Exploiting Cross Domain Relationships for Target Recognition

Cross domain recognition extracts knowledge from one domain to recognize samples from another domain of interest. The key to solving problems under this umbrella is to find out the latent connections between different domains. In this dissertation, three different cross domain recognition problems are studied by exploiting the relationships between different domains explicitly according to the specific real problems. First, the problem of cross view action recognition is studied. The same action might seem quite different when observed from different viewpoints. Thus, how to use the training samples from a given camera view and perform recognition in another new view is the key point. In this work, reconstructable paths between different views are built to mirror labeled actions from one source view into one another target view for learning an adaptable classifier. The path learning takes advantage of the joint dictionary learning techniques with exploiting hidden information in the seemingly useless samples, making the recognition performance robust and effective. Second, the problem of person re-identification is studied, which tries to match pedestrian images in non-overlapping camera views based on appearance features. In this work, we propose to learn a random kernel forest to discriminatively assign a specific distance metric to each pair of local patches from the two images in matching. The forest is composed by multiple decision trees, which are designed to partition the overall space of local patch-pairs into substantial subspaces, where a simple but effective local metric kernel can be defined to minimize the distance of true matches. Third, the problem of multi-event detection and recognition in smart grid is studied. The signal of multi-event might not be a straightforward combination of some single-event signals because of the correlation among devices. In this work, a concept of ``root-pattern\u27\u27 is proposed that can be extracted from a collection of single-event signals, but also transferable to analyse the constituent components of multi-cascading-event signals based on an over-complete dictionary, which is designed according to the ``root-patterns\u27\u27 with temporal information subtly embedded. The correctness and effectiveness of the proposed approaches have been evaluated by extensive experiments

Robust density modelling using the student's t-distribution for human action recognition

The extraction of human features from videos is often inaccurate and prone to outliers. Such outliers can severely affect density modelling when the Gaussian distribution is used as the model since it is highly sensitive to outliers. The Gaussian distribution is also often used as base component of graphical models for recognising human actions in the videos (hidden Markov model and others) and the presence of outliers can significantly affect the recognition accuracy. In contrast, the Student's t-distribution is more robust to outliers and can be exploited to improve the recognition rate in the presence of abnormal data. In this paper, we present an HMM which uses mixtures of t-distributions as observation probabilities and show how experiments over two well-known datasets (Weizmann, MuHAVi) reported a remarkable improvement in classification accuracy. © 2011 IEEE

Novel Video Completion Approaches and Their Applications

Video completion refers to automatically restoring damaged or removed objects in a video sequence, with applications ranging from sophisticated video removal of undesired static or dynamic objects to correction of missing or corrupted video frames in old movies and synthesis of new video frames to add, modify, or generate a new visual story. The video completion problem can be solved using texture synthesis and/or data interpolation to fill-in the holes of the sequence inward. This thesis makes a distinction between still image completion and video completion. The latter requires visually pleasing consistency by taking into account the temporal information. Based on their applied concepts, video completion techniques are categorized as inpainting and texture synthesis. We present a bandlet transform-based technique for each of these categories of video completion techniques. The proposed inpainting-based technique is a 3D volume regularization scheme that takes advantage of bandlet bases for exploiting the anisotropic regularities to reconstruct a damaged video. The proposed exemplar-based approach, on the other hand, performs video completion using a precise patch fusion in the bandlet domain instead of patch replacement. The video completion task is extended to two important applications in video restoration. First, we develop an automatic video text detection and removal that benefits from the proposed inpainting scheme and a novel video text detector. Second, we propose a novel video super-resolution technique that employs the inpainting algorithm spatially in conjunction with an effective structure tensor, generated using bandlet geometry. The experimental results show a good performance of the proposed video inpainting method and demonstrate the effectiveness of bandlets in video completion tasks. The proposed video text detector and the video super resolution scheme also show a high performance in comparison with existing methods

