Department of Electrical Engineering

Visual tracking is one of the fundamental problems in computer vision. Its numerous applications include robotics, autonomous driving, augmented reality and 3D reconstruction. In essence, visual tracking can be described as the problem of estimating the trajectory of a target in a sequence of images. The target can be any image region or object of interest. While humans excel at this task, requiring little effort to perform accurate and robust visual tracking, it has proven difficult to automate. It has therefore remained one of the most active research topics in computer vision.

In its most general form, no prior knowledge about the object of interest or environment is given, except for the initial target location. This general form of tracking is known as generic visual tracking. The unconstrained nature of this problem makes it particularly difficult, yet applicable to a wider range of scenarios. As no prior knowledge is given, the tracker must learn an appearance model of the target on-the-fly. Cast as a machine learning problem, it imposes several major challenges which are addressed in this thesis.

The main purpose of this thesis is the study and advancement of the, so called, Discriminative Correlation Filter (DCF) framework, as it has shown to be particularly suitable for the tracking application. By utilizing properties of the Fourier transform, a correlation filter is discriminatively learned by efficiently minimizing a least-squares objective. The resulting filter is then applied to a new image in order to estimate the target location.

This thesis contributes to the advancement of the DCF methodology in several aspects. The main contribution regards the learning of the appearance model: First, the problem of updating the appearance model with new training samples is covered. Efficient update rules and numerical solvers are investigated for this task. Second, the periodic assumption induced by the circular convolution in DCF is countered by proposing a spatial regularization component. Third, an adaptive model of the training set is proposed to alleviate the impact of corrupted or mislabeled training samples. Fourth, a continuous-space formulation of the DCF is introduced, enabling the fusion of multiresolution features and sub-pixel accurate predictions. Finally, the problems of computational complexity and overfitting are addressed by investigating dimensionality reduction techniques.

As a second contribution, different feature representations for tracking are investigated. A particular focus is put on the analysis of color features, which had been largely overlooked in prior tracking research. This thesis also studies the use of deep features in DCF-based tracking. While many vision problems have greatly benefited from the advent of deep learning, it has proven difficult to harvest the power of such representations for tracking. In this thesis it is shown that both shallow and deep layers contribute positively. Furthermore, the problem of fusing their complementary properties is investigated.

The final major contribution of this thesis regards the prediction of the target scale. In many applications, it is essential to track the scale, or size, of the target since it is strongly related to the relative distance. A thorough analysis of how to integrate scale estimation into the DCF framework is performed. A one-dimensional scale filter is proposed, enabling efficient and accurate scale estimation.

The international marine shipping industry is responsible for the transport of around 90% of the total world trade. Low-speed two-stroke diesel engines usually propel the largest trading ships. This engine type choice is mainly motivated by its high fuel efficiency and the capacity to burn cheap low-quality fuels. To reduce the marine freight impact on the environment, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) has introduced stricter limits on the engine pollutant emissions. One of these new restrictions, named Tier III, sets the maximum NOx emissions permitted. New emission reduction technologies have to be developed to fulfill the Tier III limits on two-stroke engines since adjusting the engine combustion alone is not sufficient. There are several promising technologies to achieve the required NOx reductions, Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) is one of them.  For automotive applications, EGR is a mature technology, and many of the research findings can be used directly in marine applications. However, there are some differences in marine two-stroke engines, which require further development to apply and control EGR.

The number of available engines for testing EGR controllers on ships and test beds is low due to the recent introduction of EGR. Hence, engine simulation models are a good alternative for developing controllers, and many different engine loading scenarios can be simulated without the high costs of running real engine tests. The primary focus of this thesis is the development and validation of models for two-stroke marine engines with EGR. The modeling follows a Mean Value Engine Model (MVEM) approach, which has a low computational complexity and permits faster than real-time simulations suitable for controller testing. A parameterization process that deals with the low measurement data availability, compared to the available data on automotive engines, is also investigated and described. As a result, the proposed model is parameterized to two different two-stroke engines showing a good agreement with the measurements in both stationary and dynamic conditions.

Several engine components have been developed. One of these is a new analytic in-cylinder pressure model that captures the influence of the injection and exhaust valve timings without increasing the simulation time. A new compressor model that can extrapolate to low speeds and pressure ratios in a physically sound way is also described. This compressor model is a requirement to be able to simulate low engine loads. Moreover, a novel parameterization algorithm is shown to handle well the model nonlinearities and to obtain a good model agreement with a large number of tested compressor maps. Furthermore, the engine model is complemented with dynamic models for ship and propeller to be able to simulate transient sailing scenarios, where good EGR controller performance is crucial. The model is used to identify the low load area as the most challenging for the controller performance, due to the slower engine air path dynamics. Further low load simulations indicate that sensor bias can be problematic and lead to an undesired black smoke formation, while errors in the parameters of the controller flow estimators are not as critical. This result is valuable because for a newly built engine a proper sensor setup is more straightforward to verify than to get the right parameters for the flow estimators.

In this thesis we study device-independent quantum key distribution based on energy-time entanglement. This is a method for cryptography that promises not only perfect secrecy, but also to be a practical method for quantum key distribution thanks to the reduced complexity when compared to other quantum key distribution protocols. However, there still exist a number of loopholes that must be understood and eliminated in order to rule out eavesdroppers. We study several relevant loopholes and show how they can be used to break the security of energy-time entangled systems. Attack strategies are reviewed as well as their countermeasures, and we show how full security can be re-established.

