Stander Symposium Projects

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  Study on Graphene’s photovoltaic potential and its comparison with other conventional materials

  Ashish Gogia

  Graphene has unique optical properties that make it different from other materials that are used to turn light to electricity. Graphene when absorbs a photon, generates multiple electrons while materials like silicon and gallium arsenide, generate a single electron for each photon absorbed. This means that when these conventional materials are being replaced by Graphene, the efficiency of solar cells will be increased and it also reduces the light dissipation as heat. Graphene is one of the most diverse materials available and has a variety of other remarkable electrical and mechanical properties. It has applications in fields of biological engineering, optical electronics, ultra filtration, photovoltaic, sensors and devices, nanotechnology etc. Through this paper, we will study all such properties that make it different from all the materials available.

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  Synthesizing Coupler-Drivers as a Novel Method for Actuating Mechanical Systems

  Hameed Juma

  Abstract:The objective of the proposed work is to change the mechanical design of an automated manufacturing or assembly process by introducing coupler drivers. Currently, the design of a mechanism to be included in a manufacturing or assembly process requires one of the joints in the mechanism to be used for actuation. That is, the desired motion of the device and how it will be moved are coupled and this complicates its design. The proposed work looks at decoupling the kinematic synthesis of a mechanical system from the actuation synthesis of the system. This is accomplished via a mechanical chain called a coupler driver. This work develop the kinematic synthesis theory needed to design a coupler driver for any single degree of freedom mechanical system. The research will develop the mathematical representation of coupler drivers. A MATLAB code for solving the mathematical model will be developed to validate and verify proposed solutions.During the kinematic synthesis of a single degree of freedom mechanism for a given task, a challenge is finding a solution mechanism that is not hindered by branch singularities relative to any of its driving joints. Trying to achieve the motion characteristics while avoiding the branch singularities severely limits the design space. This work approaches the problem of avoiding branch singularities by actuating a mechanism via an additional chain (set of links) attached to it.The challenge is identifying end point locations that is mechanically feasible and, drive the mechanism monotonically through its task thereby avoiding the branch singularities. The goal of this proposal is to develop the mathematical framework for identifying all possible end points for a coupler-driver for a user-defined mechanism.

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  The Complexity of Untold Stories: Experiences, Perceptions, Behaviors, and Outcomes of Collegiate Black Student-Fathers

  Karlos L. Marshall

  With the increased enrollment of untraditional student populations, the plight of collegiate Black student-fathers has yet to be examined. They are – Black men, Black men in college, Black fathers, college student-parents, and even collegiate student-athletes in some cases. Through in-depth one-on-one phenomenological interviews, chilling details, accounts, and revelations surfaced with regard to Black masculinity; fatherhood; support systems; student and parental development; and institutional resources. Findings revealed valuable information about the experiences, perceptions, behaviors, and outcomes of collegiate Black student-fathers. Recommendations are provided for faculty and administrative personnel to better assist, understand, and serve this unique student population.

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  The Effect of Race in Juvenile Sentencing

  Sarah Anne Plassenthal

  This study seeks to explore the effects a juvenile's race will have on adjudication and dispositional sentencing. This study will be comprised of content analyses looking at case level data from southwestern Ohio. I will be comparing juvenile court cases across race by both gender and offense committed. This study will analyze how white juveniles and African American juveniles are sentenced when they come into contact with the juvenile justice system. I will account for previous offenses and compare juveniles with priors only to other juveniles with prior records. I plan to reach out to the justice systems in the counties of Butler, Clark, Clinton, Darke, Greene, Miami, Montgomery, Preble, and Warren.

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  The Effects of Music on Employee Affect

  Nolan J. Mcnulty

  My thesis is concerned with the effect of music on mood in the workplace. Mood, or affect, is an important attribute in the working environment. For example, positive affect is directly proportional to employee satisfaction, which leads to more productivity and more efficiency. On the other hand, negative affect is inversely proportional to employee satisfaction. Poor employee satisfaction leads to less productivity and less efficiency. The mood of employees at a student café at the University of Dayton was assessed with and without background music while they worked. Data was collected over a two-week period from 20 student employees. Data included background questionnaires asking for demographic information such as music preference, music experience, and hours spent listening to music. The Positive Affectivity, Negative Affectivity Scale (PANAS-X) was distributed before and after each work shift in order to assess changes in affectivity scores. Each participant was exposed to both music and no-music conditions. The hypotheses were that music would enhance satisfaction in this work environment and that the music background of the participants would also affect work satisfaction.

