122560265
Multigrid and multi-level Swendsen-Wang cuts for hierarchic graph partition
Many vision tasks can be formulated as partitioning an adjacency graph through optimizing a Bayesian posterior probability p defined on the partition-space. In this paper two approaches are proposed to generalize the Swendsen-Wang cut algorithm [A. Barbu and S.C. Zhu 2003] for sampling p. The first method is called multigrid SW-cut which runs SW-cut within a sequence of local "attentional" windows and thus simulates conditional probabilities of p in the partition space. The second method is called multi-level SW-cut which projects the adjacency graph into a hierarchical representation with each vertex in the high level graph corresponding to a sub-graph at the low level, and runs SW-cut at each level. Thus it simulates conditional probabilities of p at the higher level. Both methods are shown to observe the detailed balance equation and thus provide flexibilities in sampling the posterior probability p. We demonstrate the algorithms in image and motion segmentation with three levels (see Fig.1), and compare the speed improvement of the proposed methods.
11835209
Statistical Edge Detection: Learning and Evaluating Edge Cues
We formulate edge detection as statistical inference. This statistical edge detection is data driven, unlike standard methods for edge detection which are model based. For any set of edge detection filters (implementing local edge cues), we use presegmented images to learn the probability distributions of filter responses conditioned on whether they are evaluated on or off an edge. Edge detection is formulated as a discrimination task specified by a likelihood ratio test on the filter responses. This approach emphasizes the necessity of modeling the image background (the off-edges). We represent the conditional probability distributions nonparametrically and illustrate them on two different data sets of 100 (Sowerby) and 50 (South Florida) images. Multiple edges cues, including chrominance and multiple-scale, are combined by using their joint distributions. Hence, this cue combination is optimal in the statistical sense. We evaluate the effectiveness of different visual cues using the Chernoff information and Receiver Operator Characteristic (ROC) curves. This shows that our approach gives quantitatively better results than the Canny edge detector when the image background contains significant clutter. In addition, it enables us to determine the effectiveness of different edge cues and gives quantitative measures for the advantages of multilevel processing, for the use of chrominance, and for the relative effectiveness of different detectors. Furthermore, we show that we can learn these conditional distributions on one data set and adapt them to the other with only slight degradation of performance without knowing the ground truth on the second data set. This shows that our results are not purely domain specific. We apply the same approach to the spatial grouping of edge cues and obtain analogies to nonmaximal suppression and hysteresis.
12345366
Image segmentation by data driven Markov chain Monte Carlo
This paper presents a computational paradigm called Data Driven Markov Chain Monte Carlo (DDMCMC) for image segmentation in the Bayesian, statistical framework. The paper contributes to image segmentation in three aspects. Firstly, it designs effective and well balanced Markov Chain dynamics to explore the solution space and makes the split and merge process reversible at a middle level vision formulation. Thus it achieves globally optimal solution independent of initial segmentations. Secondly, instead of computing a single maximum a posteriori solution, it proposes a mathematical principle for computing multiple distinct solutions to incorporates intrinsic ambiguities in image segmentation. A k-adventurers algorithm is proposed for extracting distinct multiple solutions from the Markov chain sequence. Thirdly, it utilizes data-driven (bottom-up) techniques, such as clustering and edge detection, to compute importance proposal probabilities, which effectively drive the Markov chain dynamics and achieve tremendous speedup in comparison to traditional jump-diffusion method. Thus DDM-CMC paradigm provides a unifying framework where the role of existing segmentation algorithms, such as; edge detection, clustering, region growing, split-merge, SNAKEs, region competition, are revealed as either realizing Markov chain dynamics or computing importance proposal probabilities. We report some results on color and grey level image segmentation in this paper and refer to a detailed report and a web site for extensive discussion.
206590834
Composite Templates for Cloth Modeling and Sketching
Cloth modeling and recognition is an important and challenging problem in both vision and graphics tasks, such as dressed human recognition and tracking, human sketch and portrait. In this paper, we present a context sensitive grammar in an And-Or graph representation which will produce a large set of composite graphical templates to account for the wide variabilities of cloth configurations, such as T-shirts, jackets, etc. In a supervised learning phase, we ask an artist to draw sketches on a set of dressed people, and we decompose the sketches into categories of cloth and body components: collars, shoulders, cuff, hands, pants, shoes etc. Each component has a number of distinct subtemplates (sub-graphs). These sub-templates serve as leafnodes in a big And-Or graph where an And-node represents a decomposition of the graph into sub-configurations with Markov relations for context and constraints (soft or hard), and an Or-node is a switch for choosing one out of a set of alternative And-nodes (sub-configurations) - similar to a node in stochastic context free grammar (SCFG). This representation integrates the SCFG for structural variability and the Markov (graphical) model for context. An algorithm which integrates the bottom-up proposals and the topdown information is proposed to infer the composite cloth template from the image.
