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.

Urdu is a complex language as it is an amalgam of many South Asian and East Asian languages; hence, its character recognition is a huge and difficult task. It is a bidirectional language with its numerals written from left to right while script is written in opposite direction which induces complexities in the recognition process. This paper presents the recognition and classification of a novel Urdu numeral dataset using convolutional neural network (CNN) and its variants. We propose custom CNN model to extract features which are used by Softmax activation function and support vector machine (SVM) classifier. We compare it with GoogLeNet and the residual network (ResNet) in terms of performance. Our proposed CNN gives an accuracy of 98.41% with the Softmax classifier and 99.0% with the SVM classifier. For GoogLeNet, we achieve an accuracy of 95.61% and 96.4% on ResNet. Moreover, we develop datasets for handwritten Urdu numbers and numbers of Pakistani currency to incorporate real-life problems. Our models achieve best accuracies as compared to previous models in the literature for optical character recognition (OCR).

Visual object tracking (VOT) is a vital part of various domains of computer vision applications such as surveillance, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), and medical diagnostics. In recent years, substantial improvement has been made to solve various challenges of VOT techniques such as change of scale, occlusions, motion blur, and illumination variations. This paper proposes a tracking algorithm in a spatiotemporal context (STC) framework. To overcome the limitations of STC based on scale variation, a max-pooling-based scale scheme is incorporated by maximizing over posterior probability. To avert target model from drift, an efficient mechanism is proposed for occlusion handling. Occlusion is detected from average peak to correlation energy (APCE)-based mechanism of response map between consecutive frames. On successful occlusion detection, a fractional-gain Kalman filter is incorporated for handling the occlusion. An additional extension to the model includes APCE criteria to adapt the target model in motion blur and other factors. Extensive evaluation indicates that the proposed algorithm achieves significant results against various tracking methods.

Despite eminent progress in recent years, various challenges associated with object tracking algorithms such as scale variations, partial or full occlusions, background clutters, illumination variations are still required to be resolved with improved estimation for real-time applications. This paper proposes a robust and fast algorithm for object tracking based on spatio-temporal context (STC). A pyramid representation-based scale correlation filter is incorporated to overcome the STC’s inability on the rapid change of scale of target. It learns appearance induced by variations in the target scale sampled at a different set of scales. During occlusion, most correlation filter trackers start drifting due to the wrong update of samples. To prevent the target model from drift, an occlusion detection and handling mechanism are incorporated. Occlusion is detected from the peak correlation score of the response map. It continuously predicts target location during occlusion and passes it to the STC tracking model. After the successful detection of occlusion, an extended Kalman filter is used for occlusion handling. This decreases the chance of tracking failure as the Kalman filter continuously updates itself and the tracking model. Further improvement to the model is provided by fusion with average peak to correlation energy (APCE) criteria, which automatically update the target model to deal with environmental changes. Extensive calculations on the benchmark datasets indicate the efficacy of the proposed tracking method with state of the art in terms of performance analysis.