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  The Importance of Faculty Mentoring for Graduate Students’ Success

  Lindsay Elrod Maxam

  Faculty members can play an important role in the development of graduate students. Faculty typically serve as academic advisers for graduate students navigating what experiences students have brought into the program as well as trying to map the best curriculum to match students’ academic and personal goals. In this relationship, it can be transformative or transactional depending on the input of both student and faculty with having different experiences. While advising is part of the faculty and student relationship, it is paramount for the relationship to also include mentoring and professional socialization. Through the socialization process, students need to be prepared to not only be a student, but also to be a professional. In addition, deeper immersion into graduate programs and other functions create new support systems, responsibilities, and opportunities like assistantships, clinical experiences, and other experiences that aid in professional socialization with faculty and practitioners. Students who are granted these opportunities have the learning experience while still preparing to be a full-time professional in their field concurrently (Weidman, Twale, & Stein, 2001).This presentation will explore the importance of faculty mentoring, advising, and socializing their students. It will also include best practices to expand the mastery of these skills.

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  The Influence of Music on Psychological Power

  Benjamin J. Balke, Sean M. Raymond

  Music is commonly believed to give people a sense of power. The current research explored the notion of how music changes two aspects of psychological power: a person’s abstract thinking and sense of control. Past research has indicated that the frequency and the psychological power of the songs can evoke power in the participants. It is believed that music with lower frequencies should make participants feel more powerful than participants who listened to high frequency music. While listening to music participants completed a variety of tasks that look to single out aspects of power. Participants listened to either high or low psychological power which may have been shifted up two semitones, down two semitones, or up one semitone and down one semitone in frequency. Preliminary findings failed to indicate a significant relationship between the psychological power of the music and abstract thinking. The results revealed an effect of the psychological power of the music on control which occurred in the opposite direction of what was expected. Preliminary findings have failed to indicate a significant relationship between shifting the frequency of the music and abstract thinking or control. Preliminary results have shown that there is some influence of the music on psychological power. Research is still on going.

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  The Layered Look: Do Additional Layers of Clothing Influence Perceived Reach Ability?

  Michael J. Tymoski

  The Layered Look- How Many Sweatshirts Does It Take?Clothing plays a necessary role in exhibition of personal style, concealment of body parts that are deemed unacceptable to exhibit by cultural norms, and protection from adverse weather (Flügel, 1930). But anyone who has worn a heavy parka knows that there is a seeming loss of motion that comes with bulky or layered apparel. Does wearing bulky clothing actually change the way we perceive our bodies and our movement capabilities? Previous studies suggest that tools such as a reaching wand are incorporated into the body schema, the cognitive representation of one’s own body. These changes to the body schema likely influence affordance judgments, or perceived potential to act in an environment (Creem, et al. 2014). In a series of experiments, we intend to determine whether clothing changes the body schema by assessing the effect of clothing on perceived affordances in reaching tasks. Participants will wear a varying (and random) number of sweatshirts, look at an arbitrary scale on the wall, and verbally make an affordance judgment about the height to which they can reach, given their perceived body capabilities. These affordance judgments will be followed by actual reaching tasks. We predict that there will be a systematic underestimation of reachability with the application of the additional layers of clothing. As burdening or encumbering objects are added to the body schema, affordance judgments will become more conservative, despite actual action capabilities remaining largely unchanged with additional layers of clothing.

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  The Lived Experiences of Gay Male Students at a Catholic Institution

  Stephen P. Zubritzky

  This qualitative research looks into the lived experiences of gay male students at a Catholic higher education institution. The experience of these students has traditionally not been analyzed, and this study takes a close look at what it means to be gay and attend a Catholic university. These students have experienced varying degrees of acceptance and support from their peers, faculty, staff and the institution as a whole. While acknowledging that the institution does provide some support, students found them to be uncoordinated, insufficient, and not of value, when compared to supports offered to students who identify with other minority groups. These students provided their own insights on what they are looking for in terms of support from the institution as a whole. Students’ recommendations formed the basis of implications for improved practices to increase notions of acceptance and support for this student population.

