PhD Theses

Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) have been the main technology used in aerial and ground vehicle navigation systems. As vehicles approach full autonomy, the requirements on the accuracy, reliability, and availability of their navigation systems become very stringent. Due to the limitations of GNSS, namely severe attenuation in deep urban canyons and susceptibility to interference, jamming, and spoofing, alternative sensors and signals are sought. 

The blood vessels of the brain and the retina share common embryological origins and have comparable anatomy and physiology. In this thesis, patients with Schizophrenia (SCZ) and Bipolar disorder (BD) were recruited and compared with healthy volunteers (HV). We examined the diameters of the retinal venules and arterioles for abnormalities in patients and HV. 

The use of machine-learning for multimedia forensics is gaining more and more consensus, especially due to the amazing possibilities offered by modern machine learning techniques. By exploiting deep learning tools, new approaches have been proposed whose performance remarkably exceed those achieved by state-of-the-art methods based on standard machine-learning and model-based techniques. 

Image filtering is a fundamental task in computer vision and image processing. Various linear and nonlinear filters are routinely used for enhancement, superresolution, sharpening, restoration, etc. The focus of this thesis is on kernel-based filtering that has received significant attention in recent years.