Electrification of vehicles is an indispensable step in improving fuel economy and reducing fossil fuel emissions. In particular, hybrid electric vehicle market has gained popularity as one such reliable solution. With the global rise in environmental concerns, the need for advancement of the relevant technologies has become more noticeable than before. In this pursuit, it is well-known that design of effective energy management strategies (EMS) that govern power distribution among the onboard energy sources is key in reducing fuel consumption and its adverse environmental impacts. This thesis is concerned with EMS design for series hybrid electric vehicles from two standpoints.

Powertrain component durability is often neglected in EMS development. In particular, batteries are prone to degradation through usage, a phenomenon widely known as cycle aging, and contribute largely to vehicle cost. In the first part of the thesis, therefore, battery lifetime optimization is integrated into the design of fuel-efficient energy management strategies.  An empirical capacity degradation model is adopted from the literature and is modified in order to predict battery lifetime. The multi-objective problem is to compromise between fuel consumption reduction and battery wear minimization. The problem is formulated within two control theory frameworks, namely Pontryagin's minimum principle and model predictive control. Simulation results suggest that there is an enormous potential in prolonging battery lifetime by sacrificing negligible to no excessive amount of fuel consumption. Performance of the developed methodology in the Pontryagin's minimum principle framework exhibits an inverse correlation with the root-mean-square of power request of drive cycles. The results can be used to develop real-time rule-based methods.  

The application considered in this part is a hybrid electric wheel loader. While prolonging battery lifetime is economically beneficial for any hybrid electric vehicle, the cost savings for high power applications such as the aforementioned construction equipment can be even more rewarding.

The second part of the thesis is dedicated to the development of time-efficient energy management strategies. Considering the need for real-time feasibility, satisfactory fuel economy and low computation time are the key elements in EMS design. In the first step, the analytical solution to equivalent consumption minimization strategy (ECMS) for series hybrid electric vehicles is derived, where the system constraints are directly taken into account in the  derivation process. The equivalence factor bounds are found and used to develop a real time adaptive ECMS. The obtained fuel economy figures  are observed to be very close to the non-causal benchmarks. These results are then utilized to propose real-time  predictive ECMS algorithms. Two scenarios are investigated depending on the availability of drive cycle knowledge. The first scenario corresponds to vehicles that are expected to follow certain drive  cycles. This situation is common among construction machinery such as the wheel loader under study. On the other hand, there are situations where driving mission is not known in advance and the driver behavior is unpredictable, such as typical city driving. For each scenario, an algorithm is presented to compute the equivalence factor efficiently. The control action is then determined by the analytical policy derived previously. Simulations of the developed algorithms on the hybrid wheel loader and a passenger car demonstrate that the methodologies are computationally efficient and attain satisfactory fuel economy with respect to the dynamic programming benchmarks. 

In computer vision, the aim is to model and extract high-level information from visual sensor measurements such as images, videos and 3D points. Since visual data is often high-dimensional, noisy and irregular, achieving robust data modeling is challenging. This thesis presents works that address challenges within a number of different computer vision problems. 

First, the thesis addresses the problem of phase unwrapping for multi-frequency amplitude modulated time-of-flight (ToF) ranging. ToF is used in depth cameras, which have many applications in 3D reconstruction and gesture recognition. While amplitude modulation in time-of-flight ranging can provide accurate measurements for the depth, it also causes depth ambiguities. This thesis presents a method to resolve the ambiguities by estimating the likelihoods of different hypotheses for the depth values. This is achieved by performing kernel density estimation over the hypotheses in a spatial neighborhood of each pixel in the depth image. The depth hypothesis with the highest estimated likelihood can then be selected as the output depth. This approach yields improvements in the quality of the depth images and extends the effective range in both indoor and outdoor environments. 

Next, point set registration is investigated, which is the problem of aligning point sets from overlapping depth images or 3D models. Robust registration is fundamental to many vision tasks, such as multi-view 3D reconstruction and object pose estimation for robotics. The thesis presents a method for handling density variations in the measured point sets. This is achieved by modeling a latent distribution representing the underlying structure of the scene. Both the model of the scene and the registration parameters are inferred in an Expectation-Maximization based framework. Secondly, the thesis introduces a method for integrating features from deep neural networks into the registration model. It is shown that the deep features improve registration performance in terms of accuracy and robustness. Additionally, improved feature representations are generated by training the deep neural network end-to-end by minimizing registration errors produced by our registration model. 

