924 research outputs found
Saying What You're Looking For: Linguistics Meets Video Search
We present an approach to searching large video corpora for video clips which
depict a natural-language query in the form of a sentence. This approach uses
compositional semantics to encode subtle meaning that is lost in other systems,
such as the difference between two sentences which have identical words but
entirely different meaning: "The person rode the horse} vs. \emph{The horse
rode the person". Given a video-sentence pair and a natural-language parser,
along with a grammar that describes the space of sentential queries, we produce
a score which indicates how well the video depicts the sentence. We produce
such a score for each video clip in a corpus and return a ranked list of clips.
Furthermore, this approach addresses two fundamental problems simultaneously:
detecting and tracking objects, and recognizing whether those tracks depict the
query. Because both tracking and object detection are unreliable, this uses
knowledge about the intended sentential query to focus the tracker on the
relevant participants and ensures that the resulting tracks are described by
the sentential query. While earlier work was limited to single-word queries
which correspond to either verbs or nouns, we show how one can search for
complex queries which contain multiple phrases, such as prepositional phrases,
and modifiers, such as adverbs. We demonstrate this approach by searching for
141 queries involving people and horses interacting with each other in 10
full-length Hollywood movies.Comment: 13 pages, 8 figure
Seeing What You're Told: Sentence-Guided Activity Recognition In Video
We present a system that demonstrates how the compositional structure of
events, in concert with the compositional structure of language, can interplay
with the underlying focusing mechanisms in video action recognition, thereby
providing a medium, not only for top-down and bottom-up integration, but also
for multi-modal integration between vision and language. We show how the roles
played by participants (nouns), their characteristics (adjectives), the actions
performed (verbs), the manner of such actions (adverbs), and changing spatial
relations between participants (prepositions) in the form of whole sentential
descriptions mediated by a grammar, guides the activity-recognition process.
Further, the utility and expressiveness of our framework is demonstrated by
performing three separate tasks in the domain of multi-activity videos:
sentence-guided focus of attention, generation of sentential descriptions of
video, and query-based video search, simply by leveraging the framework in
different manners.Comment: To appear in CVPR 201
Globally Optimal Cell Tracking using Integer Programming
We propose a novel approach to automatically tracking cell populations in
time-lapse images. To account for cell occlusions and overlaps, we introduce a
robust method that generates an over-complete set of competing detection
hypotheses. We then perform detection and tracking simultaneously on these
hypotheses by solving to optimality an integer program with only one type of
flow variables. This eliminates the need for heuristics to handle missed
detections due to occlusions and complex morphology. We demonstrate the
effectiveness of our approach on a range of challenging sequences consisting of
clumped cells and show that it outperforms state-of-the-art techniques.Comment: Engin T\"uretken and Xinchao Wang contributed equally to this wor
Kalman tracking of linear predictor and harmonic noise models for noisy speech enhancement
This paper presents a speech enhancement method based on the tracking and denoising of the formants of a linear prediction (LP) model of the spectral envelope of speech and the parameters of a harmonic noise model (HNM) of its excitation. The main advantages of tracking and denoising the prominent energy contours of speech are the efficient use of the spectral and temporal structures of successive speech frames and a mitigation of processing artefact known as the ‘musical noise’ or ‘musical tones’.The formant-tracking linear prediction (FTLP) model estimation consists of three stages: (a) speech pre-cleaning based on a spectral amplitude estimation, (b) formant-tracking across successive speech frames using the Viterbi method, and (c) Kalman filtering of the formant trajectories across successive speech frames.The HNM parameters for the excitation signal comprise; voiced/unvoiced decision, the fundamental frequency, the harmonics’ amplitudes and the variance of the noise component of excitation. A frequency-domain pitch extraction method is proposed that searches for the peak signal to noise ratios (SNRs) at the harmonics. For each speech frame several pitch candidates are calculated. An estimate of the pitch trajectory across successive frames is obtained using a Viterbi decoder. The trajectories of the noisy excitation harmonics across successive speech frames are modeled and denoised using Kalman filters.The proposed method is used to deconstruct noisy speech, de-noise its model parameters and then reconstitute speech from its cleaned parts. Experimental evaluations show the performance gains of the formant tracking, pitch extraction and noise reduction stages
Reliability-Informed Beat Tracking of Musical Signals
Abstract—A new probabilistic framework for beat tracking of musical audio is presented. The method estimates the time between consecutive beat events and exploits both beat and non-beat information by explicitly modeling non-beat states. In addition to the beat times, a measure of the expected accuracy of the estimated beats is provided. The quality of the observations used for beat tracking is measured and the reliability of the beats is automatically calculated. A k-nearest neighbor regression algorithm is proposed to predict the accuracy of the beat estimates. The performance of the beat tracking system is statistically evaluated using a database of 222 musical signals of various genres. We show that modeling non-beat states leads to a significant increase in performance. In addition, a large experiment where the parameters of the model are automatically learned has been completed. Results show that simple approximations for the parameters of the model can be used. Furthermore, the performance of the system is compared with existing algorithms. Finally, a new perspective for beat tracking evaluation is presented. We show how reliability information can be successfully used to increase the mean performance of the proposed algorithm and discuss how far automatic beat tracking is from human tapping. Index Terms—Beat-tracking, beat quality, beat-tracking reliability, k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) regression, music signal processing. I
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