3137419
Subtle Facial Expression Modeling with Vector Field Decomposition
Facial expression means not only the feature motions but also the subtle appearance changes in the face. The details are important to facial expression synthesis. In this paper, a novel method based on vector field decomposition is presented to model subtle facial expressions. The intensity change of facial expression image is represented by Helmholtz-Hodge vector field decomposition. Based on this method, subtle facial expression mapping is carried out much faster and better. Experiment results show that our method is robust and convincible to model the subtle facial expression.
1313086
Image-based surface detail transfer
Changing an object's appearance by adding geometric details is desirable in many real-world applications. Bump mapping has acted as an alternative to adding geometrical details, to an otherwise smooth object. But constructing visually interesting bump maps requires practice and artistic skills. Computer vision techniques have helped for modeling real-world objects and their surface details. In our approach, for cases where we only want to transfer geometrical details from one object to another, we might not need to explicitly compute 3D structures. In particular, our novel technique captures the geometrical details of an object from a single image in a way that is independent of the object's reflectance property. We can then transfer geometrical details to another surface, producing the appearance of a new surface with added geometrical details while preserving the object's reflectance property. Our method's advantages are that it's simple to implement, requires only a single image for each object, and produces effective results.
2276524
Automatic Business Card Scanning with a Camera
In this paper, we present a system to automatically extract, rectify and enhance business card images. First the business card image patch is automatically segmented by minimizing a novel local-global variational energy. Second a quadrangle is fitted to the segmented image patch. With the four corner points of the quadrangle, we then estimate the physical aspect ratio of the business card and obtain a homography to rectify the quadrangle back to rectangular shape. We finally enhance the contrast of the rectified business card image using a S-shaped curve. Extensive experiments demonstrated the efficacy and robustness of our system.
15783652
Low bit-rate video streaming for face-to-face teleconference
Face-to-face video teleconferencing is very important for real time communication. Current teleconferencing applications use standard video codecs, such as MPEG 1/2/4, for the compression of face video. Either a high bandwidth is required for high quality video transmission, or the transmitted face video is blurred at low bitrates. We present a system for real-time coding of face video at low bit-rate. There are two main contributions. First, we improve the technique of long term memory prediction by selecting frames into the database in an optimal way. A new frame is selected into the database only when it is significantly different from those frames which are already in the database. In this way, the database can cover a wider range of images. Second, we incorporate prior knowledge about faces into the long term memory prediction framework. The prior knowledge includes: (1) facial motions are repetitive such that most of them can be reconstructed from multiple reference frames; (2) different components of the face and the background can tolerate different levels of error because of different perceptual importance. Experiments show that, at similar PSNR, the proposed system works much faster and achieves better visual quality than the standard H.264/JVT codec.
5771284
Face relighting with radiance environment maps
A radiance environment map pre-integrates a constant surface reflectance with the lighting environment. It has been used to generate photo-realistic rendering at interactive speed. However, one of its limitations is that each radiance environment map can only render the object, which has the same surface reflectance as what it integrates. We present a ratio-image based technique to use a radiance environment map to render diffuse objects with different surface reflectance properties. This method has the advantage that it does not require the separation of illumination from reflectance, and it is simple to implement and runs at interactive speed. In order to use this technique for human face relighting, we have developed a technique that uses spherical harmonics to approximate the radiance environment map for any given image of a face. Thus we are able to relight face images when the lighting environment rotates. Another benefit of the radiance environment map is that we can interactively modify lighting by changing the coefficients of the spherical harmonics basis. Finally we can modify the lighting condition of one person's face so that it matches the new lighting condition of a different person's face image assuming the two faces have similar skin albedos.
36184486
Image-Based Surface Detail Transfer
We present a novel technique, called Image-Based Surface Detail Transfer, to transfer geometric details from one surface to another with simple 2D image operations. The basic observation is that, without knowing its 3D geometry, geometric details (local deformations) can be extracted from a single image of an object in a way independent of its surface reflectance, and furthermore, these geometric details can be transferred to modify the appearance of other objects directly in images. We show examples including surface detail transfer between real objects, as well as between real and synthesized objects.
