicability to the treatment of three-dimensional data such as point clouds provided by depth sensors. To this end, we present an approach exploiting the CNN’s ability of automated feature generation and combine it with a novel 3D feature computation technique, preserving local information contained in the data. Experiments are conducted on a large data set of 600.000 samples of hand postures obtained via ToF (time-of-flight) sensors from 20 different persons, after an extensive parameter search in order to optimize network structure. Generalization performance, measured by a leave-one-person-out scheme, exceeds that of any other method presented for this specific task, bringing the error for some persons down to 1.5 %.
Applying step heating thermography to wind turbine rotor blades as a non-destructive testing method
(2017)
Systems for automated image analysis are useful for a variety of tasks and their importance is still growing due to technological advances and an increase of social acceptance. Especially in the field of driver assistance systems the progress in science has reached a level of high performance. Fully or partly autonomously guided vehicles, particularly for road-based traffic, pose high demands on the development of reliable algorithms due to the conditions imposed by natural environments. At the Institut für Neuroinformatik methods for analyzing driving relevant scenes by computer vision are developed in cooperation with several partners from the automobile industry. We introduce a system which extracts the important information from an image taken by a CCD camera installed at the rear view mirror in a car. The approach consists of a sequential and a parallel sensor and information processing. Three main tasks namely the initial segmentation (object detection), the object tracking and the object classification are realized by integration in the sequential branch and by fusion in the parallel branch. The main gain of this approach is given by the integrative coupling of different algorithms providing partly redundant information.
Building upon prior results, we present an alternative approach to efficiently classifying a complex set of 3D hand poses obtained from modern Time-Of-Flight-Sensors (TOF). We demonstrate it is possible to achieve satisfactory results in spite of low resolution and high noise (inflicted by the sensors) and a demanding outdoor environment. We set up a large database of pointclouds in order to train multilayer perceptrons as well as support vector machines to classify the various hand poses. Our goal is to fuse data from multiple TOF sensors, which observe the poses from multiple angles. The presented contribution illustrates that real-time capability can be maintained with such a setup as the used 3D descriptors, the fusion strategy as well as the online confidence measures are computationally efficient.
In this article we present a system for coupling different base algorithms and sensors for segmentation. Three different solutions for image segmentation by fusion are described, compared and results are shown. The fusion of base algorithms with colorinformation and a sensor fusion process of an optical and a radar sensor including a feedback over time is realized. A feature-in decision-out fusion process is solved. For the fusion process a multi layer perceptron (MLP) with one hidden layer is used as a coupling net. The activity of the output neuron represents the membership of each pixel to an initial segment.
We present a novel approach of distributing small-to mid-scale neural networks onto modern parallel architectures. In this context we discuss the induced challenges and possible solutions. We provide a detailed theoretical analysis with respect to space and time complexities and reinforce our computation model with evaluations which show a performance gain over state of the art approaches.
Object detection systems which operate on large data streams require an efficient scaling with available computation power. We analyze how the use of tile-images can increase the efficiency (i.e. execution speed) of distributed HOG-based object detectors. Furthermore we discuss the challenges of using our developed algorithms in practical large scale scenarios. We show with a structured evaluation that our approach can provide a speed-up of 30-180 % for existing architectures. Due to the its generic formulation it can be applied to a wide range of HOG-based (or similar) algorithms. In this context we also study the effects of applying our method to an existing detector and discuss a scalable strategy for distributing the computation among nodes in a cluster system.
The behavior planning of a vehicle in real world traffic is a difficult problem to be solved. If different hierarchies of tasks and purposes are built to structure the behavior of a driver, complex systems can be designed. But finally behavior planning in vehicles can only influence the controlled variables: steering angle and velocity. In this paper a behavior planning for a driver assistance system aiming on cruise control is proposed. In this system the controlled variables are determined by an evaluation of the dynamics of two one-dimensional neural fields. The stimuli of the field are determined according to sensor information produced by a simulation environment.
