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The introduction of gestures as a supplementary input modality has become of increasing interest to human computer interaction design, especially for 3D computer environments. This thesis describes the concepts and development of a gesture recognition system based on the machine learning technique of Hidden Markov Models. Well-known from the field of speech recognition, this statistical method is employed in this thesis to represent and recognize predefined gestures. Within this work, gestures are defined as symbols, such as simple geometric shapes or Roman letters. They are extracted from a stream of three-dimensional optical tracking data which is resampled, reduced to 2D and quantized to be used as input to discrete Hidden Markov Models. A set of prerecorded training data is used to learn the parameters of the models and recognition is achieved by evaluating the trained models. The devised system was used to augment an existing virtual reality prototype application which serves as a demonstration and development platform for the VRGeo consortium. The consortium's goal is to investigate and utilize the benefits of virtual reality technology for the oil and gas industry. An isolated test of the system with seven gestures showed accuracies of up to 98.57% and the review from experts in the fields of virtual reality and geophysics was predominantly positive.
High-dimensional and multi-variate data from dynamical systems such as turbulent flows and wind turbines can be analyzed with deep learning due to its capacity to learn representations in lower-dimensional manifolds. Two challenges of interest arise from data generated from these systems, namely, how to anticipate wind turbine failures and how to better understand air flow through car ventilation systems. There are deep neural network architectures that can project data into a lower-dimensional space with the goal of identifying and understanding patterns that are not distinguishable in the original dimensional space. Learning data representations in lower dimensions via non-linear mappings allows one to perform data compression, data clustering (for anomaly detection), data reconstruction and synthetic data generation.
In this work, we explore the potential that variational autoencoders (VAE) have to learn low-dimensional data representations in order to tackle the problems posed by the two dynamical systems mentioned above. A VAE is a neural network architecture that combines the mechanisms of the standard autoencoder and variational bayes. The goal here is to train a neural network to minimize a loss function defined by a reconstruction term together with a variational term defined as a Kulback-Leibler (KL) divergence.
The report discusses the results obtained for the two different data domains: wind turbine time series and turbulence data from computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations.
We report on the reconstruction, clustering and unsupervised anomaly detection of wind turbine multi-variate time series data using a variant of a VAE called Variational Recurrent Autoencoder (VRAE). We trained a VRAE to cluster normal and abnormal wind turbine series (two class problem) as well as normal and multiple abnormal series (multi-class problem). We found that the model is capable of distinguishing between normal and abnormal cases by reducing the dimensionality of the input data and projecting it to two dimensions using techniques such as Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and t-distributed stochastic neighbor embedding (t-SNE). A set of anomaly scoring methods is applied on top of these latent vectors in order to compute unsupervised clustering. We have achieved an accuracy of up to 96% with the KM eans + + algorithm.
We also report the data reconstruction and generation results of two dimensional turbulence slices corresponding to CFD simulation of a HVAC air duct. For this, we have trained a Convolutional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE). We have found that the model is capable of reconstructing laminar flows up to a certain degree of resolution as well generating synthetic turbulence data from the learned latent distribution.
Neural network based object detectors are able to automatize many difficult, tedious tasks. However, they are usually slow and/or require powerful hardware. One main reason is called Batch Normalization (BN) [1], which is an important method for building these detectors. Recent studies present a potential replacement called Self-normalizing Neural Network (SNN) [2], which at its core is a special activation function named Scaled Exponential Linear Unit (SELU). This replacement seems to have most of BNs benefits while requiring less computational power. Nonetheless, it is uncertain that SELU and neural network based detectors are compatible with one another. An evaluation of SELU incorporated networks would help clarify that uncertainty. Such evaluation is performed through series of tests on different neural networks. After the evaluation, it is concluded that, while indeed faster, SELU is still not as good as BN for building complex object detector networks.
