Refine
H-BRS Bibliography
- yes (77)
Departments, institutes and facilities
- Fachbereich Informatik (77) (remove)
Document Type
- Report (77) (remove)
Year of publication
Keywords
- Robotik (5)
- Cutting sticks-Problem (3)
- Teilsummenaufteilung (3)
- Virtuelle Realität (3)
- AAL-Technik (2)
- Deep Learning (2)
- Engineering (2)
- Forschungsbericht (2)
- Gravitation (2)
- Interaktion (2)
Motion capture, often abbreviated mocap, generally aims at recording any kind of motion -- be it from a person or an object -- and to transform it to a computer-readable format. Especially the data recorded from (professional and non-professional) human actors are typically used for analysis in e.g. medicine, sport sciences, or biomechanics for evaluation of human motion across various factors. Motion capture is also widely used in the entertainment industry: In video games and films realistic motion sequences and animations are generated through data-driven motion synthesis based on recorded motion (capture) data.
Although the amount of publicly available full-body-motion capture data is growing, the research community still lacks a comparable corpus of specialty motion data such as, e.g. prehensile movements for everyday actions. On the one hand, such data can be used to enrich (hand-over animation) full-body motion capture data - usually captured without hand motion data due to the drastic dimensional difference in articulation detail. On the other hand, it provides means to classify and analyse prehensile movements with or without respect to the concrete object manipulated and to transfer the acquired knowledge to other fields of research (e.g. from 'pure' motion analysis to robotics or biomechanics).
Therefore, the objective of this motion capture database is to provide well-documented, free motion capture data for research purposes.
The presented database GraspDB14 in sum contains over 2000 prehensile movements of ten different non-professional actors interacting with 15 different objects. Each grasp was realised five times by each actor. The motions are systematically named containing an (anonymous) identifier for each actor as well as one for the object grasped or interacted with.
The data were recorded as joint angles (and raw 8-bit sensor data) which can be transformed into positional 3D data (3D trajectories of each joint).
In this document, we provide a detailed description on the GraspDB14-database as well as on its creation (for reproducibility).
Chapter 2 gives a brief overview of motion capture techniques, freely available motion capture databases for both, full body motions and hand motions, and a short section on how such data is made useful and re-used. Chapter 3 describes the database recording process and details the recording setup and the recorded scenarios. It includes a list of objects and performed types of interaction. Chapter 4 covers used file formats, contents, and naming patterns. We provide various tools for parsing, conversion, and visualisation of the recorded motion sequences and document their usage in chapter 5.
Studienverläufe von Studenten weichen nicht selten vom offiziell geplanten Curriculum ab. Für eine den Studienerfolg verbessernde Planung und Weiterentwicklung von Studiengängen und Curricula fehlen den Verantwortlichen häufig Erkenntnisse über tatsächliche sowie typischerweise erfolgreiche und weniger erfolgreiche Studienverlaufsmuster. Process-Mining-Techniken können helfen, mehr Transparenz bei der Auswertung von Studienverläufen zu schaffen und so die Erkennung typischer Studienverlaufsmuster, die Überprüfung der Übereinstimmung der konkreten Studienverläufe mit dem vorgegebenen Curriculum sowie eine zielgerechte Verbesserung des Curriculums zu unterstützen.
Das Cutting sticks-Problem ist in seiner allgemeinen Formulierung ein NP-vollständiges Problem mit Anwendungspotenzialen im Bereich der Logistik. Unter der Annahme, dass P ungleich NP (P != NP) ist, existieren keine effizienten, d.h. polynomiellen Algorithmen zur Lösung des allgemeinen Problems.
In diesem Papier werden für eine Reihe von Instanzen effiziente Lösungen angegeben.
Das Cutting sticks-Problem ist in seiner allgemeinen Formulierung ein NP-vollständiges Problem mit Anwendungspotenzialen im Bereich der Logistik. Unter der Annahme, dass P ungleich NP (P != NP) ist, existieren keine effizienten, d.h. polynomiellen Algorithmen zur Lösung des allgemeinen Problems.
In diesem Papier werden Ansätze aufgezeigt, mit denen bestimmte Instanzen des Problems effizient berechnet werden können. Für die Berechnung wichtige Parameter werden charakterisiert und deren Beziehung untereinander analysiert.
