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Falls have been reported as the leading cause of injury-related visits to emergency departments and the primary etiology of accidental deaths in elderly. Thus, the development of robust home surveillance systems is of great importance. In this article, such a system is presented, which tries to address the fall detection problem through visual cues. The proposed methodology utilizes a fast, real-time background subtraction algorithm, based on motion information in the scene and pixels intensity, capable to operate properly in dynamically changing visual conditions, in order to detect the foreground object. At the same time, it exploits 3D space's measures, through automatic camera calibration, to increase the robustness of fall detection algorithm which is based on semi-supervised learning approach. The above system uses a single monocular camera and is characterized by minimal computational cost and memory requirements that make it suitable for real-time large scale implementations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the main characteristics of Internet era is the free and online availability of extremely large collections of images located on distributed and heterogeneous platforms over the web. The proliferation of millions of shared photographs spurred the emergence of new image retrieval techniques based not only on images' visual information, but on geo-location tags and camera exif data. These huge visual collections provide a unique opportunity for cultural heritage documentation and 3D reconstruction. The main difficulty, however, is that the internet image datasets are unstructured containing many outliers. For this reason, in this paper a new content-based image filtering is proposed to discard image outliers that either confuse or significantly delay the followed e-documentation tools, such as 3D reconstruction of a cultural heritage object. The presented approach exploits and fuses two unsupervised clustering techniques: DBSCAN and spectral clustering. DBSCAN algorithm is used to remove outliers from the initially retrieved dataset and spectral clustering discriminate the noise free image dataset into different categories each representing characteristic geometric views of cultural heritage objects. To discard the image outliers, we consider images as points onto a multi-dimensional manifold and the multi-dimensional scaling algorithm is adopted to relate the space of the image distances with the space of Gram matrices through which we are able to compute the image coordinates. Finally, structure from motion is utilized for 3D reconstruction of cultural heritage landmarks. Evaluation on a dataset of about 31,000 cultural heritage images being retrieved from internet collections with many outliers indicate the robustness and cost effectiveness of the proposed method towards a reliable and just-in-time 3D reconstruction than existing state-of-the-art techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new algorithm for fair scheduling, and we compare it to other scheduling schemes such as the Earliest Deadline First (EDF) and the First Come First Served (FCFS) schemes. Our algorithm uses a max-min fair sharing approach for providing fair access to users. When there is no shortage of resources, the algorithm assigns to each task enough computational power for it to finish within its deadline. When there is congestion, the main idea is to fairly reduce the CPU rates assigned to the tasks so that the share of resources that each user gets is proportional to the user's weight. The weight of a user may be defined as the user's contribution to the infrastructure or the price he is willing to pay for services or any other socioeconomic consideration. In our algorithms, all tasks whose requirements are lower than their fair share CPU rate are served at their demanded CPU rates. However, the CPU rates of tasks whose requirements are larger than their fair share CPU rate are reduced to fit the total available computational capacity in a fair manner. Three different versions of fair scheduling are adopted in this paper: the Simple Fair Task Order (SFTO), which schedules the tasks according to their respective fair completion times, the Adjusted Fair Task Order (AFTO), which refines the SFTO policy by ordering the tasks using the adjusted fair completion time, and the Max-Min Fair Share (MMFS) scheduling policy, which simultaneously addresses the problem of finding a fair task order and assigning a processor to each task based on a max-min fair sharing policy. Experimental results and comparisons with traditional scheduling schemes such as the EDF and the FCFS are presented using three different error criteria. Validation of the simulations using real experiments of tasks generated from 3D image- rendering processes is also provided. The three proposed scheduling schemes can be integrated into existing Grid computing architectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an efficient technique for unsupervised content-based segmentation in stereoscopic video sequences by appropriately combined different content descriptors in a hierarchical framework. Three main modules are involved in the proposed scheme; extraction of reliable depth information, image partition into color and depth regions and a constrained fusion algorithm of color segments using information derived from the depth map. In the first module, each stereo pair is analyzed and the disparity field and depth map are estimated. Occlusion detection and compensation are also applied for improving the depth map estimation. In the following phase, color and depth regions are created using a novel complexity-reducing multiresolution implementation of the Recursive Shortest Spanning Tree algorithm (M-RSST). While depth segments provide a coarse representation of the image content, color regions describe very accurately object boundaries. For this reason, in the final phase, a new segmentation fusion algorithm is employed which projects color segments onto depth segments. Experimental results are presented which exhibit the efficiency of the proposed scheme as content-based descriptor, even in case of images with complicated visual content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]