11176389
Incorporating visual knowledge representation in stereo reconstruction
In this paper, we present a two-layer generative model that incorporates generic middle-level visual knowledge for dense stereo reconstruction. The visual knowledge is represented by a dictionary of surface primitives including various categories of boundary discontinuities and junctions in parametric form. Given a stereo pair, we first compute a primal sketch representation which decomposes the image into a structural part for object boundaries and high intensity contrast represented by a 2D sketch graph, and a structure less part represented by Markov random field on pixels. Then we label the sketch graph and compute the 3D sketch (like a wire-frame) by fitting the primitive dictionary to the sketch graph. The surfaces between the 3D sketches are filled in by computing the depth of the MRP model on the structureless part. These two levels interact closely since the MRF is used to propagate information between the primitives, and at the same time, the primitives act as boundary conditions for the MRF. The two processes maximize a Bayesian posterior probability jointly. We propose an MCMC algorithm that simultaneously infers the 3D primitive types and parameters and estimates the depth of the scene. Our experiments show that this representation can infer the depth map with sharp boundaries and junctions for textureless images, curve objects and free-form shapes.
398989
Parsing Images into Regions, Curves, and Curve Groups
In this paper, we present an algorithm for parsing natural images into middle level vision representations—regions, curves, and curve groups (parallel curves and trees). This algorithm is targeted for an integrated solution to image segmentation and curve grouping through Bayesian inference. The paper makes the following contributions. (1) It adopts a layered (or 2.1D-sketch) representation integrating both region and curve models which compete to explain an input image. The curve layer occludes the region layer and curves observe a partial order occlusion relation. (2) A Markov chain search scheme Metropolized Gibbs Samplers (MGS) is studied. It consists of several pairs of reversible jumps to traverse the complex solution space. An MGS proposes the next state within the jump scope of the current state according to a conditional probability like a Gibbs sampler and then accepts the proposal with a Metropolis-Hastings step. This paper discusses systematic design strategies of devising reversible jumps for a complex inference task. (3) The proposal probability ratios in jumps are factorized into ratios of discriminative probabilities. The latter are computed in a bottom-up process, and they drive the Markov chain dynamics in a data-driven Markov chain Monte Carlo framework. We demonstrate the performance of the algorithm in experiments with a number of natural images.
1511154
Association-based similarity testing and its applications
This paper proposes a new similarity measure between basket datasets based on associations. The new measure is calculated from support counts using a formula inspired by information entropy. Experiments on both real and synthetic datasets show the effectiveness of the measure. This paper then investigates the applications of the similarity measure. It first studies the problem of finding a mapping between categorical database attribute sets using similarity measures. A generic approach for identifying such a mapping is proposed. The approach is implemented based on the similarity measure proposed in the paper and its performance has been evaluated and validated. Moreover, this paper also explores the applications of using the similarity measure to mine distributed datasets.
41478916
New Uniform Colour Spaces
15097946
Algorithms for clustering high dimensional and distributed data
Clustering is the problem of identifying the distribution of patterns and intrinsic correlations in large data sets by partitioning the data points into similarity classes. The clustering problem has been widely studied in machine learning, databases, and statistics. This paper studies the problem of clustering high dimensional data. The paper proposes an algorithm called the CoFD algorithm, which is a non-distance based clustering algorithm for high dimensional spaces. Based on the Maximum Likelihood Principle, CoFD attempts to optimize its parameter settings to maximize the likelihood between data points and the model generated by the parameters. The distributed versions of the problem, called the D-CoFD algorithms, are also proposed. Experimental results on both synthetic and real data sets show the efficiency and effectiveness of CoFD and D-CoFD algorithms.
15435799
Structural and temporal analysis of the blogosphere through community factorization
The blogosphere has unique structural and temporal properties since blogs are typically used as communication media among human individuals. In this paper, we propose a novel technique that captures the structure and temporal dynamics of blog communities. In our framework, a community is a set of blogs that communicate with each other triggered by some events (such as a news article). The community is represented by its structure and temporal dynamics: a community graph indicates how often one blog communicates with another, and a community intensity indicates the activity level of the community that varies over time. Our method, community factorization, extracts such communities from the blogosphere, where the communication among blogs is observed as a set of subgraphs (i.e., threads of discussion). This community extraction is formulated as a factorization problem in the framework of constrained optimization, in which the objective is to best explain the observed interactions in the blogosphere over time. We further provide a scalable algorithm for computing solutions to the constrained optimization problems. Extensive experimental studies on both synthetic and real blog data demonstrate that our technique is able to discover meaningful communities that are not detectable by traditional methods.
7400363
Empirical Studies on Multi-label Classification
In classic pattern recognition problems, classes are mutually exclusive by definition. However, in many applications, it is quite natural that some instances belong to multiple classes at the same time. In other words, these applications are multi-labeled, classes are overlapped by definition and each instance may be associated to multiple classes. In this paper, we present a comparative study on various multi-label approaches using both gene and scene data sets. We expect our research efforts provide useful insights on the relationships among various classifiers as well as various evaluation measures and shed lights on future research. Although there is no clear winner across various performance measures, SVM binary and multi-label ADTree perform better than the others on most counts. We then propose a meta-learning approach by combining SVM binary and ADTree. Our experiments demonstrate that the combined method can take the advantages of the single approaches