Die letzten zwei Jahrzehnte wurden durch das exponentielle Wachstum der zur Verfügung stehenden Daten geprägt. Täglich produzieren Menschen und Maschinen mehr und mehr Daten, die oftmals in verteilten Datenspeichern abgelegt werden. Anwendungsgebiete lassen sich beispielsweise in der Physik und Astronomie finden, wo immense Datenmengen von Teilchenbeschleunigern oder Satelliten erzeugt werden, die gespeichert und verarbeitet werden müssen. Aus diesen Datenmengen können weder vom Menschen direkt noch durch traditionelle Analysemethoden neue Erkenntnisse gewonnen werden. Zur Verarbeitung dieser Datenmassen sind parallele sowie verteilte Datenanalyseverfahren notwendig. [MTT18,NEKH+18]
Machine learning-based solutions are frequently adapted in several applications that require big data in operations. The performance of a model that is deployed into operations is subject to degradation due to unanticipated changes in the flow of input data. Hence, monitoring data drift becomes essential to maintain the model’s desired performance. Based on the conducted review of the literature on drift detection, statistical hypothesis testing enables to investigate whether incoming data is drifting from training data. Because Maximum Mean Discrepancy (MMD) and Kolmogorov-Smirnov (KS) have shown to be reliable distance measures between multivariate distributions in the literature review, both were selected from several existing techniques for experimentation. For the scope of this work, the image classification use case was experimented with using the Stream-51 dataset. Based on the results from different drift experiments, both MMD and KS showed high Area Under Curve values. However, KS exhibited faster performance than MMD with fewer false positives. Furthermore, the results showed that using the pre-trained ResNet-18 for feature extraction maintained the high performance of the experimented drift detectors. Furthermore, the results showed that the performance of the drift detectors highly depends on the sample sizes of the reference (training) data and the test data that flow into the pipeline’s monitor. Finally, the results also showed that if the test data is a mixture of drifting and non-drifting data, the performance of the drift detectors does not depend on how the drifting data are scattered with the non-drifting ones, but rather their amount in the test set
Nowadays perception is still an up-to-date scienti fic issue on a mobile robot system. This thesis introduces an approach on how to recognize objects, namely numbers, using a digital camera on a Volksbot robot. The robot used in this thesis has been specifi cally designed for the SICK robot day. The development of the vision algorithm was done in two stages: the region of interest detection and the actual number recognition. Diff erent algorithms had been tested and evaluated and the Canny edge detector with contour finding has been proven to be the best choice for the region of interest detection and the Tesseract OCR engine was the best decision for number recognition. To integrate the vision component on an existing robot system, ROS was used. This thesis also discusses the integration of the EPOS motor controller into ROS.
Estimation of Prediction Uncertainty for Semantic Scene Labeling Using Bayesian Approximation
(2018)
With the advancement in technology, autonomous and assisted driving are close to being reality. A key component of such systems is the understanding of the surrounding environment. This understanding about the environment can be attained by performing semantic labeling of the driving scenes. Existing deep learning based models have been developed over the years that outperform classical image processing algorithms for the task of semantic labeling. However, the existing models only produce semantic predictions and do not provide a measure of uncertainty about the predictions. Hence, this work focuses on developing a deep learning based semantic labeling model that can produce semantic predictions and their corresponding uncertainties. Autonomous driving needs a real-time operating model, however the Full Resolution Residual Network (FRRN) [4] architecture, which is found as the best performing architecture during literature search, is not able to satisfy this condition. Hence, a small network, similar to FRRN, has been developed and used in this work. Based on the work of [13], the developed network is then extended by adding dropout layers and the dropouts are used during testing to perform approximate Bayesian inference. The existing works on uncertainties, do not have quantitative metrics to evaluate the quality of uncertainties estimated by a model. Hence, the area under curve (AUC) of the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curves is proposed and used as an evaluation metric in this work. Further, a comparative analysis about the influence of dropout layer position, drop probability and the number of samples, on the quality of uncertainty estimation is performed. Finally, based on the insights gained from the analysis, a model with optimal configuration of dropout is developed. It is then evaluated on the Cityscape dataset and shown to be outperforming the baseline model with an AUC-ROC of about 90%, while the latter having AUC-ROC of about 80%.
