Statistical modelling of multimodal SAR images

This paper discusses the statistical modelling of multimodal SAR image histograms. We use a generalized mixture of distributions with flexible shapes that are likely to fit the SAR image histogram. We then form a system called GGBL, composed of four parametric distributions (Gaussian, Gamma, Beta and Log‐Normal). Selection of a parametric distribution from the GGBL system for each mode of the multimodal SAR histogram is performed according to the location of the skewness and flatness coefficients in this space. We propose a distribution stability method for distribution selection, using the asymmetry and flatness coefficients, and a feature method for the estimation of the parameters of these distributions based on the characteristic points of the histogram. The GGBL system is applied to real histograms of RADARSAT and ERS SAR images with different numbers of looks. The results obtained are promising.     

Aurama: caregiver awareness for living independently with an augmented picture frame display

Aurama is a system designed to provide peace of mind and a sense of connectedness to adults who care for elderly parents living alone. Aurama monitors the elders at home using unobtrusive sensor technology and collects data about sleeping patterns, weight trends, cognitive abilities and presence at home. The system provides an unobtrusive ambient information display that presents the status of the elder and lets its users inspect long-term data about the well-being of the elder interactively. Aurama was designed iteratively with substantial user involvement through interviews, prototype evaluation, focus groups and lab tests. The final prototype was evaluated in two field trials each involving an elder and their adult children. The input of users throughout the design process and during these tests demonstrates clearly the potential of awareness systems to support the target user group to obtain peace of mind and feel connected. Furthermore, the users indicate a clear need for information on long-term trends relating to the well-being of aging parents, in contrast to the current emphasis in this field of research on providing instantaneous status information about daily activities and context.     

A review of the methodology and applications of anthropometry in ergonomics and product design

Abstract

Anthropometry is a key element of ergonomic studies for addressing the problem of fitting the tasks/products to user characteristics, but there is a gap between anthropometric data and their application for designing ergonomic products and environments. This research was conducted to review the literature on the methodology and applications of anthropometry for the ergonomic design of products and environments, and to identify where further research is needed to improve its application and evaluation protocols. One hundred and sixteen papers meeting the inclusion criteria were reviewed. Although a number of anthropometric investigations have been conducted to improve the design of products/environments for different users, further research seems to be necessary, particularly for special groups, such as children, the elderly and people with disabilities. Different anthropometric measurement methods/techniques and fitting criteria are discussed regarding their applicability for various design applications. This review also highlights methodological issues (sampling considerations and prototype evaluation and testing) that should be considered in future research to ensure a user-centred approach of the design process.

Practitioner Summary: A literature review was conducted on the methodology and applications of anthropometry for the ergonomic design of products/environments. This review emphasises the need for anthropometric research to design for special groups, such as children, the elderly and people with disabilities, and methodological issues that should be considered in future research.

Abbreviations: 1D: one-dimensional; 2D: two-dimensional; 3D: three-dimensional; HF/E: Human Factors/Ergonomics; PCA: Principal Components Analysis; CA: Cluster Analysis; DHM: Digital Human Modelling     

A design process enabling adaptation in pervasive heterogeneous contexts

In the next decades, the growth in population aging will cause important problems to most industrialized countries. To tackle this issue, Ambient Assistive Living (AAL) systems can reinforce the well-being of elderly people, by providing emergency, autonomy enhancement, and comfort services. These services will postpone the need of a medicalized environment and will allow the elderly to stay longer at home. However, each elderly has specific needs and a deployment environment of such services is likely unique. Furthermore, the needs evolve over time, and so does the deployment environment of the system. In this paper, we propose the use of a model-based development method, the adaptive medium approach, to enable dynamic adaptation of AAL systems. We also propose improvements to make it more suited to the AAL domain, such as considering heterogeneity and a composition model. The paper includes an evaluation of the prototype implementing the approach, and a comparison with related work.     

Next generation remote critical care through service-oriented architectures: challenges and opportunities

Health care providers and governments are under pressure to maintain and improve the quality of care to an increasing volume of critical care patients at either end of the life cycle, namely premature and ill term babies together with the elderly. The provision of a service of critical care utilizing real time service-oriented architectures has the potential to enable clinicians to be supported in the care of a greater number patients that are, perhaps more importantly, located elsewhere to their intensive care units. This paper presents a review of recent research in the application of computing and IT to support the service of critical care and determines the trends and challenges for the application of real time service-oriented architectures within the domain. It then presents some case study–based research on the design of a service-oriented architecture-based approach to support two aspects of critical care namely elderly care and neonatal intensive care to provide further context to trends and opportunities.     

