Cutting tubes with defined lengths (Bin Packing with a Constant Number of Item Types) - scheduled-tasks

Suppose I have an order for small tubes of different types a1...a10 and I have infinite amount of large tubes with the same length I have to cut with minimal waste so that I can produce the ordered amount of small tubes. Which optimization algorithm would apply to my problem?

As Codor pointed out, this is a Bin Packing problem. At least it is a subclass there of: There is another category called the "Cutting Stock" Problem, where the "weight" of the material is categorized in couple of discrete categories and is not continuous value.
The bin packing problem is a NP Problem which mean the optimal solution(s) can be found by trying out all possible solutions. As for the cutting stock: it is more constrained and there is a polynomial solution algorithms discovered by Thomas Rothvoss (or Rothvoß). I didn't understand it yet but if someone is interested there is a paper called "Polynomiality for Bin Packing with a Constant Number of Item Types" and a Youtube video Better Algorithms for Bin Packing. Unfortunately I haven't found yet a source code implementing the algorithms.

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In DBSCAN, what does eps represent actually?

Suppose that I have already found the eps for all density. I applied the methodology from here http://ijiset.com/v1s4/IJISET_V1_I4_48.pdf
If you don't mind, please open page 5 and see at Proposed Algorithm section. At step 10.1, the paper tells us to calculate the number of objects in eps-neighborhood.
What does eps represent actually? It is a radius to draw a circle right? So, why the radius is so small, smaller than distances between two objects? If so, the MinPts will be 0 forever.
Yes, if used with Euclidean distance, then it is a radius.
It is not infinitely small (it does not tend to 0). It's just supposed to be small compared to the data set extends, but the authors could have named it "r" instead.
Use the original paper to understand the algorithm, not some indian journal variant of it.
In Euclidean distance, it is the radius. Selection of Eps is a little difficult.
This problem is related to model selection, i.e., the selection of a particular model and its corresponding parametrization. In the case of k-means (which requires from the user the number of clusters as input) there is a plethora of measures in the literature that can help in the selection of the best number of clusters, for instance: silhouette, c-index, dunn, davies-bouldin. These measures are the so-called relative validity criteria.
In the case of Density-based clustering algorithms, there are some measures too, for instance: CDbw and DBCV.

How many and which parents should we select for crossover in genetic algorithm

I have read many tutorials, papers and I understood the concept of Genetic Algorithm, but I have some problems to implement the problem in Matlab.
In summary, I have:
A chromosome containing three genes [ a b c ] with each gene constrained by some different limits.
Objective function to be evaluated to find the best solution
What I did:
Generated random values of a, b and c, say 20 populations. i.e
[a1 b1 c1] [a2 b2 c2]…..[a20 b20 c20]
At each solution, I evaluated the objective function and ranked the solutions from best to worst.
Difficulties I faced:
Now, why should we go for crossover and mutation? Is the best solution I found not enough?
I know the concept of doing crossover (generating random number, probability…etc) but which parents and how many of them will be selected to do crossover or mutation?
Should I do the crossover for the entire 20 solutions (parents) or only two of them?
Generally a Genetic Algorithm is used to find a good solution to a problem with a huge search space, where finding an absolute solution is either very difficult or impossible. Obviously, I don't know the range of your values but since you have only three genes it's likely that a good solution will be found by a Genetic Algorithm (or a simpler search strategy at that) without any additional operators. Selection and Crossover is usually carried out on all chromosome in the population (although it's not uncommon to carry some of the best from each generation forward as is). The general idea is that the fitter chromosomes are more likely to be selected and undergo crossover with each other.
Mutation is usually used to stop the Genetic Algorithm prematurely converging on a non-optimal solution. You should analyse the results without mutation to see if it's needed. Mutation is usually run on the entire population, at every generation, but with a very small probability. Giving every gene 0.05% chance that it will mutate isn't uncommon. You usually want to give a small chance of mutation, without it completely overriding the results of selection and crossover.
As has been suggested I'd do a lit bit more general background reading on Genetic Algorithms to give a better understanding of its concepts.
Sharing a bit of advice from 'Practical Neural Network Recipies in C++' book... It is a good idea to have a significantly larger population for your first epoc, then your likely to include features which will contribute to an acceptable solution. Later epocs which can have smaller populations will then tune and combine or obsolete these favourable features.
And Handbook-Multiparent-Eiben seems to indicate four parents are better than two. However bed manufactures have not caught on to this yet and seem to only produce single and double-beds.

How to Compare the quality of two images?

