Recherche d'images par le contenu, analyse multirésolution et modèles de régression logistique

Cette thèse, présente l'ensemble de nos contributions relatives à la recherche d'images par le contenu à l'aide de l'analyse multirésolution ainsi qu'à la classification linéaire et nonlinéaire. Dans la première partie, nous proposons une méthode simple et rapide de recherche d'images par le contenu. Pour représenter les images couleurs, nous introduisons de nouveaux descripteurs de caractéristiques qui sont des histogrammes pondérés par le gradient multispectral. Afin de mesurer le degré de similarité entre deux images d'une façon rapide et efficace, nous utilisons une pseudo-métrique pondérée qui utilise la décomposition en ondelettes et la compression des histogrammes extraits des images. Les poids de la pseudo-métrique sont ajustés à l'aide du modèle classique de régression logistique afin d'améliorer sa capacité à discriminer et la précision de la recherche. Dans la deuxième partie, nous proposons un nouveau modèle bayésien de régression logistique fondé sur une méthode variationnelle. Une comparaison de ce nouveau modèle au modèle classique de régression logistique est effectuée dans le cadre de la recherche d'images. Nous illustrons par la suite que le modèle bayésien permet par rapport au modèle classique une amélioration notoire de la capacité à discriminer de la pseudo-métrique et de la précision de recherche. Dans la troisième partie, nous détaillons la dérivation du nouveau modèle bayésien de régression logistique fondé sur une méthode variationnelle et nous comparons ce modèle au modèle classique de régression logistique ainsi qu'à d'autres classificateurs linéaires présents dans la littérature. Nous comparons par la suite, notre méthode de recherche, utilisant le modèle bayésien de régression logistique, à d'autres méthodes de recherches déjà publiées. Dans la quatrième partie, nous introduisons la sélection des caractéristiques pour améliorer notre méthode de recherche utilisant le modèle introduit ci-dessus. En effet, la sélection des caractéristiques permet de donner automatiquement plus d'importance aux caractéristiques qui discriminent le plus et moins d'importance aux caractéristiques qui discriminent le moins. Finalement, dans la cinquième partie, nous proposons un nouveau modèle bayésien d'analyse discriminante logistique construit à l'aide de noyaux permettant ainsi une classification nonlinéaire flexible

Persistence Bag-of-Words for Topological Data Analysis

Persistent homology (PH) is a rigorous mathematical theory that provides a robust descriptor of data in the form of persistence diagrams (PDs). PDs exhibit, however, complex structure and are difficult to integrate in today's machine learning workflows. This paper introduces persistence bag-of-words: a novel and stable vectorized representation of PDs that enables the seamless integration with machine learning. Comprehensive experiments show that the new representation achieves state-of-the-art performance and beyond in much less time than alternative approaches.Comment: Accepted for the Twenty-Eight International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-19). arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1802.0485

Object detection and activity recognition in digital image and video libraries

This thesis is a comprehensive study of object-based image and video retrieval, specifically for car and human detection and activity recognition purposes. The thesis focuses on the problem of connecting low level features to high level semantics by developing relational object and activity presentations. With the rapid growth of multimedia information in forms of digital image and video libraries, there is an increasing need for intelligent database management tools. The traditional text based query systems based on manual annotation process are impractical for today\u27s large libraries requiring an efficient information retrieval system. For this purpose, a hierarchical information retrieval system is proposed where shape, color and motion characteristics of objects of interest are captured in compressed and uncompressed domains. The proposed retrieval method provides object detection and activity recognition at different resolution levels from low complexity to low false rates. The thesis first examines extraction of low level features from images and videos using intensity, color and motion of pixels and blocks. Local consistency based on these features and geometrical characteristics of the regions is used to group object parts. The problem of managing the segmentation process is solved by a new approach that uses object based knowledge in order to group the regions according to a global consistency. A new model-based segmentation algorithm is introduced that uses a feedback from relational representation of the object. The selected unary and binary attributes are further extended for application specific algorithms. Object detection is achieved by matching the relational graphs of objects with the reference model. The major advantages of the algorithm can be summarized as improving the object extraction by reducing the dependence on the low level segmentation process and combining the boundary and region properties. The thesis then addresses the problem of object detection and activity recognition in compressed domain in order to reduce computational complexity. New algorithms for object detection and activity recognition in JPEG images and MPEG videos are developed. It is shown that significant information can be obtained from the compressed domain in order to connect to high level semantics. Since our aim is to retrieve information from images and videos compressed using standard algorithms such as JPEG and MPEG, our approach differentiates from previous compressed domain object detection techniques where the compression algorithms are governed by characteristics of object of interest to be retrieved. An algorithm is developed using the principal component analysis of MPEG motion vectors to detect the human activities; namely, walking, running, and kicking. Object detection in JPEG compressed still images and MPEG I frames is achieved by using DC-DCT coefficients of the luminance and chrominance values in the graph based object detection algorithm. The thesis finally addresses the problem of object detection in lower resolution and monochrome images. Specifically, it is demonstrated that the structural information of human silhouettes can be captured from AC-DCT coefficients

