Efficiently learning a detection cascade with sparse eigenvectors

Real-time object detection has many computer vision applications. Since Viola and Jones proposed the first real-time AdaBoost based face detection system, much effort has been spent on improving the boosting method. In this work, we first show that feature selection methods other than boosting can also be used for training an efficient object detector. In particular, we introduce greedy sparse linear discriminant analysis (GSLDA) for its conceptual simplicity and computational efficiency; and slightly better detection performance is achieved compared with. Moreover, we propose a new technique, termed boosted greedy sparse linear discriminant analysis (BGSLDA), to efficiently train a detection cascade. BGSLDA exploits the sample reweighting property of boosting and the class-separability criterion of GSLDA. Experiments in the domain of highly skewed data distributions (e.g., face detection) demonstrate that classifiers trained with the proposed BGSLDA outperforms AdaBoost and its variants. This finding provides a significant opportunity to argue that AdaBoost and similar approaches are not the only methods that can achieve high detection results for real-time object detection

Incremental Training of a Detector Using Online Sparse Eigen-decomposition

The ability to efficiently and accurately detect objects plays a very crucial role for many computer vision tasks. Recently, offline object detectors have shown a tremendous success. However, one major drawback of offline techniques is that a complete set of training data has to be collected beforehand. In addition, once learned, an offline detector can not make use of newly arriving data. To alleviate these drawbacks, online learning has been adopted with the following objectives: (1) the technique should be computationally and storage efficient; (2) the updated classifier must maintain its high classification accuracy. In this paper, we propose an effective and efficient framework for learning an adaptive online greedy sparse linear discriminant analysis (GSLDA) model. Unlike many existing online boosting detectors, which usually apply exponential or logistic loss, our online algorithm makes use of LDA's learning criterion that not only aims to maximize the class-separation criterion but also incorporates the asymmetrical property of training data distributions. We provide a better alternative for online boosting algorithms in the context of training a visual object detector. We demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our methods on handwriting digit and face data sets. Our results confirm that object detection tasks benefit significantly when trained in an online manner.Comment: 14 page

Comparison of Supervised Classification Methods for Protein Profiling in Cancer Diagnosis

A key challenge in clinical proteomics of cancer is the identification of biomarkers that could allow detection, diagnosis and prognosis of the diseases. Recent advances in mass spectrometry and proteomic instrumentations offer unique chance to rapidly identify these markers. These advances pose considerable challenges, similar to those created by microarray-based investigation, for the discovery of pattern of markers from high-dimensional data, specific to each pathologic state (e.g. normal vs cancer). We propose a three-step strategy to select important markers from high-dimensional mass spectrometry data using surface enhanced laser desorption/ionization (SELDI) technology. The first two steps are the selection of the most discriminating biomarkers with a construction of different classifiers. Finally, we compare and validate their performance and robustness using different supervised classification methods such as Support Vector Machine, Linear Discriminant Analysis, Quadratic Discriminant Analysis, Neural Networks, Classification Trees and Boosting Trees. We show that the proposed method is suitable for analysing high-throughput proteomics data and that the combination of logistic regression and Linear Discriminant Analysis outperform other methods tested

Localized Regression

The main problem with localized discriminant techniques is the curse of dimensionality, which seems to restrict their use to the case of few variables. This restriction does not hold if localization is combined with a reduction of dimension. In particular it is shown that localization yields powerful classifiers even in higher dimensions if localization is combined with locally adaptive selection of predictors. A robust localized logistic regression (LLR) method is developed for which all tuning parameters are chosen data¡adaptively. In an extended simulation study we evaluate the potential of the proposed procedure for various types of data and compare it to other classification procedures. In addition we demonstrate that automatic choice of localization, predictor selection and penalty parameters based on cross validation is working well. Finally the method is applied to real data sets and its real world performance is compared to alternative procedures

Prediction of delayed graft function after kidney transplantation : comparison between logistic regression and machine learning methods

Background: Predictive models for delayed graft function (DGF) after kidney transplantation are usually developed using logistic regression. We want to evaluate the value of machine learning methods in the prediction of DGF. Methods: 497 kidney transplantations from deceased donors at the Ghent University Hospital between 2005 and 2011 are included. A feature elimination procedure is applied to determine the optimal number of features, resulting in 20 selected parameters (24 parameters after conversion to indicator parameters) out of 55 retrospectively collected parameters. Subsequently, 9 distinct types of predictive models are fitted using the reduced data set: logistic regression (LR), linear discriminant analysis (LDA), quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA), support vector machines (SVMs; using linear, radial basis function and polynomial kernels), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), and stochastic gradient boosting (SGB). Performance of the models is assessed by computing sensitivity, positive predictive values and area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) after 10-fold stratified cross-validation. AUROCs of the models are pairwise compared using Wilcoxon signed-rank test. Results: The observed incidence of DGF is 12.5 %. DT is not able to discriminate between recipients with and without DGF (AUROC of 52.5 %) and is inferior to the other methods. SGB, RF and polynomial SVM are mainly able to identify recipients without DGF (AUROC of 77.2, 73.9 and 79.8 %, respectively) and only outperform DT. LDA, QDA, radial SVM and LR also have the ability to identify recipients with DGF, resulting in higher discriminative capacity (AUROC of 82.2, 79.6, 83.3 and 81.7 %, respectively), which outperforms DT and RF. Linear SVM has the highest discriminative capacity (AUROC of 84.3 %), outperforming each method, except for radial SVM, polynomial SVM and LDA. However, it is the only method superior to LR. Conclusions: The discriminative capacities of LDA, linear SVM, radial SVM and LR are the only ones above 80 %. None of the pairwise AUROC comparisons between these models is statistically significant, except linear SVM outperforming LR. Additionally, the sensitivity of linear SVM to identify recipients with DGF is amongst the three highest of all models. Due to both reasons, the authors believe that linear SVM is most appropriate to predict DGF

PLS dimension reduction for classification of microarray data

PLS dimension reduction is known to give good prediction accuracy in the context of classification with high-dimensional microarray data. In this paper, PLS is compared with some of the best state-of-the-art classification methods. In addition, a simple procedure to choose the number of components is suggested. The connection between PLS dimension reduction and gene selection is examined and a property of the first PLS component for binary classification is proven. PLS can also be used as a visualization tool for high-dimensional data in the classification framework. The whole study is based on 9 real microarray cancer data sets

Exemplar-based Linear Discriminant Analysis for Robust Object Tracking

Tracking-by-detection has become an attractive tracking technique, which treats tracking as a category detection problem. However, the task in tracking is to search for a specific object, rather than an object category as in detection. In this paper, we propose a novel tracking framework based on exemplar detector rather than category detector. The proposed tracker is an ensemble of exemplar-based linear discriminant analysis (ELDA) detectors. Each detector is quite specific and discriminative, because it is trained by a single object instance and massive negatives. To improve its adaptivity, we update both object and background models. Experimental results on several challenging video sequences demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our tracking algorithm.Comment: ICIP201