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Visual tracking is a very critical issue in computer vision and video processing. For Discriminative Correlation Filter (DCF)-based tracking methods, it is very essential and meaningful to adaptively incorporate reliable target and surrounding information from video frames. However, most existing DCF-based trackers solely rely on pre-defined and fixed constraints such as a binary mask or quadratic function-based regularization to improve the discrimination. Unfortunately, such attempts fail to adjust the constraints according to the change of tracking circumstance in the video sequence, and thus lead to the lack of reliability of learned filters. To mitigate these problems, we present a novel DCF-based tracking method that introduces an adaptive target-and-surrounding soft mask (ATSM) into the learning formula. The adaptive soft mask that is represented by float numbers contains the detail information for both target region and its surrounding information: first, for the background area, it introduces meaningful background information and suppressing uninformative one; second, for the target area inside the bounding box, it helps to focus on the reliable area and repress the rapidly changing area; third, the target-and-surrounding soft mask is adaptively adjusted based on the variations of the target and its surrounding during the tracking process. By jointly modeling the filter and the adaptive soft mask, our ATSM tracker achieves an efficient integration of meaningful information of both foreground and background and performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms on seven well-known benchmarks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the explosive growth of data, the multi-view data is widely used in many fields, such as data mining, machine learning, computer vision, and so on. Because such data always has a complex structure, i.e., many categories, many perspectives of description and high dimension, how to formulate an accurate and reliable framework for the multi-view classification is a very challenging task. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-view classification method by using multiple multi-class Support Vector Machines (SVMs) with a novel collaborative strategy. Here, each multi-class SVM embeds the scaling factor to renewedly adjust the weight allocation of all features, which is beneficial to highlight more important and discriminative features. Furthermore, we adopt the decision function values to integrate multiple multi-class learners and introduce the confidence score across multiple classes to determine the final classification result. In addition, through a series of the mathematical deduction, we bridge the proposed model with the solvable problem and solve it through an alternating iteration optimization method. We evaluate the proposed method on several image and face datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method performs better than other state-of-the-art learning algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses two fundamental problems: 1) learning discriminative model parameters and 2) avoiding over-fitting, which often occurs in regression-based classification tasks. We formulate these two problems in terms of relaxing both the strict binary label matrix and graph regularization term into more flexible forms so that the margins between different classes are enlarged as much as possible and the problem of over-fitting is avoided to some extent. This task is accomplished by the proposed double relaxed regression (DRR) method. The convex problem of DRR is solved efficiently with an iterative procedure. Extensive experiments on synthetic and real world image data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of both classification accuracy and running time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Clustering is a useful statistical tool in computer vision and machine learning. It is generally accepted that introducing supervised information brings remarkable performance improvement to clustering. However, assigning accurate labels is expensive when the amount of training data is huge. Existing supervised clustering methods handle this problem by transferring the bag-level labels into the instance-level descriptors. However, the assumption that each bag has a single label limits the application scope seriously. In this paper, we propose weakly supervised multilabel clustering, which allows assigning multiple labels to a bag. Based on this, the instance-level descriptors can be clustered with the guidance of bag-level labels. The key technique is a weakly supervised random forest that infers the model parameters. Thereby, a deterministic annealing strategy is developed to optimize the nonconvex objective function. The proposed algorithm is efficient in both the training and the testing stages. We apply it to three popular computer vision tasks: 1) image clustering; 2) semantic image segmentation; and 3) multiple objects localization. Impressive performance on the state-of-the-art image data sets is achieved in our experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The use of machine learning approaches for long-term hand tracking poses some major challenges such as attaining robustness to inconsistencies in lighting, scale and object appearances, background clutter, and total object occlusion/disappearance. To address these issues in this paper, we present a robust machine learning approach based on enhanced particle filter trackers. The inherent drawbacks associated with the particle filter approach, i.e., sample degeneration and sample impoverishment, are minimized by infusing the particle filter with the mean shift approach. Moreover, to instill our tracker with reacquisition ability, we propose a rotation invariant and efficient detection framework named beta histograms of oriented gradients. Our robust appearance model operates on the red, green, blue color histogram and our newly proposed rotation invariant noise compensated local binary patterns descriptor, which is a noise compensated, rotation invariant version of the local binary patterns descriptor. Through our experiments, we demonstrate that our proposed hand tracker performs favorably against state-of-the-art algorithms on numerous challenging video sequences of hand postures, and overcomes the largely unsolved problem of redetecting hands after they vanish and reappear into the frame. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The image of a face varies with the illumination, pose, and facial expression, thus we say that a single face image is of high uncertainty for representing the face. In this sense, a face image is just an observation and it should not be considered as the absolutely accurate representation of the face. As more face images from the same person provide more observations of the face, more face images may be useful for reducing the uncertainty of the representation of the face and improving the accuracy of face recognition. However, in a real world face recognition system, a subject usually has only a limited number of available face images and thus there is high uncertainty. In this paper, we attempt to improve the face recognition accuracy by reducing the uncertainty. First, we reduce the uncertainty of the face representation by synthesizing the virtual training samples. Then, we select useful training samples that are similar to the test sample from the set of all the original and synthesized virtual training samples. Moreover, we state a theorem that determines the upper bound of the number of useful training samples. Finally, we devise a representation approach based on the selected useful training samples to perform face recognition. Experimental results on five widely used face databases demonstrate that our proposed approach can not only obtain a high face recognition accuracy, but also has a lower computational complexity than the other state-of-the-art approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The biologically inspired model (BIM) proposed by Serre presents a promising solution to object categorization. It emulates the process of object recognition in primates' visual cortex by constructing a set of scale- and position-tolerant features whose properties are similar to those of the cells along the ventral stream of visual cortex. However, BIM has potential to be further improved in two aspects: mismatch by dense input and randomly feature selection due to the feedforward framework. To solve or alleviate these limitations, we develop an enhanced BIM (EBIM) in terms of the following two aspects: 1) removing uninformative inputs by imposing sparsity constraints, 2) apply a feedback loop to middle level feature selection. Each aspect is motivated by relevant psychophysical research findings. To show the effectiveness of the EBIM, we apply it to object categorization and conduct empirical studies on four computer vision data sets. Experimental results demonstrate that the EBIM outperforms the BIM and is comparable to state-of-the-art approaches in terms of accuracy. Moreover, the new system is about 20 times faster than the BIM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eye detection plays an important role in many practical applications. This paper presents a novel two-step scheme for eye detection. The first step models an eye by a newly defined visual-context pattern (VCP), and the second step applies semisupervised boosting for precise detection. VCP describes both the space and appearance relations between an eye region (region of eye) and a reference region (region of reference). The context feature of a VCP is extracted by using the integral image. Aiming to reduce the human labeling efforts, we apply semisupervised boosting, which integrates the context feature and the Haar-like features for precise eye detection. Experimental results on several standard face data sets demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective, robust, and efficient. We finally show that this approach is ready for practical applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]