A statistical multiresolution approach for face recognition using structural hidden Markov models

This paper introduces a novel methodology that combines the multiresolution feature of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) with the local interactions of the facial structures expressed through the structural hidden Markov model (SHMM). A range of wavelet filters such as Haar, biorthogonal 9/7, and Coiflet, as well as Gabor, have been implemented in order to search for the best performance. SHMMs perform a thorough probabilistic analysis of any sequential pattern by revealing both its inner and outer structures simultaneously. Unlike traditional HMMs, the SHMMs do not perform the state conditional independence of the visible observation sequence assumption. This is achieved via the concept of local structures introduced by the SHMMs. Therefore, the long-range dependency problem inherent to traditional HMMs has been drastically reduced. SHMMs have not previously been applied to the problem of face identification. The results reported in this application have shown that SHMM outperforms the traditional hidden Markov model with a 73% increase in accuracy

Hubungan gaya pembelajaran dengan pencapaian akademik pelajar aliran vokasional

Analisis keputusan Sijil Pelajaran Malaysia (SPM) 2011 menunjukkan penurunan pencapaian bagi Sekolah Menengah Vokasional. Oleh itu, kajian ini dilaksanakan bertujuan untuk mengkaji hubungan di antara gaya pembelajaran dengan pencapaian akademik pelajar. Kajian ini juga ingin mengenalpasti gaya pembelajaran paling dominan yang diamalkan oleh pelajar serta melihat perbezaan gaya pembelajaran dengan jantina pelajar. Seramai 131 orang Pelajar Tingkatan Empat Kursus Vokasional Di Sekolah Menengah Vokasional Segamat di Johor telah terlibat dalam kajian ini. Soal selidik Index of Learning Style (ILS) yang dibangunkan oleh Felder dan Silverman (1991) yang mengandungi 44 soalan telah digunakan untukh menjalankan kajian ini. Gaya pembelajaran pelajar dapat dilihat melalui empat dimensi gaya pembelajaran yang terdiri dari dua sub-skala yang bertentangan iaitu dimensi pelajar Aktif dan Reflektif, dimensi pelajar Konkrit dan Intuitif, dimensi pelajar Verbal dan Visual, serta dimensi pelajar Tersusun dan Global. Data yang diperolehi dianalisis dengan menggunakan perisian Statistical Package for Social Science for WINDOW release 20.0 (SPSS.20.0). Ujian Korelasi Pearson digunakan untuk menganalisis data dalam mengkaji hubungan gaya pembelajaran dengan pencapaian akademik pelajar. Nilai pekali p yang diperolehi di antara gaya pembelajaran dengan pencapaian pelajar adalah (p=0.1 hingga 0.4). Ini menunjukkan tidak terdapat hubungan yang signifikan di antara dua pembolehubah tersebut. Kajian ini juga mendapati bahawa gaya pembelajaran yang menjadi amalan pelajar ialah gaya pembelajaran Tersusun. Hasil kajian juga mendapati bahawa tidak terdapat perbezaan yang signifikan di antara gaya pembelajaran dengan jantina pelajar

Speeding up Convolutional Neural Networks with Low Rank Expansions

The focus of this paper is speeding up the evaluation of convolutional neural networks. While delivering impressive results across a range of computer vision and machine learning tasks, these networks are computationally demanding, limiting their deployability. Convolutional layers generally consume the bulk of the processing time, and so in this work we present two simple schemes for drastically speeding up these layers. This is achieved by exploiting cross-channel or filter redundancy to construct a low rank basis of filters that are rank-1 in the spatial domain. Our methods are architecture agnostic, and can be easily applied to existing CPU and GPU convolutional frameworks for tuneable speedup performance. We demonstrate this with a real world network designed for scene text character recognition, showing a possible 2.5x speedup with no loss in accuracy, and 4.5x speedup with less than 1% drop in accuracy, still achieving state-of-the-art on standard benchmarks

A Multi-Stage Classifier for Face Recognition Undertaken by Coarse-to-fine Strategy

Face recognition has been a very active research area for past two decades due to its widely applications such as identity authentication, airport security and access control, surveillance, and video retrieval systems, etc. Numerous approaches have been proposed for face recognition and considerable successes have been reported [1]. A successful face recognitio

Review of constraints on vision-based gesture recognition for human–computer interaction

The ability of computers to recognise hand gestures visually is essential for progress in human-computer interaction. Gesture recognition has applications ranging from sign language to medical assistance to virtual reality. However, gesture recognition is extremely challenging not only because of its diverse contexts, multiple interpretations, and spatio-temporal variations but also because of the complex non-rigid properties of the hand. This study surveys major constraints on vision-based gesture recognition occurring in detection and pre-processing, representation and feature extraction, and recognition. Current challenges are explored in detail

