10451148
Discontinuity preserving stereo with small baseline multi-flash illumination
Currently, sharp discontinuities in depth and partial occlusions in multiview imaging systems pose serious challenges for many dense correspondence algorithms. However, it is important for 3D reconstruction methods to preserve depth edges as they correspond to important shape features like silhouettes which are critical for understanding the structure of a scene. In this paper, we show how active illumination algorithms can produce a rich set of feature maps that are useful in dense 3D reconstruction. We start by showing a method to compute a qualitative depth map from a single camera, which encodes object relative distances and can be used as a prior for stereo. In a multiview setup, we show that along with depth edges, binocular half-occluded pixels can also be explicitly and reliably labeled. To demonstrate the usefulness of these feature maps, we show how they can be used in two different algorithms for dense stereo correspondence. Our experimental results show that our enhanced stereo algorithms are able to extract high quality, discontinuity preserving correspondence maps from scenes that are extremely challenging for conventional stereo methods.
1118547
Appearance-based eye gaze estimation
We present a method for estimating eye gaze direction, which represents a departure from conventional eye gaze estimation methods, the majority of which are based on tracking specific optical phenomena like corneal reflection and the Purkinje images. We employ an appearance manifold model, but instead of using a densely sampled spline to perform the nearest manifold point query, we retain the original set of sparse appearance samples and use linear interpolation among a small subset of samples to approximate the nearest manifold point. The advantage of this approach is that since we are only storing a sparse set of samples, each sample can be a high dimensional vector that retains more representational accuracy than short vectors produced with dimensionality reduction methods. The algorithm was tested with a set of eye images labelled with ground truth point-of-regard coordinates. We have found that the algorithm is capable of estimating eye gaze with a mean angular error of 0.38 degrees, which is comparable to that obtained by commercially available eye trackers.
5670523
The Intelligent Alarm Management System
Nuisance alarms often clutter and obscure a process plant operator's view of critical information, with potentially severe consequences. The intelligent alarm management system (IAMS) suppresses nuisance alarms and provides valuable advisory information to help the operator focus quickly on important alarm information and take correct, quick actions. Test results show that IAMS effectively suppresses nuisance alarms, making alarm systems more helpful.
1108604
A distributed Cooperative coevolutionary algorithm for multiobjective optimization
Recent advances in evolutionary algorithms show that coevolutionary architectures are effective ways to broaden the use of traditional evolutionary algorithms. This paper presents a cooperative coevolutionary algorithm (CCEA) for multiobjective optimization, which applies the divide-and-conquer approach to decompose decision vectors into smaller components and evolves multiple solutions in the form of cooperative subpopulations. Incorporated with various features like archiving, dynamic sharing, and extending operator, the CCEA is capable of maintaining archive diversity in the evolution and distributing the solutions uniformly along the Pareto front. Exploiting the inherent parallelism of cooperative coevolution, the CCEA can be formulated into a distributed cooperative coevolutionary algorithm (DCCEA) suitable for concurrent processing that allows inter-communication of subpopulations residing in networked computers, and hence expedites the computational speed by sharing the workload among multiple computers. Simulation results show that the CCEA is competitive in finding the tradeoff solutions, and the DCCEA can effectively reduce the simulation runtime without sacrificing the performance of CCEA as the number of peers is increased
120730704
Robust image denoising using kernel-induced measures
We propose a class of novel nonlinear robust filters for image denoising by incorporating the kernel-induced measures into the classical linear mean filter. Particularly, we place more focus on the Gaussian kernel based filter (GK) due to its simplicity. The GK filter not only generalizes and makes the original linear mean filter highly resistant to outliers but also outperforms a typical and powerful mean-logCauchy filter recently developed by Hamza et al in the mixed noise removal in certain specific conditions in the normalized mean square error (NMSE) sense. The experimental results also illustrate that the kernel-based nonlinear filters are promising.
6439034
Efficient Image Retrieval By Color Contents
Images are becoming an important asset and managing them for efficient retrieval poses challenges to the database community. In this paper, we proposed a novel three-tier color index that supports efficient image retrieval by color contents which is important to certain applications, especially when shapes and semantic objects cannot be easily recognized. A prototype painting database system is designed and implemented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed indexing technique. Besides the color index, two other indexes, B+-trees for structured attributes and a signature file for free-text descriptions, were also implemented. As a result, a wide range of queries, both text-based and content-based can be processed efficiently. We also look at existing image database systems based on their query retrieval capabilities.
16227528
Fast image retrieval using color-spatial information
Abstract. In this paper, we present an image retrieval system that employs both the color and spatial information of images to facilitate the retrieval process. The basic unit used in our technique is a single-colored cluster, which bounds a homogeneous region of that color in an image. Two clusters from two images are similar if they are of the same color and overlap in the image space. The number of clusters that can be extracted from an image can be very large, and it affects the accuracy of retrieval. We study the effect of the number of clusters on retrieval effectiveness to determine an appropriate value for “optimal'' performance. To facilitate efficient retrieval, we also propose a multi-tier indexing mechanism called the Sequenced Multi-Attribute Tree (SMAT). We implemented a two-tier SMAT, where the first layer is used to prune away clusters that are of different colors, while the second layer discriminates clusters of different spatial locality. We conducted an experimental study on an image database consisting of 12,000 images. Our results show the effectiveness of the proposed color-spatial approach, and the efficiency of the proposed indexing mechanism.