As we begin a new year and new work with the Illinois Community College Board (ICCB), we are thrilled to see our PTR Year Two: Implementation Communities’ teams get their project work up and running. Designed to transform student outcomes and share their innovations and successes with their colleagues across the state, these grassroots teams are using their data and evidence-based practices to ...

Evidence is presented to suggest that, in three dimensions, spherical 6-designs with N points exist for N = 24, 26, ≥ 28; 7-designs for N = 24, 30, 32, 34, ≥ 36; 8-designs for N = 36, 40, 42, ≥ 44; 9-designs for N = 48, 50, 52, ≥ 54; 10-designs for N = 60, 62, ≥ 64; 11-designs for N = 70, 72, ≥ 74; and 12-designs for N = 84, ≥ 86. The existence of some of these designs is established analytical...

A new set of attributes combining color and SURF-based histograms coupled with a SVM classifier to enhance visual based autonomous aerial navigation is proposed. These new features are used for region classification with aerial images in order to speed up the UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) localization performed by image matching using only reference images according to the region classificatio...

We propose to use binary strings as an efficient feature point descriptor, which we call BRIEF. We show that it is highly discriminative even when using relatively few bits and can be computed using simple intensity difference tests. Furthermore, the descriptor similarity can be evaluated using the Hamming distance, which is very efficient to compute, instead of the L2 norm as is usually done. ...

Upwelling indices are commonly calculated using wind stress measurements [1]. They describe the physical process which causes upwelling but may not accurately predict the presence or absence of cold, nutrient rich, upwelled water reaching the surf zone. Cold, nutrient-rich, upwelled water plays an important role in surf zone ecosystems and therefore needs to be quantified. Here a daily coastal ...

An exportable and robust system using only camera images is proposed for path execution in robot navigation. Motion information is extracted in the form of optical flow from SURF robust descriptors of consecutive frames, so the method is called SURF flow. This information is used to correct robot displacement when a straight forward path command is sent to the robot, but it is not really execut...

Object recognition and tracking has a wide spectrum of promising applications. Feature-based algorithms are well-suited for such operations like Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF), SIFT (Scale-invariant feature transform), ORB (Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF) algorithm has been proved to achieve optimal results. ORB algorithm builds on the well-known FAST key point detector and the recently-dev...

Introduction. Recently, a comparative study in [2] has shown the superior performance of local features for face recognition in unconstrained environments. Due to the global integration of Speeded Up Robust Features (SURF) [1], the authors claim that it stays more robust to various image perturbations than the more locally operating SIFT descriptor. However, no detailed analysis for a SURF base...