10793748
Robust face detection with multi-class boosting
With the aim to design a general learning framework for detecting faces of various poses or under different lighting conditions, we are motivated to formulate the task as a classification problem over data of multiple classes. Specifically, our approach focuses on a new multi-class boosting algorithm, called MBHboost, and its integration with a cascade structure for effectively performing face detection. There are three main advantages of using MBHboost: 1) each MBH weak learner is derived by sharing a good projection direction such that each class of data has its own decision boundary; 2) the proposed boosting algorithm is established based on an optimal criterion for multi-class classification; and 3) since MBHboost is flexible with respect to the number of classes, it turns out that it is possible to use only one single boosted cascade for the multi-class detection. All these properties give rise to a robust system to detect faces efficiently and accurately.
10424202
A generalized shape-axis model for planar shapes
We describe a generalized shape-axis (SA) model for representing both open and closed planar curves. The SA model is an effective way to represent shapes by comparing their self-similarities. Given a 2D shape, whether it is closed or open, we use two different parametrizations for the curve. To study the self-similarity, the two parametrizations are matched to each other via a variational framework, where the self-similarity criterion is to be defined depending on the class of shapes and human perception factors. Useful self-similarity criteria include symmetry, parallelism and convexity, etc. A match is allowed to have discontinuities, and the optimal match can be computed by a dynamic programming algorithm in O(N/sup 4/) time, where N is the size of the shape. We use a grouping process for the shape axis to construct a unique SA-tree, however, when a planar shape is open, it is possible to derive an SA-forest. The generalized SA model provides a compact and informative way for 2D shape representation.
1898904
Learning effective image metrics from few pairwise examples
We present a new approach to learning image metrics. The main advantage of our method lies in a formulation that requires only a few pairwise examples. Apparently, based on the little amount of side-information, it would take a very effective learning scheme to yield a useful image metric. Our algorithm achieves this goal by addressing two key issues. First, we establish a global-local (glocal) image representation that induces two structure-meaningful vector spaces to respectively describe the global and the local image properties. Second, we develop a metric optimization framework that finds an optimal bilinear transform to best explain the given side-information. We emphasize it is the glocal image representation that makes the use of bilinear transform more powerful. Experimental results on classifications of face images and visual tracking are included to demonstrate the contributions of the proposed method
3193257
Sparse representations for image decomposition with occlusions
We study the problem of how to detect "interesting objects" appeared in a given image, I. Our approach is to treat it as a function approximation problem based on an over-redundant basis, and also account for occlusions, where the basis superposition principle is no longer valid. Since the basis (a library of image templates) is over-redundant, there are infinitely many ways to decompose I. We are motivated to select a sparse/compact representation of I, and to account for occlusions and noise. We then study a greedy and iterative "weighted L/sup p/ Matching Pursuit" strategy, with O<p<1. We use an L/sup p/ result to compute a solution, select the best template, at each stage of the pursuit.
52838645
Representation and Self-Similarity of Shapes
Representing shapes in a compact and informative form is a significant problem for vision systems that must recognize or classify objects. We describe a compact representation model for two-dimensional (2D) shapes by investigating their self-similarities and constructing their shape axis trees (SA-trees). Our approach can be formulated as a variational one (or, equivalently, as MAP estimation of a Markov random field). We start with a 2D shape, its boundary contour, and two different parameterizations for the contour (one parameterization is oriented counterclockwise and the other clockwise). To measure its self-similarity, the two parameterizations are matched to derive the best set of one-to-one point-to-point correspondences along the contour. The cost functional used in the matching may vary and is determined by the adopted self-similarity criteria, e.g., cocircularity, distance variation, parallelism, and region homogeneity. The loci of middle points of the pairing contour points yield the shape axis and they can be grouped into a unique free tree structure, the SA-tree. By implicitly encoding the (local and global) shape information into an SA-tree, a variety of vision tasks, e.g., shape recognition, comparison, and retrieval, can be performed in a more robust and efficient way via various tree-based algorithms. A dynamic programming algorithm gives the optimal solution in O(N/sup 1/), where N is the size of the contour.