In this paper, we describe a method to model human clothes for a later recognition by the use of RGB- and SWIR-cameras. A basic model is estimated during people detection and tracking. This model will be refined if the recognition is triggered. For the refining, several saliency maps are used to extract individual features. These individual features are located separately for any human body parts. The body parts are estimated by the use of a silhouette extraction combined with a skeleton estimation. In this way, the model describes the human clothes in a compact manner which allows the use of a simple and fast comparison method for people recognition. Such models can be used in security and service applications.
A self-driving car that operates on the SAE automation level 3 or 4 can navigate through different traffic conditions without human input. If such a system is on its operating limits, it will emit a takeover request before shutting down. This request will likely generate a physical response of the driver. Our goal is to shed light on the stress perception of drivers in various scenarios. To this end, we have carried out a feasibility study for preparation. Two subjects drove an autonomous vehicle and during the ride ECG signals were recorded, and afterwards evaluated. Unfortunately, the stress reaction to takeover requests could not be investigated, due to the poor function of the autonomous driving mode from the vehicle, however the reaction to autopilot misconduct without warning to the driver could be investigated instead.
Checking wind turbines for damage is a common problem for operators of wind parks, as regular inspections are legally required in many countries and prevention is economically viable. While some of the common forms of damage are easily visible on the surface, structural problems can remain invisible for years before they eventually result in catastrophic failure of a rotor blade. Common forms of testing fibre composite parts like ultrasonic testing or X-ray tests are impractical due to the large dimensions of wind turbine components and their limited accessibility for any short-range methods. Active thermographic inspection of wind turbines is a promising approach to testing for structural flaws beneath the surface of rotor blades. As part of an ongoing research project, a setup for testing the general viability of this method was built and used to compare different thermographic cameras. A sample cut from a discarded rotor blade was modified to emulate structural damage. The results are promising for the development of a cost effective on-site testing system.
Increasing economic viability and safety through structural health monitoring of wind turbines
(2017)
Serious accidents with property damage or even human casualties, result from structural flaws in wind turbine rotor blades. Common maintenance practices result in long downtimes and do not lead to the required results. Therefore, the Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences and the iQbis Consulting GmbH, currently research a new structural health monitoring method for wind turbine rotor blades. The goal of this project is to build a sensor system that can detect structural weaknesses inside of rotor blades without the need of downtime for industrial climbers. This technology has the potential to prevent accidents, save lives, extend the useful life of wind turbines and optimize the production of green energy.
We present a pipeline for recognizing dynamic freehand gestures on mobile devices based on extracting depth information coming from a single Time-of-Flight sensor. Hand gestures are recorded with a mobile 3D sensor, transformed frame by frame into an appropriate 3D descriptor and fed into a deep LSTM network for recognition purposes. LSTM being a recurrent neural model, it is uniquely suited for classifying explicitly time-dependent data such as hand gestures. For training and testing purposes, we create a small database of four hand gesture classes, each comprising 40 × 150 3D frames. We conduct experiments concerning execution speed on a mobile device, generalization capability as a function of network topology, and classification ability ‘ahead of time’, i.e., when the gesture is not yet completed. Recognition rates are high (>95%) and maintainable in real-time as a single classification step requires less than 1 ms computation time, introducing freehand gestures for mobile systems.
RELEVANCE & RESEARCH QUESTION: Currently the effectiveness of Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) systems as practice teaching methods are virtually uncharted. The proof that these systems can provide the same or better learning outcomes than a text instructed practical task could represent a significant benefit for educational activities. METHODS & DATA: To fathom the effectiveness, an experimental study with the three conditions (VR, AR and a real setup) were used to teach participant how to assemble a standard computer. Each condition was divided into two parts: part one in which participants were confronted with their specific scenario, part two in which participants had to go through a real practice after one week. The learning outcome was determined by the designation of hardware parts, a quiz that queried their function and the correct assembling of the components in addition to needed time. Apart from the mere performance, the acceptance of such application in academic context and difference in evaluation by men and women were of interest. RESULTS: Results concerning the Learning Outcome showed that participants from the VR condition outperformed those learned from the real setup ((M=10.0, SD=0.0) [virtual reality] vs. (M=8.95, SD=1.27) [control]). Furthermore, results from the assembling duration assessment demonstrated that VR Group Participants completed their tasks 6.62% faster than the control group. Regarding the identification of Hardware Parts, both groups scored a significant improvement during the post condition compared to the first test run, indicating a learning progress. However, due to the VR group achieving a better outcome in average answers and a more significant difference between the trials, the results indicate a better performance by participants assigned to the VR condition. ADDED VALUE: The results revealed that VR and AR systems could exceed text-based approach in terms of learning outcome performance. The effectiveness of the systems implicates a major benefit for the educational landscape, as learning content that is not realizable in terms of cost, distance or logistics could be designed as an immersive and engaging experience.
