Sharif Digital Repository

Most of current state-of-the-art methods for object tracking use adaptive tracking-by-detection. The performance of state-of-the-art methods is almost real-time with acceptable accuracy. These methods use tracking-by-detection because of its robustness. Tracking-bydetection methods use a detector as a tracker and sweep input for object of interest. They use their predictions to adapt their parameters and therefore be adaptive to appearance change in target. While suitable for cases when the object does not disappear from the scene, these methods tend to fail on occlusions. In this work, we build on a novel approach called Tracking-Learning-Detection (TLD) that overcomes this problem. In... 

Primary visual cortex plays a paramount role in processing visual information. Visual information after the primitive processing by LGN and Thalamus, will be sent to the primary visual cortex which is called V1 area. According to the fact that V1 neurons have the definitive sensitivity to the edge and contrast of visual stimuli so their behavior are very selective to the certain features, specially contrast, of visual stimuli. These neurons have different response behavior to contrast. In fact most of them have some nonlinear behavior to this feature. Normally we expect that response of them or spiking rate of them grow linearly by the contrast increases but in most many cases they have some... 

Blindness is one of the destructive results of retinal diseases. Artificial retina is a device which can help blind people with AMD and RP diseases to restore their vision. Prevalent approaches to artificial retina use an external power supply and processor which the data and energy is transmitted to eye through an inductive link. Taking advantages of solar power, in this project we proposed a design which the required stimulation data and energy is produced internally so the patients don’t have to carry the processor and external power supply that is of major concern for them. This is the most important advantage of this device which doesn’t need any maintenance or battery either. In this... 

Aquatic plants play an important role in water environment. Increasing drag force, distorting the velocity and turbulence structures and other related parameters, are the results of the presences of plants. These changes affect the dispersion and mass transport in the aquatic areas. This thesis presents laboratory visualizations and measurements of wave motion, and passive solute surface dispersion (longitudinal and lateral) in arrays of cylinders, a model for emergent, rigid aquatic plants. In the range of (where is Keulegan–Carpenter number, is the maximum oscillatory velocity perpendicular to the cylinder axis, is the period of oscillation, and is the diameter of the cylinder), and (where... 

Pulsating heat pipe (PHP) is a two-phase device for the means of transferring high heat fluxes and is used extensively for the electronic cooling. In this study the different flow regimes in PHP with different fluids have been investigated. In this research, 3 different fluids including: Pure fluids, Ferro-fluid and surfactant solution with %50 filling ratio have been used. For ferro-fluid, 5 different concentrations and 3 type of magnetic fields have been operated in 2 different heat pipes. Results show that ferrofluid is more stable in Pyrex made-heat pipe for long period of time and no magnet mode has the best thermal performance due to high conductivity of fluid. In copper made-heat pipe... 

Hand gesture recognition is one of the most applicable and hot research topics in computer vision community. The recent advances in imaging devices, like Microsoft Kinect, have received a great deal of attention from researchers to reconsider problems such as gesture recognition from depth information. Hand gesture recognition refers to the classification of dynamic hand movements in action videos. Generally, hand gesture recognition includes three main steps: hand detection, feature extraction and classification. The first step plays an important role in hand gesture recognition. The most challenging part of hand gesture recognition is the second step which is the process of extracting high... 

The main idea of this investigation is to increase heat transfer rate by increasing flow circulation of working fluid. By placing additional branches in the evaporator section, secondary bubble pumps were created which improved the circulation of fluid inside PHP. This research was implemented in two distinct phases. In the first phase, the novelty was implemented on a single turn PHP and in the second phase, the same procedure was implemented on a 4-turn PHP. In order to investigate the impact of these additional branches, two similar heat pipes were fabricated. One of them was the conventional PHP and the other had additional branches and is named additional branch PHP (AB-PHP). Thermal... 

Pulsating heat pipe (PHP) is a type of wickless heat pipe that has a simple structure and an outstanding thermal performance. Nanofluid is a type of fluifid in which nanoparticles are dispersed in a base fluid and has a better thermal conductivity in comparison with its base fluid. In this article, the performance of a nanofluid PHP is investigated. In order to simultaneously investigate the thermal performance and flow regimes in the PHP, a one-turn copper PHP with a Pyrex glass attached to its adiabatic section was used. A one-turn Pyrex PHP was also used to fully visualize flow patterns in the PHP. Our results showed that the material that a PHP made of and temperature of working fluid... 

Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) is the action of detecting robot pose in an unknown environment and building the environment map by use of input data that captured from robot sensors. In visual SLAM, the input data for the robot, is limited to camera sensors. Nowadays, SLAM is one of the main challenges in robotic research.For autonomous action, we need robot pose in the map of the environment. The map production in the indoor environment, there is no GPS data, is one of the research issue in robotic community, in last decade. In this thesis, a new and efficient method is proposed for SLAM at the level of objects. The maps produced by state of the art methods don’t have a... 

In small turbojet engines, it is important to find a suitable fuel injector with good spray quality. However, the rotating fuel injection system can potentially provide high atomization quality without the high-pressure fuel pump through the centrifugal forces of the engine shaft. The spray characteristics of rotary atomization for small gas turbines can be investigated using a high-speed camera. To analyze the breakup process of the liquid column and liquid film, spray visualization tests should performed under varied test conditions.In this research, experimental study on liquid breakup process has performed in rotary atomizer of j402 turbojet engine with the name of slinger injector, to... 

