Matching sets of features for efficient retrieval and recognition

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 145-153).In numerous domains it is useful to represent a single example by the collection of local features or parts that comprise it. In computer vision in particular, local image features are a powerful way to describe images of objects and scenes. Their stability under variable image conditions is critical for success in a wide range of recognition and retrieval applications. However, many conventional similarity measures and machine learning algorithms assume vector inputs. Comparing and learning from images represented by sets of local features is therefore challenging, since each set may vary in cardinality and its elements lack a meaningful ordering. In this thesis I present computationally efficient techniques to handle comparisons, learning, and indexing with examples represented by sets of features. The primary goal of this research is to design and demonstrate algorithms that can effectively accommodate this useful representation in a way that scales with both the representation size as well as the number of images available for indexing or learning. I introduce the pyramid match algorithm, which efficiently forms an implicit partial matching between two sets of feature vectors.(cont.) The matching has a linear time complexity, naturally forms a Mercer kernel, and is robust to clutter or outlier features, a critical advantage for handling images with variable backgrounds, occlusions, and viewpoint changes. I provide bounds on the expected error relative to the optimal partial matching. For very large databases, even extremely efficient pairwise comparisons may not offer adequately responsive query times. I show how to perform sub-linear time retrievals under the matching measure with randomized hashing techniques, even when input sets have varying numbers of features. My results are focused on several important vision tasks, including applications to content-based image retrieval, discriminative classification for object recognition, kernel regression, and unsupervised learning of categories. I show how the dramatic increase in performance enables accurate and flexible image comparisons to be made on large-scale data sets, and removes the need to artificially limit the number of local descriptions used per image when learning visual categories.by Kristen Lorraine Grauman.Ph.D

Learning and inference with Wasserstein metrics

Thesis: Ph. D., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2018.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 131-143).This thesis develops new approaches for three problems in machine learning, using tools from the study of optimal transport (or Wasserstein) distances between probability distributions. Optimal transport distances capture an intuitive notion of similarity between distributions, by incorporating the underlying geometry of the domain of the distributions. Despite their intuitive appeal, optimal transport distances are often difficult to apply in practice, as computing them requires solving a costly optimization problem. In each setting studied here, we describe a numerical method that overcomes this computational bottleneck and enables scaling to real data. In the first part, we consider the problem of multi-output learning in the presence of a metric on the output domain. We develop a loss function that measures the Wasserstein distance between the prediction and ground truth, and describe an efficient learning algorithm based on entropic regularization of the optimal transport problem. We additionally propose a novel extension of the Wasserstein distance from probability measures to unnormalized measures, which is applicable in settings where the ground truth is not naturally expressed as a probability distribution. We show statistical learning bounds for both the Wasserstein loss and its unnormalized counterpart. The Wasserstein loss can encourage smoothness of the predictions with respect to a chosen metric on the output space. We demonstrate this property on a real-data image tagging problem, outperforming a baseline that doesn't use the metric. In the second part, we consider the probabilistic inference problem for diffusion processes. Such processes model a variety of stochastic phenomena and appear often in continuous-time state space models. Exact inference for diffusion processes is generally intractable. In this work, we describe a novel approximate inference method, which is based on a characterization of the diffusion as following a gradient flow in a space of probability densities endowed with a Wasserstein metric. Existing methods for computing this Wasserstein gradient flow rely on discretizing the underlying domain of the diffusion, prohibiting their application to problems in more than several dimensions. In the current work, we propose a novel algorithm for computing a Wasserstein gradient flow that operates directly in a space of continuous functions, free of any underlying mesh. We apply our approximate gradient flow to the problem of filtering a diffusion, showing superior performance where standard filters struggle. Finally, we study the ecological inference problem, which is that of reasoning from aggregate measurements of a population to inferences about the individual behaviors of its members. This problem arises often when dealing with data from economics and political sciences, such as when attempting to infer the demographic breakdown of votes for each political party, given only the aggregate demographic and vote counts separately. Ecological inference is generally ill-posed, and requires prior information to distinguish a unique solution. We propose a novel, general framework for ecological inference that allows for a variety of priors and enables efficient computation of the most probable solution. Unlike previous methods, which rely on Monte Carlo estimates of the posterior, our inference procedure uses an efficient fixed point iteration that is linearly convergent. Given suitable prior information, our method can achieve more accurate inferences than existing methods. We additionally explore a sampling algorithm for estimating credible regions.by Charles Frogner.Ph. D

