7858701
Level-Biased Statistics in the Hierarchical Structure of the Web
In the literature of web search and mining, researchers used to consider the World Wide Web as a flat network, in which each page as well as each hyperlink is treated identically. However, it is the common knowledge that the Web is organized with a natural hierarchical structure according to the URLs of pages. Exploring the hierarchical structure, we found several level-biased characteristics of the Web. First, the distribution of pages over levels has a spindle shape. Second, the average indegree in each level decreases sharply when the level goes down. Third, although the indegree distributions in deeper levels obey the same power law with the global indegree distribution, the top levels show a quite different statistical characteristic. We believe that these new discoveries might be essential to the Web, and by taking use of them, the current web search and mining technologies could be improved and thus better services to the web users could be provided.
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.
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.
20330655
Site abstraction for rare category classification in large-scale web directory
Automatically classifying the Web directories is an effective way to manage Web information. However, our experiments showed that the state-of-the-art text classification technologies could not lead to acceptable performance in this task. Due to our analysis, the main problem is the lack of effective training data in rare categories of Web directories. To tackle this problem, we proposed a novel technology named Site Abstraction to synthesize new training examples from the website of the existing training document. The main idea is to propagate features through parent-child relationship in the sitemap tree. Experiments showed that our method significantly improved the classification performance.
1733796
Event detection from evolution of click-through data
Previous efforts on event detection from the web have focused primarily on web content and structure data ignoring the rich collection of web log data. In this paper, we propose the first approach to detect events from the click-through data, which is the log data of web search engines. The intuition behind event detection from click-through data is that such data is often event-driven and each event can be represented as a set ofquery-page pairs that are not only semantically similar but also have similar evolution pattern over time. Given the click-through data, in our proposed approach, we first segment it into a sequence of bipartite graphs based on theuser-defined time granularity. Next, the sequence of bipartite graphs is represented as a vector-based graph, which records the semantic and evolutionary relationships between queries and pages. After that, the vector-based graph is transformed into its dual graph, where each node is a query-page pair that will be used to represent real world events. Then, the problem of event detection is equivalent to the problem of clustering the dual graph of the vector-based graph. The clustering process is based on a two-phase graph cut algorithm. In the first phase, query-page pairs are clustered based on thesemantic-based similarity such that each cluster in the result corresponds to a specific topic. In the second phase, query-page pairs related to the same topic are further clustered based on the evolution pattern-based similarity such that each cluster is expected to represent a specific event under the specific topic. Experiments with real click-through data collected from a commercial web search engine show that the proposed approach produces high quality results.
7331201
Webpage importance analysis using conditional Markov random walk
In this paper, we propose a novel method to calculate the Web page importance based on a conditional Markov random walk model. The main assumption in this model is that given the hyperlinks in a Web page, users are not really randomly clicking one of them. Instead, many factors may bias their behaviors, for example, the anchor text, the content relevance and the previous experiences when visiting the Web site that a destination page belongs to. As one of the results, the user might tend to visit those pages in high-quality Web sites with higher probability. To implement this idea, we reformulate the Web graph to be a two-layer structure, and the Web page importance is calculated by conditional random walk in this new Web graph. Experiments on the topic distillation task of TREC 2003 Web track showed that our new method can achieve about 18% improvement on mean average precision (MAP) and 16% on precision at 10 (P@10) over the PageRank algorithm.
6430552
Real-time tracking using trust-region methods
Optimization methods based on iterative schemes can be divided into two classes: line-search methods and trust-region methods. While line-search techniques are commonly found in various vision applications, not much attention is paid to trust-region ones. Motivated by the fact that line-search methods can be considered as special cases of trust-region methods, we propose to establish a trust-region framework for real-time tracking. Our approach is characterized by three key contributions. First, since a trust-region tracking system is more effective, it often yields better performances than the outcomes of other trackers that rely on iterative optimization to perform tracking, e.g., a line-search-based mean-shift tracker. Second, we have formulated a representation model that uses two coupled weighting schemes derived from the covariance ellipse to integrate an object's color probability distribution and edge density information. As a result, the system can address rotation and nonuniform scaling in a continuous space, rather than working on some presumably possible discrete values of rotation angle and scale. Third, the framework is very flexible in that a variety of distance functions can be adapted easily. Experimental results and comparative studies are provided to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed method.
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
6716050
Semantic manifold learning for image retrieval
Learning the user's semantics for CBIR involves two different sources of information: the similarity relations entailed by the content-based features, and the relevance relations specified in the feedback. Given that, we propose an augmented relation embedding (ARE) to map the image space into a semantic manifold that faithfully grasps the user's preferences. Besides ARE, we also look into the issues of selecting a good feature set for improving the retrieval performance. With these two aspects of efforts we have established a system that yields far better results than those previously reported. Overall, our approach can be characterized by three key properties: 1) The framework uses one relational graph to describe the similarity relations, and the other two to encode the relevant/irrelevant relations indicated in the feedback. 2) With the relational graphs so defined, learning a semantic manifold can be transformed into solving a constrained optimization problem, and is reduced to the ARE algorithm accounting for both the representation and the classification points of views. 3) An image representation based on augmented features is introduced to couple with the ARE learning. The use of these features is significant in capturing the semantics concerning different scales of image regions. We conclude with experimental results and comparisons to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.
18846553
Visual Deconstruction: Recognizing Articulated Objects
We propose a deconstruction framework to recognize and find articulated objects. In particular we are interested in human arm and leg articulations.
10357072
On error exponents of modulo lattice additive noise channels
Modulo lattice additive noise (MLAN) channels appear in the analysis of structured binning codes for Costa's dirty-paper channel and of nested lattice codes for the additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. In this paper, we derive a new lower bound on the error exponents of the MLAN channel. With a proper choice of the shaping lattice and the scaling parameter, the new lower bound coincides with the random-coding lower bound on the error exponents of the AWGN channel at the same signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) in the sphere-packing and straight-line regions. This result implies that, at least for rates close to channel capacity, 1) writing on dirty paper is as reliable as writing on clean paper; and 2) lattice encoding and decoding suffer no loss of error exponents relative to the optimal codes (with maximum-likelihood decoding) for the AWGN channel.