Aufgrund eines nahezu gleichlautenden Beschlusses des Kreistages im Rhein-Sieg-Kreis (RSK) und des Hauptausschusses der Stadt Bonn im Jahr 2011 wurden die jeweiligen Verwaltungen beauftragt, gemeinsam mit den Energieversorgern der Region ein Starthilfekonzept Elektromobilität zu entwickeln. In Folge dieses Beschlusses konstituierte sich Ende 2011 ein Arbeitskreis, der aus den Verwaltungen des Rhein-Sieg-Kreises und der Stadt Bonn, den Energieversorgern SWB Energie und Wasser, der Rhenag, den Stadtwerken Troisdorf, der Rheinenergie und den RWE besteht. Die inhaltlichen Schwerpunkte, die inzwischen in drei Arbeitskreisen behandelt werden, umfassen den Ausbau der Ladeinfrastruktur, die Öffentlichkeitsarbeit und die Bereitstellung von Strom aus regenerativen Quellen durch den Zubau entsprechender Anlagen in der Region. Während Maßnahmen zur Öffentlichkeitsarbeit und die Bereitstellung Grünen Stroms aus den Arbeitskreisen direkt bearbeitet und bewegt werden, ist dies aufgrund der Komplexität des Themas und der zahlreichen Einflussgrößen beim Ausbau der Ladeinfrastruktur nicht möglich. Daraus entstand die Überlegung einer Kooperation mit der Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg.
Emotional communication is a key element of habilitation care of persons with dementia. It is, therefore, highly preferable for assistive robots that are used to supplement human care provided to persons with dementia, to possess the ability to recognize and respond to emotions expressed by those who are being cared-for. Facial expressions are one of the key modalities through which emotions are conveyed. This work focuses on computer vision-based recognition of facial expressions of emotions conveyed by the elderly.
Although there has been much work on automatic facial expression recognition, the algorithms have been experimentally validated primarily on young faces. The facial expressions on older faces has been totally excluded. This is due to the fact that the facial expression databases that were available and that have been used in facial expression recognition research so far do not contain images of facial expressions of people above the age of 65 years. To overcome this problem, we adopt a recently published database, namely, the FACES database, which was developed to address exactly the same problem in the area of human behavioural research. The FACES database contains 2052 images of six different facial expressions, with almost identical and systematic representation of the young, middle-aged and older age-groups.
In this work, we evaluate and compare the performance of two of the existing imagebased approaches for facial expression recognition, over a broad spectrum of age ranging from 19 to 80 years. The evaluated systems use Gabor filters and uniform local binary patterns (LBP) for feature extraction, and AdaBoost.MH with multi-threshold stump learner for expression classification. We have experimentally validated the hypotheses that facial expression recognition systems trained only on young faces perform poorly on middle-aged and older faces, and that such systems confuse ageing-related facial features on neutral faces with other expressions of emotions. We also identified that, among the three age-groups, the middle-aged group provides the best generalization performance across the entire age spectrum. The performance of the systems was also compared to the performance of humans in recognizing facial expressions of emotions. Some similarities were observed, such as, difficulty in recognizing the expressions on older faces, and difficulty in recognizing the expression of sadness.
The findings of our work establish the need for developing approaches for facial expression recognition that are robust to the effects of ageing on the face. The scientific results of our work can be used as a basis to guide future research in this direction.
Population ageing and growing prevalence of disability have resulted in a growing need for personal care and assistance. The insufficient supply of personal care workers and the rising costs of long-term care have turned this phenomenon into a greater social concern. This has resulted in a growing interest in assistive technology in general, and assistive robots in particular, as a means of substituting or supplementing the care provided by humans, and as a means of increasing the independence and overall quality of life of persons with special needs. Although many assistive robots have been developed in research labs world-wide, very few are commercially available. One of the reasons for this, is the cost. One way of optimising cost is to develop solutions that address specific needs of users. As a precursor to this, it is important to identify gaps between what the users need and what the technology (assistive robots) currently provides. This information is obtained through technology mapping.
The current literature lacks a mapping between user needs and assistive robots, at the level of individual systems. The user needs are not expressed in uniform terminology across studies, which makes comparison of results difficult. In this research work, we have illustrated the technology mapping of assistive robots using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). ICF provides standard terminology for expressing user needs in detail. Expressing the assistive functions of robots also in ICF terminology facilitates communication between different stakeholders (rehabilitation professionals, robotics researchers, etc.).
We also investigated existing taxonomies for assistive robots. It was observed that there is no widely accepted taxonomy for classifying assistive robots. However, there exists an international standard, ISO 9999, which classifies commercially available assistive products. The applicability of the latest revision of ISO 9999 standard for classifying mobility assistance robots has been studied. A partial classification of assistive robots based on ISO 9999 is suggested. The taxonomy and technology mapping are illustrated with the help of four robots that have the potential to provide mobility assistance. These are the SmartCane, the SmartWalker, MAid and Care-O-bot (R) 3. SmartCane, SmartWalker and MAid provide assistance by supporting physical movement. Care-O-bot (R) 3 provides assistance by reducing the need to move.
