CAR DETECTION BY CLASSIFICATION OF IMAGE SEGMENTS By

To my parents, for their years of support and encouragement. ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work would not have been possible without help and support of many people. I would to thank my advisor Dr. Xenofon Koutsoukos, whose guidance and advice was infinitely valuable in allowing me to complete this project. I would also like to thank Dr. Mitchell Wilkes for graciously agreeing to be the second reader for my thesis. Dr. Constantine Aliferis and Dr. Alexander Statnikov provided invaluable assistance in formulating the feature selection and learning problem. Thank you to Hendrik Dahlkamp for providing the image dataset created using Stanford Racing Team's research vehicle " Junior. " iii TABLE OF CONTENTS