Multichannel surface EMG decomposition based on measurement correlation and LMMSE

A method based on measurement correlation (MC) and linear minimum mean square error (LMMSE) for multichannel surface electromyography (sEMG) signal decomposition was developed in this study. This MC-LMMSE method gradually and iteratively increases the correlation between an optimized vector and a reconstructed matrix that is correlated with the measurement matrix. The performance of the proposed MC-LMMSE method was evaluated with both simulated and experimental sEMG signals. Simulation results show that the MC-LMMSE method can successfully reconstruct up to 53 innervation pulse trains with a true positive rate greater than 95%. The performance of the MC-LMMSE method was also evaluated using experimental sEMG signals collected with a 64-channel electrode array from the first dorsal interosseous muscles of three subjects at different contraction levels. A maximum of 16 motor units were successfully extracted from these multichannel experimental sEMG signals. The performance of the MC-LMMSE method was further evaluated with multichannel experimental sEMG data by using the “two sources” method. The large population of common MUs extracted from the two independent subgroups of sEMG signals demonstrates the reliability of the MC-LMMSE method in multichannel sEMG decomposition

A direct measure of discriminant and characteristic capability for classifier building and assessment

AbstractPerformance measures are used in various stages of the process aimed at solving a classification problem. Unfortunately, most of these measures are in fact biased, meaning that they strictly depend on the class ratio – i.e. on the imbalance between negative and positive samples. After pointing to the source of bias for the best known measures, novel unbiased measures are defined which are able to capture the concepts of discriminant and characteristic capability. The combined use of these measures can give important information to researchers involved in machine learning or pattern recognition tasks, in particular for classifier performance assessment and feature selection

Context-aware Image-to-class Distances from Image Classification

Parametric image classification methods are usually complex because they require intensive training. Therefore, non-parametric Nearest Neighbour (NN) classifiers are preferred in many cases. Naive Bayes Nearest Neighbour (NBNN) and its modified version, local NBNN, are recently proposed classifiers that present decent performance with reduced complexity. They compute image-to-class (I2C) distance instead of image-to-image (I2I) distance. As a result, local image features will not be quantised and the effectiveness of classifiers thereby stays in a relatively good level. In this thesis, NBNN and local NBNN are further improved. With the idea of fully taking advantage of contextual information, we use saliency detectors to classify local features of reference images into foreground and background. We base our I2C distance computation on foreground and background separately. The suggestions from these distances can make label estimation more reliable. Though the times of I2C distance computation have been increased for each query image, we accelerate our classification procedure based on the evidence that the performances of NBNN and local NBNN are hardly affected when enough anchor points, which are produced by clustering, are put into use to replace the large number of referring features in each class. On the basis of the novel works stated above, the proposed context-aware methods outperform NBNN or local NBNN in both accuracy and efficiency. The comparisons have been made on three databases: Pami-09, Caltech-5, and 15-Scene

Study of object recognition and identification based on shape and texture analysis

The objective of object recognition is to enable computers to recognize image patterns without human intervention. According to its applications, it is mainly divided into two parts: recognition of object categories and detection/identification of objects. My thesis studied the techniques of object feature analysis and identification strategies, which solve the object recognition problem by employing effective and perceptually important object features. The shape information is of particular interest and a review of the shape representation and description is presented, as well as the latest research work on object recognition. In the second chapter of the thesis, a novel content-based approach is proposed for efficient shape classification and retrieval of 2D objects. Two object detection approaches, which are designed according to the characteristics of the shape context and SIFT descriptors, respectively, are analyzed and compared. It is found that the identification strategy constructed on a single type of object feature is only able to recognize the target object under specific conditions which the identifier is adapted to. These identifiers are usually designed to detect the target objects which are rich in the feature type captured by the identifier. In addition, this type of feature often distinguishes the target object from the complex scene. To overcome this constraint, a novel prototyped-based object identification method is presented to detect the target object in the complex scene by employing different types of descriptors to capture the heterogeneous features. All types of descriptors are modified to meet the requirement of the detection strategy’s framework. Thus this new method is able to describe and identify various kinds of objects whose dominant features are quite different. The identification system employs the cosine similarity to evaluate the resemblance between the prototype image and image windows on the complex scene. Then a ‘resemblance map’ is established with values on each patch representing the likelihood of the target object’s presence. The simulation approved that this novel object detection strategy is efficient, robust and of scale and rotation invariance

Multi-view Data Analysis

Multi-view data analysis is a key technology for making effective decisions by leveraging information from multiple data sources. The process of data acquisition across various sensory modalities gives rise to the heterogeneous property of data. In my thesis, multi-view data representations are studied towards exploiting the enriched information encoded in different domains or feature types, and novel algorithms are formulated to enhance feature discriminability. Extracting informative data representation is a critical step in visual recognition and data mining tasks. Multi-view embeddings provide a new way of representation learning to bridge the semantic gap between the low-level observations and high-level human comprehensible knowledge benefitting from enriched information in multiple modalities.Recent advances on multi-view learning have introduced a new paradigm in jointly modeling cross-modal data. Subspace learning method, which extracts compact features by exploiting a common latent space and fuses multi-view information, has emerged proiminent among different categories of multi-view learning techniques. This thesis provides novel solutions in learning compact and discriminative multi-view data representations by exploiting the data structures in low dimensional subspace. We also demonstrate the performance of the learned representation scheme on a number of challenging tasks in recognition, retrieval and ranking problems.The major contribution of the thesis is a unified solution for subspace learning methods, which is extensible for multiple views, supervised learning, and non-linear transformations. Traditional statistical learning techniques including Canonical Correlation Analysis, Partial Least Square regression and Linear Discriminant Analysis are studied by constructing graphs of specific forms under the same framework. Methods using non-linear transforms based on kernels and (deep) neural networks are derived, which lead to superior performance compared to the linear ones. A novel multi-view discriminant embedding method is proposed by taking the view difference into consideration. Secondly, a multiview nonparametric discriminant analysis method is introduced by exploiting the class boundary structure and discrepancy information of the available views. This allows for multiple projecion directions, by relaxing the Gaussian distribution assumption of related methods. Thirdly, we propose a composite ranking method by keeping a close correlation with the individual rankings for optimal rank fusion. We propose a multi-objective solution to ranking problems by capturing inter-view and intra-view information using autoencoderlike networks. Finally, a novel end-to-end solution is introduced to enhance joint ranking with minimum view-specific ranking loss, so that we can achieve the maximum global view agreements within a single optimization process.In summary, this thesis aims to address the challenges in representing multi-view data across different tasks. The proposed solutions have shown superior performance in numerous tasks, including object recognition, cross-modal image retrieval, face recognition and object ranking

Discriminant Analysis in Correlation Similarity Measure Space

Correlation is one of the most widely used similarity measures in machine learning like Euclidean and Mahalanobis distances. However, compared with proposed numerous discriminant learning algorithms in distance metric space, only a very little work has been conducted on this topic using correlation similarity measure. In this paper, we propose a novel discriminant learning algorithm in correlation measure space, Correlation Discriminant Analysis (CDA). In this framework, based on the definitions of within-class correlation and between-class correlation, the optimum transformation can be sought for to maximize the difference between them, which is in accordance with good classification performance empirically. Under different cases of the transformation, different implementations of the algorithm are given. Extensive empirical evaluations of CDA demonstrate its advantage over alternative methods. 1