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  The Performance of Concentrated Portfolios of High Quality Stocks in Highly Volatile Markets: The 2008 - 2013 Experience

  Christine A. Ferry

  The objective of this study is to determine how well concentrated portfolios of high quality stocks perform under highly volatile market conditions. Three different portfolios of 30 stocks each were established based on market cap: (1) mega cap (2) large cap and (3) mid cap. All of the stocks in each portfolio had Standard and Poors quality ranking of A-, A, and A+. One hypothesis tested was that concentrated portfolios of high quality stocks generate excess returns (alpha) when compared to a fully diversified portfolio of stocks such as the S&P ETF SPY. A second hypothesis tested was that portfolios of quality stocks generate better risk adjusted returns relative to the broad market. Quarterly and annual data are used for the performance comparisons.

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  The Relationship Between Executive Functioning Skills (EF) and Spontaneous Focusing on Numerosity (SFON) in Preschoolers

  Kelsey A. Clayback

  Longitudinal data is currently being collected in order to examine the relationship between children’s Spontaneous Focusing on Numerosity (SFON) and children’s cognitive control skills, or executive functioning (EF). SFON refers to a child’s tendency to focus on the characteristic of number in his/her environment without being explicitly instructed to do so. Previous research has shown that both SFON and EF are important predictors of children’s mathematical ability. However, literature has not yet examined what influences SFON or how it develops. This data, collected in fall of 2014 and currently in spring of 2015, includes a battery of assessments of children’s EF and SFON skills. I hypothesize that EF skills influence SFON and children with more developed EF skills will also have a higher level of SFON. Since evidence has shown that both EF and SFON influence mathematical ability, a relationship between the two predictors seems likely. Research is ongoing; however, a significant relationship between SFON and two EF skills, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility, was observed in the data from fall 2014. This research will offer insight into the role EF plays in SFON of preschoolers.

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  The Relationship of Primary and Secondary Psychopathy to Different Types of Empathetic Deficits

  Alyssa P. Gretak

  The present study examines the relationship between the constructs of psychopathy and empathy in 180 undergraduate students. This study attempts to address discrepancies in previous research concerning these constructs by assessing a number of different types of empathy concurrently. Participants were asked to complete measures of psychopathy, implicit and explicit cognitive and affective empathy, social desirability, and anxiety. To measure affective implicit empathy, participants listened to a mock news broadcast that is empathy evoking. While listening to the broadcast, the participants wore a heart rate monitor to determine if the individual experienced an increase in heart rate in response to the stimuli. The current study will test the hypotheses that those high in secondary psychopathy will be lower on all empathy measures than those low in psychopathy. In contrast, those high in primary psychopathy will only be lower on the implicit, affective empathy measure. If we find statistically significant results supporting our hypotheses, the current study will expand upon and address the discrepancies of the existing research by assessing implicit affective empathy along with more commonly assessed types of empathy in this research area (Blair, Jones, Clark, & Smith, 1997; Lishner, 2012).

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  The State of El Salvador: Human Rights and Violence in the Post-War Era

  Christine E. Caldera

  During the Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992), the government of El Salvador knowingly used forms of political violence such as disappearances and torture against the political opposition and other innocent civilians, including women and children. With the signing of the Peace Accords in 1992, El Salvador has since transitioned from an authoritarian regime to a democracy. This project focuses on how the change in regime type influenced the level of repression and respect for human rights in El Salvador. The research analyzes two conflict resolution mechanisms, the Peace Accords and Truth Commission, and the implementation of democratic practices such as elections to understand how these mechanisms influenced the respect and protection of Salvadoran’s physical security rights. The research shows that despite the introduction of democracy, violence remains prevalent in the form of criminal activity and people continue to fear for their personal security as they did during the war.

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  Too Close for Comfort: The Effect of Threatening

  Anissa Jeanette Maffett

  Stereotypes are relied upon to help guide people through their social world. Although typically characterized as unfavorable, stereotypes can serve a number of beneficial functions. Stereotypes allow people to quickly process new information about novel individuals, environments, or events by applying preexisting stereotype-consistent information. Processing new information quickly is essential in novel or unfamiliar situation because it helps determine how to best react. While there are a number of beneficial qualities of stereotypes, a disadvantage of stereotypes is that they can potentially lead to distortions in reality. Stereotypes play an active role in the evaluation of stimuli (e.g., persons), but we know much less about whether stereotypes influence the visual perception of physical stimuli. The current project examines whether people deferentially perceive the distance of physical targets based on whether the target is accompanied by stereotype-based threat. Previous research finds that people evaluate physically threatening stimuli (e.g., spiders, aggressive people) as physically closer than non-threatening stimuli (Cole, Balceitis, & Dunning, 2012). The current study seeks to replicate and extend these findings by examining the role of stereotypes in activating a threat response. The current study will examine this question by looking at the visual perception of distance when presented with threatening stimuli based on stereotype information. Specifically, will participants perceive a confederate participant to be physically closer when that person fits the stereotype of someone who likely has an ostensibly dangerous (and fictitious) disease? It is predicted that participants who are made aware of the threatening status of an individual through stereotypes will perceive that person as physically closer than when the person is not consistent with the stereotypes of a potential disease-carrier. The findings from this experiment have the potential to understand just how influential stereotypes can be in distorting physical reality in our social world.

