8560106
Combined spatial and temporal domain wavelet shrinkage algorithm for video denoising
A combined spatial- and temporal-domain wavelet shrinkage algorithm for video denoising is presented in this paper. The spatial-domain denoising technique is a selective wavelet shrinkage method which uses a two-threshold criteria to exploit the geometry of the wavelet subbands of each video frame, and each frame of the image sequence is spatially denoised independently of one another. The temporal-domain denoising technique is a selective wavelet shrinkage method which estimates the level of noise corruption as well as the amount of motion in the image sequence. The amount of noise is estimated to determine how much filtering is needed in the temporal-domain, and the amount of motion is taken into consideration to determine the degree of similarity between consecutive frames. The similarity affects how much noise removal is possible using temporal-domain processing. Using motion and noise level estimates, a video denoising technique is established which is robust to various levels of noise corruption and various levels of motion.
10569326
Intelligent compliant motion control
The role of a compliant motion scheme is to control a robot manipulator in contact with its environment. By accommodating with the interaction force, the manipulator can be used to accomplish tasks that involve constrained motions. This paper presents a new work on the compliant motion control for position-controlled manipulator. A new method for achieving efficient interaction between the manipulator and its environment is developed. The interaction force is reduced using a quadratic cost function. In this method, the compliance is formulated as function of the interaction force. An adaptive element is used to update the compliance. The stability of the system is investigated using the Lyapunov approach. Experiments are conducted in our laboratory to demonstrate the use of such scheme.
2500181
Video object segmentation and tracking using /spl psi/-learning classification
As a requisite of the emerging content-based multimedia technologies, video object (VO) extraction is of great importance. This paper presents a novel semiautomatic segmentation and tracking method for single VO extraction. Unlike traditional approaches, the proposed method formulates the separation of the VO from the background as a classification problem. Each frame is divided into small blocks of uniform size, which are called object blocks if the centering pixels belong to the object, or background blocks otherwise. After a manual segmentation of the first frame, the blocks of this frame are used as the training samples for the object-background classifier. A newly developed learning tool called /spl psi/-learning is employed to train the classifier which outperforms the conventional Support Vector Machines in linearly nonseparable cases. To deal with large and complex objects, a multilayer approach constructing a so-called hyperplane tree is proposed. Each node of the tree represents a hyperplane, responsible for classifying only a subset of the training samples. Multiple hyperplanes are thus needed to classify the entire set. Through the combination of the multilayer scheme and /spl psi/-learning, one can avoid the complexity of nonlinear mapping as well as achieve high classification accuracy. During the tracking phase, the pixel in the center of every block in a successive frame is classified by a sequence of hyperplanes from the root to a leaf node of the hyperplane tree, and the class of the block is identified accordingly. All the object blocks thus form the object of interest, whose boundary unfortunately is stair-like due to the block effect. In order to obtain the pixel-wise boundary in a cost efficient way, a pyramid boundary refining algorithm is designed, which iteratively selects a few informative pixels for class label checking, and reduces uncertainty about the actual boundary of the object. The proposed method has been applied on video sequences with various spatial and temporal characteristics, and experimental results demonstrate it to be effective, efficient, and robust.
33641222
Object tracking using the Gabor wavelet transform and the golden section algorithm
The paper presents an object tracking method for object-based video processing which uses a two-dimensional (2D) Gabor wavelet transform (GWT) and a 2D golden section algorithm. An object in the current frame is modeled by local features from a number of the selected feature points, and the global placement of these feature points. The feature points are stochastically selected based on the energy of their GWT coefficients. Points with higher energy have a higher probability of being selected since they are visually more important. The amplitudes of the GWT coefficients of a feature point are then used as the local feature. The global placement of the feature points is determined by a 2D mesh whose feature is the area of the triangles formed by the feature points. In this way, a local feature is represented by a GWT coefficient amplitude vector, and a global feature is represented by a triangle area vector. One advantage of the 2D mesh is that the direction of its triangle area vector is invariant to affine transform. Consequently, the similarity between two local features or two global features can be defined as a function of the angle and the length ratio between two vectors, and the overall similarity between two objects is a weighted sum of the local and global similarities. In order to find the corresponding object in the next frame, the 2D golden section algorithm is employed. Our results show that the method is robust to object deformation and supports object tracking in noisy video sequences.
9136723
Biped Locomotion by Reduced Ankle Power
Power reduction in the ankle joints of a biped robot is considered inthis paper. Ankles of human beings have small torque and are veryflexible within a certain range of motion (very stiff near and beyondthis range). This characteristic makes foot landing soft and gives agood contact between its sole and the ground. This feature can beimplemented in a biped robot by using a small actuator for the anklejoints. A small actuator consumes less energy and reduces the weightof the leg. With less power in the ankle joints, robot walkingbecomes more difficult to control. This problem can be solved byproviding a feedback control mechanism as presented in this paper. Thecontrol mechanism uses the motion of the body and the swinging leg toeliminate instability caused by the weak ankle. Two locomotionexamples, standing and walking, were investigated respectively toshow the validity of the proposed control scheme. In standing, thecontrol input is the displacement of the ankle joint of thesupporting leg. The control mechanism decides the bending angle ofthe body and the position of the swinging leg. For walking, only thebending angle of the body is used to avoid the discontinuity of thecontrol input. Experimental results are presented to show theeffectiveness of the control mechanism.
