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Manifold learning has been demonstrated as an effective way to represent intrinsic geometrical structure of samples. In this paper, a new manifold learning approach, named Local Coordinates Alignment (LCA), is developed based on the alignment technique. LCA first obtains local coordinates as representations of local neighborhood by preserving proximity relations on a patch, which is Euclidean. Then, these extracted local coordinates are aligned to yield the global embeddings. To solve the out of sample problem, linearization of LCA (LLCA) is proposed. In addition, in order to solve the non-Euclidean problem in real world data when building the locality, kernel techniques are utilized to represent similarity of the pairwise points on a local patch. Empirical studies on both synthetic data and face image sets show effectiveness of the developed approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a new method for simultaneously determining three-dimensional (3D) motion and structure of a nonrigid object from its uncalibrated two-dimensional (2D) data with Gaussian or non-Gaussian distributions. A nonrigid motion can be treated as a combination of a rigid component and a nonrigid deformation. To reduce the high dimensionality of the deformable structure or shape, we estimate the probability distribution function (PDF) of the structure through random sampling, integrating an established probabilistic model. The fitting between the observations and the estimated 3D structure will be evaluated using the pooled variance estimator. The recovered structure is only available when the 2D feature points have been properly corresponded over two image frames. Applications of the proposed method to both synthetic and real image sequences are demonstrated with promising results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similarity metric is a key component in query-by-example image searching with visual features. After extraction of image visual features, the scheme of computing their similarities can affect the system performance dramatically — the image searching results are normally displayed in decreasing order of similarity (alternatively, increasing order of distance) on the graphical interface for end users. Unfortunately, conventional similarity metrics, in image searching with visual features, usually encounter several difficulties, namely, lighting, background, and viewpoint problems. From the signal processing point of view, this paper introduces a novel similarity metric and therefore reduces the above three problems to some extent. The effectiveness of this newly developed similarity metric is demonstrated by a set of experiments upon a small image ground truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Human tastes in art motivate the need for effective means to build a visual mosaic picture which is made up of many small tiles. In some previous work researchers have tried to translate pictures' styles.1 In this paper, a new approach to image processing in arts is presented in the domain of generating a series of artistic mosaic pictures. An arbitrary image is first translated into a mosaic-based one by dividing it into a number of sub-blocks each with the mean value of the pixels in it. Each of these small fragments can be assigned a new location within this image so that a new mosaic picture is generated. By this mean, images with similar color features can be used to create a series of mosaic pictures. The mosaic pictures consist of the same elements as each other, but might be extremely different from the semantic contents. A basic algorithm is presented, followed by some further improvements. Some preliminary experimental results are then given to show the impact of the proposed special techniques. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The face is the most distinctive and widely used key to a person's identity. The area of face detection has attracted considerable attention in the advancement of human-machine interaction as it provides a natural and efficient way to communicate between humans and machines. The problem of facial parts in image sequences has become a popular area of research due to emerging applications in intelligent human-computer interface, surveillance systems, content-based image retrieval, video conferencing, financial transaction, forensic applications, pedestrian detection, image database management system and so on. This paper presents the results of an image based neural network face detection system which seeks to address the problem of detecting faces under gross variations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose a new supervised learning algorithm, which is named the Generalized Marginal Fisher Analysis (GMFA), to utilize the advantages of the Marginal Fisher Analysis (MFA) and the Generalized Singular Value Decomposition (GSVD) techniques for face recognition. The experimental results on several standard face databases demonstrate that GMFA outperforms LDA/Fisherface, LDA/GSVD and MFA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considering that the Human Visual System (HVS) has different perceptual characteristics for different morphological components, a novel image quality metric is proposed by incorporating Morphological Component Analysis (MCA) and HVS, which is capable of assessing the image with different kinds of distortion. Firstly, reference and distorted images are decomposed into linearly combined texture and cartoon components by MCA respectively. Then these components are turned into perceptual features by Just Noticeable Difference (JND) which integrates masking features, luminance adaptation and Contrast Sensitive Function (CSF). Finally, the discrimination between reference and distorted images perceptual features is quantified using a pooling strategy before the final image quality is obtained. Experimental results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed prevails over some existing methods on LIVE database II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the problem of enriching the travelogue associated with a small number (even one) of images with more web images. Images associated with the travelogue always consist of the content and the style of textual information. Relying on this assumption, in this paper, we present a framework of travelogue enriching, exploiting both textual and visual information generated by different users. The framework aims to select the most relevant images from automatically collected candidate image set to enrich the given travelogue, and form a comprehensive overview of the scenic spot. To do these, we propose to build two-layer probabilistic models, i.e. a text-layer model and image-layer models, on offline collected travelogues and images. Each topic (e.g. Sea, Mountain, Historical Sites) in the text-layer model is followed by an image-layer model with sub-topics learnt (e.g. the topic of sea is with the sub-topic like beach, tree, sunrise and sunset). Based on the model, we develop strategies to enrich travelogues in the following steps: (1) remove noisy names of scenic spots from travelogues; (2) generate queries to automatically gather candidate image set; (3) select images to enrich the travelogue; and (4) choose images to portray the visual content of a scenic spot. Experimental results on Chinese travelogues demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach on tasks of travelogue enrichment and the corresponding scenic spot illustration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Image quality is a key characteristic in image processing,10,11 image retrieval,12,13 and biometrics.14 In this paper, a novel reduced-reference image quality assessment method is proposed based on wavelet transform. By simulating the human visual system, we take the variance of the visual sensitive coefficients into account to measure a distorted image. The computational complexity of the proposed method is much lower compared with some existing methods. Experimental results demonstrate its advantages in terms of correlation coefficient, outlier ratio, transmitted information, and CPU cost. Moreover, it is also illustrated that the proposed method has a good accordance with human subjective perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]