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  Tower of London Poppy Removal & Distribution Preparation Process

  Emily E. Cooperrider

  More than 880,000 ceramic poppies were created and planted in the moat and surrounding areas of the Tower of London to signify each death in England and Colonies during World War I. This document is a step-by-step guide for carrying out Process Improvement initiative, and tracking the information a Process Improvement Team (PIT) develops. The poppy removal and distribution preparation project needed a plan to remove the 888,246 ceramic poppies planted around the Tower of London, materials for the removal and packaging, calculations for weights and numbers, and job descriptions for over 8,000 volunteers. The poppy installation is to be removed from the Tower Moat by 27 November 2014 in order to allow their worldwide distribution to buyers. The following plan will outline a method of removing the ceramic poppies and the resources necessary to effectively remove the poppies before the mentioned date. It is necessary to reduce the amount of time it takes to remove, clean, and prepare the ceramic poppies for distribution. The planting of the poppies took longer than expected, and because the customers expect the poppies by a certain date, the total process must be more efficient, raise quality, and reduce risk of breakage.

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  Transformational Learning-Improving Estimating

  Lacey E. Engle, Laura E. Stroyne

  Two students from the University of Dayton, one Chemical Engineering and one Industrial Engineering Technology major, were selected as charter students to partake in an 8 week internship abroad in London, England. The students would be working at Tryzens Group, an ecommerce solutions company. In this internship, the students were to use the classroom knowledge gained from their Lean Six Sigma course, and apply it to an unfamiliar process. This internship/project was the last step in receiving a Lean Six Sigma Green Belt Certification. Tryzens Group is an international company delivering ecommerce solutions. Their systems drive business performance and multichannel retail experience for leading companies world-wide. A sharp increase in popularity of the company drove Tryzens to expand rapidly. They now have offices in the United Kingdom, India, and Bulgaria. Since growing, Tryzens has struggled with providing accurate requirement estimations. This project was focused on improving Tryzens’ estimation process.

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  #TrendingNow: Social Media Use and its Effect on First Year Millennial Students Interpersonal Relationships during College Transition

  Meghan Mettling

  Constantly connected to one another via various forms of technology, Millennial generation of students interact with one another in new ways, which represents a challenge and an opportunity for higher education professionals to reach out to students and help them to connect to campus and to one another. The purpose of this quantitative study is to find out how first year Millennial students at a mid-size private institution used social media during their first semester on campus to connect and form relationships with peers, faculty, and staff in the campus community. Data was collected via a survey sent to a random sample of first year residential students. Data analysis showed a positive correlation between students who used social media to connect to others in the campus community during their first semester and a positive social adjustment to college.. Higher education practitioners may use the results of this research to design new and innovative practices for connecting electronically with first year students during the college transition process and increasing second year retention rates.

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  Under Pressure? The Relationship Between Reciprocity, Intimacy, and Obligation in Self-Disclosure

  Juile L. Prosser

  Studies of self-disclosure conducted in the lab report that individuals report greater liking for those who disclose highly intimate information; whereas field studies report that individuals report greater liking for those who disclose information of lower intimacy. One possible explanation for such inconsistent findings is that laboratory studies typically create a scenario where the recipient of self-disclosed information is expected and obligated to reciprocate. Field studies, however, remove the obligation for the participant to reciprocate, thus creating an unbiased evaluation. Thus far, research has not directly compared the level of intimacy with whether the participant is obligated to respond or not (the participant’s role), nor has it examined how these factors influence a participant’s willingness to respond when given the choice to do so. The current study examines the effects of self-disclosure on liking when level of intimacy and participants’ roles are manipulated in a lab setting. Participants are given the opportunity to evaluate an individual based on a vignette of high or low intimate content. The interactive effects of participant role and intimacy level on reports of interpersonal liking as well as the role of perceived similarity with the disclosing target will be examined.

