Scalable Nearest Neighbor Search with Compact Codes

An important characteristic of the recent decade is the dramatic growth in the use and generation of data. From collections of images, documents and videos, to genetic data, and to network traffic statistics, modern technologies and cheap storage have made it possible to accumulate huge datasets. But how can we effectively use all this data? The growing sizes of the modern datasets make it crucial to develop new algorithms and tools capable of sifting through this data efficiently. A central computational primitive for analyzing large datasets is the Nearest Neighbor Search problem in which the goal is to preprocess a set of objects, so that later, given a query object, one can find the data object closest to the query. In most situations involving high-dimensional objects, the exhaustive search which compares the query with every item in the dataset has a prohibitive cost both for runtime and memory space. This thesis focuses on the design of algorithms and tools for fast and cost efficient nearest neighbor search. The proposed techniques advocate the use of compressed and discrete codes for representing the neighborhood structure of data in a compact way. Transforming high-dimensional items, such as raw images, into similarity-preserving compact codes has both computational and storage advantages as compact codes can be stored efficiently using only a few bits per data item, and more importantly they can be compared extremely fast using bit-wise or look-up table operators. Motivated by this view, the present work explores two main research directions: 1) finding mappings that better preserve the given notion of similarity while keeping the codes as compressed as possible, and 2) building efficient data structures that support non-exhaustive search among the compact codes. Our large-scale experimental results reported on various benchmarks including datasets upto one billion items, show boost in retrieval performance in comparison to the state-of-the-art

Intrusion detection in mobile ad hoc networks

Most existent protocols, applications and services for Mobile Ad Hoc NET-works (MANETs) assume a cooperative and friendly network environment and do not accommodate security. Therefore, Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs), serving as the second line of defense for information systems, are indispensable for MANETs with high security requirements. Central to the research described in this dissertation is the proposed two-level nonoverlapping Zone-Based Intrusion Detection System (ZBIDS) which fit the unique requirement of MANETs. First, in the low-level of ZBIDS, I propose an intrusion detection agent model and present a Markov Chain based anomaly detection algorithm. Local and trusted communication activities such as routing table related features are periodically selected and formatted with minimum errors from raw data. A Markov Chain based normal profile is then constructed to capture the temporal dependency among network activities and accommodate the dynamic nature of raw data. A local detection model aggregating abnormal behaviors is constructed to reflect recent subject activities in order to achieve low false positive ratio and high detection ratio. A set of criteria to tune parameters is developed and the performance trade-off is discussed. Second, I present a nonoverlapping Zone-based framework to manage locally generated alerts from a wider area. An alert data model conformed to the Intrusion Detection Message Exchange Format (IDMEF) is presented to suit the needs of MANETs. Furthermore, an aggregation algorithm utilizing attribute similarity from alert messages is proposed to integrate security related information from a wider area. In this way, the gateway nodes of ZBIDS can reduce false positive ratio, improve detection ratio, and present more diagnostic information about the attack. Third, MANET IDSs need to consider mobility impact and adjust their behavior dynamically. I first demonstrate that nodes?? moving speed, a commonly used parameter in tuning IDS performance, is not an effective metric for the performance measurement of MANET IDSs. A new feature -link change rate -is then proposed as a unified metric for local MANET IDSs to adaptively select normal profiles . Different mobility models are utilized to evaluate the performance of the adaptive mechanisms

Self-similarity and wavelet forms for the compression of still image and video data

This thesis is concerned with the methods used to reduce the data volume required to represent still images and video sequences. The number of disparate still image and video coding methods increases almost daily. Recently, two new strategies have emerged and have stimulated widespread research. These are the fractal method and the wavelet transform. In this thesis, it will be argued that the two methods share a common principle: that of self-similarity. The two will be related concretely via an image coding algorithm which combines the two, normally disparate, strategies. The wavelet transform is an orientation selective transform. It will be shown that the selectivity of the conventional transform is not sufficient to allow exploitation of self-similarity while keeping computational cost low. To address this, a new wavelet transform is presented which allows for greater orientation selectivity, while maintaining the orthogonality and data volume of the conventional wavelet transform. Many designs for vector quantizers have been published recently and another is added to the gamut by this work. The tree structured vector quantizer presented here is on-line and self structuring, requiring no distinct training phase. Combining these into a still image data compression system produces results which are among the best that have been published to date. An extension of the two dimensional wavelet transform to encompass the time dimension is straightforward and this work attempts to extrapolate some of its properties into three dimensions. The vector quantizer is then applied to three dimensional image data to produce a video coding system which, while not optimal, produces very encouraging results

