17778034
Evolutionary Gibbs sampler for image segmentation
We propose a novel evolutionary algorithm for the function optimization problem in Bayesian image segmentation with Markov random field prior. Function variables are partitioned into several codings. A pivot coding is selected and variables in it are evolved respectively according to their probability distributions which encode both the evolutionary pressure and contextual constraints from neighboring pixels. Variables in other codings are evolved according to their conditional probabilities. In summary, the algorithm is about building probabilistic models to guide search. It achieves the efficiency and flexibility by incorporating Gibbs sampler in an evolutionary approach. Remarkable performance is observed in some experiments.
270876
Feature Extraction with Genetic Algorithms Based Nonlinear Principal Component Analysis for Face Recognition
Principal component analysis (PCA) and linear discriminant analysis (LDA) are two commonly used feature extraction techniques. In this paper, a nonlinear evolutionary weighted principal component analysis (EWPCA) based on genetic algorithms is proposed. Similar to LDA, the EWPCA maximizes the ratio of between-class variations to that of within-class variations, and achieves better classification performance than that of traditional PCA. Genetic algorithms are chosen as the searching method to select optimal weights for the EWPCA. In face recognition, evolutionary facial feature obtained by performing EWPCA is used as the representation of original face images. Experimental results on ORL and combo face databases prove that EWPCA outperforms both PCA, kernel PCA and LDA
28149553
Fingerprint Indexing Based On Symmetrical Measurement
Due to the small number of classes and uneven distribution, the Henry's fingerprint classification approach is not able to provide an efficient way to narrow down the search when identifying a person in a large database. In this paper, three symmetrical filters are used to measure different orientation structures. We proposed a new fingerprint indexing approach based on these three symmetrical measurements. Experiments conducted on the NIST database 4 show the effectiveness of the proposed approach
35155949
Constrained nonlinear models of fingerprint orientations with prediction
In this paper, we developed an algorithm to model the fingerprint orientation field. The algorithm comprises two steps, orientation prediction and model computation. Orientation prediction is based on piece-wise first-order phase portrait model. It is used to estimate the orientation in areas where there is no ridge information in the input image or the coherence of the orientation field is low. In the model computation, a constrained nonlinear phase portrait algorithm is proposed, which aims to get an accurate mathematical model of the fingerprint orientation field. Compared to the prior works, this algorithm is able to predict orientation even in noisy regions and it integrates the global and local orientation description into a unified mathematical form. Experiments conducted on the first 500 images of the NIST-4 database showed that the proposed algorithm is able to model all the fingerprint orientation patterns except those with very poor quality images where the orientation information cannot be clearly extracted.
31566264
Cooperation-Based Behavior Design
Robot soccer explores such a research topic that multiple agents work together in a Real-time, Cooperative and Adversarial (RCA) environment to achieve specific objectives. It requires that each agent can not only deal with situations individually, but also present cooperation with its teammates. In this paper, we describe a robot architecture, which addresses "scaling cooperation" among robots, and meanwhile allows each robot to make decisions independently in real-time case. The architecture is based on "ideal cooperation" principle and implemented for Small Robot League in RoboCup. Experimental results prove its effectiveness and reveal several primary characteristics of behaviors in robot soccer.
7829422
Fast Relative Depth Computation for an Active Stereo Vision System
Real-time computation of exact depth is not feasible in an active vision setup. Instead, reliable relative depth information which can be rapidly computed is preferred. In this paper, a stereo cue for computing relative depth obtained from an active stereo vision system is proposed. The proposed stereo cue can be computed purely from the coordinates of points in the stereo pair. The computational cost required is very low. No camera calibration or prior knowledge of the parameters of the stereo vision system is required. We show that the relationship between the relative depth cue and the actual depth in the three-dimensional (3D) space is monotonic. Such a relation is maintained even when the focal length and the vergence angle are changed, so long as the focal lengths of the two cameras are similar. Therefore, real-time implementation in an active vision setup can be realized. Stability analysis shows that the proposed method will be stable in practical situations, unless the stereo camera diverges. Experimental results are presented to highlight the properties and advantages of the proposed method.