Recent work in image captioning and scene-segmentation has shown significant results in the context of scene-understanding. However, most of these developments have not been extrapolated to research areas such as robotics. In this work we review the current state-ofthe- art models, datasets and metrics in image captioning and scenesegmentation. We introduce an anomaly detection dataset for the purpose of robotic applications, and we present a deep learning architecture that describes and classifies anomalous situations. We report a METEOR score of 16.2 and a classification accuracy of 97 %.
This paper describes the security mechanisms of several wireless building automation technologies, namely ZigBee, EnOcean, ZWave, KNX, FS20, and Home-Matic. It is shown that none of the technologies provides the necessary measure ofsecurity that should be expected in building automation systems. One of the conclusions drawn is that software embedded in systems that are build for a lifetime of twenty years or more needs to be updatable.
Tracelets and Specifications
(2017)
In the accompanying paper [1] the authors study a model of concurrent programs in terms of events and a dependence relation, i.e., a set of arrows, between them. There also two simplifying interface models are presented; they abstract in different ways from the intricate network of internal points and arrows of program components. This report supplements [1] by presenting full proofs for the properties of the interface models, in particular, that both models exhibit homomorphic behaviour w.r.t. sequential and concurrent composition. [1] B. Möller, C.A.R. Hoare, M.E. Müller, G. Struth: A discrete geometric model of concurrent program execution. In H. Zhu, J. Bowen: Proc. UTP 16. LNCS 10134. Springer 2017, 1-25
Publikation Umweltdaten
(2009)
Das Cutting sticks-Problem ist ein NP-vollständiges Problem mit Anwendungspotenzialen im Bereich der Logistik. Es werden grundlegende Definitionen für die Behandlung sowie bisherige Ansätze zur Lösung des Problems aufgearbeitet und durch einige neue Aussagen ergänzt. Insbesondere stehen Ideen für eine algorithmische Lösung des Problems bzw. von Varianten des Problems im Fokus.
This project investigated the viability of using the Microsoft Kinect in order to obtain reliable Red-Green-Blue-Depth (RGBD) information. This explored the usability of the Kinect in a variety of environments as well as its ability to detect different classes of materials and objects. This was facilitated through the implementation of Random Sample and Consensus (RANSAC) based algorithms and highly parallelized workflows in order to provide time sensitive results. We found that the Kinect provides detailed and reliable information in a time sensitive manner. Furthermore, the project results recommend usability and operational parameters for the use of the Kinect as a scientific research tool.
Extraction of text information from visual sources is an important component of many modern applications, for example, extracting the text from traffic signs on a road scene in an autonomous vehicle. For natural images or road scenes this is a unsolved problem. In this thesis the use of histogram of stroke widths (HSW) for character and noncharacter region classification is presented. Stroke widths are extracted using two methods. One is based on the Stroke Width Transform and another based on run lengths. The HSW is combined with two simple region features– aspect and occupancy ratios– and then a linear SVM is used as classifier. One advantage of our method over the state of the art is that it is script-independent and can also be used to verify detected text regions with the purpose of reducing false positives. Our experiments on generated datasets of Latin, CJK, Hiragana and Katakana characters show that the HSW is able to correctly classify at least 90% of the character regions, a similar figure is obtained for non-character regions. This performance is also obtained when training the HSW with one script and testing with a different one, and even when characters are rotated. On the English and Kannada portions of the Chars74K dataset we obtained over 95% correctly classified character regions. The use of raycasting for text line grouping is also proposed. By combining it with our HSW-based character classifier, a text detector based on Maximally Stable Extremal Regions (MSER) was implemented. The text detector was evaluated on our own dataset of road scenes from the German Autobahn, where 65% precision, 72% recall with a f-score of 69% was obtained. Using the HSW as a text verifier increases precision while slightly reducing recall. Our HSW feature allows the building of a script-independent and low parameter count classifier for character and non-character regions.
Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are technology systems and devices designed as an aid to the driver of a vehicle. One of the critical components of any ADAS is the traffic sign recognition module. For this module to achieve real-time performance, some preprocessing of input images must be done, which consists of a traffic sign detection (TSD) algorithm to reduce the possible hypothesis space. Performance of TSD algorithm is critical.
One of the best algorithms used for TSD is the Radial Symmetry Detector (RSD), which can detect both Circular [7] and Polygonal traffic signs [5]. This algorithm runs in real-time on high end personal computers, but computational performance of must be improved in order to be able to run in real-time in embedded computer platforms.
