527851
Efficient constrained local model fitting for non-rigid face alignment
Active appearance models (AAMs) have demonstrated great utility when being employed for non-rigid face alignment/tracking. The "simultaneous" algorithm for fitting an AAM achieves good non-rigid face registration performance, but has poor real time performance (2-3 fps). The "project-out" algorithm for fitting an AAM achieves faster than real time performance (> 200 fps) but suffers from poor generic alignment performance. In this paper we introduce an extension to a discriminative method for non-rigid face registration/tracking referred to as a constrained local model (CLM). Our proposed method is able to achieve superior performance to the "simultaneous" AAM algorithm along with real time fitting speeds (35 fps). We improve upon the canonical CLM formulation, to gain this performance, in a number of ways by employing: (i) linear SVMs as patch-experts, (ii) a simplified optimization criteria, and (iii) a composite rather than additive warp update step. Most notably, our simplified optimization criteria for fitting the CLM divides the problem of finding a single complex registration/warp displacement into that of finding N simple warp displacements. From these N simple warp displacements, a single complex warp displacement is estimated using a weighted least-squares constraint. Another major advantage of this simplified optimization lends from its ability to be parallelized, a step which we also theoretically explore in this paper. We refer to our approach for fitting the CLM as the "exhaustive local search" (ELS) algorithm. Experiments were conducted on the CMU Multi-PIE database.
46437694
Estimation of multiple directional illuminants from a single image
We present a new method for the detection and estimation of multiple directional illuminants, using only one single image of an object with known geometry. It obviates the need to modify the imaged scene by inserting calibration objects of any particular geometry, relying instead on partial knowledge of the geometry of the scene. We first develop our method for the case of a Lambertian sphere with known size, illuminated by a set of directional light sources. A novel and robust way is proposed to segment the surface into regions, with each region illuminated by a different set of sources. Our region-based least-squares method is impervious to noise and missing data, which is crucial to extending the method to arbitrary smooth geometry and to surfaces having both Lambertian and specular properties. We propose a novel methodology that integrates information from shadows and shading in the presence of strong directional sources of illumination, even when significant non-directional sources exist in the scene and the object surface is not Lambertian. We demonstrate experimentally the accuracy of our method, both in detecting the number of light sources and in estimating their directions, by testing on images of a variety of synthetic and real objects.
9142519
Utilizing field usage patterns for Java heap space optimization
This research studies the characteristics of field usage patterns in the SpecJVM98 benchmarks. It finds that multiple object instances of the same class often exhibit different field-usage patterns. Motivated by this observation, we designed a heap compression mechanism that classifies object instances at runtime based on their field-usage patterns and eliminates unused fields to save space. To achieve the maximum space savings while minimizing the space and time overhead, our design combines three interrelated techniques in a novel manner: runtime object instance classification, field virtualization, and bidirectional object layout. An experimental evaluation reveals that this mechanism can reduce the maximum heap occupancy of SpecJVM98 benchmarks by up to 18% and 14% on average while keeping the application execution overhead low.
2947494
High Resolution Tracking of Non-Rigid Motion of Densely Sampled 3D Data Using Harmonic Maps
Abstract
We present a novel automatic method for high resolution, non-rigid dense 3D point tracking. High quality dense point clouds of non-rigid geometry moving at video speeds are acquired using a phase-shifting structured light ranging technique. To use such data for the temporal study of subtle motions such as those seen in facial expressions, an efficient non-rigid 3D motion tracking algorithm is needed to establish inter-frame correspondences. The novelty of this paper is the development of an algorithmic framework for 3D tracking that unifies tracking of intensity and geometric features, using harmonic maps with added feature correspondence constraints. While the previous uses of harmonic maps provided only global alignment, the proposed introduction of interior feature constraints allows to track non-rigid deformations accurately as well. The harmonic map between two topological disks is a diffeomorphism with minimal stretching energy and bounded angle distortion. The map is stable, insensitive to resolution changes and is robust to noise. Due to the strong implicit and explicit smoothness constraints imposed by the algorithm and the high-resolution data, the resulting registration/deformation field is smooth, continuous and gives dense one-to-one inter-frame correspondences. Our method is validated through a series of experiments demonstrating its accuracy and efficiency.

13511504
Non-Rigid Object Alignment with a Mismatch Template Based on Exhaustive Local Search
Non-rigid object alignment is especially challenging when only a single appearance template is available and target and template images fail to match. Two sources of discrepancy between target and template are changes in illumination and non-rigid motion. Because most existing methods rely on a holistic representation for the alignment process, they require multiple training images to capture appearance variance. We developed a patch-based method that requires only a single appearance template of the object. Specifically, we fit the patch-based face model to an unseen image using an exhaustive local search and constrain the local warp updates within a global warping space. Our approach is not limited to intensity values or gradients, and therefore offers a natural framework to integrate multiple local features, such as filter responses, to increase robustness to large initialization error, illumination changes and non-rigid deformations. This approach was evaluated experimentally on more than 100 subjects for multiple illumination conditions and facial expressions. In all the experiments, our patch-based method outperforms the holistic gradient descent method in terms of accuracy and robustness of feature alignment and image registration.
