Kaiserslautern - Fachbereich Informatik
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Faculty / Organisational entity
Component fault trees that contain safety basic events as well as security basic events cannot be analyzed like normal CFTs. Safety basic events are rated with probabilities in an interval [0,1], for security basic events simpler scales such as \{low, medium, high\} make more sense. In this paper an approach is described how to handle a quantitative safety analysis with different rating schemes for safety and security basic events. By doing so, it is possible to take security causes for safety failures into account and to rate their effect on system safety.
The main goal of this thesis is twofold. First, the thesis aims at bridging the gap between existing Pattern Recognition (PR) methods of automatic signature verification and the requirements for their application in forensic science. This gap, attributed by various factors ranging from system definition to evaluation, prevents automatic methods from being used by Forensic Handwriting Examiners (FHEs). Second, the thesis presents novel signature verification methods developed particularly considering the implications of forensic casework, and outperforming the state-of-the-art PR methods.
The first goal of the thesis is attributed by four important factors, i.e., data, terminology, output reporting, and how evaluation of automatic systems is carried out today. It is argued that traditionally the signature data used in PR are not actual/close representative of the real world data (especially that available in forensic cases). The systems trained on such data are, therefore, not suitable for forensic environments. This situation can be tackled by providing more realistic data to PR researchers. To this end, various signature and handwriting datasets are gathered in collaboration with FHEs and are made publicly available through the course of this thesis. A special attention is given to disguised signatures--where authentic authors purposefully make their signatures look like a forgery. This genre was at large neglected in PR research previously.
The terminology used, in the two communities - PR and FHEs, differ greatly. In fact, even in PR, there is no standard terminology and people often differ in the usage of various terms particularly related to various types of forged signatures/handwriting. The thesis presents a new terminology that is equally useful for both forensic scientists and PR researchers. The proposed terminology is hoped to increase the general acceptability of automatic signature analysis systems in forensic science.
The outputs reported by general signature verification systems are not acceptable for FHEs and courts as they are either binary (yes/no) or score (raw evidence) based on similarity/difference. The thesis describes that automatic systems should rather report the probability of observing the evidence (e.g., a certain similarity/difference score) given the signature belongs to the acclaimed identity, and the probability of observing the same evidence given the signature does not belong to the acclaimed identity. This will take automatic systems from hard decisions to soft decisions, thereby enabling them to report likelihood ratios that actually represent the evidential value of the score rather than the raw score (evidence).
When automatic systems report soft decisions (as in the form of likelihood ratios), the thesis argues that there must be some methods to evaluate such systems. This thesis presents one such adaptation. The thesis argues that the state-of-the-art evaluation methods, like equal error rate and area under curve, do not address the needs of forensic science. These needs require an assessment of the evidential value of signature verification, rather than a hard/pure classification (accept/reject binary decision). The thesis demonstrates and validates a relatively simple adaptation of the current verification methods based on the Bayesian inference dependent calibration of continuous scores rather than hard classifications (binary and/or score based classification).
The second goal of this thesis is to introduce various local features based techniques which are capable of performing signature verification in forensic cases and reporting results as anticipated by FHEs and courts. This is an important contribution of the thesis because of the following two reasons. First, to the best of author's knowledge, local feature descriptors are for the first time used for development of signature verification systems for forensic environments (particularly considering disguised signatures). Previously, such methods have been heavily used for recognition tasks, rather than verification of writing behaviors, such as character and digit recognition. Second, the proposed methods not only report the more traditional decisions (like scores-usually reported in PR) but also the Bayesian inference based likelihood ratios (suitable for courts and forensic cases).
Furthermore, the thesis also provides a detailed man vs. machine comparison for signature verification tasks. The men, in this comparison, are forensic scientists serving as forensic handwriting examiners and having experience of varying number of years. The machines are the local features based methods proposed in this thesis, along with various other state-of-the-art signature verification systems. The proposed methods clearly outperform the state-of-the-art systems, and sometimes the human experts.
Finally, the thesis details various tasks that have been performed in the areas closely related to signature verification and its application in forensic casework. These include, developing novel local feature based methods for extraction of signatures/handwritten text from document images, hyper-spectral image analysis for extraction of signatures from forensic documents, and analysis of on-line signatures acquired through specialized pens equipped with Accelerometer and Gyroscope. These tasks are important as they enable the thesis to take PR systems one step further close to direct application in forensic cases.