Supervised dictionary learning for action recognition and localization

PhDImage sequences with humans and human activities are everywhere. With the amount of produced and distributed data increasing at an unprecedented rate, there has been a lot of interest in building systems that can understand and interpret the visual data, and in particular detect and recognise human actions. Dictionary based approaches learn a dictionary from descriptors extracted from the videos in the first stage and a classifier or a detector in the second stage. The major drawback of such an approach is that the dictionary is learned in an unsupervised manner without considering the task (classification or detection) that follows it. In this work we develop task dependent(supervised) dictionaries for action recognition and localization, i.e., dictionaries that are best suited for the subsequent task. In the first part of the work, we propose a supervised max-margin framework for linear and non-linear Non-Negative Matrix Factorization (NMF). To achieve this, we impose max-margin constraints within the formulation of NMF and simultaneously solve for the classifier and the dictionary. The dictionary (basis matrix) thus obtained maximizes the margin of the classifier in the low dimensional space (in the linear case) or in the high dimensional feature space (in the non-linear case). In the second part the work, we develop methodologies for action localization. We first propose a dictionary weighting approach where we learn local and global weights for the dictionary by considering the localization information of the training sequences. We next extend this approach to learn a task-dependent dictionary for action localization that incorporates the localization information of the training sequences into dictionary learning. The results on publicly available datasets show that the performance of the system is improved by using the supervised information while learning dictionary.QMUL; EPSRC PhD scholarship program (EP/G033935/1)

Visual Feature Learning

Categorization is a fundamental problem of many computer vision applications, e.g., image classification, pedestrian detection and face recognition. The robustness of a categorization system heavily relies on the quality of features, by which data are represented. The prior arts of feature extraction can be concluded in different levels, which, in a bottom up order, are low level features (e.g., pixels and gradients) and middle/high-level features (e.g., the BoW model and sparse coding). Low level features can be directly extracted from images or videos, while middle/high-level features are constructed upon low-level features, and are designed to enhance the capability of categorization systems based on different considerations (e.g., guaranteeing the domain-invariance and improving the discriminative power). This thesis focuses on the study of visual feature learning. Challenges that remain in designing visual features lie in intra-class variation, occlusions, illumination and view-point changes and insufficient prior knowledge. To address these challenges, I present several visual feature learning methods, where these methods cover the following sub-topics: (i) I start by introducing a segmentation-based object recognition system. (ii) When training data are insufficient, I seek data from other resources, which include images or videos in a different domain, actions captured from a different viewpoint and information in a different media form. In order to appropriately transfer such resources into the target categorization system, four transfer learning-based feature learning methods are presented in this section, where both cross-view, cross-domain and cross-modality scenarios are addressed accordingly. (iii) Finally, I present a random-forest based feature fusion method for multi-view action recognition

Online Multi-Stage Deep Architectures for Feature Extraction and Object Recognition

Multi-stage visual architectures have recently found success in achieving high classification accuracies over image datasets with large variations in pose, lighting, and scale. Inspired by techniques currently at the forefront of deep learning, such architectures are typically composed of one or more layers of preprocessing, feature encoding, and pooling to extract features from raw images. Training these components traditionally relies on large sets of patches that are extracted from a potentially large image dataset. In this context, high-dimensional feature space representations are often helpful for obtaining the best classification performances and providing a higher degree of invariance to object transformations. Large datasets with high-dimensional features complicate the implementation of visual architectures in memory constrained environments. This dissertation constructs online learning replacements for the components within a multi-stage architecture and demonstrates that the proposed replacements (namely fuzzy competitive clustering, an incremental covariance estimator, and multi-layer neural network) can offer performance competitive with their offline batch counterparts while providing a reduced memory footprint. The online nature of this solution allows for the development of a method for adjusting parameters within the architecture via stochastic gradient descent. Testing over multiple datasets shows the potential benefits of this methodology when appropriate priors on the initial parameters are unknown. Alternatives to batch based decompositions for a whitening preprocessing stage which take advantage of natural image statistics and allow simple dictionary learners to work well in the problem domain are also explored. Expansions of the architecture using additional pooling statistics and multiple layers are presented and indicate that larger codebook sizes are not the only step forward to higher classification accuracies. Experimental results from these expansions further indicate the important role of sparsity and appropriate encodings within multi-stage visual feature extraction architectures