1196113
Feature-based wavelet shrinkage algorithm for image denoising
A selective wavelet shrinkage algorithm for digital image denoising is presented. The performance of this method is an improvement upon other methods proposed in the literature and is algorithmically simple for large computational savings. The improved performance and computational speed of the proposed wavelet shrinkage algorithm is presented and experimentally compared with established methods. The denoising method incorporated in the proposed algorithm involves a two-threshold validation process for real-time selection of wavelet coefficients. The two-threshold criteria selects wavelet coefficients based on their absolute value, spatial regularity, and regularity across multiresolution scales. The proposed algorithm takes image features into consideration in the selection process. Statistically, most images have regular features resulting in connected subband coefficients. Therefore, the resulting subbands of wavelet transformed images in large part do not contain isolated coefficients. In the proposed algorithm, coefficients are selected due to their magnitude, and only a subset of those selected coefficients which exhibit a spatially regular behavior remain for image reconstruction. Therefore, two thresholds are used in the coefficient selection process. The first threshold is used to distinguish coefficients of large magnitude and the second is used to distinguish coefficients of spatial regularity. The performance of the proposed wavelet denoising technique is an improvement upon several other established wavelet denoising techniques, as well as being computationally efficient to facilitate real-time image-processing applications.
11061253
The Nonhomomorphicity of Boolean Functions
We introduce the notion of nonhomomorphicity as an alternative criterion that forecasts nonlinear characteristics of a Boolean function. Although both nonhomomorphicity and nonlinearity reflect a "difference" between a Boolean function and all the affine functions, they are measured from different perspectives. We are interested in nonhomomorphicity due to several reasons that include (1) unlike other criteria, we have not only established tight lower and upper bounds on the nonhomomorphicity of a function, but also precisely identified the mean of nonhomomorphicity over all the Boolean functions on the same vector space, (2) the nonhomomorphicity of a function can be estimated efficiently, and in fact, we demonstrate a fast statistical method that works both on large and small dimensional vector spaces.
105147
Digital Watermarking Robust Against JPEG Compression
Digital watermarking has been considered as an important technique to protect the copyright of digital content. For a digital watermarking method to be effective, it is essential that a watermark embedded in a still or moving image resists against various attacks ranging from compression, filtering to cropping. As JPEG is a dominant still image compression standard for Internet applications, digital watermarking methods that are robust against the JPEG compression are especially useful. Most digital watermarking methods proposed so far work by modulating pixels/coefficients without considering the quality level of JPEG, which renders watermarks readily removable. In this paper, we propose a new method that actively uses the JPEG quality level as a parameter in embedding a watermark into an image. A useful feature of the new method is that the watermark can be extracted even when the image is compressed using JPEG.
646545
Designing and Evaluating an XPath Dialect for Linguistic Queries
Linguistic research and natural language processing employ large repositories of ordered trees. XML, a standard ordered tree model, and XPath, its associated language, are natural choices for linguistic data and queries. However, several important expressive features required for linguistic queries are missing or hard to express in XPath. In this paper, we motivate and illustrate these features with a variety of linguistic queries. Then we propose extensions to XPath to support linguistic queries, and design an efficient query engine based on a novel labeling scheme. Experiments demonstrate that our language is not only sufficiently expressive for linguistic trees but also efficient for practical usage.
2310959
XKvalidator: a constraint validator for XML
The role of XML in data exchange is evolving from one of merely conveying the structure of data to one that also conveys its semantics. In particular, several proposals for key and foreign key constraints have recently appeared, and aspects of these proposals have been adopted within XMLSchema.In this paper, we examine the problem of checking keys and foreign keys in XML documents using a validator based on SAX. The algorithm relies on an indexing technique based on the paths found in key definitions, and can be used for checking the correctness of an entire document (bulk checking) as well as for checking updates as they are made to the document (incremental checking). The asymptotic performance of the algorithm is linear in the size of the document or update. Furthermore, experimental results demonstrate reasonable performance.
14051411
A Framework for the Management of Information Security
Information security is strongly dependent on access control models and cryptographic techniques. These are well established areas of research and practice in the enforcement of technical information security policies but are not capable of supporting development of comprehensive information security within organizations. Therefore, there is a need to study upper level issues to establish organizational models for specifying security enforcement mechanisms and coordinating policies. This paper proposes a model for dealing with high level information security policies. The core is to enforce a continuous refinement of information security requirements aiming at formally deriving technical security policies from high level security objectives. This refinement is carried out by in formation security harmonization functions. Contribution of this paper is on the specification of a notation for expressing information security requirements and on the specification of a mechanism to formulate harmonization functions.