El Ahmar, Wassim2019-07-182019-07-182019-07-18http://hdl.handle.net/10393/39448http://dx.doi.org/10.20381/ruor-23692Alex Krizhevsky and his colleagues changed the world of machine vision and image processing in 2012 when their deep learning model, named Alexnet, won the Im- ageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge with more than 10.8% lower error rate than their closest competitor. Ever since, deep learning approaches have been an area of extensive research for the tasks of object detection, classification, pose esti- mation, etc...This thesis presents a comprehensive analysis of different deep learning models and architectures that have delivered state of the art performances in various machine vision tasks. These models are compared to each other and their strengths and weaknesses are highlighted. We introduce a new approach for human head and shoulder detection from RGB- D data based on a combination of image processing and deep learning approaches. Candidate head-top locations(CHL) are generated from a fast and accurate image processing algorithm that operates on depth data. We propose enhancements to the CHL algorithm making it three times faster. Different deep learning models are then evaluated for the tasks of classification and detection on the candidate head-top loca- tions to regress the head bounding boxes and detect shoulder keypoints. We propose 3 different small models based on convolutional neural networks for this problem. Experimental results for different architectures of our model are highlighted. We also compare the performance of our model to mobilenet. Finally, we show the differences between using 3 types of inputs CNN models: RGB images, a 3-channel representation generated from depth data (Depth map, Multi-order depth template, and Height difference map or DMH), and a 4 channel input composed of RGB+D data.endeep learningconvolutional neural networksmachine learningartificial intelligenceaicnnrgbdmachine visionThesis