Vector Quantization Techniques for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search on Large-Scale Datasets

The technological developments of the last twenty years are leading the world to a new era. The invention of the internet, mobile phones and smart devices are resulting in an exponential increase in data. As the data is growing every day, finding similar patterns or matching samples to a query is no longer a simple task because of its computational costs and storage limitations. Special signal processing techniques are required in order to handle the growth in data, as simply adding more and more computers cannot keep up.Nearest neighbor search, or similarity search, proximity search or near item search is the problem of finding an item that is nearest or most similar to a query according to a distance or similarity measure. When the reference set is very large, or the distance or similarity calculation is complex, performing the nearest neighbor search can be computationally demanding. Considering today’s ever-growing datasets, where the cardinality of samples also keep increasing, a growing interest towards approximate methods has emerged in the research community.Vector Quantization for Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search (VQ for ANN) has proven to be one of the most efficient and successful methods targeting the aforementioned problem. It proposes to compress vectors into binary strings and approximate the distances between vectors using look-up tables. With this approach, the approximation of distances is very fast, while the storage space requirement of the dataset is minimized thanks to the extreme compression levels. The distance approximation performance of VQ for ANN has been shown to be sufficiently well for retrieval and classification tasks demonstrating that VQ for ANN techniques can be a good replacement for exact distance calculation methods.This thesis contributes to VQ for ANN literature by proposing five advanced techniques, which aim to provide fast and efficient approximate nearest neighbor search on very large-scale datasets. The proposed methods can be divided into two groups. The first group consists of two techniques, which propose to introduce subspace clustering to VQ for ANN. These methods are shown to give the state-of-the-art performance according to tests on prevalent large-scale benchmarks. The second group consists of three methods, which propose improvements on residual vector quantization. These methods are also shown to outperform their predecessors. Apart from these, a sixth contribution in this thesis is a demonstration of VQ for ANN in an application of image classification on large-scale datasets. It is shown that a k-NN classifier based on VQ for ANN performs on par with the k-NN classifiers, but requires much less storage space and computations

Fractal image compression and the self-affinity assumption : a stochastic signal modelling perspective

Bibliography: p. 208-225.Fractal image compression is a comparatively new technique which has gained considerable attention in the popular technical press, and more recently in the research literature. The most significant advantages claimed are high reconstruction quality at low coding rates, rapid decoding, and "resolution independence" in the sense that an encoded image may be decoded at a higher resolution than the original. While many of the claims published in the popular technical press are clearly extravagant, it appears from the rapidly growing body of published research that fractal image compression is capable of performance comparable with that of other techniques enjoying the benefit of a considerably more robust theoretical foundation. . So called because of the similarities between the form of image representation and a mechanism widely used in generating deterministic fractal images, fractal compression represents an image by the parameters of a set of affine transforms on image blocks under which the image is approximately invariant. Although the conditions imposed on these transforms may be shown to be sufficient to guarantee that an approximation of the original image can be reconstructed, there is no obvious theoretical reason to expect this to represent an efficient representation for image coding purposes. The usual analogy with vector quantisation, in which each image is considered to be represented in terms of code vectors extracted from the image itself is instructive, but transforms the fundamental problem into one of understanding why this construction results in an efficient codebook. The signal property required for such a codebook to be effective, termed "self-affinity", is poorly understood. A stochastic signal model based examination of this property is the primary contribution of this dissertation. The most significant findings (subject to some important restrictions} are that "self-affinity" is not a natural consequence of common statistical assumptions but requires particular conditions which are inadequately characterised by second order statistics, and that "natural" images are only marginally "self-affine", to the extent that fractal image compression is effective, but not more so than comparable standard vector quantisation techniques

Media gateway utilizando um GPU

Mestrado em Engenharia de Computadores e Telemátic