Automatic non-linear video editing for home video collections

The video editing process consists of deciding what elements to retain, delete, or combine from various video sources so that they come together in an organized, logical, and visually pleasing manner. Before the digital era, non-linear editing involved the arduous process of physically cutting and splicing video tapes, and was restricted to the movie industry and a few video enthusiasts. Today, when digital cameras and camcorders have made large personal video collections commonplace, non-linear video editing has gained renewed importance and relevance. Almost all available video editing systems today are dependent on considerable user interaction to produce coherent edited videos. In this work, we describe an automatic non-linear video editing system for generating coherent movies from a collection of unedited personal videos. Our thesis is that computing image-level visual similarity in an appropriate manner forms a good basis for automatic non-linear video editing. To our knowledge, this is a novel approach to solving this problem. The generation of output video from the system is guided by one or more input keyframes from the user, which guide the content of the output video. The output video is generated in a manner such that it is non-repetitive and follows the dynamics of the input videos. When no input keyframes are provided, our system generates "video textures" with the content of the output chosen at random. Our system demonstrates promising results on large video collections and is a first step towards increased automation in non-linear video editin

Fast and robust image feature matching methods for computer vision applications

Service robotic systems are designed to solve tasks such as recognizing and manipulating objects, understanding natural scenes, navigating in dynamic and populated environments. It's immediately evident that such tasks cannot be modeled in all necessary details as easy as it is with industrial robot tasks; therefore, service robotic system has to have the ability to sense and interact with the surrounding physical environment through a multitude of sensors and actuators. Environment sensing is one of the core problems that limit the deployment of mobile service robots since existing sensing systems are either too slow or too expensive. Visual sensing is the most promising way to provide a cost effective solution to the mobile robot sensing problem. It's usually achieved using one or several digital cameras placed on the robot or distributed in its environment. Digital cameras are information rich sensors and are relatively inexpensive and can be used to solve a number of key problems for robotics and other autonomous intelligent systems, such as visual servoing, robot navigation, object recognition, pose estimation, and much more. The key challenges to taking advantage of this powerful and inexpensive sensor is to come up with algorithms that can reliably and quickly extract and match the useful visual information necessary to automatically interpret the environment in real-time. Although considerable research has been conducted in recent years on the development of algorithms for computer and robot vision problems, there are still open research challenges in the context of the reliability, accuracy and processing time. Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) is one of the most widely used methods that has recently attracted much attention in the computer vision community due to the fact that SIFT features are highly distinctive, and invariant to scale, rotation and illumination changes. In addition, SIFT features are relatively easy to extract and to match against a large database of local features. Generally, there are two main drawbacks of SIFT algorithm, the first drawback is that the computational complexity of the algorithm increases rapidly with the number of key-points, especially at the matching step due to the high dimensionality of the SIFT feature descriptor. The other one is that the SIFT features are not robust to large viewpoint changes. These drawbacks limit the reasonable use of SIFT algorithm for robot vision applications since they require often real-time performance and dealing with large viewpoint changes. This dissertation proposes three new approaches to address the constraints faced when using SIFT features for robot vision applications, Speeded up SIFT feature matching, robust SIFT feature matching and the inclusion of the closed loop control structure into object recognition and pose estimation systems. The proposed methods are implemented and tested on the FRIEND II/III service robotic system. The achieved results are valuable to adapt SIFT algorithm to the robot vision applications

