13944296
Textureshop: texture synthesis as a photograph editing tool
We combine existing techniques for shape-from-shading and texture synthesis to create a new tool for texturing objects in photographs. Our approach clusters pixels with similar recovered normals into patches on which texture is synthesized. Distorting the texture based on the recovered normals creates the illusion that the texture adheres to the undulations of the photographed surface. Inconsistencies in the recovered surface are disguised by the graphcut blending of the individually textured patches. Further applications include the generation of detail on manually-shaded painting, extracting and synthesizing a displacement map from a texture swatch, and the embossed transfer of normals from one image to another, which would be difficult to create with current image processing packages.
9299231
Language Models for Expert Finding--UIUC TREC 2006 Enterprise Track Experiments
In this paper, we report our experiments in the TREC 2006 Enterprise Track. Our focus is to study a language model for expert finding. We extend an existing language model for expert retrieval in three aspects. First, we model the document-expert association using a mixure model instead of name matching heuristics as in the existing work; such a mixture model allows us to put different weights on email matching and name matching. Second, we propose to model the prior of an expert based on the counts of email matches in the supporting documents instead of using uniform prior as in the previous work. Finally, we perform topic expansion and generalize the model from computing the likelihood to computing the cross entropy. Our experiments show that the first two extensions are more effective than the third extension, though when optimized, they all seem to be effective.
7037192
Interactive material replacement in photographs
Material replacement has wide application throughout the entertainment industry, particularly for post-production make-up application or wardrobe adjustment. More generally, any low-cost mock-up object can be processed to have the appearance of expensive, high-quality materials. We demonstrate a new system that allows fast, intuitive material replacement in photographs. We extend recent work in object selection and fast texture synthesis, as well as develop a novel approach to shape-from-shading capable of handling objects with albedo changes. Each component of our system runs with interactive speed, allowing for easy experimentation and refinement of results.
13897908
Detail preserving shape deformation in image editing
Shape deformation is a common practice in digital image editing, but can unrealistically stretch or compress texture detail. We propose an image editing system that decouples feature position from pixel color generation, by resynthesizing texture from the source image to preserve its detail and orientation around a new feature curve location. We introduce a new distortion to patch-based texture synthesis that aligns texture features with image features. A dense correspondence field between source and target images generated by the control curves then guides texture synthesis.
16418680
Term feedback for information retrieval with language models
In this paper we study term-based feedback for information retrieval in the language modeling approach. With term feedback a user directly judges the relevance of individual terms without interaction with feedback documents, taking full control of the query expansion process. We propose a cluster-based method for selecting terms to present to the user for judgment, as well as effective algorithms for constructing refined query language models from user term feedback. Our algorithms are shown to bring significant improvement in retrieval accuracy over a non-feedback baseline, and achieve comparable performance to relevance feedback. They are helpful even when there are no relevant documents in the top.
5670917
Improving the Robustness of Language Models - UIUC TREC 2003 Robust and Genomics Experiments
In this paper, we report our experiments in the TREC 2003 Genomics Track and the Robust Track. A common theme that we explored is the robustness of a basic language modeling retrieval approach. We examine several aspects of robustness, including robustness in handling different types of queries, different types of documents, and optimizing performance for difficult topics. Our basic retrieval method is the KL-divergence retrieval model with the two-stage smoothing method plus a mixture model feedback method. In the Genomics IR track, we propose a new method for modeling semi-structured queries using language models, which is shown to be more robust and effective than the regular query model in handling gene queries. In the Robust track, we experimented with two heuristic approaches to improve the robustness in using language models for pseudo feedback.
7764302
Cognitive personal positioning based on activity map and adaptive particle filter
This paper presents a cognitive approach for a reliable yet battery-friendly personal positioning. A user's position is learned from both historical log and possible measurements. Firstly, user's past activities recorded in the log are summarized into an activity map. Accordingly, a user-habit guided particle filtering algorithm is presented for position prediction. Specifically, our algorithm makes reference to the map to determine the most probable correct position, smoothed with occasional measurement. User's current position is modeled probabilistically by a collection of particles and her future moves are modeled with a tendency to follow a familiar path on the map; The estimate is then smoothed by Bayesian filtering. We also allow the number of particles to vary according to user's position in the map. Thus, along with better insights about user's movement experience, our approach can learn from the past and potentially improve the quality of estimates. Our experiments show that this adaptive filtering model using the activity map can deal with non-linear behaviors rather effectively. The new cognitive scheme can indeed track the user's position with a high degree of accuracy. Moreover, the algorithms exhibit low computational complexities, making them well suited for applications on wearable computers.
6933858
Region Growing with Automatic Seeding for Semantic Video Object Segmentation
As content-based multimedia applications become increasingly important, demand for technologies on semantic video object segmentation is growing, where the segmented objects are expected to be in line with human visual perception. Existing research is limited to semi-automatic approach, in which human intervene is often required. These include manual selection of seeds for region growing or manual classification of background edges etc. In this paper, we propose an automatic region growing algorithm for video object segmentation, which features in automatic selection of seeds and thus the entire segmentation does not require any action from human users. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm performs well in terms of the effectiveness in video object segmentation.
1979571
Face Video Competition
Person recognition using facial features, e.g., mug-shot images, has long been used in identity documents. However, due to the widespread use of web-cams and mobile devices embedded with a camera, it is now possible to realise facial video recognition, rather than resorting to just still images. In fact, facial video recognition offers many advantages over still image recognition; these include the potential of boosting the system accuracy and deterring spoof attacks. This paper presents the first known benchmarking effort of person identity verification using facial video data. The evaluation involves 18 systems submitted by seven academic institutes.
45563418
Video extraction in compressed domain
In this paper, we propose a video extraction algorithm directly in the compressed domain for low cost and fast content access to those compressed video data via MPEG. Extensive experiments show that such extracted images and videos not only maintain well-preserved content features, but also illustrate reasonable quality in terms of both PSNR values and visual inspection. In cases where video processing tasks do not necessarily require full resolution pixel data such as browsing, pattern recognition, and object tracking in surveillance applications, the proposed algorithm will provide superior performance in terms of computing efficiency, under the context that millions of video frames need to be accessed, yet they are stored in compressed format.
16979811
Neural adaptive control for a class of nonlinear systems with unknown deadzone
This paper focuses on the adaptive control of a class of nonlinear systems with unknown deadzone using neural networks. By constructing a deadzone pre-compensator, a neural adaptive control scheme is developed using backstepping design techniques. Transient performance is guaranteed and semi-globally uniformly ultimately bounded stability is obtained. Another feature of this scheme is that the neural networks reconstruction error bound is assumed to be unknown and can be estimated online. Simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.