How Does Subjective Well-Being Evolve with Age? A Literature Review

This literature review provides an overview of the theoretical and empirical research in several disciplines on the relation between ageing and subjective well-being, i.e., how subjective well-being evolves across the lifespan. Because of the different methodologies, data sets and samples used, comparison among disciplines and studies is difficult. However, extant studies do show either a U-shaped, inverted U-shaped or linear relation between ageing and subjective well-being.     

Remote health monitoring of elderly through wearable sensors

Multimedia Tools and Applications - Due to a rapidly increasing aging population and its associated challenges in health and social care, Ambient Assistive Living has become the focal point for...     

SAR-based detection of flooded vegetation – a review of characteristics and approaches

The ability of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to detect flooded vegetation (FV) (the temporary or permanent occurrence of waterbodies underneath vegetated areas) offers a great benefit in the research fields of flood and wetland monitoring. The growing demand for near real-time information in flood monitoring and an increased awareness of the importance of wetland ecosystems are strong drivers for the ongoing research in these fields, where FV constitutes an essential part. This study reviewed 128 publications summarizing the knowledge about the relationships between the SAR parameters and the environmental conditions for the detection of FV. An advanced review of 83 studies was carried out to gain insights about applied classification techniques and SAR data for the extraction of FV. Although some trends emerged about which wavelengths, polarisations, or incidence angles to use, there is variation in the application of different classification techniques or using SAR-derived information depending on the data sets and the study area. Notable throughout the analysed articles is the growing demand for unsupervised and computationally efficient methods of higher accuracy for the extraction of FV. Based on the advances in SAR with regard to spatial and temporal resolution, the development of robust approaches for the extraction of FV from various and complex environments has to be further pursued.     

Correction to: Investigating socially assistive systems from system design and evaluation: a systematic review

Purpose The development of assistive technologies that support people in social interactions has attracted increased attention in HCI. This paper presents a systematic review of studies of Socially Assistive Systems targeted at older adults and people with disabilities. The purpose is threefold: (1) Characterizing related assistive systems with a special focus on the system design, primarily including HCI technologies used and user-involvement approach taken; (2) Examining their ways of system evaluation; (3) Reflecting on insights for future design research. Methods A systematic literature search was conducted using the keywords “social interactions” and “assistive technologies” within the following databases: Scopus, Web of Science, ACM, Science Direct, PubMed, and IEEE Xplore. Results Sixty-five papers met the inclusion criteria and were further analyzed. Our results showed that there were 11 types of HCI technologies that supported social interactions for target users. The most common was cognitive and meaning understanding technologies, often applied with wearable devices for compensating users’ sensory loss; 33.85% of studies involved end-users and stakeholders in the design phase; Four types of evaluation methods were identified. The majority of studies adopted laboratory experiments to measure user-system interaction and system validation. Proxy users were used in system evaluation, especially in initial experiments; 42.46% of evaluations were conducted in field settings, primarily including the participants’ own homes and institutions. Conclusion We contribute an overview of Socially Assistive Systems that support social interactions for older adults and people with disabilities, as well as illustrate emerging technologies and research opportunities for future work.

     

A comprehensive review of hyperspectral data fusion with lidar and sar data

With the development of remote sensing techniques, the fusion of multimodal data, particularly hyperspectral-Light Detection And Ranging (HS-LiDAR) and hyperspectral-SAR, has become an important research field in numerous application areas. Multispectral, HS, LiDAR, and Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images contain detailed information about the monitored surface that are complementary to each other. Thus, data fusion methods have become a promising solution to obtain high spatial resolution remote-sensing images. The main point of this review paper is to classify hyperspectral-LiDAR and hyperspectral-SAR data fusion with approaches. Moreover, recent achievements in the fusion of hyperspectral-LiDAR and hyperspectral-SAR data are highlighted in terms of faced challenges and applications. Most frequently used data fusion datasets that include IEEE GRSS Data Fusion Contests are also described.     

Multimodal Co-learning: Challenges,applications with datasets,recent advances and future directions

Multimodal deep learning systems that employ multiple modalities like text, image, audio, video, etc., are showing better performance than individual modalities (i.e., unimodal) systems. Multimodal machine learning involves multiple aspects: representation, translation, alignment, fusion, and co-learning. In the current state of multimodal machine learning, the assumptions are that all modalities are present, aligned, and noiseless during training and testing time. However, in real-world tasks, typically, it is observed that one or more modalities are missing, noisy, lacking annotated data, have unreliable labels, and are scarce in training or testing, and or both. This challenge is addressed by a learning paradigm called multimodal co-learning. The modeling of a (resource-poor) modality is aided by exploiting knowledge from another (resource-rich) modality using the transfer of knowledge between modalities, including their representations and predictive models.Co-learning being an emerging area, there are no dedicated reviews explicitly focusing on all challenges addressed by co-learning. To that end, in this work, we provide a comprehensive survey on the emerging area of multimodal co-learning that has not been explored in its entirety yet. We review implementations that overcome one or more co-learning challenges without explicitly considering them as co-learning challenges. We present the comprehensive taxonomy of multimodal co-learning based on the challenges addressed by co-learning and associated implementations. The various techniques, including the latest ones, are reviewed along with some applications and datasets. Additionally, we review techniques that appear to be similar to multimodal co-learning and are being used primarily in unimodal or multi-view learning. The distinction between them is documented. Our final goal is to discuss challenges and perspectives and the important ideas and directions for future work that we hope will benefit for the entire research community focusing on this exciting domain.     