Artificial Intelligence Driven Human-Machine Collaboration Scenarios in Virtual Reality (Poster)
(2018)
In this review, we describe current Machine Learning approaches to hand gesture recognition with depth data from time-of-flight sensors. In particular, we summarise the achievements on a line of research at the Computational Neuroscience laboratory at the Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences. Relating our results to the work of others in this field, we confirm that Convolutional Neural Networks and Long Short-Term Memory yield most reliable results. We investigated several sensor data fusion techniques in a deep learning framework and performed user studies to evaluate our system in practice. During our course of research, we gathered and published our data in a novel benchmark dataset (REHAP), containing over a million unique three-dimensional hand posture samples.
Relax yourself - Using Virtual Reality to enhance employees mental health and work performance
(2019)
This paper presents work-in-progress aiming to develop an actively adapting virtual reality (VR) relaxation application. Due to the immersive nature of VR technologies, people can escape from their real environment and get into a relaxing state. Goal of the application is to adapt to the users' physiological signals to foster the positive effect. Until now, a first version of the VR application was constructed and is currently evaluated in an experiment. Preliminary results of this study demonstrate that people appreciate the immersion into the virtual environment and escape from reality. Moreover, participants highlighted the option to adapt users' needs and preferences. Based on the final study data, the constructed application will be enhanced with regard to adoption and surrounding factors.
Die Entwicklung von vollautomatisierten Fahrzeugen wird in der gesellschaftlichen Diskussion immer präsenter. Wichtig für die Durchsetzung und verbreitete Nutzung dieser technischer Neuerungen ist jedoch vor allem die Akzeptanz der Bevölkerung – in diesem Fall nicht nur die der potenziellen KäuferInnen sondern auch die der übrigen Verkehrs-teilnehmenden. Vorgestellt wird eine explorative Online-Studie zur Akzeptanz von auto-nomen Fahren basierend auf quantitativen und qualitativen Daten einer Stichprobe von N = 89. Die Ergebnisse zeigen unter anderem eine geringe Vertrautheit mit dem Thema, ein vergleichsweise ausgeprägtes Vertrauen aber eine geringe Nutzungsabsicht.
Mobile Walzenmesstechnik
(2003)
E-Learning and openness in education are receiving ever increasing attention in businesses as well as in academia. However, these practices have only to small extent been introduced in public administrations. The study addresses this gap by presenting a literature review on Open Educational Resources [OER] and E-Learning in the public sector. The main goal of the article is to identify challenges to open E-Learning in public administrations. Experiences will be conceptualized as barriers which need to be considered when introducing open E-Learning systems and programs in administrations. The main outcome is a systematic review of lessons learned, presented as a contextualized Barrier Framework which is suitable to analyze requirements when introducing E-Learning and OER in public administrations.
Why do barriers to the exchange of open knowledge resources change in public administrations? Experts in the public sector have been interviewed and outlined antecedents of change to certain barriers. The results are an initial step towards theorizing on barrier change and stepping beyond the current trend of categorizing difficulties to e-Learning and use of open knowledge resources. Categorizing only shows the range of potential challenges. Whether and how the barriers change, however, is seldom addressed in previous literature. The results presented in this study thus provide a new perspective on the phenomenon. Results are part of a longitudinal study about open e-Learning in the public sector across four European countries. They will provide fresh empirical input for discussions at the World Conference on E-Learning how to advance future research and practices in the domain
We present a system for 3D hand gesture recognition based on low-cost time-of-flight(ToF) sensors intended for outdoor use in automotive human-machine interaction. As signal quality is impaired compared to Kinect-type sensors, we study several ways to improve performance when a large number of gesture classes is involved. Our system fuses data coming from two ToF sensors which is used to build up a large database and subsequently train a multilayer perceptron (MLP). We demonstrate that we are able to reliably classify a set of ten hand gestures in real-time and describe the setup of the system, the utilised methods as well as possible application scenarios.
