This thesis addresses a number of problems in the field of Active Wave Absorption Systems (AWAS) in wave flumes. The main objective is to establish new tools and methodologies for the improvement of existing AWAS that play a key role in Costal Engineering studies. The main problems addressed are: i) estimation of uncertainties in wave [...]
Human-made environments tend to be structured, i.e., composed mainly of planar surfaces, whose majority are either parallel or perpendicular to each other. Furthermore, those environments lack texture. Traditional methods for Mapping and Localization rely on point features. However, when applying those methods to structured environments, the density of point features may be insufficient for the [...]
With the rise of big data, and of the internet of things, distributed applications are becoming increasingly more popular. Distributed optimization focuses on finding the minimizer of a cost which is the sum of several functions. Each of these functions is stored within an agent that is physically separated from the others. Because no agent [...]
Affordances are defined as action opportunities that an environment offers an agent. This concept, introduced by American psychologist J. J. Gibson in the 70s, provides a non-reductionist explanation regarding visual perception in animals by placing their motor capabilities as the backbone of perceptual faculties. In addition to its profound impact in psychology and neuroscience, action-derived [...]
Vision is one of the most important sensing modalities in nature because of the valuable, thorough information it can provide about the environment. Vision sensing can come in different flavors ranging from human vision, where images are perspective views that follow the pinhole model, to insect vision where compound eyes with ommatidia design enable the [...]
Image classification is a fundamental Computer Vision task that has become more relevant in our current information-driven society. Despite the recent leap forward in the field brought by deep learning approaches, we identify two main challenging problems that are still unresolved and are currently active research topics: multi-label image classification and classifying in the presence [...]