3D multiresolution statistical approaches for accelerated medical image and volume segmentation

This thesis was submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and awarded by Brunel University.Medical volume segmentation got the attraction of many researchers; therefore, many techniques have been implemented in terms of medical imaging including segmentations and other imaging processes. This research focuses on an implementation of segmentation system which uses several techniques together or on their own to segment medical volumes, the system takes a stack of 2D slices or a full 3D volumes acquired from medical scanners as a data input. Two main approaches have been implemented in this research for segmenting medical volume which are multi-resolution analysis and statistical modeling. Multi-resolution analysis has been mainly employed in this research for extracting the features. Higher dimensions of discontinuity (line or curve singularity) have been extracted in medical images using a modified multi-resolution analysis transforms such as ridgelet and curvelet transforms. The second implemented approach in this thesis is the use of statistical modeling in medical image segmentation; Hidden Markov models have been enhanced here to segment medical slices automatically, accurately, reliably and with lossless results. But the problem with using Markov models here is the computational time which is too long. This has been addressed by using feature reduction techniques which has also been implemented in this thesis. Some feature reduction and dimensionality reduction techniques have been used to accelerate the slowest block in the proposed system. This includes Principle Components Analysis, Gaussian Pyramids and other methods. The feature reduction techniques have been employed efficiently with the 3D volume segmentation techniques such as 3D wavelet and 3D Hidden Markov models. The system has been tested and validated using several procedures starting at a comparison with the predefined results, crossing the specialists’ validations, and ending by validating the system using a survey filled by the end users explaining the techniques and the results. This concludes that Markovian models segmentation results has overcome all other techniques in most patients’ cases. Curvelet transform has been also proved promising segmentation results; the end users rate it better than Markovian models due to the long time required with Hidden Markov models

Visual speech recognition and utterance segmentation based on mouth movement

This paper presents a vision-based approach to recognize speech without evaluating the acoustic signals. The proposed technique combines motion features and support vector machines (SVMs) to classify utterances. Segmentation of utterances is important in a visual speech recognition system. This research proposes a video segmentation method to detect the start and end frames of isolated utterances from an image sequence. Frames that correspond to `speaking' and `silence' phases are identified based on mouth movement information. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed visual speech recognition technique yields high accuracy in a phoneme classification task. Potential applications of such a system are, e.g., human computer interface (HCI) for mobility-impaired users, lip-reading mobile phones, in-vehicle systems, and improvement of speech-based computer control in noisy environments

Application of orthogonal neighborhood preserving projections and two dimensional hidden Markov model for the degradation evaluation of rolling elements bearings

An effective degradation indicator created from the general features is still a hotspot for the condition monitoring of bearing. To cover the shortage of the general features based indicator, some new indicators are built using multiple general features extracted from the original vibration signal without considering the internal relevancy among the features. To address that problem, a new indicator is proposed using the Orthogonal Neighborhood Preserving Projections (ONPP) and 2-Dimensional Hidden Markov Model (2-D HMM). With the ability of keeping the local structure of data set, Orthogonal Neighborhood Preserving Projections is used to obtain the low dimensional features with the main information remained. Unlike 1-Dimensional data-processing algorithm that commonly converts the multiple features into a vector to deal with the high-dimensional data with the integral property of the multiple features considered only, 2-Dimensional Hidden Markov Model not only take the relevance between the individuals of fault features into consideration but also capture the global characteristics of the multiple features. Then a likelihood probability based health assessment indication can be constructed by combing 2-D HMM with the data pre-processed by ONPP. The experiment results indicate that the proposed indicator show great abilities to make degradation performance of the bearing and is sensitive to incipient defects

Robust density modelling using the student's t-distribution for human action recognition

The extraction of human features from videos is often inaccurate and prone to outliers. Such outliers can severely affect density modelling when the Gaussian distribution is used as the model since it is highly sensitive to outliers. The Gaussian distribution is also often used as base component of graphical models for recognising human actions in the videos (hidden Markov model and others) and the presence of outliers can significantly affect the recognition accuracy. In contrast, the Student's t-distribution is more robust to outliers and can be exploited to improve the recognition rate in the presence of abnormal data. In this paper, we present an HMM which uses mixtures of t-distributions as observation probabilities and show how experiments over two well-known datasets (Weizmann, MuHAVi) reported a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy. © 2011 IEEE