Das Fraunhofer-Institut für Intelligente Analyse- und Informationssysteme (IAIS) betreibt seit mehreren Jahren auf dem Campus Schloss Birlinghoven in Sankt Augustin angewandte Forschung in den Bereichen Multisensordatenanalyse und Datenvisualisierung.
Im Rahmen einer mehrjährigen Kooperation zwischen dem Fraunhofer-IAIS und der Wehrtechnischen Dienststelle 71 (WTD71) wurde das Seeraumüberwachungssystem iLEXX entwickelt. Es soll den Benutzer auf auffällige Situationen hinweisen und ihm kontextabhängig alle notwendigen Handlungsoptionen zur weiteren Aufklärung der Situation oder der Abwehr einer Bedrohung aufzeigen. Das iLEXX-System verarbeitet eine Vielzahl von Sensordaten und Ereignissen. Abhängig vom Szenario kommen hier mehrere tausend Updates pro Sekunde zusammen, die in Echtzeit vorverarbeitet und visualisiert werden müssen.
Die Matrix-Vektor-Multiplikation für dünn besetzte Matrizen (SpMV) stellt für weitreichende wissenschaftliche Anwendungen eine der Kernoperationen des High-Performance-Computing-Bereichs dar. Für die verteilte Berechnung mit immer beliebter werdenden hybriden Rechenclustern kommt dabei die Frage nach einer geeigneten Partitionierungsstrategie für die Verteilung von Daten und Berechnung auf. Diese Arbeit beschäftigt sich damit welchen Einfluss die Struktur der Matrix und die unterschiedlichen Prozessortypen auf die Leistung der SpMV haben und schlägt ein Modell vor, um für diese eine lastbalancierte Verteilung zu erreichen. Wesentliche Bestandteile sind dabei die Laufzeitvorhersage für aktuelle CPUs und GPUs basierend auf einem abgewandelten Roofline-Modell sowie die bewährte Methode der Graph-Partitionierung.
In der Arbeit wurde ein Steuerungsframework für die LAMA-Bibliothek (http://www.libama.org) zur Konfiguration von Lösern linearer Gleichungssysteme entwickelt. Hierzu wurde ein Parser mit der Boost.Spirit-Biblithek realisiert, der die Laufzeitinterpretation einer domänenspezifische Sprache (DSL) erlaubt. Durch die Konfigurationssprache ist es möglich, Löser ohne Einschränkungen über ihre ID zu verknüpfen, diesen Lösern Logger und logisch verknüpfte Haltekriterien zuzuordnen.
Das Deutsche Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt (DLR) führt viele Forschungen und Studien im Bereich der Luft- und Raumfahrt durch. Dabei spielen die Studien für die Gesundheit und Medizin auch eine sehr wichtige Rolle bei der DLR. Zu diesem Zweck führt die DLR die Artificial Gravity bed rest study (AGBRESA) im Auftrag der European Space Agency (esa) und in Kooperation der NASA durch. In dieser Studie werden die negativen Auswirkungen der Schwerelosigkeit auf dem Menschen im Weltall simuliert. Dabei werden Experimente durchgeführt, um die negative Auswirkungen entgegenzuwirken. Die Ergebnisse der Experimente werden in der DLR digital, aber auch auf Papier dokumentiert. In diesem Master-Projekt habe ich nun die Aufgabe, die Papierprotokolle für den Bereich der Blutabnahme und der Labordokumentation in eine digitale Form zu ersetzen.