Further, an approach for 3D point set segmentation is presented. As scene models are often represented using 3D point measurements, segmentation of these is important for general scene understanding. Learning models for segmentation requires a significant amount of annotated data, which is expensive and time-consuming to acquire. The approach presented in the thesis circumvents this by projecting the points into virtual camera views and render 2D images. The method can then exploit accurate convolutional neural networks for image segmentation and map the segmentation predictions back to the 3D points. This also allows for transferring learning using available annotated image data, thereby reducing the need for 3D annotations. 

Finally, the thesis explores the problem of video object segmentation (VOS), where the task is to track and segment target objects in each frame of a video sequence. Accurate VOS requires a robust model of the target that can adapt to different scenarios and objects. This needs to be achieved using only a single labeled reference frame as training data for each video sequence. To address the challenges in VOS, the thesis introduces a parametric target model, optimized to predict a target label derived from the mask annotation. The target model is integrated into a deep neural network, where its predictions guide a decoder module to produce target segmentation masks. The deep network is trained on labeled video data to output accurate segmentation masks for each frame. Further, it is shown that by training the entire network model in an end-to-end manner, it can learn a representation of the target that provides increased segmentation accuracy. 

Cellular network operators have witnessed significant growth in data traffic in the past few decades. This growth occurs due to the increase in the number of connected mobile devices, and further, the emerging mobile applications developed for rendering video-based on-demand services. As the available frequency bandwidth for cellular communication is limited, significant efforts are dedicated to improving the utilization of available spectrum and increasing the system performance with the aid of new technologies.  Third-generation (3G) and fourth-generation (4G) mobile communication networks were designed to facilitate high data traffic in cellular networks in past decades. Nevertheless, there is still a requirement for new cellular network technologies to accommodate the ever-growing data traffic demand. The fifth-generation (5G) is the latest generation of mobile communication systems deployed and implemented around the world. Its objective is to meet the tremendous ongoing increase in the data traffic requirements in cellular networks.  

Massive MIMO (multiple-input-multi-output) is one of the backbone technologies in 5G networks. Massive MIMO originated from the concept of multi-user MIMO. It consists of base stations (BSs) implemented with a large number of antennas to increase the signal strengths via adaptive beamforming and concurrently serving many users on the same time-frequency blocks. With Massive MIMO technology, there is a notable enhancement of both sum spectral efficiency (SE) and energy efficiency (EE) in comparison with conventional MIMO-based cellular networks. Resource allocation is an imperative factor to exploit the specified gains of Massive MIMO. It corresponds to efficiently allocating resources in the time, frequency, space, and power domains for cellular communication. Power control is one of the resource allocation methods of Massive MIMO networks to deliver high spectral and energy efficiency. Power control refers to a scheme that allocates transmit powers to the data transmitters such that the system maximizes some desirable performance metric. 

The first part of this thesis investigates reusing a Massive MIMO network's resources for direct communication of some specific user pairs known as device-to-device (D2D) underlay communication. D2D underlay can conceivably increase the SE of traditional Massive MIMO networks by enabling more simultaneous transmissions on the same frequencies. Nevertheless, it adds additional mutual interference to the network. Consequently, power control is even more essential in this scenario than the conventional Massive MIMO networks to limit the interference caused by the cellular network and the D2D communication to enable their coexistence. We propose a novel pilot transmission scheme for D2D users to limit the interference on the channel estimation phase of cellular users compared with sharing pilot sequences for cellular and D2D users. We also introduce a novel pilot and data power control scheme for D2D underlaid Massive MIMO networks. This method aims to assure that the D2D communication enhances the SE of the network compared to conventional Massive MIMO networks. 

In the second part of this thesis, we propose a novel power control approach for multi-cell Massive MIMO networks. The proposed power control approach solves the scalability issue of two well-known power control schemes frequently used in the Massive MIMO literature, based on the network-wide max-min and proportional fairness performance metrics. We first identify the scalability issue of these existing approaches. Additionally, we provide mathematical proof for the scalability of our proposed method. Our scheme aims at maximizing the geometric mean of the per-cell max-min SE. To solve the optimization problem, we prove that it can be rewritten in a convex form and is solved using standard optimization solvers.  

The final part of this thesis focuses on downlink channel estimation in a Massive MIMO network. In Massive MIMO networks, to fully benefit from large antennas at the BSs and perform resource allocation, the BS must have access to high-quality channel estimates that can be acquired via the uplink pilot transmission phase. Time-division duplex (TDD) based Massive MIMO relies on channel reciprocity for the downlink transmission. Thanks to the channel hardening in the Massive MIMO networks with ideal propagation conditions, users rely on the statistical knowledge of channels for decoding the data in the downlink. However, when the channel hardening level is low, using only the channel statistics causes fluctuations in the performance. We investigate how to improve the performance by empowering the user to estimate the downlink channel from downlink data transmissions utilizing a model-based and a data-driven approach instead of relying only on channel statistics. Furthermore, the performance of the proposed method is compared with solely relying on statistical knowledge.