I have applied Two different Image Enhancement Algorithm on a particular Image and got two resultant image , Now i want to compare the quality of those two image in order to find the effectiveness of those two Algorithms and find the more appropriate one based on the comparison of Feature vectors of those two images.So what Suitable Feature Vectors should i compare in this Case?
Iam asking in context of comparing the texture features of the images and which feature vector will be more suitable.
I need Mathematical support for verifying the effectiveness of any one algorithm based on the evaluation of Images for example using Constrast and Variance.So are there any more approaches do that?
A better approach would be to do some Noise/Signal ratio by comparing image spectra ?
Slayton is right, you need a metric and a way to measure against it, which can be an academic project in itself. However, i could think of one approach straightaway, not sure if it makes sense to your specific task at hand:
Metric:
The sum of abs( colour difference ) across all pixels. The lower, the more similar the images are.
Method:
For each pixel, get the absolute colour difference (or distance, to be precise) in LAB space between original and processed image and sum that up. Don't ruin your day trying to understand the full wikipedia article and coding that, this has been done before. Try re-using the methods getDistanceLabFrom(Color color) or getDistanceRgbFrom(Color color) from this PHP implementation. It worked like a charm for me when i needed a way to match a color of pixels in a jpg picture - which basically is the same principle.
The theory behind it (as far as my limited understanding goes): It's doing a mathematical abstraction of rgb or (better) lab colour space as a three dimensional room, and then calculate the distance, that's why it works well - and hardly worked for me when looking at a color code from a one-dimensionional perspective.
The usual way is to start with a reference image (a good one), then add some noise on it (in a controlled way).
Then, your algorithm should remove as much as possible from the added noise. The results are easy to compare with a signal-to-noise ration (see wikipedia).
Now, the approach is easy to apply on simple noise models, but if you aim to improve more complex appearance issues, you must devise a way to apply the noise, which is not easy.
Another, quite common way to do it is the one recommended by slayton: take all your colleagues to appreciate the output of your algorithm, then average their impressions.
If you have only the 2 images and no reference (higest quality) image, then you can see my rude solution/bash script there: https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/75995/how-do-i-compare-two-similar-images-sharpness/117823#117823
It gets the 2 filenames and outputs the higher quality filename. It assumes the content of the images is identical (same source image).
It can be fooled though.

Lucas Kanade Optical Flow, Direction Vector

I am working on optical flow, and based on the lecture notes here and some samples on the Internet, I wrote this Python code.
All code and sample images are there as well. For small displacements of around 4-5 pixels, the direction of vector calculated seems to be fine, but the magnitude of the vector is too small (that's why I had to multiply u,v by 3 before plotting them).
Is this because of the limitation of the algorithm, or error in the code? The lecture note shared above also says that motion needs to be small "u, v are less than 1 pixel", maybe that's why. What is the reason for this limitation?
#belisarius says "LK uses a first order approximation, and so (u,v) should be ideally << 1, if not, higher order terms dominate the behavior and you are toast. ".
A standard conclusion from the optical flow constraint equation (OFCE, slide 5 of your reference), is that "your motion should be less than a pixel, less higher order terms kill you". While technically true, you can overcome this in practice using larger averaging windows. This requires that you do sane statistics, i.e. not pure least square means, as suggested in the slides. Equally fast computations, and far superior results can be achieved by Tikhonov regularization. This necessitates setting a tuning value(the Tikhonov constant). This can be done as a global constant, or letting it be adjusted to local information in the image (such as the Shi-Tomasi confidence, aka structure tensor determinant).
Note that this does not replace the need for multi-scale approaches in order to deal with larger motions. It may extend the range a bit for what any single scale can deal with.
Implementations, visualizations and code is available in tutorial format here, albeit in Matlab not Python.

Pathfinding algorithm with only partial knowledge of graph

I need to program an algorithm to navigate a robot through a "maze" (a rectangular grid with a starting point, a goal, empty spaces and uncrossable spaces or "walls"). It can move in any cardinal direction (N, NW, W, SW, S, SE, E, NE) with constant cost per move.
The problem is that the robot doesn't "know" the layout of the map. It can only view it's 8 surrounding spaces and store them (it memorizes the surrounding tiles of every space it visits). The only other input is the cardinal direction in which the goal is on every move.
Is there any researched algorithm that I could implement to solve this problem? The typical ones like Dijkstra's or A* aren't trivialy adapted to the task, as I can't go back to revisit previous nodes in the graph without cost (retracing the steps of the robot to go to a better path would cost the moves again), and can't think of a way to make a reasonable heuristic for A*.
I probably could come up with something reasonable, but I just wanted to know if this was an already solved problem, and I need not reinvent the wheel :P
Thanks for any tips!
The problem isn't solved, but like with many planning problems, there is a large amount of research already available.
Most of the work in this area is based on the original work of R. E. Korf in the paper "Real-time heuristic search". That paper seems to be paywalled, but the preliminary results from the paper, along with a discussion of the Real-Time A* algorithm are still available.
The best recent publications on discrete planning with hidden state (path-finding with partial knowledge of the graph) are by Sven Koenig. This includes the significant work on the Learning Real-Time A* algorithm.
Koenig's work also includes some demonstrations of a range of algorithms on theoretical experiments that are far more challenging that anything that would be likely to occur in a simulation. See in particular "Easy and Hard Testbeds for Real-Time Search Algorithms" by Koenig and Simmons.