The aim of this paper is to propose and evaluate the novel method of template generation, matching, comparing and visualization applied to motion capture (kinematic) analysis. To evaluate our approach, we have used motion capture recordings (MoCap) of two highly-skilled black belt karate athletes consisting of 560 recordings of various karate techniques acquired with wearable sensors. We have evaluated the quality of generated templates; we have validated the matching algorithm that calculates similarities and differences between various MoCap data; and we have examined visualizations of important differences and similarities between MoCap data. We have concluded that our algorithms works the best when we are dealing with relatively short (2–4 s) actions that might be averaged and aligned with the dynamic time warping framework. In practice, the methodology is designed to optimize the performance of some full body techniques performed in various sport disciplines, for example combat sports and martial arts. We can also use this approach to generate templates or to compare the correct performance of techniques between various top sportsmen in order to generate a knowledge base of reference MoCap videos. The motion template generated by our method can be used for action recognition purposes. We have used the DTW classifier with angle-based features to classify various karate kicks. We have performed leave-one-out action recognition for the Shorin-ryu and Oyama karate master separately. In this case, $100\%$ actions were correctly classified. In another experiment, we used templates generated from Oyama master recordings to classify Shorin-ryu master recordings and vice versa. In this experiment, the overall recognition rate was $94.2\%$ , which is a very good result for this type of complex action.

The Cosmic-Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory (CREDO) is a newly formed, global collaboration dedicated to observing and studying cosmic rays (CR) and cosmic-ray ensembles (CRE): groups of at least two CR with a common primary interaction vertex or the same parent particle. The CREDO program embraces testing known CR and CRE scenarios, and preparing to observe unexpected physics, it is also suitable for multi-messenger and multi-mission applications. Perfectly matched to CREDO capabilities, CRE could be formed both within classical models (e.g., as products of photon–photon interactions), and exotic scenarios (e.g., as results of decay of Super-Heavy Dark Matter particles). Their fronts might be significantly extended in space and time, and they might include cosmic rays of energies spanning the whole cosmic-ray energy spectrum, with a footprint composed of at least two extensive air showers with correlated arrival directions and arrival times. As the CRE are predominantly expected to be spread over large areas and, due to the expected wide energy range of the contributing particles, such a CRE detection might only be feasible when using all available cosmic-ray infrastructure collectively, i.e., as a globally extended network of detectors. Thus, with this review article, the CREDO Collaboration invites the astroparticle physics community to actively join or to contribute to the research dedicated to CRE and, in particular, to pool together cosmic-ray data to support specific CRE detection strategies.

The motivation of this paper is to examine the effectiveness of state-of-the-art and newly proposed motion capture pattern recognition methods in the task of head gesture classifications. The head gestures are designed for a user interface that utilizes a virtual reality helmet equipped with an internal measurement unit (IMU) sensor that has 6-axis accelerometer and gyroscope. We will validate a classifier that uses Principal Components Analysis (PCA)-based features with various numbers of dimensions, a two-stage PCA-based method, a feedforward artificial neural network, and random forest. Moreover, we will also propose a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) classifier trained with extension of DTW Barycenter Averaging (DBA) algorithm that utilizes quaternion averaging and a bagged variation of previous method (DTWb) that utilizes many DTW classifiers that perform voting. The evaluation has been performed on 975 head gesture recordings in seven classes acquired from 12 persons. The highest value of recognition rate in a leave-one-out test has been obtained for DTWb and it equals 0.975 (0.026 better than the best of state-of-the-art methods to which we have compared our approach). Among the most important applications of the proposed method is improving life quality for people who are disabled below the neck by supporting, for example, an assistive autonomous power chair with a head gesture interface or remote controlled interfaces in robotics.

We present the purpose, long-term development vision, basic design, detection algorithm and preliminary results obtained with the Cosmic Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory (CREDO) Detector mobile application. The CREDO Detector app and related infrastructure are unique in terms of their scale, targeting many form-factors and open-access philosophy. This philosophy translates to the open-source code of the app, open-access in terms of both data inflow as well as data consumption and above all, the citizen science philosophy that means that the infrastructure is open to all who wish to participate in the project. The CREDO infrastructure and CREDO Detector app are designed for the large-scale study of various radiation forms that continuously reach the Earth from space, but with the sensitivity to local radioactivity as well. Such study has great significance both scientifically and educationally as cosmic radiation has an impact on diverse research areas from life on Earth to the functioning of modern electronic devices. The CREDO Detector app is now working worldwide across phones, tablets, laptops, PCs and cheap dedicated registration stations. These diverse measurements contribute to the broader search for large-scale cosmic ray correlations, as well as the CREDO-specific proposed extensive air showers and incoherent secondary cosmic rays.

Gamification is known to enhance users’ participation in education and research projects that follow the citizen science paradigm. The Cosmic Ray Extremely Distributed Observatory (CREDO) experiment is designed for the large-scale study of various radiation forms that continuously reach the Earth from space, collectively known as cosmic rays. The CREDO Detector app relies on a network of involved users and is now working worldwide across phones and other CMOS sensor-equipped devices. To broaden the user base and activate current users, CREDO extensively uses the gamification solutions like the periodical Particle Hunters Competition. However, the adverse effect of gamification is that the number of artefacts, i.e., signals unrelated to cosmic ray detection or openly related to cheating, substantially increases. To tag the artefacts appearing in the CREDO database we propose the method based on machine learning. The approach involves training the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to recognise the morphological difference between signals and artefacts. As a result we obtain the CNN-based trigger which is able to mimic the signal vs. artefact assignments of human annotators as closely as possible. To enhance the method, the input image signal is adaptively thresholded and then transformed using Daubechies wavelets. In this exploratory study, we use wavelet transforms to amplify distinctive image features. As a result, we obtain a very good recognition ratio of almost 99% for both signal and artefacts. The proposed solution allows eliminating the manual supervision of the competition process.

In this paper, we describe the convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approach to the problems of categorization and artefact reduction of cosmic ray images obtained from CMOS sensors used in mobile phones. As artefacts, we understand all images that cannot be attributed to particles’ passage through sensor but rather result from the deficiencies of the registration procedure. The proposed deep neural network is composed of a pretrained CNN and neural-network-based approximator, which models the uncertainty of image class assignment. The network was trained using a transfer learning approach with a mean squared error loss function. We evaluated our approach on a data set containing 2350 images labelled by five judges. The most accurate results were obtained using the VGG16 CNN architecture; the recognition rate (RR) was 85.79% ± 2.24% with a mean squared error (MSE) of 0.03 ± 0.00. After applying the proposed threshold scheme to eliminate less probable class assignments, we obtained a RR of 96.95% ± 1.38% for a threshold of 0.9, which left about 62.60% ± 2.88% of the overall data. Importantly, the research and results presented in this paper are part of the pioneering field of the application of citizen science in the recognition of cosmic rays and, to the best of our knowledge, this analysis is performed on the largest freely available cosmic ray hit dataset.