Graphbasierte Diskussionen sind eine Form von Online-Diskussionen, bei denen eine Diskussion als Graph visualisiert wird. Beispielhafte Diskussionsanwendungen sind unter anderem Belvedere [SWCP95], FreeStyler [Gas03] oder Digalo [LK06]. Graphen dieser Art sind, was bestimmte Eigenschaften betrifft, vergleichbar mit Petri-Netzen [Pet62]. So gibt es bei Beiden gewichtete, gerichtete Kanten sowie Knoten verschiedenen Typs, die jeweils bestimmte Eigenschaften besitzen. Im Gegensatz zu einem Petri-Netz, das immer ein bipartiter Graph ist, können bei einem Diskussionsgraphen jedoch prinzipiell alle Knoten miteinander verbunden werden. Moderatoren solcher Diskussionen sind oftmals mit dem Problem konfrontiert, dass sie mehrere Diskussionen gleichzeitig beobachten wollen, was jedoch aufgrund der Komplexität der Struktur von Diskussionsgraphen kaum effizient möglich ist.
Distributed computing environments allow collaborative problem solving across teams and organisations. A fundamental precondition for collaboration is the ability to find available participants and be able to exchange information. One way to approach this conceptual formulation are central directories or registry services. A major disadvantage of centralized components is, that they limit the flexibility to form ad hoc networks that are targeted to solve a specific problem. To facilitate flexible and dynamic collaborations, ideas from decentralized and self-organising networks can be combined with concepts of service oriented computing. This project aims to investigate potential solutions for dynamic discovery of network participants and outlines how to manage challenges associated with the development of a discovery protocol for distributed systems. During the course of this project a prototypical implementation was created that integrates into the open source distributed, collaborative problem solving environment RCE [9]. It is currently developed at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) but is planned to make the framework available to broader community.
As cameras are ubiquitous in autonomous systems, object detection is a crucial task. Object detectors are widely used in applications such as autonomous driving, healthcare, and robotics. Given an image, an object detector outputs both the bounding box coordinates as well as classification probabilities for each object detected. The state-of-the-art detectors are treated as black boxes due to their highly non-linear internal computations. Even with unprecedented advancements in detector performance, the inability to explain how their outputs are generated limits their use in safety-critical applications in particular. It is therefore crucial to explain the reason behind each detector decision in order to gain user trust, enhance detector performance, and analyze their failure.
Previous work fails to explain as well as evaluate both bounding box and classification decisions individually for various detectors. Moreover, no tools explain each detector decision, evaluate the explanations, and also identify the reasons for detector failures. This restricts the flexibility to analyze detectors. The main contribution presented here is an open-source Detector Explanation Toolkit (DExT). It is used to explain the detector decisions, evaluate the explanations, and analyze detector errors. The detector decisions are explained visually by highlighting the image pixels that most influence a particular decision. The toolkit implements the proposed approach to generate a holistic explanation for all detector decisions using certain gradient-based explanation methods. To the author’s knowledge, this is the first work to conduct extensive qualitative and novel quantitative evaluations of different explanation methods across various detectors. The qualitative evaluation incorporates a visual analysis of the explanations carried out by the author as well as a human-centric evaluation. The human-centric evaluation includes a user study to understand user trust in the explanations generated across various explanation methods for different detectors. Four multi-object visualization methods are provided to merge the explanations of multiple objects detected in an image as well as the corresponding detector outputs in a single image. Finally, DExT implements the procedure to analyze detector failures using the formulated approach.
The visual analysis illustrates that the ability to explain a model is more dependent on the model itself than the actual ability of the explanation method. In addition, the explanations are affected by the object explained, the decision explained, detector architecture, training data labels, and model parameters. The results of the quantitative evaluation show that the Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD) is more faithfully explained compared to other detectors regardless of the explanation methods. In addition, a single explanation method cannot generate more faithful explanations than other methods for both the bounding box and the classification decision across different detectors. Both the quantitative and human-centric evaluations identify that SmoothGrad with Guided Backpropagation (GBP) provides more trustworthy explanations among selected methods across all detectors. Finally, a convex polygon-based multi-object visualization method provides more human-understandable visualization than other methods.
The author expects that DExT will motivate practitioners to evaluate object detectors from the interpretability perspective by explaining both bounding box and classification decisions.