315976
Resource Annotation Framework in a Georeferenced and Geospatial Digital Library
G-Portal is a georeferenced and geospatial digital library that aims to identify, classify and organize geospatial and georeferenced resources on the web and to provide digital library services for these resources. Annotation service is supported in G-Portal to enable users to contribute content to the digital library. In this paper, we present a resource annotation framework for georeferenced and geospatial digital libraries and discuss its application in G-Portal. The framework is flexible for managing annotations of heterogeneous web resources. It allows users to contribute not only the annotation content but also the schema of the annotations. Meanwhile, other digital library services, such as visualization and classification, can be provided over the annotations since they are treated as first class objects. This paper mainly focuses on the design of the resource annotation framework.
8080684
Well-Behaved Inference Rules for First-Order Theorem Proving
The concept of well-behaved inference rules is developed in first-order polynomial-based theorem proving. It is shown that well-behaved inference rules are complete for both the set of support strategy and the linear strategy. Furthermore, two concrete inference rules that are well behaved are presented, and two other strategies for them are described.
8336028
Evaluation and optimization of clustering in gene expression data analysis
MOTIVATION
A measurement of cluster quality is needed to choose potential clusters of genes that contain biologically relevant patterns of gene expression. This is strongly desirable when a large number of gene expression profiles have to be analyzed and proper clusters of genes need to be identified for further analysis, such as the search for meaningful patterns, identification of gene functions or gene response analysis.


RESULTS
We propose a new cluster quality method, called stability, by which unsupervised learning of gene expression data can be performed efficiently. The method takes into account a cluster's stability on partition. We evaluate this method and demonstrate its performance using four independent, real gene expression and three simulated datasets. We demonstrate that our method outperforms other techniques listed in the literature. The method has applications in evaluating clustering validity as well as identifying stable clusters.


AVAILABILITY
Please contact the first author.
2119274
Dynamical mobile terminal location registration in wireless PCS networks
In this paper, we propose a mobile terminal (MT) location registration/update model. In this model, the registration decision is based on two factors-the time elapsed since last call arrival and the distance the MT has traveled since last registration. It is established that the optimal registration strategy can be represented by a curve. Only when the state of the system reaches this curve is a registration performed. In order for an MT to calculate its traveled distance, an interactive implementation scheme and a distance calculation algorithm are developed. When the call interarrival times are independent and geometrically distributed, the proposed model becomes a distance-based model and, in this case, the optimal registration strategy is of threshold structure. For the distance-based model, a single sample path-based ordinal optimization algorithm is devised. In this algorithm, without any knowledge about the system parameters, the MT observes the system state transitions, estimates the ordinal of a set of strategies, and updates the registration strategy adaptively. Since only a single sample path is used, this algorithm can be implemented online. Several numerical examples are provided to compare the proposed model and the existing ones.
6770113
Image magnification method using joint diffusion
In this paper a new algorithm for image magnification is presented. Because linear magnification/interpolation techniques diminish the contrast and produce sawtooth effects, in recent years, many nonlinear interpolation methods, especially nonlinear diffusion based approaches, have been proposed to solve these problems. Two recently proposed techniques for interpolation by diffusion, forward and backward diffusion (FAB) and level-set reconstruction (LSR), cannot enhance the contrast and smooth edges simultaneously. In this article, a novel Partial Differential Equations (PDE) based approach is presented. The contributions of the paper include: firstly, a unified form of diffusion joining FAB and LSR is constructed to have all of their virtues; secondly, to eliminate artifacts of the joint diffusion, soft constraint takes the place of hard constraint presented by LSR; thirdly, the determination of joint coefficients, criterion for stopping time and color image processing are also discussed. The results demonstrate that the method is visually and quantitatively better than Bicubic, FAB and LSR.