4,496 research outputs found
Magnification Control in Winner Relaxing Neural Gas
An important goal in neural map learning, which can conveniently be
accomplished by magnification control, is to achieve information optimal coding
in the sense of information theory. In the present contribution we consider the
winner relaxing approach for the neural gas network. Originally, winner
relaxing learning is a slight modification of the self-organizing map learning
rule that allows for adjustment of the magnification behavior by an a priori
chosen control parameter. We transfer this approach to the neural gas
algorithm. The magnification exponent can be calculated analytically for
arbitrary dimension from a continuum theory, and the entropy of the resulting
map is studied numerically conf irming the theoretical prediction. The
influence of a diagonal term, which can be added without impacting the
magnification, is studied numerically. This approach to maps of maximal mutual
information is interesting for applications as the winner relaxing term only
adds computational cost of same order and is easy to implement. In particular,
it is not necessary to estimate the generally unknown data probability density
as in other magnification control approaches.Comment: 14pages, 2 figure
Magnification Control in Self-Organizing Maps and Neural Gas
We consider different ways to control the magnification in self-organizing
maps (SOM) and neural gas (NG). Starting from early approaches of magnification
control in vector quantization, we then concentrate on different approaches for
SOM and NG. We show that three structurally similar approaches can be applied
to both algorithms: localized learning, concave-convex learning, and winner
relaxing learning. Thereby, the approach of concave-convex learning in SOM is
extended to a more general description, whereas the concave-convex learning for
NG is new. In general, the control mechanisms generate only slightly different
behavior comparing both neural algorithms. However, we emphasize that the NG
results are valid for any data dimension, whereas in the SOM case the results
hold only for the one-dimensional case.Comment: 24 pages, 4 figure
A Generative Model of Natural Texture Surrogates
Natural images can be viewed as patchworks of different textures, where the
local image statistics is roughly stationary within a small neighborhood but
otherwise varies from region to region. In order to model this variability, we
first applied the parametric texture algorithm of Portilla and Simoncelli to
image patches of 64X64 pixels in a large database of natural images such that
each image patch is then described by 655 texture parameters which specify
certain statistics, such as variances and covariances of wavelet coefficients
or coefficient magnitudes within that patch.
To model the statistics of these texture parameters, we then developed
suitable nonlinear transformations of the parameters that allowed us to fit
their joint statistics with a multivariate Gaussian distribution. We find that
the first 200 principal components contain more than 99% of the variance and
are sufficient to generate textures that are perceptually extremely close to
those generated with all 655 components. We demonstrate the usefulness of the
model in several ways: (1) We sample ensembles of texture patches that can be
directly compared to samples of patches from the natural image database and can
to a high degree reproduce their perceptual appearance. (2) We further
developed an image compression algorithm which generates surprisingly accurate
images at bit rates as low as 0.14 bits/pixel. Finally, (3) We demonstrate how
our approach can be used for an efficient and objective evaluation of samples
generated with probabilistic models of natural images.Comment: 34 pages, 9 figure
Prototype selection for parameter estimation in complex models
Parameter estimation in astrophysics often requires the use of complex
physical models. In this paper we study the problem of estimating the
parameters that describe star formation history (SFH) in galaxies. Here,
high-dimensional spectral data from galaxies are appropriately modeled as
linear combinations of physical components, called simple stellar populations
(SSPs), plus some nonlinear distortions. Theoretical data for each SSP is
produced for a fixed parameter vector via computer modeling. Though the
parameters that define each SSP are continuous, optimizing the signal model
over a large set of SSPs on a fine parameter grid is computationally infeasible
and inefficient. The goal of this study is to estimate the set of parameters
that describes the SFH of each galaxy. These target parameters, such as the
average ages and chemical compositions of the galaxy's stellar populations, are
derived from the SSP parameters and the component weights in the signal model.
Here, we introduce a principled approach of choosing a small basis of SSP
prototypes for SFH parameter estimation. The basic idea is to quantize the
vector space and effective support of the model components. In addition to
greater computational efficiency, we achieve better estimates of the SFH target
parameters. In simulations, our proposed quantization method obtains a
substantial improvement in estimating the target parameters over the common
method of employing a parameter grid. Sparse coding techniques are not
appropriate for this problem without proper constraints, while constrained
sparse coding methods perform poorly for parameter estimation because their
objective is signal reconstruction, not estimation of the target parameters.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/11-AOAS500 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Reflectance Hashing for Material Recognition
We introduce a novel method for using reflectance to identify materials.
Reflectance offers a unique signature of the material but is challenging to
measure and use for recognizing materials due to its high-dimensionality. In
this work, one-shot reflectance is captured using a unique optical camera
measuring {\it reflectance disks} where the pixel coordinates correspond to
surface viewing angles. The reflectance has class-specific stucture and angular
gradients computed in this reflectance space reveal the material class.
These reflectance disks encode discriminative information for efficient and
accurate material recognition. We introduce a framework called reflectance
hashing that models the reflectance disks with dictionary learning and binary
hashing. We demonstrate the effectiveness of reflectance hashing for material
recognition with a number of real-world materials
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