Scalable multimedia indexing and similarity search in high dimensionality

Orientador: Ricardo da Silva TorresDissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de ComputaçãoResumo: A disseminação de grandes coleções de arquivos de imagens, músicas e vídeos tem aumentado a demanda por métodos de indexação e sistemas de recuperação de informações multimídia. No caso de imagens, os sistemas de busca mais promissores são os sistemas baseados no conteúdo, que ao invés de usarem descrições textuais, utilizam vetores de características, que são representações de propriedades visuais, como cor, textura e forma. O emparelhamento dos vetores de características da imagem de consulta e das imagens de uma base de dados é implementado através da busca por similaridade. A sua forma mais comum é a busca pelos k vizinhos mais próximos, ou seja, encontrar os k vetores mais próximos ao vetor da consulta. Em grandes bases de imagens, um índice é indispensável para acelerar essas consultas. O problema é que os vetores de características podem ter muitas dimensões, o que afeta gravemente o desempenho dos métodos de indexação. Acima de 10 dimensões, geralmente é preciso recorrer aos métodos aproximados, sacrificando a eficácia em troca da rapidez. Dentre as diversas soluções propostas, existe uma abordagem baseada em curvas fractais chamadas curvas de preenchimento do espaço. Essas curvas permitem mapear pontos de um espaço multidimensional em uma única dimensão, de maneira que os pontos próximos na curva correspondam a pontos próximos no espaço. O grande problema dessa alternativa é a existência de regiões de descontinuidade nas curvas, pontos próximos dessas regiões não são mapeados próximos na curva. A principal contribuição deste trabalho é um método de indexação de vetores de características de alta dimensionalidade, que utiliza uma curva de preenchimento do espaço e múltiplos representantes para os dados. Esse método, chamado MONORAIL, gera os representantes explorando as propriedades geométricas da curva. Isso resulta em um ganho na eficácia da busca por similaridade, quando comparado com o método de referência. Outra contribuição não trivial deste trabalho é o rigor experimental usado nas comparações: os experimentos foram cuidadosamente projetados para garantir resultados estatisticamente significativos. A escalabilidade do MONORAIL é testada com três bases de dados de tamanhos diferentes, a maior delas com mais de 130 milhões de vetoresAbstract: The spread of large collections of images, videos and music has increased the demand for indexing methods and multimedia information retrieval systems. For images, the most promising search engines are content-based, which instead of using textual annotations, use feature vectors to represent visual properties such as color, texture, and shape. The matching of feature vectors of query image and database images is implemented by similarity search. Its most common form is the k nearest neighbors search, which aims to find the k closest vectors to the query vector. In large image databases, an index structure is essential to speed up those queries. The problem is that the feature vectors may have many dimensions, which seriously affects the performance of indexing methods. For more than 10 dimensions, it is often necessary to use approximate methods to trade-off effectiveness for speed. Among the several solutions proposed, there is an approach based on fractal curves known as space-filling curves. Those curves allow the mapping of a multidimensional space onto a single dimension, so that points near on the curve correspond to points near on the space. The great problem with that alternative is the existence of discontinuity regions on the curves, where points near on those regions are not mapped near on the curve. The main contribution of this dissertation is an indexing method for high-dimensional feature vectors, using a single space-filling curve and multiple surrogates for each data point. That method, called MONORAIL, generates surrogates by exploiting the geometric properties of the curve. The result is a gain in terms of effectiveness of similarity search, when compared to the baseline method. Another non-trivial contribution of this work is the rigorous experimental design used for the comparisons. The experiments were carefully designed to ensure statistically sound results. The scalability of the MONORAIL is tested with three databases of different sizes, the largest one with more than 130 million vectorsMestradoCiência da ComputaçãoMestre em Ciência da Computaçã

Content-based image retrieval-- a small sample learning approach.

