8,551 research outputs found
An audio-based sports video segmentation and event detection algorithm
In this paper, we present an audio-based event detection algorithm shown to be effective when applied to Soccer video. The main benefit of this approach is the ability to recognise patterns that display high levels of crowd response correlated to key events. The soundtrack from a Soccer sequence is first parameterised using Mel-frequency Cepstral coefficients. It is then segmented into homogenous components using a windowing algorithm with a decision process based on Bayesian model selection. This decision process eliminated the need for defining a heuristic set of rules for segmentation. Each audio segment is then labelled using a series of Hidden Markov model (HMM) classifiers, each a representation of one of 6 predefined semantic content classes found in Soccer video. Exciting events are identified as those segments belonging to a crowd cheering class. Experimentation indicated that the algorithm was more effective for classifying crowd response when compared to traditional model-based segmentation and classification techniques
Fair comparison of skin detection approaches on publicly available datasets
Skin detection is the process of discriminating skin and non-skin regions in
a digital image and it is widely used in several applications ranging from hand
gesture analysis to track body parts and face detection. Skin detection is a
challenging problem which has drawn extensive attention from the research
community, nevertheless a fair comparison among approaches is very difficult
due to the lack of a common benchmark and a unified testing protocol. In this
work, we investigate the most recent researches in this field and we propose a
fair comparison among approaches using several different datasets. The major
contributions of this work are an exhaustive literature review of skin color
detection approaches, a framework to evaluate and combine different skin
detector approaches, whose source code is made freely available for future
research, and an extensive experimental comparison among several recent methods
which have also been used to define an ensemble that works well in many
different problems. Experiments are carried out in 10 different datasets
including more than 10000 labelled images: experimental results confirm that
the best method here proposed obtains a very good performance with respect to
other stand-alone approaches, without requiring ad hoc parameter tuning. A
MATLAB version of the framework for testing and of the methods proposed in this
paper will be freely available from https://github.com/LorisNann
Learning the dynamics and time-recursive boundary detection of deformable objects
We propose a principled framework for recursively segmenting deformable objects across a sequence
of frames. We demonstrate the usefulness of this method on left ventricular segmentation across a cardiac
cycle. The approach involves a technique for learning the system dynamics together with methods of
particle-based smoothing as well as non-parametric belief propagation on a loopy graphical model capturing
the temporal periodicity of the heart. The dynamic system state is a low-dimensional representation
of the boundary, and the boundary estimation involves incorporating curve evolution into recursive state
estimation. By formulating the problem as one of state estimation, the segmentation at each particular
time is based not only on the data observed at that instant, but also on predictions based on past and future
boundary estimates. Although the paper focuses on left ventricle segmentation, the method generalizes
to temporally segmenting any deformable object
Probabilistic Intra-Retinal Layer Segmentation in 3-D OCT Images Using Global Shape Regularization
With the introduction of spectral-domain optical coherence tomography (OCT),
resulting in a significant increase in acquisition speed, the fast and accurate
segmentation of 3-D OCT scans has become evermore important. This paper
presents a novel probabilistic approach, that models the appearance of retinal
layers as well as the global shape variations of layer boundaries. Given an OCT
scan, the full posterior distribution over segmentations is approximately
inferred using a variational method enabling efficient probabilistic inference
in terms of computationally tractable model components: Segmenting a full 3-D
volume takes around a minute. Accurate segmentations demonstrate the benefit of
using global shape regularization: We segmented 35 fovea-centered 3-D volumes
with an average unsigned error of 2.46 0.22 {\mu}m as well as 80 normal
and 66 glaucomatous 2-D circular scans with errors of 2.92 0.53 {\mu}m
and 4.09 0.98 {\mu}m respectively. Furthermore, we utilized the inferred
posterior distribution to rate the quality of the segmentation, point out
potentially erroneous regions and discriminate normal from pathological scans.