Grid services will form the base for future computational Grids. Web Services, have been extended to build Grid services. Grid Services are dened in the Open Grid Service Architecture (OGSA). The Globus Alliance has released a Web Service Resource Framework, which is still under development and which is still missing vital parts. One of them is a Concept that allows Grid-Service Requests to securely traverse Firewalls, and its realization. This Thesis aims at the development and realization of a detailed Concept for an Application Level Gateway for Grid services, based on an existing rough concept. This approach should enable a strict division between a local network and the Internet. The internet is considered as a untrusted site and the local network is considered as a trusted site. Grid resources are placed in the internet as well as in the local network. This means that the possibility to communicate through a Firewall is essential. Some further protocols like Grid Resource Allocation and Management (GRAM) and the Grid File Transfer Protocol (GridFTP) must be able to traverse the network borders securely as well, while no further actions must be taken from the user side. The German Federal Oce for Information Security (BSI) proposes a Firewall - Application Level Gateway (ALG) - Firewall solution to the German Aerospace Center (DLR) where this Thesis is written, as a principle approach. In this approach, the local network is divided from the Internet with two rewalls. Between those rewalls is a demilitarized zone (DMZ), where computers may be placed, which can be accessed from the Internet and from the local network. An ALG which is placed in this DMZ should represent the local Grid nodes to the Internet and it should act as a client to the local nodes. All Grid service requests must be directed to the ALG instead of the protected Grid nodes. The ALG then checks and validates the requests on the application level (OSI layer 7). Requests that pose no security threat and fulll certain criteria will then be forwarded to the local Grid nodes. The responses from the local Grid nodes are checked and validated by the ALG as well.
Um eine Software fertigzustellen und dem Endkunden zu übergeben muss zunächst der Entwicklungsprozess durchschritten werden. Das zügige Durchlaufen dieses Entwicklungsprozesses ist besonders für den Endkunden von entscheidender Bedeutung, da die Wartezeit auf das Softwareprodukt für ihn reduziert wird. Problematisch könnte beispielsweise dabei ein modulares Vorgehen werden, wenn zunächst alle einzelnen Teilkomponenten eines Softwareproduktes entwickelt und diese daraufhin in einer anschließenden Phase, auch Integrationsphase genannt, zusammengefügt würden. Die Länge dieser Integrationsphase kann nur schwer vorausgesagt werden, so dass weder das Entwicklerteam noch der Endkunde wissen, wie lang die Fertigstellung des Produktes dauern wird. Dabei entsteht ein weiterer Nachteil. Da die Komponenten separat voneinander entwickelt werden, könnte es passieren, dass diese beim finalen Zusammenfügen nicht kompatibel sein und müssten, falls notwendig, angepasst werden. Die Folge wäre eine Verschwendung von personellen und somit auch finanziellen Ressourcen seitens des entwickelnden Unternehmens.
Object detection concerns the classification and localization of objects in an image. To cope with changes in the environment, such as when new classes are added or a new domain is encountered, the detector needs to update itself with the new information while retaining knowledge learned in the past. Previous works have shown that training the detector solely on new data would produce a severe "forgetting" effect, in which the performance on past tasks deteriorates through each new learning phase. However, in many cases, storing and accessing past data is not possible due to privacy concerns or storage constraints. This project aims to investigate promising continual learning strategies for object detection without storing and accessing past training images and labels. We show that by utilizing the pseudo-background trick to deal with missing labels, and knowledge distillation to deal with missing data, the forgetting effect can be significantly reduced in both class-incremental and domain-incremental scenarios. Furthermore, an integration of a small latent replay buffer can result in a positive backward transfer, indicating the enhancement of past knowledge when new knowledge is learned.
This thesis investigates the benefit of rubrics for grading short answers using an active learning mechanism. Automating short answer grading using Natural Language Processing (NLP) is one of the active research areas in the education domain. This could save time for the evaluator and invest more time in preparing for the lecture. Most of the research on short answer grading was treated as a similarity task between reference and student answers. However, grading based on reference answers does not account for partial grades and does not provide feedback. Also, the grading is automatic that tries to replace the evaluator. Hence, using rubrics for short answer grading with active learning eliminates the drawbacks mentioned earlier.