Attention-awareness is a key topic for the upcoming generation of computer-human interaction. A human moves his or her eyes to visually attends to a particular region in a scene. Consequently, he or she can process visual information rapidly and efficiently without being overwhelmed by vast amount of information from the environment. Such a physiological function called visual attention provides a computer system with valuable information of the user to infer his or her activity and the surrounding environment. For example, a computer can infer whether the user is reading text or not by analyzing his or her eye movements. Furthermore, it can infer with which object he or she is interacting by recognizing the object the user is looking at. Recent developments of mobile eye tracking technologies enable us
to capture human visual attention in ubiquitous everyday environments. There are various types of applications where attention-aware systems may be effectively incorporated. Typical examples are augmented reality (AR) applications such as Wikitude which overlay virtual information onto physical objects. This type of AR application presents augmentative information of recognized objects to the user. However, if it presents information of all recognized objects at once, the over
ow of information could be obtrusive to the user. As a solution for such a problem, attention-awareness can be integrated into a system. If a
system knows to which object the user is attending, it can present only the information of
relevant objects to the user.
Towards attention-aware systems in everyday environments, this thesis presents approaches
for analysis of user attention to visual content. Using a state-of-the-art wearable eye tracking device, one can measure the user's eye movements in a mobile scenario. By capturing the user's eye gaze position in a scene and analyzing the image where the eyes focus, a computer can recognize the visual content the user is currently attending to. I propose several image analysis methods to recognize the user-attended visual content in a scene image. For example, I present an application called Museum Guide 2.0. In Museum Guide 2.0, image-based object recognition and eye gaze analysis are combined together to recognize user-attended objects in a museum scenario. Similarly, optical character recognition
(OCR), face recognition, and document image retrieval are also combined with eye gaze analysis to identify the user-attended visual content in respective scenarios. In addition to Museum Guide 2.0, I present other applications in which these combined frameworks are effectively used. The proposed applications show that the user can benefit from active information presentation which augments the attended content in a virtual environment with
a see-through head-mounted display (HMD).
In addition to the individual attention-aware applications mentioned above, this thesis
presents a comprehensive framework that combines all recognition modules to recognize the user-attended visual content when various types of visual information resources such as text, objects, and human faces are present in one scene. In particular, two processing strategies are proposed. The first one selects an appropriate image analysis module according to the user's current cognitive state. The second one runs all image analysis modules simultaneously and merges the analytic results later. I compare these two processing strategies in terms of user-attended visual content recognition when multiple visual information resources are present in the same scene.
Furthermore, I present novel interaction methodologies for a see-through HMD using eye gaze input. A see-through HMD is a suitable device for a wearable attention-aware system for everyday environments because the user can also view his or her physical environment
through the display. I propose methods for the user's attention engagement estimation with the display, eye gaze-driven proactive user assistance functions, and a method for interacting
with a multi-focal see-through display.
Contributions of this thesis include:
• An overview of the state-of-the-art in attention-aware computer-human interaction
and attention-integrated image analysis.
• Methods for the analysis of user-attended visual content in various scenarios.
• Demonstration of the feasibilities and the benefits of the proposed user-attended visual content analysis methods with practical user-supportive applications.
• Methods for interaction with a see-through HMD using eye gaze.
• A comprehensive framework for recognition of user-attended visual content in a complex
scene where multiple visual information resources are present.
This thesis opens a novel field of wearable computer systems where computers can understand the user attention in everyday environments and provide with what the user wants. I will show the potential of such wearable attention-aware systems for everyday
environments for the next generation of pervasive computer-human interaction.
Industrial design has a long history. With the introduction of Computer-Aided Engineering, industrial design was revolutionised. Due to the newly found support, the design workflow changed, and with the introduction of virtual prototyping, new challenges arose. These new engineering problems have triggered
new basic research questions in computer science.
In this dissertation, I present a range of methods which support different components of the virtual design cycle, from modifications of a virtual prototype and optimisation of said prototype, to analysis of simulation results.
