Technical Report / Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. Department of Computer Science
Publisher: Dean Prof. Dr. Sascha Alda
Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Department of Computer Science
Sankt Augustin, Germany
ISSN 1869-5272
Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, Department of Computer Science
Sankt Augustin, Germany
ISSN 1869-5272
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05-2017
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.
04-2017
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.
03-2017
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.
02-2017
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 %.
01-2017
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.
02-2016
Das Optimalziel für ein Logistiklager ist eine hohe Auslastung des Transportsystems. Es stellt sich somit die Frage nach der Auswahl der Aufträge, die gleichzeitig innerhalb des Lagers abgearbeitet werden, ohne Staus, Blockaden oder Überlastungen entstehen zu lassen. Dieser Auswahlprozess wird auch als Path-Packing bezeichnet. Diese Masterthesis untersucht das Path-Packing auf graphentheoretischer Ebene und stellt verschiedene Greedy-Heuristiken, eine Optimallösung auf Basis der Linearen Programmierung sowie einen kombinierten Ansatz gegenüber. Die Ansätze werden anhand von Messzeiten und Auslastungen unterschiedlich randomisiert erstellter Testdaten ausgewertet.
01-2016
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.
05-2015
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.
04-2015
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.
03-2015
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.
01-2015
Rural areas often lack affordable broadband Internet connectivity, mainly due to the CAPEX and especially OPEX of traditional operator equipment [HEKN11]. This digital divide limits the access to knowledge, health care and other services for billions of people. Different approaches to close this gap were discussed in the last decade [SPNB08]. In most rural areas satellite bandwidth is expensive and cellular networks (3G,4G) as well as WiMAX suffer from the usually low population density making it hard to amortize the costs of a base station [SPNB08].
05-2014
Digitalisierung eines Pen-&-Paper-Rollenspiels mit Übertragung von Interaktionen in die reale Welt
(2015)
Das hier vorliegende Werk ist eine Zusammenführung des Masterprojekts und der darauf aufbauenden Masterarbeit von Antony Konstantinidis und Nicolas Kopp. Diese Arbeiten sind in den Jahren 2013 und 2014 entstanden und ergeben zusammen ein umfassendes Bild der Software- und Spielenentwicklung, der Konzeption von Echtzeitanwendungen und vermitteln Hintergründe aus den verschiedensten Bereichen der Mixed Reality, des Storytelling, der Netzwerkkonzeption und der künstlichen Intelligenz.
04-2014
Business process infrastructures like BPMS (Business Process Management Systems) and WfMS (Workflow Management Systems) traditionally focus on the automation of processes predefined at design time. This approach is well suited for routine tasks which are processed repeatedly and which are described by a predefined control flow. In contrast, knowledge-intensive work is more goal and data-driven and less control-flow oriented. Knowledge workers need the flexibility to decide dynamically at run-time and based on current context information on the best next process step to achieve a given goal. Obviously, in most practical scenarios, these decisions are complex and cannot be anticipated and modeled completely in a predefined process model. Therefore, adaptive and dynamic process management techniques are necessary to augment the control-flow oriented part of process management (which is still a need also for knowledge workers) with flexible, context-dependent, goaloriented support.
03-2014
Ziel des hier beschriebenen Forschungsprojekts war die Entwicklung eines prototypischen Fahrradfahrsimulators für den Einsatz in der Verkehrserziehung und im Verkehrssicherheitstraining. Der entwickelte Prototyp soll möglichst universell für verschiedene Altersklassen und Applikationen einsetzbar sowie mobil sein.
02-2014
A principal step towards solving diverse perception problems is segmentation. Many algorithms benefit from initially partitioning input point clouds into objects and their parts. In accordance with cognitive sciences, segmentation goal may be formulated as to split point clouds into locally smooth convex areas, enclosed by sharp concave boundaries. This goal is based on purely geometrical considerations and does not incorporate any constraints, or semantics, of the scene and objects being segmented, which makes it very general and widely applicable. In this work we perform geometrical segmentation of point cloud data according to the stated goal. The data is mapped onto a graph and the task of graph partitioning is considered. We formulate an objective function and derive a discrete optimization problem based on it. Finding the globally optimal solution is an NP-complete problem; in order to circumvent this, spectral methods are applied. Two algorithms that implement the divisive hierarchical clustering scheme are proposed. They derive graph partition by analyzing the eigenvectors obtained through spectral relaxation. The specifics of our application domain are used to automatically introduce cannot-link constraints in the clustering problem. The algorithms function in completely unsupervised manner and make no assumptions about shapes of objects and structures that they segment. Three publicly available datasets with cluttered real-world scenes and an abundance of box-like, cylindrical, and free-form objects are used to demonstrate convincing performance. Preliminary results of this thesis have been contributed to the International Conference on Autonomous Intelligent Systems (IAS-13).