No pre- or postprocessing was required and we used the same set of parameters
for all data sets, underlining the robustness and out-of-the-box nature of our
approach.Comment: Accepted for publication in Medical Image Analysis (MIA), Elsevie
A sticky HDP-HMM with application to speaker diarization
We consider the problem of speaker diarization, the problem of segmenting an
audio recording of a meeting into temporal segments corresponding to individual
speakers. The problem is rendered particularly difficult by the fact that we
are not allowed to assume knowledge of the number of people participating in
the meeting. To address this problem, we take a Bayesian nonparametric approach
to speaker diarization that builds on the hierarchical Dirichlet process hidden
Markov model (HDP-HMM) of Teh et al. [J. Amer. Statist. Assoc. 101 (2006)
1566--1581]. Although the basic HDP-HMM tends to over-segment the audio
data---creating redundant states and rapidly switching among them---we describe
an augmented HDP-HMM that provides effective control over the switching rate.
We also show that this augmentation makes it possible to treat emission
distributions nonparametrically. To scale the resulting architecture to
realistic diarization problems, we develop a sampling algorithm that employs a
truncated approximation of the Dirichlet process to jointly resample the full
state sequence, greatly improving mixing rates. Working with a benchmark NIST
data set, we show that our Bayesian nonparametric architecture yields
state-of-the-art speaker diarization results.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/10-AOAS395 the Annals of
Applied Statistics (http://www.imstat.org/aoas/) by the Institute of
Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
One-shot learning of object categories
Learning visual models of object categories notoriously requires hundreds or thousands of training examples. We show that it is possible to learn much information about a category from just one, or a handful, of images. The key insight is that, rather than learning from scratch, one can take advantage of knowledge coming from previously learned categories, no matter how different these categories might be. We explore a Bayesian implementation of this idea. Object categories are represented by probabilistic models. Prior knowledge is represented as a probability density function on the parameters of these models. The posterior model for an object category is obtained by updating the prior in the light of one or more observations. We test a simple implementation of our algorithm on a database of 101 diverse object categories. We compare category models learned by an implementation of our Bayesian approach to models learned from by maximum likelihood (ML) and maximum a posteriori (MAP) methods. We find that on a database of more than 100 categories, the Bayesian approach produces informative models when the number of training examples is too small for other methods to operate successfully
Dialogue Act Modeling for Automatic Tagging and Recognition of Conversational Speech
We describe a statistical approach for modeling dialogue acts in
conversational speech, i.e., speech-act-like units such as Statement, Question,
Backchannel, Agreement, Disagreement, and Apology. Our model detects and
predicts dialogue acts based on lexical, collocational, and prosodic cues, as
well as on the discourse coherence of the dialogue act sequence. The dialogue
model is based on treating the discourse structure of a conversation as a
hidden Markov model and the individual dialogue acts as observations emanating
from the model states. Constraints on the likely sequence of dialogue acts are
modeled via a dialogue act n-gram. The statistical dialogue grammar is combined
with word n-grams, decision trees, and neural networks modeling the
idiosyncratic lexical and prosodic manifestations of each dialogue act. We
develop a probabilistic integration of speech recognition with dialogue
modeling, to improve both speech recognition and dialogue act classification
accuracy. Models are trained and evaluated using a large hand-labeled database
of 1,155 conversations from the Switchboard corpus of spontaneous
human-to-human telephone speech. We achieved good dialogue act labeling
accuracy (65% based on errorful, automatically recognized words and prosody,
and 71% based on word transcripts, compared to a chance baseline accuracy of
35% and human accuracy of 84%) and a small reduction in word recognition error.Comment: 35 pages, 5 figures. Changes in copy editing (note title spelling
changed
A role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition
Infants segment words from fluent speech during the same period when they are learning phonetic categories, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition typically ignore information about the words in which sounds appear. We use a Bayesian model to illustrate how feedback from segmented words might constrain phonetic category learning by providing information about which sounds occur together in words. Simulations demonstrate that word-level information can successfully disambiguate overlapping English vowel categories. Learning patterns in the model are shown to parallel human behavior from artificial language learning tasks. These findings point to a central role for the developing lexicon in phonetic category acquisition and provide a framework for incorporating top-down constraints into models of category learning
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