Starting with a virtual prototype, I support engineers by supplying intuitive discrete normal vectors which can be used to interactively deform the control mesh of a surface. I provide and compare a variety of different normal definitions which have different strengths and weaknesses. The best choice depends on
the specific model and on an engineer’s priorities. Some methods have higher accuracy, whereas other methods are faster.
I further provide an automatic means of surface optimisation in the form of minimising total curvature. This minimisation reduces surface bending, and therefore, it reduces material expenses. The best results can be obtained for analytic surfaces, however, the technique can also be applied to real-world examples.
Moreover, I provide engineers with a curvature-aware technique to optimise mesh quality. This helps to avoid degenerated triangles which can cause numerical issues. It can be applied to any component of the virtual design cycle: as a direct modification of the virtual prototype (depending on the surface defini-
tion), during optimisation, or dynamically during simulation.
Finally, I have developed two different particle relaxation techniques that both support two components of the virtual design cycle. The first component for which they can be used is discretisation. To run computer simulations on a model, it has to be discretised. Particle relaxation uses an initial sampling,
and it improves it with the goal of uniform distances or curvature-awareness. The second component for which they can be used is the analysis of simulation results. Flow visualisation is a powerful tool in supporting the analysis of flow fields through the insertion of particles into the flow, and through tracing their movements. The particle seeding is usually uniform, e.g. for an integral surface, one could seed on a square. Integral surfaces undergo strong deformations, and they can have highly varying curvature. Particle relaxation redistributes the seeds on the surface depending on surface properties like local deformation or curvature.
Today’s pervasive availability of computing devices enabled with wireless communication and location- or inertial sensing capabilities is unprecedented. The number of smartphones sold worldwide are still growing and increasing numbers of sensor enabled accessories are available which a user can wear in the shoe or at the wrist for fitness tracking, or just temporarily puts on to measure vital signs. Despite this availability of computing and sensing hardware the merit of application seems rather limited regarding the full potential of information inherent to such senor deployments. Most applications build upon a vertical design which encloses a narrowly defined sensor setup and algorithms specifically tailored to suit the application’s purpose. Successful technologies, however, such as the OSI model, which serves as base for internet communication, have used a horizontal design that allows high level communication protocols to be run independently from the actual lower-level protocols and physical medium access. This thesis contributes to a more horizontal design of human activity recognition systems at two stages. First, it introduces an integrated toolchain to facilitate the entire process of building activity recognition systems and to foster sharing and reusing of individual components. At a second stage, a novel method for automatic integration of new sensors to increase a system’s performance is presented and discussed in detail.
The integrated toolchain is built around an efficient toolbox of parametrizable components for interfacing sensor hardware, synchronization and arrangement of data streams, filtering and extraction of features, classification of feature vectors, and interfacing output devices and applications. The toolbox emerged as open-source project through several research projects and is actively used by research groups. Furthermore, the toolchain supports recording, monitoring, annotation, and sharing of large multi-modal data sets for activity recognition through a set of integrated software tools and a web-enabled database.
The method for automatically integrating a new sensor into an existing system is, at its core, a variation of well-established principles of semi-supervised learning: (1) unsupervised clustering to discover structure in data, (2) assumption that cluster membership is correlated with class membership, and (3) obtaining at a small number of labeled data points for each cluster, from which the cluster labels are inferred. In most semi-supervised approaches, however, the labels are the ground truth provided by the user. By contrast, the approach presented in this thesis uses a classifier trained on an N-dimensional feature space (old classifier) to provide labels for a few points in an (N+1)-dimensional feature space which are used to generate a new, (N+1)-dimensional classifier. The different factors that make a distribution difficult to handle are discussed, a detailed description of heuristics designed to mitigate the influences of such factors is provided, and a detailed evaluation on a set of over 3000 sensor combinations from 3 multi-user experiments that have been used by a variety of previous studies of different activity recognition methods is presented.
Since their invention in the 1980s, behaviour-based systems have become very popular among roboticists. Their component-based nature facilitates the distributed implementation of systems, fosters reuse, and allows for early testing and integration. However, the distributed approach necessitates the interconnection of many components into a network in order to realise complex functionalities. This network is crucial to the correct operation of the robotic system. There are few sound design techniques for behaviour networks, especially if the systems shall realise task sequences. Therefore, the quality of the resulting behaviour-based systems is often highly dependant on the experience of their developers.
