Object tracking is still an intriguing task as the target undergoes significant appearance changes due to illumination, fast motion, occlusion and shape deformation. Background clutter and numerous other environmental factors are other major constraints which remain a riveting challenge to develop a robust and effective tracking algorithm. In the present study, an adaptive Spatio-temporal context (STC)-based algorithm for online tracking is proposed by combining the context-aware formulation, Kalman filter, and adaptive model learning rate. For the enhancement of seminal STC-based tracking performance, different contributions were made in the proposed study. Firstly, a context-aware formulation was incorporated in the STC framework to make it computationally less expensive while achieving better performance. Afterwards, accurate tracking was made by employing the Kalman filter when the target undergoes occlusion. Finally, an adaptive update scheme was incorporated in the model to make it more robust by coping with the changes of the environment. The state of an object in the tracking process depends on the maximum value of the response map between consecutive frames. Then, Kalman filter prediction can be updated as an object position in the next frame. The average difference between consecutive frames is used to update the target model adaptively. Experimental results on image sequences taken from Template Color (TC)-128, OTB2013, and OTB2015 datasets indicate that the proposed algorithm performs better than various algorithms, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

The geographically spatial and controlled distribution of fossil fuel resources, catastrophic global warming, and depletion of fossil fuel resources have forced us to integrate zero- or low-emissions energy resources, such as wind and solar, in the generation mix. These renewable energy resources are unexhausted, available around the globe, and free of cost. The advancement in wind and solar technologies has caused an appreciable decrease in installed the and global levelized costs of electricity via these sources. Therefore, the penetration of renewable energy resources in the generation mix can provide a promising solution to the above-mentioned problems. The aim of simultaneously reducing fuel consumption in terms of “Fuel Cost” and “Emission” in thermal power plants is called a combined economic emission dispatch problem. It is a combinatorial and multi-objective optimization problem. The solution of this problem is to allocate the load demand and losses on the committed units in such way that the overall costs of the generation and emission of thermal units are reduced, while the legal bounds (constraints) are met. It is a highly non-linear and complex optimization problem. The valve-point loading effect makes this problem non-convex. The addition of renewable energy resources (RERs) adds more complexities to this problem because they are intermittent. In this work, chaotic salp swarm algorithms (CISSA) are used to solve the combined economic emission dispatch problem. Chaos is used as an alternative to randomization for the tuning of the control variable to improve the trait of obtaining global extrema. Different test cases having different combinations of thermal, solar, and wind units are solved using the proposed algorithm. The results show the superiority of this study in comparison to the existent research results in terms of the cost of generation and emissions.

Compressed Sensing (CS) theory breaks the Nyquist theorem through random under-sampling and enables us to reconstruct a signal from 10%-50% samples. Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) is a good candidate for application of compressed sensing techniques due to i) implicit sparsity in MR images and ii) inherently slow data acquisition process. In multi-slice MRI, strong inter-slice correlation has been exploited for further scan time reduction through interpolated compressed sensing (iCS). In this paper, a novel fast interpolated compressed sensing (FiCS) technique is proposed based on 2D variable density under-sampling (VRDU) scheme. The 2D-VRDU scheme improves the result by sampling the high energy central part of the k-space slices. The novel interpolation technique takes two consecutive slices and estimates the missing samples of the target slice (T slice) from its left slice (L slice). Compared to the previous methods, slices recovered with the proposed FiCS technique have a maximum correlation with their corresponding original slices. The proposed FiCS technique is evaluated by using both subjective and objective assessment. In subjective assessment, our proposed technique shows less partial volume loss compared to existing techniques. For objective assessment different performance metrics, such as structural similarity index measurement (SSIM), peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), mean square error (MSE) and correlation, are used and compared with existing interpolation techniques. Simulation results on knee and brain dataset shows that the proposed FiCS technique has improved image quality and performance with even reduced scan time, lower computational complexity and maximum information content.

During recent years correlation tracking is considered fast and effective by the virtue of circulant structure of the sampling data for learning phase of filter and Fourier domain calculation of correlation. During the occurrence of occlusion, motion blur and out of view movement of target, most of the correlation filter based trackers start to learn using erroneous samples and tracker starts drifting. Currently, adaptive correlation filter based tracking algorithms are being combined with redetection modules. This hybridization helps in redetection of the target in long term tracking. The redetection modules are mostly classifier, which classify the true object after tracking failure occurrence. The methods perform favorable during short term occlusion or partial occlusion. To further increase the tracking efficiency specifically during long term occlusion, while maintaining real time processing speed, this study proposes tracking failure avoidance method. We first propose, a strategy to detect the occlusion using two cues from the response map i.e., peak correlation score and peak to side lobe ratio. After successful detection of tracking failure, second strategy is proposed to save the target being getting more erroneous. Kalman filter based predictor continuously predicts the location during occlusion. Kalman filter passes this result to Support Vector Machine (SVM). When the target reappears in frame, support vector machine based classifier classifies the correct object using the predicted location of Kalman filter. This decreases the chance of tracking failure as Kalman filter continuously updates itself during occlusion and predicts the next location using its own previous prediction. Once the true object is detected by classifier after the clearance of occlusion, this result is forwarded to correlation filter tracker to resume its operation of tracking and updating its parameters. Together these two proposed schemes show significant improvement in tracking efficiency. Furthermore, this collaboration in redetection phase shows significant improvement in the tracking accuracy over videos containing six challenging aspects of visual object tracking as mentioned in the literature.