To improve the computational performance of the RSD, we propose a multiscale approach and the removal of a gaussian smoothing filter used in this algorithm. We evaluate the performance on both computation times, detection and false positive rates on a synthetic image dataset and on the german traffic sign detection benchmark [29].
We observed significant speedups compared to the original algorithm. Our Improved Radial Symmetry Detector is up to 5.8 times faster than the original on detecting Circles, up to 3.8 times faster on Triangle detection, 2.9 times faster on Square detection and 2.4 times faster on Octagon detection. All of this measurements were observed with better detection and false positive rates than the original RSD.
When evaluated on the GTSDB, we observed smaller speedups, in the range of 1.6 to 2.3 times faster for Circle and Regular Polygon detection, but for Circle detection we observed a decreased detection rate than the original algorithm, while for Regular Polygon detection we always observed better detection rates. False positive rates were high, in the range of 80% to 90%.
We conclude that our Improved Radial Symmetry Detector is a significant improvement of the Radial Symmetry Detector, both for Circle and Regular polygon detection. We expect that our improved algorithm will lead the way to obtain real-time traffic sign detection and recognition in embedded computer platforms.
Der Einsatz von Agentensystemen ist vielfältig, dennoch sind aktuelle Realisierungen lediglich in der Lage primär regelkonformes oder aber „geskriptetes“ Verhalten auch unter Einsatz von randomisierten Verfahren abzubilden. Für eine realistische Repräsentation sind jedoch auch Abweichungen von den Regeln notwendig, die nicht zufällig sondern kontextbedingt auftreten. Im Rahmen dieses Forschungsprojektes wurde ein realitätsnaher Straßenverkehrssimulator realisiert, der mittels eines detailliert definierten Systems für kognitive Agenten auch diese irregulären Verhaltensweisen generiert und somit ein realistisches Verkehrsverhalten für die Verwendung in VR-Anwendungen simuliert. Durch das Erweitern der Agenten mit psychologischen Persönlichkeitsprofilen, basierend auf dem „Fünf-Faktoren-Modell“, zeigen die Agenten individualisierte und gleichzeitig konsistente Verhaltensmuster. Ein dynamisches Emotionsmodell sorgt zusätzlich für eine situationsbedingte Adaption des Verhaltens, z.B. bei langen Wartezeiten. Da die detaillierte Simulation kognitiver Prozesse, der Persönlichkeitseinflüsse und der emotionalen Zustände erhebliche Rechenleistungen verlangt, wurde ein mehrschichtiger Simulationsansatz entwickelt, der es erlaubt den Detailgrad der Berechnung und Darstellung jedes Agenten während der Simulation stufenweise zu verändern, so dass alle im System befindlichen Agenten konsistent simuliert werden können. Im Rahmen diverser Evaluierungsiterationen in einer bestehenden VR-Anwendung – dem FIVIS-Fahrradfahrsimulator des Antragstellers - konnte eindrucksvoll nachgewiesen werden, dass die realisierten Konzepte die ursprünglich formulierten Forschungsfragestellung überzeugend und effizient lösen.
Nowadays Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) are used in many fields of research, e.g. to create prototypes of hardware or in applications where hardware functionality has to be changed more frequently. Boolean circuits, which can be implemented by FPGAs are the compiled result of hardware description languages such as Verilog or VHDL. Odin II is a tool, which supports developers in the research of FPGA based applications and FPGA architecture exploration by providing a framework for compilation and verification. In combination with the tools ABC, T-VPACK and VPR, Odin II is part of a CAD flow, which compiles Verilog source code that targets specific hardware resources. This paper describes the development of a graphical user interface as part of Odin II. The goal is to visualize the results of these tools in order to explore the changing structure during the compilation and optimization processes, which can be helpful to research new FPGA architectures and improve the workflow.
Having multiple talkers on a bus system rises the bandwidth on this bus. To monitor the communication on a bus, tools that constantly read the bus are needed. This report shows an implementation of a monitoring system for the CAN bus utilizing the Altera DE2 development board. The Biomedical Institute of the University of New Brunswick is currently developing together with different partners a prosthetic limb device, the UNB hand. Communication in this device is done via two CAN buses, which operate at a bit-rate of 1 Mbit/s. The developed monitoring system has been completely designed in Verilog HDL. It monitors the CAN bus in real-time and allows monitoring of different modules as well as of the overall load. The calculated data is displayed on the built-in LCD and also transmitted via UART to a PC. A sample receiver programmed in C is also given. The evaluation of this system has been done by using the Microchip CAN Bus Analyzer Tool connected to the GPIO port of the development board that simulates CAN communication.