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This paper presents a fast and accurate affine canonicalization method for planar shapes. This method improves on previous ones based on iterative optimization that produce multiple canonical versions. Canonicalization provides a common reference frame for shape comparison without the loss of discrimination ability often caused by invariant features. It also gives for free the alignment transformation between any pair of shapes. The proposed method is based on the properties of the joint angular distribution of marginal skewness and kurtosis, the so-called SK signature , which can be efficiently computed in closed form from the raw image moments. The experiments demonstrate that the method is robust to the non-affine distortions caused by natural perspective image conditions. Thus, it can be used as an automatic preprocessing step to add affine invariance in statistical pattern recognition applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In the paper an iteratively unsupervised image segmentation algorithm is developed, which is based on our proposed multiphase multiple piecewise constant (MMPC) model and its graph cuts optimization. The MMPC model use multiple constants to model each phase instead of one single constant used in Chan and Vese (CV) model and cartoon limit so that heterogeneous image object segmentation can be effectively dealt with. We show that the multiphase optimization problem based on our proposed model can be approximately solved by graph cuts methods. Four-Color theorem is used to relabel the regions of image after every iteration, which makes it possible to represent and segment an arbitrary number of regions in image with only four phases. Therefore, the computational cost and memory usage are greatly reduced. The comparison with some typical unsupervised image segmentation methods using a large number of images from the Berkeley Segmentation Dataset demonstrates the proposed algorithm can effectively segment natural images with a good performance and acceptable computational time. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: This paper presents a flexible framework to build a target-specific, part-based representation for arbitrary articulated or rigid objects. The aim is to successfully track the target object in 2D, through multiple scales and occlusions. This is realized by employing a hierarchical, iterative optimization process on the proposed representation of structure and appearance. Therefore, each rigid part of an object is described by a hierarchical spring system represented by an attributed graph pyramid. Hierarchical spring systems encode the spatial relationships of the features (attributes of the graph pyramid) describing the parts and enforce them by spring-like behavior during tracking. Articulation points connecting the parts of the object allow to transfer position information from reliable to ambiguous parts. Tracking is done in an iterative process by combining the hypotheses of simple trackers with the hypotheses extracted from the hierarchical spring systems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Decreasing the individual error and increasing the diversity among classifiers are two crucial factors for improving ensemble performances. Nevertheless, the “kappa-error” diagram shows that enhancing the diversity is at the expense of reducing individual accuracy. Hence, a new method named Matching Pursuit Optimization Ensemble Classifiers (MPOEC) is proposed in this paper in order to balance the diversity and the individual accuracy. MPOEC method adopts a greedy iterative algorithm of matching pursuit to search for an optimal combination of entire classifiers, and eliminates some similar or poor classifiers by giving zero coefficients. In MPOEC approach, the coefficient of every classifier is gained by minimizing the residual between the target function and the linear combination of the basis functions, especially, when the basis functions are similar, their coefficients will be close to zeros in one iteration of the optimization process, which indicates that obtained coefficients of classifiers are based on the diversity among ensemble individuals. Because some classifiers are given zero coefficients, MPOEC approach may be also considered as a selective classifiers ensemble method. Experimental results show that MPOEC improves the performance compared with other methods. Furthermore, the kappa-error diagrams indicate that the diversity is increased by the proposed method compared with standard ensemble strategies and evolutionary ensemble. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Nearest neighbor classification is one of the most used and well known methods in data mining. Its simplest version has several drawbacks, such as low efficiency, high storage requirements and sensitivity to noise. Data reduction techniques have been used to alleviate these shortcomings. Among them, prototype selection and generation techniques have been shown to be very effective. Positioning adjustment of prototypes is a successful trend within the prototype generation methodology. Evolutionary algorithms are adaptive methods based on natural evolution that may be used for searching and optimization. Positioning adjustment of prototypes can be viewed as an optimization problem, thus it can be solved using evolutionary algorithms. This paper proposes a differential evolution based approach for optimizing the positioning of prototypes. Specifically, we provide a complete study of the performance of four recent advances in differential evolution. Furthermore, we show the good synergy obtained by the combination of a prototype selection stage with an optimization of the positioning of prototypes previous to nearest neighbor classification. The results are contrasted with non-parametrical statistical tests and show that our proposals outperform previously proposed methods. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In this paper we introduce an adaptive image thresholding technique via minimax optimization of a novel energy functional that consists of a non-linear convex combination of an edge sensitive data fidelity term and a regularization term. While the proposed data fidelity term requires the threshold surface to intersect the image surface only at places with large image gradient magnitude, the regularization term enforces smoothness in the threshold surface. To the best of our knowledge, all the previously proposed energy functional-based adaptive image thresholding algorithms rely on manually set weighting parameters to achieve a balance between the data fidelity and the regularization terms. In contrast, we use minimax principle to automatically find this weighting parameter value, as well as the threshold surface. Our conscious choice of the energy functional permits a variational formulation within the minimax principle leading to a globally optimum solution. The proposed variational minimax optimization is carried out by an iterative gradient descent with exact line search technique that we experimentally demonstrate to be computationally far more attractive than the Fibonacci search applied to find the minimax solution. Our method shows promising results to preserve edge/texture structures in different benchmark images over other competing methods. We also demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed method for delineating lung boundaries from magnetic resonance imagery (MRI). [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

• The first work that can correct attributes while preserving the original meaning of each attribute dimension. • The first plug-in module that aims to facilitate existing approaches and makes ZSL models eligible or even GZSL tasks. • The corrected attributes can better reflect the visual contexts without losing the integrability in attributes. While Zero Shot Learning models can recognize new classes without training examples, they often fails to incorporate both seen and unseen classes together at the test time, which is known as the Generalized Zero-shot Learning (GZSL) problem. This paper identifies a bottleneck issue when attributes are not well-defined, reliable, inaccurate in quantitative representations, or suffering from the visual-semantic discrepancy. We propose a Generic Plug-in Attribute Correction (GPAC) module which can effectively accommodate conventional ZSL in GZSL tasks. Different from existing embedding-based approaches which often lose the favor of transparency in attributes, our key challenge is to fully preserve the original meaning of the attributes and make it complementary and interpretable to upgrade existing ZSL models. To this end, we propose a novel nonnegative constraint with iterative Stochastic Gradient Descent toolbox to effectively fit our GPAC module into previous ZSL models. Extensive experiments on five popular datasets show that our method can effectively correct attributes and make conventional ZSL can achieve state-of-the-art performance on GZSL tasks. It is also a good practice for future models when incorporating prior human knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]