A review of affective computing: From unimodal analysis to multimodal fusion

Affective computing is an emerging interdisciplinary research field bringing together researchers and practitioners from various fields, ranging from artificial intelligence, natural language processing, to cognitive and social sciences. With the proliferation of videos posted online (e.g., on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter) for product reviews, movie reviews, political views, and more, affective computing research has increasingly evolved from conventional unimodal analysis to more complex forms of multimodal analysis. This is the primary motivation behind our first of its kind, comprehensive literature review of the diverse field of affective computing. Furthermore, existing literature surveys lack a detailed discussion of state of the art in multimodal affect analysis frameworks, which this review aims to address. Multimodality is defined by the presence of more than one modality or channel, e.g., visual, audio, text, gestures, and eye gage. In this paper, we focus mainly on the use of audio, visual and text information for multimodal affect analysis, since around 90% of the relevant literature appears to cover these three modalities. Following an overview of different techniques for unimodal affect analysis, we outline existing methods for fusing information from different modalities. As part of this review, we carry out an extensive study of different categories of state-of-the-art fusion techniques, followed by a critical analysis of potential performance improvements with multimodal analysis compared to unimodal analysis. A comprehensive overview of these two complementary fields aims to form the building blocks for readers, to better understand this challenging and exciting research field.     

深度多模态表示学习的研究综述

尽管深度学习因为强大的非线性表示能力已广泛应用于许多领域,多源异构模态数据间结构和语义上的鸿沟严重阻碍了后续深度学习模型的应用。虽然已经有许多学者提出了大量的表示学习方法以探索不同模态间的相关性和互补性,并提高深度学习预测和泛化性能。然而,多模态表示学习研究还处于初级阶段,依然存在许多科学问题尚需解决。迄今为止,多模态表示学习仍缺乏统一的认知,多模态表示学习研究的体系结构和评价指标尚不完全明确。根据不同模态的特征结构、语义信息和表示能力,从表示融合和表示对齐两个角度研究和分析了深度多模态表示学习的进展,并对现有研究工作进行了系统的总结和科学的分类。同时,解析了代表性框架和模型的基本结构、应用场景和关键问题,分析了深度多模态表示学习的理论基础和最新发展,并且指出了多模态表示学习研究当前面临的挑战和今后的发展趋势,以进一步推动深度多模态表示学习的发展和应用。     

合成孔径雷达及其干涉技术研究进展

合成孔径雷达(Synthetic aperturer adar,SAR)能够在全天候、全天时条件下对地面进行大范围测绘,是现代民用遥感和军事侦察中的重要手段。本文回顾了SAR及干涉合成孔径雷达(InSAR)技术的历史,叙述了SAR由非聚焦到完全聚焦,由光学处理到全数字式处理,由二维测绘到干涉三维测绘的发展历程。通过例举典型系统,介绍了国外机载、空载SAR和InSAR技术的现状,并对我国近年来在该领域取得的进展作了简要介绍。最后,本文给出对SIR—C／X—SAR采集的航天飞机SAR数据处理所得到的成像结果。     

Review Article SAR interferometry—issues,techniques, applications

Data from interferometric synthetic aperture radar (INSAR) can provide three-dimensional information by using the phase as an additional information source derived from the complex radar data. In this paper, the issues, techniques and applications of SAR interferometry are reviewed. After a brief historical review, the geometric implementations of SAR interferometry are described. The general processing techniques are summarized and an introduction to various phase unwrapping techniques is given. Besides the differential use of SAR interferometry, the review focuses on parameters such as baseline, decorrelation and motion compensation which have a limiting influence on the quality of the data. After evaluating the various existing and potential applications using SAR interferometric techniques such as topographic mapping, digital elevation modelling, slope measurement, change detection, classification, ocean currents, polar research, seismic events and volcanic hazards, the paper concludes with some research issues, trends and developments in SAR interferometry. The paper is illustrated by examples of SAR interferometric data and derived products from the ESA ERS-1/ERS-2 and SIR-C/X-SAR satellite mission and from single pass aircraft data. An extensive list of references and bibliography on SAR interferometry is provided at the end of this review paper.     