The aim of this thesis was to test predictive coding as a model of cortical organization and function in multisensory processing using a specific brain response, the mismatch negativity (MMN) in both Auditory and visual modalities, and a novel tool for connectivity analysis, dynamic causal modeling (DCM). Predictive coding models state that the brain perceives and makes inferences about the world by recursively updating predictions about sensory input. Thus, perception would result from comparing bottom-up input from the environment with top-down predictions. The generation of the MMN, an event related response elicited by violations in the regularity of a structured auditory or visual... 

Blood is the most important liquid in human body. Red blood cells (RBCs) are the main part of blood. RBCs are rounded, but this shape would be changed during different disease. Blood tests taken to diagnose blood diseases. Current instruments do not provide any information about RBCs morphology, and an expert recognize the RBCs morphology by looking at blood smear under microscope. Regards to low accuracy and performance of this method, an automate method must be presented. Capturing images from blood smear under microscope is simple and low-cost. Although there is few methods on RBCs detection and very limited one on RBCs recognition on the literature, no general method to recognize most of... 

One of the main reasons of being unable in doing routine jobs is the disability to attain and keep balance. This ability can be restored using rehabilitation techniques. A physiotherapist can be very helpful. This approach, however, apart from being very time consuming and expensive, needs quite a few physiotherapists. The physiotherapist will be prone to physical damages as well. This leads to improving therapy methods which do not require a physiotherapist. Using the rehabilitation balance devices can help solve the problem to some extents. If good device with reliable value system be developed, this device can be used without physiotherapist.
This project has been carried out to... 

Content Based Image Retrieval (CBIR) is in fact an image search engine which Operates on image Context . in this thesis (project) the aim was to use the Visual attention of humans in detecting the objects in image. in this ability first a salient image of the most important things in the image would be created And after an initial separation , for the final recognition the other features (details) in the image will be used It’s a while that the use of Visual attention models and saliency maps in designing the interfaces between humans and machines has been considered widely. This fact in the design of CBIR systems has not a good background (satisfying history). In this thesis I have... 

LFP characteristics have been shown to be informative of sensory stimuli and influenced by attention. We show the gamma power in area MT is selective to motion direction showing a Gaussian tuning curve. Here we show for the first time, some evidence based on a single monkey’s data that spatial attention enhances the tuning curve based on gamma power.The synchronization of activity across neurons has been a focus in many recent studies of information processing in networks of cortical cells and areas. One aspect of such inter-neuronal synchrony is the locking of spiking activity to local field potentials (LFPs). Such an interaction has been observed between the timing of individual action... 

The ability of human to analyze the environment around them has been an inspiring source for event analysis research. Since human perception of the environment is formed in a multi-modal space, many efforts have been made to fuse information to create an intelligent fusion. In this study, we want to better understand the environment using information fusion. For this purpose, fuzzy fusion of audio and video signals based on ink drop spread operator is performed for recognizing and tracking of the targets using several scenarios of the AV16.3 dataset. We then focused on the fusion of audio data for sound source localization, one of the most important applications in evaluating fusion... 

Visual odometry(VO) is the process of estimating the egomotion of an agent(e.g., vehicle, human, and robot) using the input of a single or multiple cameras attached to it. Application domains include robotics, wearable computing, augmented reality, and automotive. The term was chosen for its similarity to wheel odometry, which incrementally estimates the motion of a vehicle by integrating the number of turns of its wheels over time. Likewise, VO operates by incrementally estimating the pose of the vehicle through examination of the changes that movements induces on the images of its onboard cameras. For the VO to work effectively, there should be sufficient illumination in the environment... 

The highest and most difficult layer of Natural Language Processing, is the understanding of meaning. As a result, lexicons and annotated corpora are of the utmost importance in this area. However, the lack of such semantic resources, especially in Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR), is one of the main issues in this field for Persian Language. This work by modeling PropBank, a semantic valency lexicon for English predicates, is the first step towards building such lexicons for Persian Language with the focus on AMR. Thus, a guideline describing how to annotate the Persian predicates is provided which first evaluates the common structures between the two languages and then focuses on the... 

The purpose of this paper is to estimate the stiffness and strength of damaged rectangular reinforced concrete shear walls after an earthquake using surface crack patterns. Assessing the damage severity of buildings after an earthquake is an important part of the emergency inspection operation of buildings. Expert inspectors tag buildings into two categories of safe or unsafe that are usually affected by subjective decisions, which may result in catastrophic events reported in previous earthquakes. In this research, an extensive database on the images of damaged rectangular reinforced concrete shear walls (RCSWs) is collected and used to develop predictive equations for updated stiffness and... 

Brain-computer interfaces (BCI) are systems which enable a user to control a device using only his or her neural activity. An important part of a brain-computer interface is an algorithm for classifying different commands that the user may want to execute. There are several neurological phenomena that can be used in a BCI. One of them is event related de-synchronization (ERD), which is a temporary decrease in power of the mu and beta brain waves. This phenomenon can be registered using electroencephalography (EEG) and occurs when a subject performs or imagines a limb movement. The goal of this thesis is to implement an algorithm that would be able to classify EEG signal for controlling an...