Context-aware Facial Inpainting with GANs

Facial inpainting is a difficult problem due to the complex structural patterns of a face image. Using irregular hole masks to generate contextualised features in a face image is becoming increasingly important in image inpainting. Existing methods generate images using deep learning models, but aberrations persist. The reason for this is that key operations are required for feature information dissemination, such as feature extraction mechanisms, feature propagation, and feature regularizers, are frequently overlooked or ignored during the design stage. A comprehensive review is conducted to examine existing methods and identify the research gaps that serve as the foundation for this thesis. The aim of this thesis is to develop novel facial inpainting algorithms with the capability of extracting contextualised features. First, Symmetric Skip Connection Wasserstein GAN (SWGAN) is proposed to inpaint high-resolution face images that are perceptually consistent with the rest of the image. Second, a perceptual adversarial Network (RMNet) is proposed to include feature extraction and feature propagation mechanisms that target missing regions while preserving visible ones. Third, a foreground-guided facial inpainting method is proposed with occlusion reasoning capability, which guides the model toward learning contextualised feature extraction and propagation while maintaining fidelity. Fourth, V-LinkNet is pro-posed that takes into account of the critical operations for information dissemination. Additionally, a standard protocol is introduced to prevent potential biases in performance evaluation of facial inpainting algorithms. The experimental results show V-LinkNet achieved the best results with SSIM of 0.96 on the standard protocol. In conclusion, generating facial images with contextualised features is important to achieve realistic results in inpainted regions. Additionally, it is critical to consider the standard procedure while comparing different approaches. Finally, this thesis outlines the new insights and future directions of image inpainting

L'atomisme, le holisme et la quête d'une tierce alternative viable

Selon John McDowell, l'atomisme et le holisme sont chacun incapables de porter fruit. Plutôt que d'osciller futilement entre ces deux pôles, il croit que nous devrions repenser notre façon de concevoir la relation liant l'esprit et le monde. Inspiré par certains passages de Kant, il nous invite donc à reconsidérer l'expérience de telle sorte qu'on y admette d'entrée de jeu l'exercice d'une liberté distinctement humaine-l'étendue de l'esprit devenant ainsi dénuée de toute contrainte externe. À notre avis, McDowell a plus de succès lorsqu'il dépeint le va-et-vient entre l'atomisme et le holisme que lorsqu'il propose une façon d'échapper à ce mouvement. Nous croyons que la fusion qu'il cherche à développer ne tient pas la route dans la mesure où, d'un point de vue naturaliste, il y a bel et bien lieu de distinguer la réceptivité empirique et la spontaneité conceptuelle. À l'encontre de McDowell, nous soutenons qu'il n'y a oscillation entre ces facultés que si l'on endosse une inférence allant du statut non-atomique des représentations au holisme, saut inductif qui repose sur une approche spéculative que nous rejetons. Le premier chapitre cherche à démontrer comment les théories holistes de filière quinéenne se fondent sur des présupposés spéculatifs et comment les éléments plus louables de la philosophie de McDowell à cet égard sont rendus impuissants par son assentiment à la critique que fait W. Sellars du "mythe du Donné". Le second chapitre reconstruit méticuleusement l'argument fort complexe qu'étale McDowell dans Mind and World, pour ensuite critiquer sa suggestion que la culture et l'éducation induisent chez l'être humain une attitude critique pouvant remplacer la friction produite par l'expérience. Le troisième chapitre soutient que la thèse de Sellars voulant que l'expérience peut causer mais non justifier nos représentations détruirait non seulement la connaissance empirique mais aussi la capacité de tirer des inférences. Enfin, le quatrième chapitre présente une nouvelle vision "constrictive" qui, par l'entremise des notions de coercition et de complexité, reconnait que la représentation du monde met en jeu une échelle plus large que l'atome mais plus petite que le tout. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Atomisme, Holisme, Représentation, John McDowell