PROPRE is a generic and modular neural learning paradigm that autonomously extracts meaningful concepts of multimodal data flows driven by predictability across modalities in an unsupervised, incremental and online way. For that purpose, PROPRE consists of the combination of projection and prediction. Firstly, each data flow is topologically projected with a self-organizing map, largely inspired from the Kohonen model. Secondly, each projection is predicted by each other map activities, by mean of linear regressions. The main originality of PROPRE is the use of a simple and generic predictability measure that compares predicted and real activities for each modal stream. This measure drives the corresponding projection learning to favor the mapping of predictable stimuli across modalities at the system level (i.e. that their predictability measure overcomes some threshold). This predictability measure acts as a self-evaluation module that tends to bias the representations extracted by the system so that to improve their correlations across modalities. We already showed that this modulation mechanism is able to bootstrap representation extraction from previously learned representations with artificial multimodal data related to basic robotic behaviors [1] and improves performance of the system for classification of visual data within a supervised learning context [2]. In this article, we improve the self-evaluation module of PROPRE, by introducing a sliding threshold, and apply it to the unsupervised classification of gestures caught from two time-of-flight (ToF) cameras. In this context, we illustrate that the modulation mechanism is still useful although less efficient than purely supervised learning.
We present a study on 3D based hand pose recognition using a new generation of low-cost time-of-flight(ToF) sensors intended for
outdoor use in automotive human-machine interaction. As signal quality
is impaired compared to Kinect-type sensors, we study several ways to
improve performance when a large number of gesture classes is involved. We investigate the performance of different 3D descriptors, as well as the fusion of two ToF sensor streams. By basing a data fusion strategy on the fact that multilayer perceptrons can produce normalized confidences individually for each class, and similarly by designing information-theoretic online measures for assessing confidences of decisions, we show that appropriately chosen fusion strategies can improve overall performance to a very satisfactory level. Real-time capability is retained as the used 3D descriptors, the fusion strategy as well as the online confidence measures are computationally efficient.
Mobile devices are nowadays used almost ubiquitously by a large number of users. 2013 was the first year in which the number of sold mobile devices (tablet computers and mobile phones) outperformed the number of PCs’ sold. And this trend seems to be continuing in the coming years. Additionally, the scenarios in which these kinds of devices are used, grow almost day by day. Another trend in modern landscapes is the idea of Cloud Computing, that basically allows for a very flexible provision of computational services to customers. Yet, these two trends are not well connected. Of course there exists already quite a large amount of mobile applications (apps) that utilize Cloud Computing based services. The other way round, that mobile devices provide one of the building blocks for the provision of Cloud Computing based services is not well established yet. Therefore, this paper concentrates on an extension of a technology that allows to provide standardized Web Services, as one of the building blocks for Cloud Computing, on mobile devices. The extension hereby consists of a new approach that now also allows to provide asynchronous Web Services on mobile devices, in contrast to synchronous ones. Additionally, this paper also illustrates how the described technology was already used in an app provided by a business partner.
This paper describes the design and development stages of a web-based framework, aiming to support the creation of mobile applications within the context of mobile learning. The suggested approach offers the opportunity to deploy and execute these applications on mobile devices. This web-based solution additionally offers the possibility to visualize the data collected by the mobile applications in a web-browser. Despite previous research efforts carried out in this domain, few of the projects have addressed these processes from a purely web-based perspective. Currently, a prototype of an authoring tool for creating mobile data collection applications is already implemented. In order to integrate and validate this solution in everyday educational settings, we are collaborating with a network of high schools. On the basis of workshops with teachers we will carry out, refinements and requirements for further enhancements will be collected and will be used to guide our coming efforts.