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  Understanding the Role of the Common Core State Standards in Catholic Education

  Annemarie Fisher

  In 2009, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) revolutionized academic standards, providing a format adopted by states across America that focused on raising Math and English Language Arts standards as preparation for colleges and careers. In conjunction with the adoption and implementation of the CCSS across the United States, Catholic schools have worked towards the strengthening and advancement of their own educational systems. This thesis first examines the background of the CCSS, including implementation and professional development, as well as the opposition regarding the standards. The paper presents an overview of the history of academic standards in Catholic education and then explores the current role of the CCSS in Catholic schools. Through interviews with teachers, principals, and superintendents in Catholic education, this study examines how two archdioceses understood and implemented the standards.

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  Variable Extrusion Dies that Exhibit Significant Change in Exit Area

  Heather M. Smith

  Conventional polymer extrusion is a common manufacturing process in which plastic resin is melted and pulled through a fixed-geometry die plate to produce a shape. This process creates long parts with a uniform cross-sectional area, including pipes, molding, and window frames. Shape-changing dies would expand the capabilities of extrusion by allowing the cross-sectional area to change over the length of the extruded part. This would allow for parts manufactured more quickly and at a lower tooling cost, as compared to other processes such as injection molding. A constant extruder screw speed is desired throughout the process due to the pellets being melted by friction within the screw. As the area of the orifice changes throughout the extrusion, problems arise which may be pacified by varying the line speed, or tracking differences between the final shape and the exit area of the part. The goal of this project is to design a series of variable extrusion dies that exhibit significant changes in area. Three types of die were created, each evaluating a different strategy, including bypass ports and shape modifying features beyond the die exit. The dies have recently been produced, installed, and tested to evaluate the various features of each design.

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  Where Do I Belong? LGBT Experiences in On-Campus Housing

  Chelsie W. Fuller

  Studies have shown that for many who identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and/or Queer (LGBTQ) students, navigating through higher education is a difficult task full of opposition and challenges preventing them from achieving their full academic potential. While these challenges present themselves through several outlets on campus, Housing and facilities is one of the main areas that have the potential to challenge and educate students as they connect their learning experiences to their living realities. For students who are feeling that they do not belong, or that there is no “space” for them, navigating higher education and the campus culture can be all the more difficult. Taking a closer look at the ways in which residence halls and on-campus living facilities impact the experiences for students identifying as LGBTQ could help to show exactly how student affairs professionals and campus administrators can go about making useful changes to support these students. Interviewing students who identify as LGBTQ and gauging their experiences within on-campus housing may shed some light on whether there is a correlation between the experience of LGBTQ students, and their choice to continue to live within on-campus housing. Findings of this qualitative study may help student affairs practitioners identify common student experiences and how they relate to retaining students to live in on-campus housing.

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  Wright B Flyer Silver Bird Replica Senior Design Project

  Domenic M. Miccinilli, Matthew R. Pulfer, Denton G. Sagerman, Alex M. Watt, Seth D. Wieging

  The Wright Model B Flyer was one of the first piloted aircraft produced by the Wright brothers in 1910. Wright B Flyer Incorporated specializes in fully functional Wright Model B replicas. The Silver Bird was an aircraft designed and manufactured by the company back in 2007. Unfortunately, the plane and its two pilots were lost due to a welding failure that caused the propeller malfunction. The company has since commissioned another model to be designed and built. The overarching goal of this research is to verify the existing design and perform sensitivity studies to see if the performance can be improved given certain model constraints. Thus far, engineering drawings, as well as 3D models were used to extract crucial dimensions and aerodynamic locations. Other considerations including, but not limited to, airfoil design, constraint analysis, weight buildup, and CG envelope have also been investigated. Test pilots have flown the model to compare the flight characteristics of the simulated aircraft to the previous Silver Bird. The pilots’ feedback, input from other Wright B Flyer Inc. personnel, and flight test data comparisons have been used to evaluate the accuracy of the model. Further investigations will involve looking into various geometric changes to the model and analyzing the effect of these deltas on various flight parameters. These cause and effect results will impact the future design of the Silver Bird, as Wright B Model Inc. looks to build a more effective and transportable model that encompasses the original Wright B Silver Bird model.