20945105
Real-Time Moving Vehicle Detection With Cast Shadow Removal in Video Based on Conditional Random Field
This paper presents an approach of moving vehicle detection and cast shadow removal for video based traffic monitoring. Based on conditional random field, spatial and temporal dependencies in traffic scenes are formulated under a probabilistic discriminative framework, where contextual constraints during the detection process can be adaptively adjusted in terms of data-dependent neighborhood interaction. Computationally efficient algorithm has been developed to discriminate moving cast shadows and handle nonstationary background processes for real-time vehicle detection in video streams. Experimental results show that the proposed approach effectively fuses contextual dependencies and robustly detects moving vehicles under heavy shadows even in grayscale video.
2310778
Boosting an associative classifier
Associative classification is a new classification approach integrating association mining and classification. It becomes a significant tool for knowledge discovery and data mining. However, high-order association mining is time consuming when the number of attributes becomes large. The recent development of the AdaBoost algorithm indicates that boosting simple rules could often achieve better classification results than the use of complex rules. In view of this, we apply the AdaBoost algorithm to an associative classification system for both learning time reduction and accuracy improvement. In addition to exploring many advantages of the boosted associative classification system, this paper also proposes a new weighting strategy for voting multiple classifiers.
21401289
Parallelism in Relational Database Management Systems
In order to provide real-time responses to complex queries involving large volumes of data, it has become necessary to exploit parallelism in query processing. This paper addresses the issues and solutions relating to intraquery parallelism in a relational database management system (DBMS). We provide a broad framework for the study of the numerous issues that need to be addressed in supporting parallelism efficiently and flexibly. The alternatives for a parallel architecture system are discussed, followed by the focus on how a query can be parallelized and how that affects load balancing of the different tasks created. The final part of the paper contains information about how the IBM DATABASE 2™ (DB2®) Version 3 product provides support for I/O parallelism to reduce response time for data-intensive queries.
7145981
High performance first principles method for complex magnetic properties
The understanding of metallic magnetism is of fundamental importance for a wide range of technological applications ranging from thin film disc drive read heads to bulk magnets used in motors and power generation. In this submission for the Gordon Bell Prize we use the power of massively parallel processing (MPP) computers to perform first principles calculations of large system models of non-equilibrium magnetic states in metallic magnets. The calculations are based on a new constrained local moment (CLM) model that places the recently proposed Spin-Dynamics of Antropov et al. [1] on firm theoretical foundations. The equations of constrained local spin density approximation (constrained LSDA) are solved using the massively parallel locally self-consistent multiple scattering (LSMS) method[3] extended to treat general non-collinear arrangements of the magnetic moments [4]. A general algorithm has been developed for self-consistently finding the constraining fields which are introduced into LSDA in order to maintain a prescribed magnetic moment orientation configuration. The existence of CLM states is demonstrated for 1024 atom per unit cell models of Iron above its Curie temperature. The constrained LSMS method we have developed exploits the locality in the physics of the problem to produce an algorithm that has only local and limited communications on parallel computers leading to very good scale-up to large processor counts and linear scaling of the number of operations with the number of atoms in the system. The computationally intensive step of inversion of a dense complex matrix is largely reduced to matrix-matrix multiplies which are implemented in BLAS. Throughout the code attention is paid to minimizing both the total operation count and total execution time, with primacy given to the latter. Full 64-bit arithmetic is used throughout. The code shows near linear scale-up to 1024-processing elements (PE) and attains a performance of 657 Gflops on a Cray T3E1200 LC1024 at a US Government site. Performance figures of 276 Gflops and 329 Gflops have also been obtained on T3E900 and T3E1200 LC512 machines at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), and Cray Research respectively. All performance figures include necessary I/O.
9587091
Topology control for delay-constraint data collection in wireless sensor networks
Data collection is one of the most important operations in wireless sensor networks. Many practical applications require the real-time data transmission, such as monitoring, tracking, etc. In this paper, we import and define the topology control problem for delay-constraint data collection (TDDC), and then formalize this problem into an integer programming problem. As NP-Hardness of this problem, we present a load-aware power-increased topology control algorithm (namely LPTC) to heuristically solve the problem. The theoretical analysis shows that this algorithm can reach O(1)-approximation ratio for the linear networks. And we also analyze the impact of the delay-constraint on the worst-case for the planar networks. Moreover, this paper designs two localized algorithms, called as SDEL and DDEL, based on the area division for TDDC problem. The experimental results show that LPTC algorithm can save at least 17% power consumptions compared with HBH algorithm in many situations.
22289409
Attribute Clustering for Grouping, Selection, and Classification of Gene Expression Data