Recommender systems have become an important application domain related to the development of personalized mobile services. Thus, various recommender mechanisms have been developed for filtering and delivering relevant information to mobile users. This paper presents a rich context model to provide the relevant content of news to the current context of mobile users. The proposed rich context model allows not only providing relevant news with respect to the user’s current context but, at the same time, also determines a convenient representation format of news suitable for mobile devices.
In recent years, teachers have started to conduct pedagogical activities to promote different kinds of learning interactions supported by rich media. The deployment of such activities is rapidly increasing, as teachers and students own technological means that allow supporting them along such interactions. These activities can be carried out in traditional classroom settings while using regular computers. Additionally, they can also be conducted from anywhere at any time while using smartphones and tablets. In this paper, we describe a pedagogical activity requiring students to author and later peer- assess learning interactions
incorporated to videos in YouTube. We describe EDU.Tube, an environment that enables them to create, share and consume such rich media learning activities across a variety of devices. We then detail a plan for the implementation of an activity that took place in 3 different classes dealing with diverse materials addressing computer science related topics. Finally, we also
provide an evaluation presenting students' insights and feedbacks resulting from the experienced activity. We discuss and analyze these outcomes in order to elaborate on them as concerns that could be applied for the further deployment of the EDU.Tube environment.
This paper presents a web-based framework that allows the creation and deployment of mobile learning activities. We present an authoring tool that allows not-technically skilled persons to design mobile learning tasks and deploy them as a web-based mobile application. Since the presented approach is based exclusively on web-technologies, the deployed mobile application can be executed via a mobile browser and therefore is platform independent. Despite previous research efforts carried out in this domain, few of the projects have addressed this course of actions from a purely web-based perspective. Through the latest development of web technologies, mobile applications have access to internal sensors like camera, microphone and GPS and therefore allow data collection within web-applications. In order to validate whether the proposed framework can be applied in educational settings, we conducted a pilot study with experienced teachers and present the results of these efforts in this paper.
With the introduction of Apple’s iPhone, gesture control became pop-
ular and was perceived as an intuitive means of interaction. Contact-
less gestures received broad attention with the X-Box Kinect.
Current technology is limited to a small number of uses, mainly
in entertainment systems. The target of this project is to increase the
range of possible applications, e.g. to the field of automotive,
industrial applications (manufacturing plants), assisted living in con-
texts ranging from private households to hospitals (interaction for
people with disabilities) and many more.
With a rapidly ageing population, it is increasingly important to de-
velop devices for elderly and disabled people that can support and aid
them in their daily lives, helping them to live at home as long as pos-
sible. The goal of this project is to implement a human-machine inter-
action and assistance system that can offer personalised health sup-
port for elderly people, or for those who have special needs in the
home environment.
As smart homes are being more and more popular, the needs of finding assisting systems which interface between users and home environments are growing. Furthermore, for elderly and disabled people living in such homes it is totally important to develop devices, which can support and aid them in their ordinary daily life. This demands means and tools that extend independent living and promote improved health. In this work we reviewed the state of the art in the assistant systems in home environments. A case study of medical assisting system for elderly and people with disabilities is discussed deeply. A smart nfc-based person-specific assistant system for services in home environment is proposed. The role of this system is the assisting by controlling of home activities and adaption of home-human interface towards the needs of the considered person. For the special case of medical assisting the system has the ability of providing for elderly or disabled people person-specific medical assistance. The system has the ability of identifying its interaction partner using some biometric features. According to the recognized ID the system, first, adopts towards the needs of recognized person. Second the system represents person-specific list of medicaments either visually, on screen, or acoustic, speaker. And third the system gives an alarm in the case of taking medicament either later or earlier as normal taking time.
