8868065
Controlling Uncertainty in Personal Positioning at Minimal Measurement Cost
One interesting scenario in personal positioning involves an energy-conscious mobile user who tries to obtain estimates about his positions with sufficiently high confidence while consuming as little battery energy as possible. Besides obtaining estimates directly from a position measuring device, the user can rely on extrapolative calculations based on a user movement model and a known initial estimate. Because each measuring probe usually incurs a substantially higher cost than the extrapolative calculation, the objective is to minimize the overall cost of the measurement probes. 
 
Assuming that the user moves at a normally-distributed velocity, we consider two scenarios which differ in the probing devices used. In the first scenario, only one probing device is used. In this case, the aim is to minimize the total number of probes required. In the second scenario, two types of positioning devices are given, where one type of devices offers a higher positioning precision, but also at a greater probing cost. In this case, the aim is to choose an optimal combination of probes from the two types of devices. 
 
For both scenarios, we present algorithms for determining the minimum-cost probing sequences. The algorithms are computationally efficient in reducing the searching space of all possible probing sequences. Our approach is based on Kalman Filtering theory which allows to integrate estimates obtained from the measurements and the extrapolative calculations. The variances in the estimates can provably stay below the specified level throughout the journey. 
 
To the best of our knowledge, these results appear to be the first that uses a mathematically rigorous approach to minimize the probing cost while guaranteeing the quality of estimates in personal positioning.
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.
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.
5098005
RotoTexture: Automated Tools for Texturing Raw Video
We propose a video editing system that allows a user to apply a time-coherent texture to a surface depicted in the raw video from a single uncalibrated camera, including the surface texture mapping of a texture image and the surface texture synthesis from a texture swatch. Our system avoids the construction of a 3D shape model and instead uses the recovered normal field to deform the texture so that it plausibly adheres to the undulations of the depicted surface. The texture mapping method uses the nonlinear least-squares optimization of a spring model to control the behavior of the texture image as it is deformed to match the evolving normal field through the video. The texture synthesis method uses a coarse optical flow to advect clusters of pixels corresponding to patches of similarly oriented surface points. These clusters are organized into a minimum advection tree to account for the dynamic visibility of clusters. We take a rather crude approach to normal recovering and optical flow estimation, yet the results are robust and plausible for nearly diffuse surfaces such as faces and t-shirts
29388694
A fuzzy logic approach for detection of video shot boundaries
Video temporal segmentation is normally the first and important step for content-based video applications. Many features including the pixel difference, colour histogram, motion, and edge information etc. have been widely used and reported in the literature to detect shot cuts inside videos. Although existing research on shot cut detection is active and extensive, it still remains a challenge to achieve accurate detection of all types of shot boundaries with one single algorithm. In this paper, we propose a fuzzy logic approach to integrate hybrid features for detecting shot boundaries inside general videos. The fuzzy logic approach contains two processing modes, where one is dedicated to detection of abrupt shot cuts including those short dissolved shots, and the other for detection of gradual shot cuts. These two modes are unified by a mode-selector to decide which mode the scheme should work on in order to achieve the best possible detection performances. By using the publicly available test data set from Carleton University, extensive experiments were carried out and the test results illustrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms the representative existing algorithms in terms of the precision and recall rates.
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.
14545049
An Axiomatic Approach to IR--UIUC TREC 2005 Robust Track Experiments
In this paper, we report our experiments in the TREC 2005 Robust Track. Our focus is to explore the use of a new axiomatic approach to information retrieval. Most existing retrieval models make the assumption that terms are independent of each other. Although such simplifying assumption has facilitated the construction of successful retrieval systems, the assumption is not true; words are related by use, and their similarity of occurrence in documents can reflect underlying semantic relations between terms. Our new method aims at incorporating term dependency relations into the axiomatic retrieval model in a natural way. In this paper, we describe the method and present analysis of our Robust-2005 evaluation results. The results show that the proposed method works equally well as the KL-divergence retrieval model with a mixture model feedback method. The performance can be further improved by using the external resources such as Google.