This dissertation presents a novel integrated concept for the design and verification of behaviour-based systems that realise task sequences. Part of this concept is a technique for encoding task sequences in behaviour networks. Furthermore, the concept provides guidance to developers of such networks. Based on a thorough analysis of methods for defining sequences, Moore machines have been selected for representing complex tasks. With the help of the structured workflow proposed in this work and the developed accompanying tool support, Moore machines defining task sequences can be transferred automatically into corresponding behaviour networks, resulting in less work for the developer and a lower risk of failure.
Due to the common integration of automatically and manually created behaviour-based components, a formal analysis of the final behaviour network is reasonable. For this purpose, the dissertation at hand presents two verification techniques and justifies the selection of model checking. A novel concept for applying model checking to behaviour-based systems is proposed according to which behaviour networks are modelled as synchronised automata. Based on such automata, properties of behaviour networks that realise task sequences can be verified or falsified. Extensive graphical tool support has been developed in order to assist the developer during the verification process.
Several examples are provided in order to illustrate the soundness of the presented design and verification techniques. The applicability of the integrated overall concept to real-world tasks is demonstrated using the control system of an autonomous bucket excavator. It can be shown that the proposed design concept is suitable for developing complex sophisticated behaviour networks and that the presented verification technique allows for verifying real-world behaviour-based systems.
This dissertation focuses on the visualization of urban microclimate data sets,
which describe the atmospheric impact of individual urban features. The application
and adaptation of visualization and analysis concepts to enhance the
insight into observational data sets used this specialized area are explored, motivated
through application problems encountered during active involvement
in urban microclimate research at the Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
Besides two smaller projects dealing with the analysis of thermographs
recorded with a hand-held device and visualization techniques used for building
performance simulation results, the main focus of the work described in
this document is the development of a prototypic tool for the visualization
and analysis of mobile transect measurements. This observation technique involves
a sensor platform mounted to a vehicle, which is then used to traverse
a heterogeneous neighborhood to investigate the relationships between urban
form and microclimate. The resulting data sets are among the most complex
modes of in-situ observations due to their spatio-temporal dependence, their
multivariate nature, but also due to the various error sources associated with
moving platform observations.
The prototype enables urban climate researchers to preprocess their data,
to explore a single transect in detail, and to aggregate observations from multiple
traverses conducted over diverse routes for a visual delineation of climatic
microenvironments. Extending traditional analysis methods, the suggested visualization
tool provides techniques to relate the measured attributes to each
other and to the surrounding land cover structure. In addition to that, an
improved method for sensor lag correction is described, which shows the potential
to increase the spatial resolution of measurements conducted with slow
air temperature sensors.
In summary, the interdisciplinary approach followed in this thesis triggers
contributions to geospatial visualization and visual analytics, as well as to urban
climatology. The solutions developed in the course of this dissertation are
meant to support domain experts in their research tasks, providing means to
gain a qualitative overview over their specific data sets and to detect patterns,
which can then be further analyzed using domain-specific tools and methods.
In 2003, a dictionary data structure called jumplist has been introduced by Brönnimann, Cazals and Durand. It is based on a circularly closed (singly) linked list, but additional jump-pointers are added to provide shortcuts to parts further ahead in the list.
The original jump-and-walk data structure by Brönnimann, Cazals and Durand only introduces one jump-pointer per node. In this thesis, I add one more-jump pointer to each node and present algorithms for generation, insertion and search for the resulting data structure.
Furthermore, I try to evaluate the effects on the expected search costs and the complexity of the generation and insertion.
It turns out that the two-jump-pointer variant of the jumplist has a slightly better prefactor (1.2 vs. 2) in the leading term of the expected internal path length than the original version and despite the more complex structure of the two-jump-pointer variant compared to the regular jumplist, the complexity of generation and insertion remains linearithmic.
Information Visualization (InfoVis) and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) have strong ties with each other. Visualization supports the human cognitive system by providing interactive and meaningful images of the underlying data. On the other side, the HCI domain cares about the usability of the designed visualization from the human perspectives. Thus, designing a visualization system requires considering many factors in order to achieve the desired functionality and the system usability. Achieving these goals will help these people in understanding the inside behavior of complex data sets in less time.