15731582
Effective Appearance Model and Similarity Measure for Particle Filtering and Visual Tracking
In this paper, we adaptively model the appearance of objects based on Mixture of Gaussians in a joint spatial-color space (the approach is called SMOG). We propose a new SMOG-based similarity measure. SMOG captures richer information than the general color histogram because it incorporates spatial layout in addition to color. This appearance model and the similarity measure are used in a framework of Bayesian probability for tracking natural objects. In the second part of the paper, we propose an Integral Gaussian Mixture (IGM) technique, as a fast way to extract the parameters of SMOG for target candidate. With IGM, the parameters of SMOG can be computed efficiently by using only simple arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, division) and thus the computation is reduced to linear complexity. Experiments show that our method can successfully track objects despite changes in foreground appearance, clutter, occlusion, etc.; and that it outperforms several color-histogram based methods.
8764300
MDPE: A Very Robust Estimator for Model Fitting and Range Image Segmentation
In this paper, we propose a novel and highly robust estimator, called MDPE1 (Maximum Density Power Estimator). This estimator applies nonparametric density estimation and density gradient estimation techniques in parametric estimation (“model fitting”). MDPE optimizes an objective function that measures more than just the size of the residuals. Both the density distribution of data points in residual space and the size of the residual corresponding to the local maximum of the density distribution, are considered as important characteristics in our objective function. MDPE can tolerate more than 85% outliers. Compared with several other recently proposed similar estimators, MDPE has a higher robustness to outliers and less error variance.We also present a new range image segmentation algorithm, based on a modified version of the MDPE (Quick-MDPE), and its performance is compared to several other segmentation methods. Segmentation requires more than a simple minded application of an estimator, no matter how good that estimator is: our segmentation algorithm overcomes several difficulties faced with applying a statistical estimator to this task.
28595757
User-Defined Aggregates for Datamining
5819516
Facial expression decomposition
In this paper, we propose a novel approach for facial expression decomposition - higher-order singular value decomposition (HOSVD), a natural generalization of matrix SVD. We learn the expression subspace and person subspace from a corpus of images showing seven basic facial expressions, rather than resort to expert-coded facial expression parameters. We propose a simultaneous face and facial expression recognition algorithm, which can classify the given image into one of the seven basic facial expression categories, and then other facial expressions of the new person can be synthesized using the learned expression subspace model. The contributions of this work lie mainly in two aspects. First, we propose a new HOSVD based approach to model the mapping between persons and expressions, used for facial expression synthesis for a new person. Second, we realize simultaneous face and facial expression recognition as a result of facial expression decomposition. Experimental results are presented that illustrate the capability of the person subspace and expression subspace in both synthesis and recognition tasks. As a quantitative measure of the quality of synthesis, we propose using gradient minimum square error (GMSE) which measures the gradient difference between the original and synthesized images.
7772067
Extractive Chinese Spoken Document Summarization Using Probabilistic Ranking Models
The purpose of extractive summarization is to automatically select indicative sentences, passages, or paragraphs from an original document according to a certain target summarization ratio, and then sequence them to form a concise summary. In this paper, in contrast to conventional approaches, our objective is to deal with the extractive summarization problem under a probabilistic modeling framework. We investigate the use of the hidden Markov model (HMM) for spoken document summarization, in which each sentence of a spoken document is treated as an HMM for generating the document, and the sentences are ranked and selected according to their likelihoods. In addition, the relevance model (RM) of each sentence, estimated from a contemporary text collection, is integrated with the HMM model to improve the representation of the sentence model. The experiments were performed on Chinese broadcast news compiled in Taiwan. The proposed approach achieves noticeable performance gains over conventional summarization approaches.