Scientific publications

Online detection and tracking of a variable number of faces in video is a crucial component in many real-world applications ranging from video-surveillance to online gaming. In this paper we propose FAST-DT, a fully automated system capable of detecting and tracking a variable number of faces online without relying on any scene-specific cues.

We are currently confronted with a trend of increased pressure on health care, with associated increasing financial costs, due to an aging society and the expected increase in the prevalence of disability and chronic disease. Finding measures for cost reduction, without sacrificing quality of care, is a significant healthcare challenge.

General purpose platforms are characterized by unpredictable timing behavior. Real-time schedules of tasks on general purpose platforms need to be robust against variations in task execution times. We define robustness in terms of the expected number of tasks that miss deadlines. We present an iterative robust scheduler that produces robust multiprocessor schedules of directed acyclic graphs with a low expected number of tasks that miss their deadlines.

Exploration of design alternatives and estimation of their key performance metrics such as latency and energy consumption is essential for making the proper design decisions in the early phases of system development. Often, high-level models of the dynamic behavior of the system are used for the analysis of design alternatives.

We evaluate the effect of applying the commercial formal technique Analytical Software Design (ASD) to an industrial project. In ASD, interfaces and software designs are modelled using a formal tabular notation. The ASD tool set supports formal checks of these models, such as deadlock freedom and interface compliance.

To improve the design of a power control unit at Philips, two Domain Specific Languages (DSLs) have been used. The first DSL provides a concise and readable notation for the essential state transitions. It is used to generate both configuration files and analysis models. In addition, we also generate instances of a second DSL which represents test traces.

Using ITS data without understanding its quality is questionable. The QSRTI method has been created by TNO on behalf of the Dutch Road Authority (RWS) in response to the European ITS action plan [1]. To reduce the number of road accidents and enhancing traffic efficiency, the European Commission has formulated a priority action in this ITS action plan, known as action C: "Data and procedures for the provision, where possible, of road safety related minimum universal traffic information free of charge to users".

Software maintenance consumes a significant and increasing proportion of industrial software engineering budgets, only to maintain the existing product functionality. This hinders the development of new innovative features with added value to customers. To make software development efforts more effective, legacy software needs to be rejuvenated into a substantial redesign.

Performance is a key aspect of many embedded systems, embedded data processing systems in particular. System performance can typically only be measured in the later stages of system development. To avoid expensive re-work in the final stages of development, it is essential to have accurate performance estimations in the early stages.

In our mission to advance innovation by industrial adoption of academic results, we perform many projects with high-tech industries. Favoring formal methods, we observe a gap between industrial needs in performance modeling and the analysis capabilities of formal methods for this goal. After clarifying this gap, we highlight some relevant deficiencies for state-of-the-art quantitative analysis techniques (focusing on model checking and simulation).