Ground failures, in particular landsliding, liquefaction and lateral spreading can be triggered by seismic sources. The frequency, magnitude, and impact of these ground failures are highly dependent on the topography and geology of the site including its slope, depositional environment, and geotechnical properties as well as the proximity of the...
Driver distraction is a commonly observable phenomenon with a significant effect on the transportation network. Although the negative effects of driver distraction on safety are commonly studied, there has been little effort made to investigate the impacts of distraction on efficiency.
This study will examine driver behavior in standing queues...
Streaming media and interactive television viewing experiences are becoming more commonplace with the introduction of services such as Netflix Streaming, the Apple TV, and Google TV aided by the increase adoption of broadband internet. As these services make their way into the living room, and developers struggle to accommodate more...
A fundamental problem in computer vision is to partition an image into meaningful segments. While image segmentation is required by many applications, the thesis focuses on segmentation of computed tomography (CT) images for analysis and quality control of composite materials. The key research contribution of this thesis is a novel...
Terrestrial Laser Scanning (TLS) is an efficient, effective, and precise measurement tool rapidly growing in popularity in a wide variety of fields. Use of TLS data often requires aligning multiple scans for a more complete model of a scene or object, a procedure known as scan registration. Each scan setup...
This dissertation addresses a number of inter-related and fundamental problems in computer vision. Specifically, we address object discovery, recognition, segmentation, and 3D pose estimation in images, as well as 3D scene reconstruction and scene interpretation. The key ideas behind our approaches include using shape as a basic object feature, and...
Nonindigenous species are a major threat to the ecological integrity and biodiversity of marine and estuarine ecosystems. To become a successful invader, species must pass through four phases: (1) survive transport, (2) survive release, (3) establish a population, and (4) expand their range. To better understand these processes, an integrated...
Transport in a binary stochastic media has been an area of interest for many applications over the past three decades. Many different methods have been attempted, most based on the Levermore-Pomraning coupled transport model. However, this method has never been able to correctly solve problems where a large amount of...