In the context of existing approaches to cluster computing we present a newly developed modular framework `SimpleHydra' for rapid deployment and management of Beowulf clusters. Instead of focusing only the pure computation tasks on homogeneous clusters (i.e. clusters with identically set up nodes), this framework aims to ease the configuration of heterogeneous clusters and to provide a low-level / high-level object-oriented API for low-latency distributed computing. Our framework does not make any restrictions regarding the hardware and minimizes the use of external libraries to the case of special modules. In addition to that our framework enables the user to develop highly dynamic cluster topologies. We describe the framework's general structure as well as time critical elements, give application examples in the `Big-Data' context during a research project and briefly discuss additional features. Furthermore we give a thorough theoretical time/space complexity analysis of our implemented methods and general approaches.
In this paper, we describe an efficient method for a fast people re-identification based on models of human clothes. An initial model is estimated during people detection and tracking, which will be refined during the re-identification. This stepwise extraction, combination and comparing of features speeds up the whole re-identification. For the refining, several saliency maps are used to extract individual features. These individual features are located separately for any human body part. The body parts are located with an optimized GPU-based HOG detector. Furthermore, we introduce a meanshift-based fusion concept which utilizes multiple detectors in order to increase the detection reliability.
Currently in home environments, robot assisting systems with emotion understanding ability are generally achieved in two several manners. The first is the implementing of such systems in such a way that they offer general services for all considered persons without considering privacy, special needs of their interaction partners. The second way is the targetting of such systems for merely one person. In this work we present a robot assisting system, which has both the abilities of assisting several persons at the same time and sustaining their privacy and security issues. The robot can interact with it's interaction partner emotionally by analyzing the emotions of her expressed either visually, facial expression, or auditive, speech prosody. The role of this system is the providing of person-specific support in home environment. In order to identify its interaction partner the system uses diverse biometric traits. According to the recognized ID the system, first, adopts towards the needs of recognized person. Second the system loads the corresponding emotional profile of the detected interaction partner in order to practice a person-specific emotional human-robot interaction, which has an advantage over the person independent interaction.
One of the technical building blocks of Cloud Computing infrastructures are Web Services. With respect to mobile devices their role as Web Service consumers is widely accepted and today a large number of mobile applications already consume Web Services in order to fulfill their task. Still, not much research is conducted, as yet, to allow deploying Web Services on mobile devices and thus uses these kinds of devices as Web Service providers. This paper presents an analysis of one already implemented approach for provisioning mobile Web Services with respect to energy/battery consumption. Here, after shortly presenting the implementation for the provisioning of mobile Web Services an evaluation of the battery consumption that results in using the approach is presented. Last but not least, an improvement with respect to the battery consumption is presented. The performance test shows that the improved approach provides a reasonable way to introduce Web Service provisioning for mobile devices.
The development of web based applications gained enormous interests in recent years. Most of formerly desktop based applications nowadays provide at least a web based version or are completely re-implemented as web based applications. Nevertheless, from the development point of view, there are still a lot of strategies for the development of web based applications borrowed from the development strategies for desktop applications. Therefore, this paper concentrates on the description of an approach that allows to re-use a from the development of desktop applications well-known Design Pattern with a distinct enhancement for web based applications.
Mobile devices, in the form of smartphones, are endowed with rich capabilities in terms of multimedia, sensors and connectivity. The wide adoption of these devices allows using them across different settings and situations. One area in which mobile devices become more and more prominent is within the field of mobile learning. Here, mobile devices provide rich possibilities for the contextualization of the learner, by using the set of sensors available in the device. On the one hand, the usage of mobile devices enables participation in learning activities independent of time and space. Nevertheless, developing mobile learning applications for the heterogeneity of mobile devices available in the market becomes a challenge. Not only this is a problem related to form factor aspects, but also the large number of different operating systems, platforms and app infrastructures (app stores) are aspects to be considered. In this paper we present our initial efforts with regard to the development of cross-platform mobile applications to support the contextualization of learning content.
The mathematical competence of first year students is an important success factor at least for technical studies. As a significant percentage of students do not have sufficient mathematical skills, universities often utilise blended learning courses to increase these skills prior to the start of studies. Due to the diversity of students and their educational backgrounds, individual strategies are needed to achieve the necessary competence for successfully managing their studies. This paper describes our approach at the University of Applied Sciences Ruhr West, where we are using personalized blended learning concepts based on the measurement of individual mathematical competences at the beginning of a coaching process. This is used to gain a better matching between the individual learner level and the adapted learning concepts. We combine individual presence learning groups and a personalized e-learning environment. This environment is adapted based on mathematical skills of each stud ent. It uses individual learning advices, short-term optical feedback and up to date e-learning material in a Moodle-based LMS (learning management system). The coaching concept is approved by the results of summative and formative evaluations.