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  3D Anomaly Detection using Structure from Motion

  Yakov Diskin

  We present a 3D anomaly detection technique designed to support various applications in changing environmental conditions. The novelty of the work lies in our approach of creating an illumination invariant system tasked with detecting anomalies in a changing environment. Previous efforts have focused on image enhancement techniques that manipulate the intensity values of the image to create a more controlled and unnatural illumination. Since most applications require detecting anomalies in a scene irrespective of the time of day, (lighting conditions or weather conditions present at the time of the frame capture), image enhancement algorithms fail to suppress the illumination differences enough for Background Model (BM) subtraction to be effective. A more effective anomaly detection technique utilizes the 3D scene reconstruction capabilities of structure from motion to create a 3D background model of the environment. By rotating and computing the projectile of the 3D model, pervious work has been shown to effectively eliminate the background by subtracting the newly capture dataset from the BM projectile leaving only the anomalies within the scene. Although previous techniques have proven to work in some cases, these techniques fail when the illumination significantly changes between the capture of the datasets. Our approach completely eliminates the illumination challenges from the anomaly detection problem. The algorithm is based on our previous work in which we have shown a capability to reconstruct a surrounding environment in near real-time speeds. The algorithm, namely Dense Point-cloud Representation (DPR), allows for a 3D reconstruction of a scene using only a single moving camera. Utilizing the 3D models, we compute the volumetric changes between two reconstructed scenes. We measure the success of our technique by evaluating the detection outputs, false alarm rate and computational expense when comparing the two state of the art anomaly detection techniques.

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  A Computer Based Detection of Lung Nodules in Chest

  Barath Narayanan

  Lung cancer is the leading cause of cancerous disease in the United States. Lung cancer usually exhibits its presence with the formation of pulmonary nodules. Nodules are round or oval-shaped growth present in the lung. Chest radiographs are used by radiologists to detect and treat such nodules, but nodules are quite difficult to detect with human eye and are sometimes misinterpreted with lesions present. Thus, automated analysis of such data is very essential and would be of valuable help in lung cancer screening. A new Computer Aided Detection (CAD) system in chest radiography is proposed in this paper. The algorithmic steps of the CAD system include: (i) local contrast enhancement of chest radiographs; (ii) automated anatomical segmentation; (iii) detection of nodule candidates; (iv) feature extraction; (v) candidate classification. In this research, we present facets of the proposed algorithm using a publically available dataset and we explore new set of features and other classifiers. The publically available dataset was created by Lung Image Database Consortium (LIDC) and Image Database Resource Initiative (IDRI). LIDC-IDRI dataset is comprised of 276 patient chest radiographs containing nodules of various types and sizes. The centroids of the nodules are provided by at least one of four board certified radiologists. Local contrast enhancement of chest radiographs is achieved using a Gaussian low pass filter. Automated anatomical segmentation is performed using an active shape model. Potential candidate nodules can then be determined by using an adaptive distance –based threshold algorithm limited to the delineated lung fields. Later, a set of features are computed for each potential candidate. Based on those tailored features, a learning based system such as neural network can be used to classify the candidates into true or false positives. This CAD system could serve as an express way for processing an x-ray and would aid in providing a second opinion to radiologists.

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  Advanced Image Processing for Automatic Pipeline Right-Of-Way Threat Detection

  Chen Cui, Paheding Sidike, Yakov Diskin, Binu M. Nair, Sai B. Arigela

  Rapid advances made in the area of camera and sensor technology has enabled the use of video acquisition systems to monitor the right-of-way of pipelines. Huge amount of data is thus made available for analysis. However, it would be very expensive to employ analysts to scan through the data and identify threats to the right-of-way in the vast amount of wide area imagery. This warrants the deployment of an automated mechanism that is able to detect threats to the right-of-way and send out warnings in the event of detection of a threat. A novel algorithmic framework for the robust detection and classification of objects on pipeline right-of-way (ROW) is designed in four directions: visibility improvement, context-based segmentation, change detection, and part-based object recognition. In the first part of the framework, an adaptive image enhancement algorithm is utilized to improve the visibility of aerial imagery the can aid in threat detection. In this technique, a nonlinear transfer function is developed to achieve the enhancement process for the extremely non-uniform lighting conditions. In the second of the proposed scheme, the context-based segmentation is developed to eliminate regions from imagery that are not considered to be a threat to the pipeline. This segmentation algorithm allows to accelerate threat identification and improve object detection rate. Thirdly, a volumetric change detection algorithm utilizing dense point cloud representation flags changes in consecutive flights. The last phase of the framework is an efficient part-based object recognition model. This technique employs parts of the object with specific feature representative to characterize objects, which is robust to detect objects in partial occlusions and appearance variations. In other words, it is a stricter pre-trained classifier that searches imagery for specific targets that are considered threats. The classifier outputs location of threats and the severity of threat to pipeline.