Initially, the proposed approach is evaluated on the Mohler dataset, popularly used to benchmark the methodology. This phase is used to determine the parameters for the proposed approach. Therefore, the approach with the selected parameter exceeds the performance of current State-Of-The-Art (SOTA) methods resulting in the Pearson correlation value of 0.63 and Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 0.85. The proposed approach has surpassed the SOTA methods by almost 4%.
Finally, the benchmarked approach is used to grade the short answer based on rubrics instead of reference answers. The proposed approach evaluates short answers from Autonomous Mobile Robot (AMR) dataset to provide scores and feedback (formative assessment) based on the rubrics. The average performance of the dataset results in the Pearson correlation value of 0.61 and RMSE of 0.83. Thus, this research has proven that rubrics-based grading achieves formative assessment without compromising performance. In addition, the rubrics have the advantage of generalizability to all answers.
Chipkarten im Mobilfunk
(2002)
This work aims to create a natural language generation (NLG) base for further development of systems for automatic examination questions generation and automatic summarization in Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg and Fraunhofer IAIS, respectively. Nowadays both tasks are very relevant. The first can significantly simplify the university teachers' work and the second to be of assistance for a faster retrieval of knowledge from an excessively large amount of information that people often work with. We focus on the search for an efficient and robust approach to the controlled NLG problem. Therefore, though the initial idea of the project was the usage of the generative adversarial neural networks (GANs), we switched our attention to more robust and easily-controllable autoencoders. Thus, in this work we implement an autoencoder for unsupervised discovery of latent space representations of text, and show the ability of the system to generate new sentences based on this latent space. Apart from that, we apply Gaussian mixture techniques in order to obtain meaningful text clusters and thereby try to create a tool that would allow us to generate sentences relevant to the semantics of the Gaussian clusters, e.g. positive or negative reviews or examination questions on certain topic. The developed system is tested on several datasets and compared to GANs' performance.
Distributed systems comprise distributed computing systems, distributed information systems, and distributed pervasive systems. They are often very complex and their implementation is challenging. Intensive and continuous testing is indispensable to ensure reliability and high quality of a distributed system. The testing process should have a high degree of automation, not only on lower levels (i.e. unit and module testing), but also on higher testing levels (e.g. system, integration, and acceptance tests). To achieve automation on higher testing levels virtual infrastructure components (e.g. virtual machines, virtual networks) that are offered as a Service (IaaS) can be employed. The elasticity of on-demand computation resources fits well together with the varying resource demands of automated test execution.
A methodology for automated acceptance testing of distributed systems that uses virtual infrastructure is presented. It is founded on a task-oriented model that is used to abstract concurrency and asynchronous, remote communication in distributed systems. The model is used as groundwork for a domain-specific language that allows expressing tests for distributed systems in the form of scenarios. On the one hand, test scenarios are executable and, therefore, fully automated. On the other hand, test scenarios represent requirements to the system under test making an automated, example-based verification possible.
A prototypical implementation is used to apply the developed methodology in the context of two different case studies. The first case study uses RCE as an example of a distributed, workflow-driven integration environment for scientific computing. The second one uses MongoDB as an example of a document-oriented database system that offers distributed data storage through master-slave replication. The results of the experimental evaluation indicate that the developed acceptance testing methodology is a useful approach to design, build, and execute tests for distributed systems with high quality and a high degree of automation.
Diese Arbeit soll sich mit dem Erstellen von High Dynamic Range Images beschäftigen und damit, es den Fotografen ein wenig leichter zu machen. Ein Algorithmus zum Entfernen von Bildartefakten wird ausgewählt und parallel unter Nutzung der NVIDIA CUDA API implementiert. Der dadurch erzielte Geschwindigkeitszuwachs macht dieses Verfahren tauglich für den Einsatz in Bildbearbeitungsprogrammen.