Durch Anpassung der Mathematik-Qualifizierungsmaßnahmen in der Studieneingangsphase an die einzelnen Kompetenzen der Studienanfängerinnen und Studienanfänger wird die individuelle Passgenauigkeit der Maßnahmen erhöht und ein hoher Lernfortschritt erzielt. Dies führt zu einer wesentlichen Verbesserung der
Eingangsqualifikation im Bereich der Mathematik und zu einer Homogenisierung der Leistungsfähigkeit von
Studierenden
The term “Cloud Computing” does not primarily specify new types of core technologies but rather addresses features to do with integration, inter-operability and accessibility. Although not new, virtualization and automation are cor features that characterize Cloud Computing. In this paper, we intend to explore the possibility of integrating cloud services with educational scenarios without re-defining neither the technology nor the usage scenarios from scratch. Our suggestion is based on certain solutions that have already been implemented and tested for specific cases.
"Quarter agile" aims to promote older people's social participation and community
via physical and cognitive training which the participants also help create. The project relies heavily on the use of smartphones as training support. Loneliness
and loss of physical and cognitive skills are to be prevented by means of training
and participation in groups. We want to investigate the effects of technology-
assisted training on physical and cognitive performance and social participation of
older people. "Quarter agile" is geared towards healthy people ages 65 and up who are residents of the specified neighborhood.
Design and Evaluation of a Platform Independent Application for Mobile Access of Moodle Quizzes
(2013)
The use of Web Services in modern software development is widely accepted and provides (integrated in an according architecture) a fast, flexible and scalable way for the implementation of modern software products. On the other hand, the development of mobile applications, so called apps, becomes more and more important. While using Web Services also from mobile devices is an already accepted scheme in the development of mobile apps, there is not much work done yet for providing Web Services on mobile devices. Therefore, this paper presents a new perspective to Web Services that could be run on mobile devices and, by this, become mobile Web Services.
One of the most stressing challenges in our culture is the demographic change. On the one hand, people become older and older, at the same time less young people are available in order to support the elderly. Currently, this fact already provides a number of social impacts that need to be solved in the near future. This paper concentrates on the integration of mobile devices in scenarios that allow elderly people to age successfully. Here, the term "aging successfully" refers to broad range of aspects from health to social life of elderly people. A special focus of this paper lies in the question whether services deployed to a mobile device provide advantages in the area of aging successfully. In order to answer this question, both technical challenges are explained and solved by example architectures, and scenarios that benefit from services deployed to mobile devices are explained.
In jedem Unternehmen gibt es Stellen, an denen es nicht rund läuft. In manchen Organisationseinheiten ist Sand im Getriebe, es knirscht und knackt – schon bereits bei der Zusammenarbeit mit anderen Abteilungen. Was kann man tun?
Eine Möglichkeit besteht darin, ein großes Veränderungsprojekt aufzusetzen und alle Mitarbeiter und Führungskräfte ins kalte Wasser zu werfen.
Doch viele dieser großen Veränderungsprojekte scheitern. Hauptgrund ist, dass Führungskräfte von der Notwendigkeit der Änderungen nicht überzeugt sind.
Die Autoren dieses Buchs haben daher einen anderen Ansatz entwickelt:
Veränderung ja, aber in kleinen, nachhaltigen Schritten. In einem solchen kontinuierlichen Veränderungsprozess geht es darum, nach und nach stabil laufende Prozesse einzuführen bzw. bestehende Prozesse zu optimieren. Mit dieser Methode wird die Akzeptanz der Mitarbeiter erreicht. Sie bietet Führungskräften die Möglichkeit, Veränderungen und Prozesse mitzugestalten und sich im Rahmen ihrer Linienverantwortung gezielt einzubringen.