Quantum key distribution is in part based on the profound no-cloning theorem, which prevents physical states to be copied at a microscopic level. This important property of quantum mechanics can be seen as Nature's own copy-protection, and can also be used to create a currency based on quantummechanics, i.e., quantum money. Here, the traditional copy-protection mechanisms of traditional coins and banknotes can be abandoned in favor of the laws of quantum physics. Previously, quantum money assumes a traditional hierarchy where a central, trusted bank controls the economy. We show how quantum money together with a blockchain allows for Quantum Bitcoin, a novel hybrid currency that promises fast transactions, extensive scalability, and full anonymity.

Numerical algorithms for efficiently solving optimal control problems are important for commonly used advanced control strategies, such as model predictive control (MPC), but can also be useful for advanced estimation techniques, such as moving horizon estimation (MHE). In MPC, the control input is computed by solving a constrained finite-time optimal control (CFTOC) problem on-line, and in MHE the estimated states are obtained by solving an optimization problem that often can be formulated as a CFTOC problem. Common types of optimization methods for solving CFTOC problems are interior-point (IP) methods, sequential quadratic programming (SQP) methods and active-set (AS) methods. In these types of methods, the main computational effort is often the computation of the second-order search directions. This boils down to solving a sequence of systems of equations that correspond to unconstrained finite-time optimal control (UFTOC) problems. Hence, high-performing second-order methods for CFTOC problems rely on efficient numerical algorithms for solving UFTOC problems. Developing such algorithms is one of the main focuses in this thesis. When the solution to a CFTOC problem is computed using an AS type method, the aforementioned system of equations is only changed by a low-rank modification between two AS iterations. In this thesis, it is shown how to exploit these structured modifications while still exploiting structure in the UFTOC problem using the Riccati recursion. Furthermore, direct (non-iterative) parallel algorithms for computing the search directions in IP, SQP and AS methods are proposed in the thesis. These algorithms exploit, and retain, the sparse structure of the UFTOC problem such that no dense system of equations needs to be solved serially as in many other algorithms. The proposed algorithms can be applied recursively to obtain logarithmic computational complexity growth in the prediction horizon length. For the case with linear MPC problems, an alternative approach to solving the CFTOC problem on-line is to use multiparametric quadratic programming (mp-QP), where the corresponding CFTOC problem can be solved explicitly off-line. This is referred to as explicit MPC. One of the main limitations with mp-QP is the amount of memory that is required to store the parametric solution. In this thesis, an algorithm for decreasing the required amount of memory is proposed. The aim is to make mp-QP and explicit MPC more useful in practical applications, such as embedded systems with limited memory resources. The proposed algorithm exploits the structure from the QP problem in the parametric solution in order to reduce the memory footprint of general mp-QP solutions, and in particular, of explicit MPC solutions. The algorithm can be used directly in mp-QP solvers, or as a post-processing step to an existing solution.

System identification is used in engineering sciences to build mathematical models from data. A common issue in system identification problems is that the true inputs to the system are not fully known. In this thesis, existing approaches to unknown input problems are classified and some of their properties are analyzed.

 A new indirect framework is proposed to treat system identification problems with unknown inputs. The effects of the unknown inputs are assumed to be measured through possibly unknown dynamics. Furthermore, the measurements may also be dependent on other known or measured inputs and can in these cases be called indirect input measurements. Typically, these indirect input measurements can arise when a subsystem of a larger system is of interest and only a limited set of sensors is available. Two examples are when it is desired to estimate parts of a mechanical system or parts of a dynamic network without full knowledge of the signals in the system. The input measurements can be used to eliminate the unknown inputs from a mathematical model of the system through algebraic manipulations. The resulting indirect model structure only depends on known and measured signals and can be used to estimate the desired dynamics or properties. The effects of using the input measurements are analyzed in terms of identifiability, consistency and variance properties. It is shown that cancelation of shared dynamics can occur and that the resulting estimation problem is similar to errors-in-variables and closed-loop estimation problems because of the noisy inputs used in the model. In fact, the indirect framework unifies a number of already existing system identification problems that are contained as special cases.

For completeness, an instrumental variable method is proposed as one possibility for estimating the indirect model. It is shown that multiple datasets can be used to overcome certain identifiability issues and two approaches, the multi-stage and the joint identification approach, are suggested to utilize multiple datasets for estimation of models. Furthermore, the benefits of using the indirect model in filtering and for control synthesis are briefly discussed. 

To show the applicability, the framework is applied to the roll dynamics of a ship for tracking of the loading conditions. The roll dynamics is very sensitive to changes in these conditions and a worst-case scenario is that the ship will capsize.  It is assumed that only motion measurements from an inertial measurement unit (IMU) together with measurements of the rudder angle are available. The true inputs are thus not available, but the measurements from the IMU can be used to form an indirect model from a well-established ship model. It is shown that only a subset of the unknown parameters can be estimated simultaneously. Data was collected in experiments with a scale ship model in a basin and the joint identification approach was selected for this application due to the properties of the model. The approach was applied to the collected data and gave promising results.