01-2014
Design of a declarative language for task-oriented grasping and tool-use with dextrous robotic hands
(2014)
Apparently simple manipulation tasks for a human such as transportation or tool use are challenging to replicate in an autonomous service robot. Nevertheless, dextrous manipulation is an important aspect for a robot in many daily tasks. While it is possible to manufacture special-purpose hands for one specific task in industrial settings, a generalpurpose service robot in households must have flexible hands which can adapt to many tasks. Intelligently using tools enables the robot to perform tasks more efficiently and even beyond the designed capabilities. In this work a declarative domain-specific language, called Grasp Domain Definition Language (GDDL), is presented that allows the specification of grasp planning problems independently of a specific grasp planner. This design goal resembles the idea of the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL). The specification of GDDL requires a detailed analysis of the research in grasping in order to identify best practices in different domains that contribute to a grasp. These domains describe for instance physical as well as semantic properties of objects and hands. Grasping always has a purpose which is captured in the task domain definition. It enables the robot to grasp an object in a taskdependent manner. Suitable representations in these domains have to be identified and formalized for which a domain-driven software engineering approach is applied. This kind of modeling allows the specification of constraints which guide the composition of domain entity specifications. The domain-driven approach fosters reuse of domain concepts while the constraints enable the validation of models already during design time. A proof of concept implementation of GDDL into the GraspIt! grasp planner is developed. Preliminary results of this thesis have been published and presented on the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
03-2013
The objective of this research project is to develop a user-friendly and cost-effective interactive input device that allows intuitive and efficient manipulation of 3D objects (6 DoF) in virtual reality (VR) visualization environments with flat projections walls. During this project, it was planned to develop an extended version of a laser pointer with multiple laser beams arranged in specific patterns. Using stationary cameras observing projections of these patterns from behind the screens, it is planned to develop an algorithm for reconstruction of the emitter’s absolute position and orientation in space. Laser pointer concept is an intuitive way of interaction that would provide user with a familiar, mobile and efficient navigation though a 3D environment. In order to navigate in a 3D world, it is required to know the absolute position (x, y and z position) and orientation (roll, pitch and yaw angles) of the device, a total of 6 degrees of freedom (DoF). Ordinary laser-based pointers when captured on a flat surface with a video camera system and then processed, will only provide x and y coordinates effectively reducing available input to 2 DoF only. In order to overcome this problem, an additional set of multiple (invisible) laser pointers should be used in the pointing device. These laser pointers should be arranged in a way that the projection of their rays will form one fixed dot pattern when intersected with the flat surface of projection screens. Images of such a pattern will be captured via a real-time camera-based system and then processed using mathematical re-projection algorithms. This would allow the reconstruction of the full absolute 3D pose (6 DoF) of the input device. Additionally, multi-user or collaborative work should be supported by the system, would allow several users to interact with a virtual environment at the same time. Possibilities to port processing algorithms into embedded processors or FPGAs will be investigated during this project as well.
02-2013
Realism and plausibility of computer controlled entities in entertainment software have been enhanced by adding both static personalities and dynamic emotions. Here a generic model is introduced which allows the transfer of findings from real-life personality studies to a computational model. This information is used for decision making. The introduction of dynamic event-based emotions enables adaptive behavior patterns. The advantages of this new model have been validated with a four-way crossroad in a traffic simulation. Driving agents using the introduced model enhanced by dynamics were compared to agents based on static personality profiles and simple rule-based behavior. It has been shown that adding an adaptive dynamic factor to agents improves perceivable plausibility and realism. It also supports coping with extreme situations in a fair and understandable way.
01-2013
Als Basis für Simulationen innerhalb virtueller Umgebungen werden meist unterliegende Semantiken benötigt. Im Fall von Verkehrssimulationen werden in der Regel definierte Verkehrsnetzwerke genutzt. Die Erstellung dieser Netzwerke wird meist per Hand durchgeführt, wodurch sie fehleranfällig ist und viel Zeit erfordert. Dieses Projekt wurde im Rahmen des AVeSi Projektes durchgeführt, in dem an der Entwicklung einer realistischen Verkehrssimulation für virtuelle Umgebung geforscht wird. Der im Projekt angestrebte Simulationsansatz basiert auf der Nutzung von zwei Komplexitätsebenen – einer mikroskopischen und einer mesoskopischen. Um einen Übergang zwischen den Simulationsebenen zu realisieren ist eine Verknüpfung der Verkehrsnetzwerke notwendig, was ebenfalls mit einem hohen Zeitaufwand verbunden ist. In diesem Bericht werden Modelle für Verkehrsnetzwerke beider Ebenen vorgestellt. Anschließend wird ein Ansatz beschrieben, der eine automatische Generierung und Verknüpfung von Verkehrsnetzwerken beider Modelle ermöglicht. Als Grundlage für die Generierung der Netzwerke dienen Daten im OpenDRIVE®-Format. Zur Evaluierung wurden wirklichkeitsgetreue OpenStreetMap-Daten, durch Verwendung einer Drittanbietersoftware, in OpenDRIVE®-Datensätze überführt. Es konnte nachgewiesen werden, dass es durch den Ansatz möglich ist, innerhalb weniger Minuten, große Verkehrsnetzwerke zu erzeugen, auf denen unmittelbar Simulationen ausgeführt werden können. Die Qualität der zur Evaluierung generierten Netzwerke reicht jedoch für Umgebungen, in denen ein hoher Realitätsgrad gefordert wird, nicht aus, was einen zusätzlichen Bearbeitungsschritt notwendig macht. Die Qualitätsprobleme konnten darauf zurückgeführt werden, dass der Detailgrad, der den Evaluierungsdaten zu Grunde liegenden OpenStreetMap-Daten, nicht hoch genug und der Überführungsprozess nicht ausreichend transparent ist.