31213439
Nasopharyngeal carcinoma lesion segmentation from MR images by support vector machine
A two-class support vector machine (SVM)-based image segmentation approach has been developed for the extraction of nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC) lesion from magnetic resonance (MR) images. By exploring two-class SVM, the developed method can learn the actual distribution of image data without prior knowledge and draw an optimal hyperplane for class separation, via an SVM parameters training procedure and an implicit kernel mapping. After learning, segmentation task is performed by the trained SVM classifier. The proposed technique is evaluated by 39 MR images with NPC and the results suggest that the proposed query-based approach provides an effective method for NPC extraction from MR images with high accuracy
62765835
Detecting abnormal regions in colonoscopic images by patch-based classifier ensemble
In this paper, a new method is proposed to detect abnormal regions in colonoscopic images by patch-based classifier ensemble. Through supervised learning from image patches of various sizes, a set of basic SVM classifiers is trained for each size. A diagnostic model can then be constructed based on the ensemble of basic classifiers which is then used to detect abnormal regions in colonoscopic images. The multiple sizes of patches provide multiple level representation of the image content, which can help improve detection results. Several fusion criteria are explored to determine the final output of the ensemble. Experimental results show promising performance of our proposed method.
6840410
Similarity-Driven Cluster Merging Method for Unsupervised Fuzzy Clustering
In this paper, a similarity-driven cluster merging method is proposed for unsupervised fuzzy clustering. The cluster merging method is used to resolve the problem of cluster validation. Starting with an overspecified number of clusters in the data, pairs of similar clusters are merged based on the proposed similarity-driven cluster merging criterion. The similarity between clusters is calculated by a fuzzy cluster similarity matrix, while an adaptive threshold is used for merging. In addition, a modified generalized objective function is used for prototype-based fuzzy clustering. The function includes the p-norm distance measure as well as principal components of the clusters. The number of the principal components is determined automatically from the data being clustered. The properties of this unsupervised fuzzy clustering algorithm are illustrated by several experiments.
5987649
An Improved Real-Time Contour Tracking Algorithm Using Fast Level Set Method
Human contour provides important information in high level vision tasks such as activity recognition and human computer interaction where detailed analysis of shape deformation is required. In this paper, a real time region-based contour tracking algorithm is presented. The main advantage of our algorithm is the ability of tracking nonrigid objects such as human using an adaptive external speed function with fast level set method. The weighting parameter, λi is adjusted to accommodate the situations in which the object being tracked and the background have similar intensity. Experimental results show the better performance of the proposed algorithm with adaptive weights.
5808505
Bootstrapping SVM active learning by incorporating unlabelled images for image retrieval
The performance of image retrieval with SVM active learning is known to be poor when started with few labeled images only. In this paper, the problem is solved by incorporating the unlabelled images into the bootstrapping of the learning process. In this work, the initial SVM classifier is trained with the few labeled images and the unlabelled images randomly selected from the image database. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results show that by incorporating unlabelled images in the bootstrapping, the efficiency of SVM active learning can be improved, and thus improves the overall retrieval performance.
9891360
Image retrieval with SVM active learning embedding Euclidean search
Image retrieval with relevance feedback suffers from the small sample problem. Recently, SVM active learning has been proposed to tackle this problem, showing promising results. However, a small but sufficient number of initially labelled samples are still required to ensure subsequent efficient active learning and good retrieval performance. In the existing method, the user is asked to label more images before active learning starts. In this paper, a method of embedding Euclidean search into SVM active learning is proposed. With the help of Euclidean search, the adverse effect on retrieval performance due to lack of initially labelled samples can be reduced. Experimental results demonstrate the improvement by the proposed method, especially when the number of initially labelled samples is small.
