25776373
Iteration-free fractal image coding based on efficient domain pool design
The domain pool design is one of the dominant issues which affect the coding performance of fractal image compression. In this paper, we employ the LBG algorithm and propose a block averaging method to design the efficient domain pools based on a proposed iteration-free fractal image codec. The redundancies between the generated domain blocks are reduced by the proposed methods. Therefore, we can obtain the domain pools that are more efficient than those in the conventional fractal coding schemes and thus the coding performance is improved. On the other hand, the iteration process in the conventional fractal coding scheme not only requires a large size of memory and a high computation complexity but also prolongs the decoding process. The proposed iteration-free fractal codec can overcome the problems above. In computer simulation, both the LBG-based and block-averaging methods for the domain pool design in the proposed iteration free scheme achieve excellent performances. For example, based on the proposed block-averaging method, the decoded Lena image has at least a 0.5 dB higher PSNR (under the same bit rate) and an eight-time faster decoding speed than the conventional fractal coding schemes that require iterations.
2551829
Adaptive Schemes for Improving Fractal Block Coding of Images
In this paper, we propose several adaptive methods to improve the fractal block coding (FBC) of still images. First of all, the range of the contrast scaling is adaptively selected according to its statistical property: then, we search for the best quantized value in the selected range. Then, the domain pool of the current range block is predicted using a finite-state method, which uses the information of previous best-match domain blocks and domain pools. The size of the domain pool is automatically adjusted; however, conventional studies can only determine a fixed-size domain pool. Therefore, the search process for finding the best-match domain block in our approach is more flexible. In addition, we propose a finite-state method to estimate the mean (average pixel value) of the current range block by using the means of the previous blocks. From the simulation, we achieve 0.35 dB improvement in peak signal-to-noise ratio and 10.5% reduction in bit rate on average compared with the basic FBC scheme. Finally, the encoding and decoding time of different FBC schemes is also evaluated for completeness.
1730596
A Scalable Kernel-Based Algorithm for Semi-Supervised Metric Learning
In recent years, metric learning in the semisupervised setting has aroused a lot of research interests. One type of semi-supervised metric learning utilizes supervisory information in the form of pairwise similarity or dissimilarity constraints. However, most methods proposed so far are either limited to linear metric learning or unable to scale up well with the data set size. In this paper, we propose a nonlinear metric learning method based on the kernel approach. By applying low-rank approximation to the kernel matrix, our method can handle significantly larger data sets. Moreover, our low-rank approximation scheme can naturally lead to out-of-sample generalization. Experiments performed on both artificial and real-world data show very promising results.
4841642
Locally linear metric adaptation with application to semi-supervised clustering and image retrieval
Many computer vision and pattern recognition algorithms are very sensitive to the choice of an appropriate distance metric. Some recent research sought to address a variant of the conventional clustering problem called semi-supervised clustering, which performs clustering in the presence of some background knowledge or supervisory information expressed as pairwise similarity or dissimilarity constraints. However, existing metric learning methods for semi-supervised clustering mostly perform global metric learning through a linear transformation. In this paper, we propose a new metric learning method that performs nonlinear transformation globally but linear transformation locally. In particular, we formulate the learning problem as an optimization problem and present three methods for solving it. Through some toy data sets, we show empirically that our locally linear metric adaptation (LLMA) method can handle some difficult cases that cannot be handled satisfactorily by previous methods. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on some UCI data sets. Besides applying LLMA to semi-supervised clustering, we have also used it to improve the performance of content-based image retrieval systems through metric learning. Experimental results based on two real-world image databases show that LLMA significantly outperforms other methods in boosting the image retrieval performance.
8902172
Kernel-based distance metric learning for content-based image retrieval
For a specific set of features chosen for representing images, the performance of a content-based image retrieval (CBIR) system depends critically on the similarity or dissimilarity measure used. Instead of manually choosing a distance function in advance, a more promising approach is to learn a good distance function from data automatically. In this paper, we propose a kernel approach to improve the retrieval performance of CBIR systems by learning a distance metric based on pairwise constraints between images as supervisory information. Unlike most existing metric learning methods which learn a Mahalanobis metric corresponding to performing linear transformation in the original image space, we define the transformation in the kernel-induced feature space which is nonlinearly related to the image space. Experiments performed on two real-world image databases show that our method not only improves the retrieval performance of Euclidean distance without distance learning, but it also outperforms other distance learning methods significantly due to its higher flexibility in metric learning.
32579362
Tele-action objects for an active multimedia system
We present the concept of tele-action objects (TAOs), which possess private knowledge specific to the object instances. The user can create and modify the private knowledge of a tele-action object, so that the tele-action object will automatically react to certain events to pre-perform operations for generating timely response, improving operational efficiency and maintaining consistency. Moreover tele-action objects also possess a hypergraph structure leading to the effective presentation and efficient communication of multimedia information. The active multimedia system (AMS) is provided to manipulate and maintain the TAOs. The user interface and the system architecture for the AMS are described. A multimedia mail system is implemented to illustrate the usefulness of tele-action objects. Finally, we discuss the advantages of the proposed approach and future research.
1945331
From Components to Autonomic Elements Using Negotiable Contracts
Autonomic computing aims at producing software systems that can manage themselves. As component-based development also partly addresses the complexity of large applications, we propose to combine the benefits of both approaches by using components equipped with negotiable contracts. These contracts specify the correct behavior of the components and play a central role in feedback control loops to enforce some autonomic features on components. In this paper, we present ConFract, a contract-based framework for hierarchical components in which contracts are runtime objects that are dynamically built from specifications, and automatically updated according to dynamic reconfigurations. Moreover, contracts clearly define the responsibilities (guarantor, beneficiaries) between their participating components which are exploited by some negotiations to automatically adapt components and contracts, and revalidate the system. The generic negotiation mechanism and an associated concession-based policy are presented.