In less than ten years, deep neural networks have evolved into all-encompassing tools in multiple areas of science and engineering, due to their almost unreasonable effectiveness in modeling complex real-world relationships. In computer vision in particular, they have taken tasks such as object recognition, that were previously considered very difficult, and transformed them into everyday practical tools. However, neural networks have to be trained with supercomputers on massive datasets for hours or days, and this limits their ability adjust to changing conditions.

This thesis explores discriminative correlation filters, originally intended for tracking large objects in video, so-called visual object tracking. Unlike neural networks, these filters are small and can be quickly adapted to changes, with minimal data and computing power. At the same time, they can take advantage of the computing infrastructure developed for neural networks and operate within them.

The main contributions in this thesis demonstrate the versatility and adaptability of correlation filters for various problems, while complementing the capabilities of deep neural networks. In the first problem, it is shown that when adopted to track small regions and points, they outperform the widely used Lucas-Kanade method, both in terms of robustness and precision. 

In the second problem, the correlation filters take on a completely new task. Here, they are used to tell different places apart, in a 16 by 16 square kilometer region of ocean near land. Given only a horizon profile - the coast line silhouette of islands and islets as seen from an ocean vessel - it is demonstrated that discriminative correlation filters can effectively distinguish between locations.

In the third problem, it is shown how correlation filters can be applied to video object segmentation. This is the task of classifying individual pixels as belonging either to a target or the background, given a segmentation mask provided with the first video frame as the only guidance. It is also shown that discriminative correlation filters and deep neural networks complement each other; where the neural network processes the input video in a content-agnostic way, the filters adapt to specific target objects. The joint function is a real-time video object segmentation method.

Finally, the segmentation method is extended beyond binary target/background classification to additionally consider distracting objects. This addresses the fundamental difficulty of coping with objects of similar appearance.

Many practical applications, such as search and rescue operations and environmental monitoring, involve the use of mobile sensor platforms. The workload of the sensor operators is becoming overwhelming, as both the number of sensors and their complexity are increasing. This thesis addresses the problem of automating sensor systems to support the operators. This is often referred to as sensor management. By planning trajectories for the sensor platforms and exploiting sensor characteristics, the accuracy of the resulting state estimates can be improved. The considered sensor management problems are formulated in the framework of stochastic optimal control, where prior knowledge, sensor models, and environment models can be incorporated. The core challenge lies in making decisions based on the predicted utility of future measurements.

In the special case of linear Gaussian measurement and motion models, the estimation performance is independent of the actual measurements. This reduces the problem of computing sensing trajectories to a deterministic optimal control problem, for which standard numerical optimization techniques can be applied. A theorem is formulated that makes it possible to reformulate a class of nonconvex optimization problems with matrix-valued variables as convex optimization problems. This theorem is then used to prove that globally optimal sensing trajectories can be computed using off-the-shelf optimization tools. 

As in many other fields, nonlinearities make sensor management problems more complicated. Two approaches are derived to handle the randomness inherent in the nonlinear problem of tracking a maneuvering target using a mobile range-bearing sensor with limited field of view. The first approach uses deterministic sampling to predict several candidates of future target trajectories that are taken into account when planning the sensing trajectory. This significantly increases the tracking performance compared to a conventional approach that neglects the uncertainty in the future target trajectory. The second approach is a method to find the optimal range between the sensor and the target. Given the size of the sensor's field of view and an assumption of the maximum acceleration of the target, the optimal range is determined as the one that minimizes the tracking error while satisfying a user-defined constraint on the probability of losing track of the target.    

While optimization for tracking of a single target may be difficult, planning for jointly maintaining track of discovered targets and searching for yet undetected targets is even more challenging. Conventional approaches are typically based on a traditional tracking method with separate handling of undetected targets. Here, it is shown that the Poisson multi-Bernoulli mixture (PMBM) filter provides a theoretical foundation for a unified search and track method, as it not only provides state estimates of discovered targets, but also maintains an explicit representation of where undetected targets may be located. Furthermore, in an effort to decrease the computational complexity, a version of the PMBM filter which uses a grid-based intensity to represent undetected targets is derived.