45421467
Support vector machines for face recognition
Abstract Support vector machines (SVMs) have been recently proposed as a new learning network for bipartite pattern recognition. In this paper, SVMs incorporated with a binary tree recognition strategy are proposed to tackle the multi-class face recognition problem. The binary tree extends naturally, the pairwise discrimination capability of the SVMs to the multi-class scenario. Two face databases are used to evaluate the proposed method. The performance of the SVMs based face recognition is compared with the standard eigenface approach, and also the more recently proposed algorithm called the nearest feature line (NFL).
34632260
Restricted Random Testing
This paper presents a novel adaptation of traditional random testing, called Restricted Random Testing (RRT). RRT offers a significant improvement over random testing, as measured by the F-measure. This paper describes the ideology behind RRT and explains its algorithm. RRT's performance is examined using several experiments, the results of which are presented and discussed.
18666864
An evolutionary clustering algorithm for gene expression microarray data analysis
Clustering is concerned with the discovery of interesting groupings of records in a database. Many algorithms have been developed to tackle clustering problems in a variety of application domains. In particular, some of them have been used in bioinformatics research to uncover inherent clusters in gene expression microarray data. In this paper, we show how some popular clustering algorithms have been used for this purpose. Based on experiments using simulated and real data, we also show that the performance of these algorithms can be further improved. For more effective clustering of gene expression microarray data, which is typically characterized by a lot of noise, we propose a novel evolutionary algorithm called evolutionary clustering (EvoCluster). EvoCluster encodes an entire cluster grouping in a chromosome so that each gene in the chromosome encodes one cluster. Based on such encoding scheme, it makes use of a set of reproduction operators to facilitate the exchange of grouping information between chromosomes. The fitness function that the EvoCluster adopts is able to differentiate between how relevant a feature value is in determining a particular cluster grouping. As such, instead of just local pairwise distances, it also takes into consideration how clusters are arranged globally. Unlike many popular clustering algorithms, EvoCluster does not require the number of clusters to be decided in advance. Also, patterns hidden in each cluster can be explicitly revealed and presented for easy interpretation even by casual users. For performance evaluation, we have tested EvoCluster using both simulated and real data. Experimental results show that it can be very effective and robust even in the presence of noise and missing values. Also, when correlating the gene expression microarray data with DNA sequences, we were able to uncover significant biological binding sites (both previously known and unknown) in each cluster discovered by EvoCluster.
15434765
A Dynamic Sub-vector Weighting Scheme for Image Retrieval with Relevance Feedback
In image retrieval with relevance feedback, feature components obtained from low-level descriptors are often weighted to reflect the high-level concepts and a user’s subjective perception embodied in the images labelled by the user in the feedback. However, the number of the labelled images is often small and an optimal weighting cannot be achieved in practice because of the singularity of the covariance matrix needed for weighting. To solve this problem, a dynamic sub-vector weighting scheme is proposed in this paper. In this scheme, a multi-dimensional feature vector is partitioned into multiple sub-vectors whose dimensions are dynamically adjusted to match the small number of available labelled images. Because of the lower dimensionality of the sub-vectors, the optimal weighting can be performed based on these sub-vectors, respectively. The multiple similarity scores obtained from sub-vector comparisons are then combined, as the final score, to rank the database images and determine the retrieval result. Experimental results demonstrated better performance of the proposed weighting scheme than some existing weighting schemes.
1881695
Handling Missing Data with Variational Bayesian Learning of ICA
Missing data is common in real-world datasets and is a problem for many estimation techniques. We have developed a variational Bayesian method to perform Independent Component Analysis (ICA) on high-dimensional data containing missing entries. Missing data are handled naturally in the Bayesian framework by integrating the generative density model. Modeling the distributions of the independent sources with mixture of Gaussians allows sources to be estimated with different kurtosis and skewness. The variational Bayesian method automatically determines the dimensionality of the data and yields an accurate density model for the observed data without overfitting problems. This allows direct probability estimation of missing values in the high dimensional space and avoids dimension reduction preprocessing which is not feasible with missing data.