Graphs are widely used data structures to represent the relations between the data elements in complex applications. Due to the diversity of this data type, graphs have been applied in numerous information visualization applications (e.g., state transition diagrams, social networks, etc.). Therefore, many graph layout algorithms have been proposed in the literature to help in visualizing this rich data type. Some of these algorithms are used to visualize large graphs, while others handle the medium sized graphs. Regardless of the graph size, the resulting layout should be understandable from the users’ perspective and at the same time it should fulfill a list of aesthetic criteria to increase the representation readability. Respecting these two principles leads to produce a resulting graph visualization that helps the users in understanding and exploring the complex behavior of critical systems.
In this thesis, we utilize the graph visualization techniques in modeling the structural and behavioral aspects of embedded systems. Furthermore, we focus on evaluating the resulting representations from the users’ perspectives.
The core contribution of this thesis is a framework, called ESSAVis (Embedded Systems Safety Aspect Visualizer). This framework visualizes not only some of the safety aspects (e.g. CFT models) of embedded systems, but also helps the engineers and experts in analyzing the system safety critical situations. For this, the framework provides a 2Dplus3D environment in which the 2D represents the graph representation of the abstract data about the safety aspects of the underlying embedded system while the 3D represents the underlying system 3D model. Both views are integrated smoothly together in the 3D world fashion. In order to check the effectiveness and feasibility of the framework and its sub-components, we conducted many studies with real end users as well as with general users. Results of the main study that targeted the overall ESSAVis framework show high acceptance ratio and higher accuracy with better performance using the provided visual support of the framework.
The ESSAVis framework has been designed to be compatible with different 3D technologies. This enabled us to use the 3D stereoscopic depth of such technologies to encode nodes attributes in node-link diagrams. In this regard, we conducted an evaluation study to measure the usability of the stereoscopic depth cue approach, called the stereoscopic highlighting technique, against other selected visual cues (i.e., color, shape, and sizes). Based on the results, the thesis proposes the Reflection Layer extension to the stereoscopic highlighting technique, which was also evaluated from the users’ perspectives. Additionally, we present a new technique, called ExpanD (Expand in Depth), that utilizes the depth cue to show the structural relations between different levels of details in node-link diagrams. Results of this part opens a promising direction of the research in which visualization designers can get benefits from the richness of the 3D technologies in visualizing abstract data in the information visualization domain.
Finally, this thesis proposes the application of the ESSAVis frame- work as a visual tool in the educational training process of engineers for understanding the complex concepts. In this regard, we conducted an evaluation study with computer engineering students in which we used the visual representations produced by ESSAVis to teach the principle of the fault detection and the failure scenarios in embedded systems. Our work opens the directions to investigate many challenges about the design of visualization for educational purposes.
Large displays become more and more popular, due to dropping prices. Their size and high resolution leverages collaboration and they are capable of dis- playing even large datasets in one view. This becomes even more interesting as the number of big data applications increases. The increased screen size and other properties of large displays pose new challenges to the Human- Computer-Interaction with these screens. This includes issues such as limited scalability to the number of users, diversity of input devices in general, leading to increased learning efforts for users, and more.
Using smart phones and tablets as interaction devices for large displays can solve many of these issues. Since they are almost ubiquitous today, users can bring their own device. This approach scales well with the number of users. These mobile devices are easy and intuitive to use and allow for new interaction metaphors, as they feature a wide array of input and output capabilities, such as touch screens, cameras, accelerometers, microphones, speakers, Near-Field Communication, WiFi, etc.
This thesis will present a concept to solve the issues posed by large displays. We will show proofs-of-concept, with specialized approaches showing the via- bility of the concept. A generalized, eyes-free technique using smart phones or tablets to interact with any kind of large display, regardless of hardware or software then overcomes the limitations of the specialized approaches. This is implemented in a large display application that is designed to run under a multitude of environments, including both 2D and 3D display setups. A special visualization method is used to combine 2D and 3D data in a single visualization.
Additionally the thesis will present several approaches to solve common is- sues with large display interaction, such as target sizes on large display getting too small, expensive tracking hardware, and eyes-free interaction through vir- tual buttons. These methods provide alternatives and context for the main contribution.