Migration and the Multi-Dimensional Well-Being of Elderly Persons in Georgia

High rates of migration coupled with low formal social protection provisions may place many members of the elderly Georgian population in precarious living conditions that promote vulnerability and limit well-being achievement. This potential connection has been poorly explored in past literature, however, suggesting a need to better assess how the migration of an adult child may influence the multidimensional well-being of the elderly in Georgia. Using a novel dataset comprising 2202 elderly individuals across all regions of Georgia (excepting the territories of Abkhazia and South Ossetia), this paper proposes a multidimensional well-being index that has been specifically designed to encompass the unique resources and constraints faced by elderly individuals in different age cohorts. Following the construction of a multidimensional well-being index—comprised of domains including physical health and independence, housing well-being, social well-being, and emotional well-being—the outcomes of elderly individuals are compared by age and the presence/absence of adult children due to migration. Findings suggest that the migration status of an elderly person’s adult children is related to the attainment of well-being. Elderly individuals with a migrant child are more likely to attain well-being in physical health as well as in the overall multidimensional well-being index.     

多周期家庭护理的路径规划与调度算法

在家庭护理服务质量方面,现有研究大多考虑老人的服务需求是否得到满足、服务是否及时、老人对服务是否满意等因素,忽略了老人在选择护工上的偏好习惯。提出带服务约束的多周期家庭护理路径规划与调度问题,并将其归约为多车场车辆路径优化问题,证明该问题的NP难解性。为了在老人提供的黑名单、必选服务技能、服务价格等约束下最优化家庭护理机构的服务质量,提出贪心算法,优先为服务开始时间早的老人提供服务,为老人安排最高服务质量的护工。以贪心算法求得的结果作为初始解,并针对该问题的多周期性质,定制一个遗传算法对初始解进行优化,以获得更优的多周期护工路径规划方案。在3组不同规模的开源数据集上进行实验,结果表明,与基准算法和随机算法相比,所提出的贪心算法将服务质量分别提高了31.7%和79.8%,定制的遗传算法将服务质量分别提高了65.7%和126.3%。     

空间增强现实中的人机交互技术综述

空间增强现实是增强现实的三大形式之一,它利用投影等方式在物理空间中增强显示虚拟内容.在空间增强现实系统中,用户可以在物理空间与虚拟内容交互,具有良好的环境感知、空间感知与协同感知,交互任务执行过程中认知负荷低.首先以空间增强现实显示方式为例,通过其系统架构介绍空间增强现实的技术原理;然后将空间增强现实中的人机交互技术分...     

Observations of typhoon eye using SAR and IR sensors

In this review, recent studies on the observations of typhoon eyes by images acquired by multiple sensors, including synthetic aperture radar (SAR), and infrared (IR) radiometer, are first summarized. Large horizontal distances between typhoon eyes on the ocean surface by SAR and those on the cloud top by IR sensors have been demonstrated; these have previously been ignored but should not be ignored in typhoon forecasts and numerical simulations. Then, based on nine published typhoon cases, the horizontal shifts and vertical tilt angles from the cloud-top typhoon eye locations by IR sensors on board the Feng-Yun 2 (FY-2) and Multi Functional Transport Satellite (MTSAT) to those at sea surface by SAR are further estimated. This shift difference between different sensors raises an issue on project distortion and navigation system errors for FY-2 and MTSAT satellites, which are of concern to both space agencies and data users. Finally, issues for current ongoing study and future research related to typhoon eyes are discussed, including rainband tracking between sensors for local wind speeds.     

RFID-based indoor location tracking to ensure the safety of the elderly in smart home environments

In recent years, the number of elderly people living alone has grown rapidly. This increases the need for indoor healthcare services that help elderly residents live a safe and independent life. There has been increasing interest in indoor ubiquitous healthcare (U-Healthcare) applications that monitor the elderly unobtrusively via sensors and that warn them or healthcare providers of abnormal conditions. In U-Healthcare applications, automatically locating and tracking users who move around a building is a fundamental feature. Outdoor location sensing technologies such as the global positioning systems are not suitable for use in indoor environments, such as “smart home” applications, because their indoor-based location sensing lacks accuracy. This paper proposes an indoor U-Healthcare system that uses radio-frequency identification technology to accurately locate and track the elderly. The proposed system provides real-time monitoring of elderly people’s whereabouts. In addition, it analyzes their locations in association with time slots and the length of time they stay in the same place, thus inferring information such as movement patterns, ranges, and frequencies. This information is used to determine elderly people’s well-being and to warn family or healthcare workers of any potential problems. The proposed indoor U-Healthcare system improves the quality and convenience of care delivered to elderly people.