Handbook of Lexical Functional Grammar

Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG) is a nontransformational theory of linguistic structure, first developed in the 1970s by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan, which assumes that language is best described and modeled by parallel structures representing different facets of linguistic organization and information, related by means of functional correspondences. This volume has five parts. Part I, Overview and Introduction, provides an introduction to core syntactic concepts and representations. Part II, Grammatical Phenomena, reviews LFG work on a range of grammatical phenomena or constructions. Part III, Grammatical modules and interfaces, provides an overview of LFG work on semantics, argument structure, prosody, information structure, and morphology. Part IV, Linguistic disciplines, reviews LFG work in the disciplines of historical linguistics, learnability, psycholinguistics, and second language learning. Part V, Formal and computational issues and applications, provides an overview of computational and formal properties of the theory, implementations, and computational work on parsing, translation, grammar induction, and treebanks. Part VI, Language families and regions, reviews LFG work on languages spoken in particular geographical areas or in particular language families. The final section, Comparing LFG with other linguistic theories, discusses LFG work in relation to other theoretical approaches

Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions

Academic study of the tantric traditions has blossomed in recent decades, in no small measure thanks to the magisterial contributions of Alexis G.J.S. Sanderson, until 2015 Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University. This collection of essays honours him and touches several elds of Indology that he has helped to shape (or, in the case of Śaivism, revolutionised): the history, ritual, and philosophies of tantric Buddhism, Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism; religious art and architecture; and Sanskrit belles lettres. Former students and other experts inuenced by his scholarship here ofer papers that contribute signicantly to our understanding of the cultural, religious, and intellectual histories of premodern South and Southeast Asia. Readership: Anyone interested in Asia’s tantric traditions, philosophy and religion in premodern India, Sanskrit, and Indology. The book will be essential reading to specialists and advanced students of Śaivism and Tantric Buddhism

Ambivalent Sovereignty: Inquiries into the Dual Foundation of Political Realism\u27s Subject

Ambivalent Sovereignty inquires into the subject of political realism. This subject, sovereign authority, appears to have a dual foundation. It appears divided against itself, but how can realism nonetheless observe legitimate modes of sovereignty emerge? Against the liberal idea that a synthesis of both material-coercive and ideal-persuasive powers should be accomplished, within the world of international relations, realism gives meaning to a structural type of state power that is also constitutionally and legitimately dividing itself--against itself. Machiavelli but particularly also other realists such as Hannah Arendt, Max Weber, and Aristotle are being reinterpreted to demonstrate why each state\u27s ultimate authority may symbiotically emerge from its self-divisions, rather than from one synthetic unity. Whereas liberal theorists, from Montesquieu to John Rawls and Alexander Wendt, err too far in assuming the presence of the state\u27s monistic authority, the realist theorists further advance an answer to how sovereign states may begin to both recognize and include only the most-legitimate manifestations of their common dualist authority. Ambivalent Sovereignty is relevant in this sense as it transcends-and-yet-includes these common dualities: freedom/necessity; emergence/causation; self-organization/power structures

Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions

Academic study of the tantric traditions has blossomed in recent decades, in no small measure thanks to the magisterial contributions of Alexis G.J.S. Sanderson, until 2015 Spalding Professor of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University. This collection of essays honours him and touches several elds of Indology that he has helped to shape (or, in the case of Śaivism, revolutionised): the history, ritual, and philosophies of tantric Buddhism, Śaivism and Vaiṣṇavism; religious art and architecture; and Sanskrit belles lettres. Former students and other experts inuenced by his scholarship here ofer papers that contribute signicantly to our understanding of the cultural, religious, and intellectual histories of premodern South and Southeast Asia. Readership: Anyone interested in Asia’s tantric traditions, philosophy and religion in premodern India, Sanskrit, and Indology. The book will be essential reading to specialists and advanced students of Śaivism and Tantric Buddhism