Gait recognition using HMMs and dual discriminative observations for sub-dynamics analysis

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2013 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other users, including reprinting/ republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted components of this work in other works.We propose a new gait recognition method that combines holistic and model-based features. Both types of features are extracted automatically from gait silhouette sequences and their combination takes place by means of a pair of hidden Markov models. In the proposed system, the holistic features are initially used for capturing general gait dynamics whereas, subsequently, the model-based features are deployed for capturing more detailed sub-dynamics by refining upon the preceding general dynamics. Furthermore, the holistic and model-based features are suitably processed in order to improve the discriminatory capacity of the final system. The experimental results show that the proposed method exhibits performance advantages in comparison with popular existing methods

Action classification using a discriminative non-parametric hidden Markov model

We classify human actions occurring in videos, using the skeletal joint positions extracted from a depth image sequence as features. Each action class is represented by a non-parametric Hidden Markov Model (NP-HMM) and the model parameters are learnt in a discriminative way. Specifically, we use a Bayesian framework based on Hierarchical Dirichlet Process (HDP) to automatically infer the cardinality of hidden states and formulate a discriminative function based on distance between Gaussian distributions to improve classification performance. We use elliptical slice sampling to efficiently sample parameters from the complex posterior distribution induced by our discriminative likelihood function. We illustrate our classification results for action class models trained using this technique

A latent discriminative model-based approach for classification of imaginary motor tasks from EEG data

We consider the problem of classification of imaginary motor tasks from electroencephalography (EEG) data for brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) and propose a new approach based on hidden conditional random fields (HCRFs). HCRFs are discriminative graphical models that are attractive for this problem because they (1) exploit the temporal structure of EEG; (2) include latent variables that can be used to model different brain states in the signal; and (3) involve learned statistical models matched to the classification task, avoiding some of the limitations of generative models. Our approach involves spatial filtering of the EEG signals and estimation of power spectra based on auto-regressive modeling of temporal segments of the EEG signals. Given this time-frequency representation, we select certain frequency bands that are known to be associated with execution of motor tasks. These selected features constitute the data that are fed to the HCRF, parameters of which are learned from training data. Inference algorithms on the HCRFs are used for classification of motor tasks. We experimentally compare this approach to the best performing methods in BCI competition IV as well as a number of more recent methods and observe that our proposed method yields better classification accuracy

Discriminative methods for classification of asynchronous imaginary motor tasks from EEG data

In this work, two methods based on statistical models that take into account the temporal changes in the electroencephalographic (EEG) signal are proposed for asynchronous brain-computer interfaces (BCI) based on imaginary motor tasks. Unlike the current approaches to asynchronous BCI systems that make use of windowed versions of the EEG data combined with static classifiers, the methods proposed here are based on discriminative models that allow sequential labeling of data. In particular, the two methods we propose for asynchronous BCI are based on conditional random fields (CRFs) and latent dynamic CRFs (LDCRFs), respectively. We describe how the asynchronous BCI problem can be posed as a classification problem based on CRFs or LDCRFs, by defining appropriate random variables and their relationships. CRF allows modeling the extrinsic dynamics of data, making it possible to model the transitions between classes, which in this context correspond to distinct tasks in an asynchronous BCI system. On the other hand, LDCRF goes beyond this approach by incorporating latent variables that permit modeling the intrinsic structure for each class and at the same time allows modeling extrinsic dynamics. We apply our proposed methods on the publicly available BCI competition III dataset V as well as a data set recorded in our laboratory. Results obtained are compared to the top algorithm in the BCI competition as well as to methods based on hierarchical hidden Markov models (HHMMs), hierarchical hidden CRF (HHCRF), neural networks based on particle swarm optimization (IPSONN) and to a recently proposed approach based on neural networks and fuzzy theory, the S-dFasArt. Our experimental analysis demonstrates the improvements provided by our proposed methods in terms of classification accuracy

Discriminative Segmental Cascades for Feature-Rich Phone Recognition

Discriminative segmental models, such as segmental conditional random fields (SCRFs) and segmental structured support vector machines (SSVMs), have had success in speech recognition via both lattice rescoring and first-pass decoding. However, such models suffer from slow decoding, hampering the use of computationally expensive features, such as segment neural networks or other high-order features. A typical solution is to use approximate decoding, either by beam pruning in a single pass or by beam pruning to generate a lattice followed by a second pass. In this work, we study discriminative segmental models trained with a hinge loss (i.e., segmental structured SVMs). We show that beam search is not suitable for learning rescoring models in this approach, though it gives good approximate decoding performance when the model is already well-trained. Instead, we consider an approach inspired by structured prediction cascades, which use max-marginal pruning to generate lattices. We obtain a high-accuracy phonetic recognition system with several expensive feature types: a segment neural network, a second-order language model, and second-order phone boundary features

Bio-Inspired Multi-Layer Spiking Neural Network Extracts Discriminative Features from Speech Signals

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) enable power-efficient implementations due to their sparse, spike-based coding scheme. This paper develops a bio-inspired SNN that uses unsupervised learning to extract discriminative features from speech signals, which can subsequently be used in a classifier. The architecture consists of a spiking convolutional/pooling layer followed by a fully connected spiking layer for feature discovery. The convolutional layer of leaky, integrate-and-fire (LIF) neurons represents primary acoustic features. The fully connected layer is equipped with a probabilistic spike-timing-dependent plasticity learning rule. This layer represents the discriminative features through probabilistic, LIF neurons. To assess the discriminative power of the learned features, they are used in a hidden Markov model (HMM) for spoken digit recognition. The experimental results show performance above 96% that compares favorably with popular statistical feature extraction methods. Our results provide a novel demonstration of unsupervised feature acquisition in an SNN