Tao Dacheng.Thesis (M.Phil.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2004.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 70-75).Abstracts in English and Chinese.Chapter Chapter 1 --- Introduction --- p.1Chapter 1.1 --- Content-based Image Retrieval --- p.1Chapter 1.2 --- SVM based RF in CBIR --- p.3Chapter 1.3 --- DA based RF in CBIR --- p.4Chapter 1.4 --- Existing CBIR Engines --- p.5Chapter 1.5 --- Practical Applications of CBIR --- p.10Chapter 1.6 --- Organization of this thesis --- p.11Chapter Chapter 2 --- Statistical Learning Theory and Support Vector Machine --- p.12Chapter 2.1 --- The Recognition Problem --- p.12Chapter 2.2 --- Regularization --- p.14Chapter 2.3 --- The VC Dimension --- p.14Chapter 2.4 --- Structure Risk Minimization --- p.15Chapter 2.5 --- Support Vector Machine --- p.15Chapter 2.6 --- Kernel Space --- p.17Chapter Chapter 3 --- Discriminant Analysis --- p.18Chapter 3.1 --- PCA --- p.18Chapter 3.2 --- KPCA --- p.18Chapter 3.3 --- LDA --- p.20Chapter 3.4 --- BDA --- p.20Chapter 3.5 --- KBDA --- p.21Chapter Chapter 4 --- Random Sampling Based SVM --- p.24Chapter 4.1 --- Asymmetric Bagging SVM --- p.25Chapter 4.2 --- Random Subspace Method SVM --- p.26Chapter 4.3 --- Asymmetric Bagging RSM SVM --- p.26Chapter 4.4 --- Aggregation Model --- p.30Chapter 4.5 --- Dissimilarity Measure --- p.31Chapter 4.6 --- Computational Complexity Analysis --- p.31Chapter 4.7 --- QueryGo Image Retrieval System --- p.32Chapter 4.8 --- Toy Experiments --- p.35Chapter 4.9 --- Statistical Experimental Results --- p.36Chapter Chapter 5 --- SSS Problems in KBDA RF --- p.42Chapter 5.1 --- DKBDA --- p.43Chapter 5.1.1 --- DLDA --- p.43Chapter 5.1.2 --- DKBDA --- p.43Chapter 5.2 --- NKBDA --- p.48Chapter 5.2.1 --- NLDA --- p.48Chapter 5.2.2 --- NKBDA --- p.48Chapter 5.3 --- FKBDA --- p.49Chapter 5.3.1 --- FLDA --- p.49Chapter 5.3.2 --- FKBDA --- p.49Chapter 5.4 --- Experimental Results --- p.50Chapter Chapter 6 --- NDA based RF for CBIR --- p.52Chapter 6.1 --- NDA --- p.52Chapter 6.2 --- SSS Problem in NDA --- p.53Chapter 6.2.1 --- Regularization method --- p.53Chapter 6.2.2 --- Null-space method --- p.54Chapter 6.2.3 --- Full-space method --- p.54Chapter 6.3 --- Experimental results --- p.55Chapter 6.3.1 --- K nearest neighbor evaluation for NDA --- p.55Chapter 6.3.2 --- SSS problem --- p.56Chapter 6.3.3 --- Evaluation experiments --- p.57Chapter Chapter 7 --- Medical Image Classification --- p.59Chapter 7.1 --- Introduction --- p.59Chapter 7.2 --- Region-based Co-occurrence Matrix Texture Feature --- p.60Chapter 7.3 --- Multi-level Feature Selection --- p.62Chapter 7.4 --- Experimental Results --- p.63Chapter 7.4.1 --- Data Set --- p.64Chapter 7.4.2 --- Classification Using Traditional Features --- p.65Chapter 7.4.3 --- Classification Using the New Features --- p.66Chapter Chapter 8 --- Conclusion --- p.68Bibliography --- p.7

Comparison of classification ability of hyperball algorithms to neural network and k-nearest neighbour algorithms

The main focus of this thesis is to evaluate and compare Hyperbalilearning algorithm (HBL) to other learning algorithms. In this work HBL is compared to feed forward artificial neural networks using back propagation learning, K-nearest neighbor and 103 algorithms. In order to evaluate the similarity of these algorithms, we carried out three experiments using nine benchmark data sets from UCI machine learning repository. The first experiment compares HBL to other algorithms when sample size of dataset is changing. The second experiment compares HBL to other algorithms when dimensionality of data changes. The last experiment compares HBL to other algorithms according to the level of agreement to data target values. Our observations in general showed, considering classification accuracy as a measure, HBL is performing as good as most ANn variants. Additionally, we also deduced that HBL.:s classification accuracy outperforms 103's and K-nearest neighbour's for the selected data sets

Inter-query Learning in Content-based Image Retrieval

Computer Scienc