Data mining in soft computing framework: a survey

The present article provides a survey of the available literature on data mining using soft computing. A categorization has been provided based on the different soft computing tools and their hybridizations used, the data mining function implemented, and the preference criterion selected by the model. The utility of the different soft computing methodologies is highlighted. Generally fuzzy sets are suitable for handling the issues related to understandability of patterns, incomplete/noisy data, mixed media information and human interaction, and can provide approximate solutions faster. Neural networks are nonparametric, robust, and exhibit good learning and generalization capabilities in data-rich environments. Genetic algorithms provide efficient search algorithms to select a model, from mixed media data, based on some preference criterion/objective function. Rough sets are suitable for handling different types of uncertainty in data. Some challenges to data mining and the application of soft computing methodologies are indicated. An extensive bibliography is also included

Towards an Architecture for Efficient Distributed Search of Multimodal Information

The creation of very large-scale multimedia search engines, with more than one billion images and videos, is a pressing need of digital societies where data is generated by multiple connected devices. Distributing search indexes in cloud environments is the inevitable solution to deal with the increasing scale of image and video collections. The distribution of such indexes in this setting raises multiple challenges such as the even partitioning of data space, load balancing across index nodes and the fusion of the results computed over multiple nodes. The main question behind this thesis is how to reduce and distribute the multimedia retrieval computational complexity? This thesis studies the extension of sparse hash inverted indexing to distributed settings. The main goal is to ensure that indexes are uniformly distributed across computing nodes while keeping similar documents on the same nodes. Load balancing is performed at both node and index level, to guarantee that the retrieval process is not delayed by nodes that have to inspect larger subsets of the index. Multimodal search requires the combination of the search results from individual modalities and document features. This thesis studies rank fusion techniques focused on reducing complexity by automatically selecting only the features that improve retrieval effectiveness. The achievements of this thesis span both distributed indexing and rank fusion research. Experiments across multiple datasets show that sparse hashes can be used to distribute documents and queries across index entries in a balanced and redundant manner across nodes. Rank fusion results show that is possible to reduce retrieval complexity and improve efficiency by searching only a subset of the feature indexes

Information Retrieval for Multivariate Research Data Repositories

In this dissertation, I tackle the challenge of information retrieval for multivariate research data by providing novel means of content-based access. Large amounts of multivariate data are produced and collected in different areas of scientific research and industrial applications, including the human or natural sciences, the social or economical sciences and applications like quality control, security and machine monitoring. Archival and re-use of this kind of data has been identified as an important factor in the supply of information to support research and industrial production. Due to increasing efforts in the digital library community, such multivariate data are collected, archived and often made publicly available by specialized research data repositories. A multivariate research data document consists of tabular data with $m$ columns (measurement parameters, e.g., temperature, pressure, humidity, etc.) and $n$ rows (observations). To render such data-sets accessible, they are annotated with meta-data according to well-defined meta-data standard when being archived. These annotations include time, location, parameters, title, author (and potentially many more) of the document under concern. In particular for multivariate data, each column is annotated with the parameter name and unit of its data (e.g., water depth [m]). The task of retrieving and ranking the documents an information seeker is looking for is an important and difficult challenge. To date, access to this data is primarily provided by means of annotated, textual meta-data as described above. An information seeker can search for documents of interest, by querying for the annotated meta-data. For example, an information seeker can retrieve all documents that were obtained in a specific region or within a certain period of time. Similarly, she can search for data-sets that contain a particular measurement via its parameter name or search for data-sets that were produced by a specific scientist. However, retrieval via textual annotations is limited and does not allow for content-based search, e.g., retrieving data which contains a particular measurement pattern like a linear relationship between water depth and water pressure, or which is similar to example data the information seeker provides. In this thesis, I deal with this challenge and develop novel indexing and retrieval schemes, to extend the established, meta-data based access to multivariate research data. By analyzing and indexing the data patterns occurring in multivariate data, one can support new techniques for content-based retrieval and exploration, well beyond meta-data based query methods. This allows information seekers to query for multivariate data-sets that exhibit patterns similar to an example data-set they provide. Furthermore, information seekers can specify one or more particular patterns they are looking for, to retrieve multivariate data-sets that contain similar patterns. To this end, I also develop visual-interactive techniques to support information seekers in formulating such queries, which inherently are more complex than textual search strings. These techniques include providing an over-view of potentially interesting patterns to search for, that interactively adapt to the user's query as it is being entered. Furthermore, based on the pattern description of each multivariate data document, I introduce a similarity measure for multivariate data. This allows scientists to quickly discover similar (or contradictory) data to their own measurements

Video metadata extraction in a videoMail system

Currently the world swiftly adapts to visual communication. Online services like YouTube and Vine show that video is no longer the domain of broadcast television only. Video is used for different purposes like entertainment, information, education or communication. The rapid growth of today’s video archives with sparsely available editorial data creates a big problem of its retrieval. The humans see a video like a complex interplay of cognitive concepts. As a result there is a need to build a bridge between numeric values and semantic concepts. This establishes a connection that will facilitate videos’ retrieval by humans. The critical aspect of this bridge is video annotation. The process could be done manually or automatically. Manual annotation is very tedious, subjective and expensive. Therefore automatic annotation is being actively studied. In this thesis we focus on the multimedia content automatic annotation. Namely the use of analysis techniques for information retrieval allowing to automatically extract metadata from video in a videomail system. Furthermore the identification of text, people, actions, spaces, objects, including animals and plants. Hence it will be possible to align multimedia content with the text presented in the email message and the creation of applications for semantic video database indexing and retrieving