122073
Fast Object Detection with Occlusions
We describe a new framework, based on boosting algorithms and cascade structures, to efficiently detect objects/faces with occlusions. While our approach is motivated by the work of Viola and Jones, several techniques have been developed for establishing a more general system, including (i) a robust boosting scheme, to select useful weak learners and to avoid overfitting; (ii) reinforcement training, to reduce false-positive rates via a more effective training procedure for boosted cascades; and (iii) cascading with evidence, to extend the system to handle occlusions, without compromising in detection speed. Experimental results on de- tecting faces under various situations are provided to demonstrate the performances of the proposed method.
5237024
Time-constraint boost for TV commercials detection
Commercials detection is very important for TV broadcast analysis. However, independent classification of video shots is very difficult because a considerable portion of individual commercial shots look very much like the programs. In this paper, the authors proposed a novel way to tackle this problem: to dependently treat successive video shots and improve the final classification performance by considering their temporal coherence. Following this idea, the authors discussed how to apply the majority-based windowing and minority-based merging techniques to the training and test process of statistical classifiers. As a result, a new algorithm named time-constraint boost is proposed. Simulation results show that this algorithm can improve both the training and generalization performance and lead to a promising commercials detection accuracy.
46322331
Heterogeneous Information Integration in Hierarchical Text Classification
Previous work has shown that considering the category distance in the taxonomy tree can improve the performance of text classifiers. In this paper, we propose a new approach to further integrate more categorical information in the text corpus using the principle of multi-objective programming (MOP). That is, we not only consider the distance between categories defined by the branching of the taxonomy tree, but also consider the similarity between categories defined by the document/term distributions in the feature space. Consequently, we get a refined category distance by using MOP to leverage these two kinds of information. Experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm in hierarchical text classification.
15516376
Supervised rank aggregation
This paper is concerned with rank aggregation, the task of combining the ranking results of individual rankers at meta-search. Previously, rank aggregation was performed mainly by means of unsupervised learning. To further enhance ranking accuracies, we propose employing supervised learning to perform the task, using labeled data. We refer to the approach as Supervised Rank Aggregation. We set up a general framework for conducting Supervised Rank Aggregation, in which learning is formalized an optimization which minimizes disagreements between ranking results and the labeled data. As case study, we focus on Markov Chain based rank aggregation in this paper. The optimization for Markov Chain based methods is not a convex optimization problem, however, and thus is hard to solve. We prove that we can transform the optimization problem into that of Semidefinite Programming and solve it efficiently. Experimental results on meta-searches show that Supervised Rank Aggregation can significantly outperform existing unsupervised methods.
39165911
Constant false-alarm ratio processing for video cut detection
In this paper, a video cut detection algorithm with constant false-alarm ratio (CFAR) is proposed. Applying the non-parameter based CFAR processing technique from radar signal detection, a theoretical threshold determination strategy for video cut detection is developed, which results in controllable precision and evaluative recall performances. Detailed deductions and simulation results show that this algorithm leads to very good detection performance as compared to the previous works.
17410284
AggregateRank: bringing order to web sites
Since the website is one of the most important organizational structures of the Web, how to effectively rank websites has been essential to many Web applications, such as Web search and crawling. In order to get the ranks of websites, researchers used to describe the inter-connectivity among websites with a so-called HostGraph in which the nodes denote websites and the edges denote linkages between websites (if and only if there are hyperlinks from the pages in one website to the pages in the other, there will be an edge between these two websites), and then adopted the random walk model in the HostGraph. However, as pointed in this paper, the random walk over such a HostGraph is not reasonable because it is not in accordance with the browsing behavior of web surfers. Therefore, the derivate rank cannot represent the true probability of visiting the corresponding website.In this work, we mathematically proved that the probability of visiting a website by the random web surfer should be equal to the sum of the PageRank values of the pages inside that website. Nevertheless, since the number of web pages is much larger than that of websites, it is not feasible to base the calculation of the ranks of websites on the calculation of PageRank. To tackle this problem, we proposed a novel method named AggregateRank rooted in the theory of stochastic complement, which cannot only approximate the sum of PageRank accurately, but also have a lower computational complexity than PageRank. Both theoretical analysis and experimental evaluation show that AggregateRank is a better method for ranking websites than previous methods.