String-like occluding region extraction for background restoration

The 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition : ICPR 2006, slides ; Place : Hong Kong, China ; Date : August 20-24, 200

The Hong Kong Statement on Practice Research 2017 : Contexts and Challenges of the Far East

This statement on social work practice research highlights the contributions of scholars, practitioners, and conference participants in the Fourth International Conference on Practice Research (ICPR) in 2017, hosted by The Hong Kong Polytechnic University in May 2017. It focuses on the contexts and challenges of carrying out practice research in the Far East and beyond as well as raises pertinent questions about the development of practice research. It begins with a brief description of the context of social work practice research in the Far East. The second part explores the organizational and community contexts and challenges of practice research with special attention to the perspectives of practitioners. It concludes with reviewing some of the continuing challenges that will guide the program planning for the Fifth ICPR in 2020 in Melbourne, Australia, located at the crossroads between East and West.Peer reviewe

A target dependent colorspace for robust tracking

Presentado al 18th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR)celebrado en 2006 en Hong Kong (China).The selection of the appropriate colorspace for tracking applications has not been an issue previously considered in the literature. Many color representations have been suggested, based on the invariance to illumination changes. Nevertheless, none of them is invariant enough to deal with general and unconstrained environments. In tracking tasks, we might prefer to represent image pixels into a colorspace where the distance between the target and background colorpoints were maximized, simplifying the task of the tracker. Based on this criterion, we propose an 'object dependent' colorspace, which is computed as a simple calibration procedure before tracking. Furthermore, this colorspace may be easily adapted at each frame. Synthetic and real experiments show how this colorspace allows for a better discrimination of the foreground and background, and permits to track in circumstances where the same tracking algorithm relying on other colorspaces would fail.This work was supported by the project 'Integration of robust perception, learning, and navigation systems in mobile robotics' (J-0929).This work was supported by CICYT project DPI2004-05414 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology.Peer Reviewe

Bit-pairing codification for binary pattern projection system

In a previous work, we proposed a new binary-light projection mechanism that had a much reduced system size that made it particularly suitable for 3D shape inspection of semiconductor products. The inspection speed of the mechanism was governed by the number of required images which also equaled the number of shiftings of the grating. In this paper we address how inspection speed could be gained, i.e., how the number of required images could be reduced, by the incorporation of two neighboring bits in the codification of each scene element. We provide an optimal design of such a codification strategy. A solution to the shifting strategy optimization is also proposed that is applicable to any given binary patterns. Theoretical analysis and real image experiments are presented to illustrate the workability of the solutions. © 2006 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

A Survey on Ear Biometrics

Recognizing people by their ear has recently received significant attention in the literature. Several reasons account for this trend: first, ear recognition does not suffer from some problems associated with other non contact biometrics, such as face recognition; second, it is the most promising candidate for combination with the face in the context of multi-pose face recognition; and third, the ear can be used for human recognition in surveillance videos where the face may be occluded completely or in part. Further, the ear appears to degrade little with age. Even though, current ear detection and recognition systems have reached a certain level of maturity, their success is limited to controlled indoor conditions. In addition to variation in illumination, other open research problems include hair occlusion; earprint forensics; ear symmetry; ear classification; and ear individuality. This paper provides a detailed survey of research conducted in ear detection and recognition. It provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature revealing the current state-of-art for not only those who are working in this area but also for those who might exploit this new approach. Furthermore, it offers insights into some unsolved ear recognition problems as well as ear databases available for researchers

Curved Gabor Filters for Fingerprint Image Enhancement

Gabor filters play an important role in many application areas for the enhancement of various types of images and the extraction of Gabor features. For the purpose of enhancing curved structures in noisy images, we introduce curved Gabor filters which locally adapt their shape to the direction of flow. These curved Gabor filters enable the choice of filter parameters which increase the smoothing power without creating artifacts in the enhanced image. In this paper, curved Gabor filters are applied to the curved ridge and valley structure of low-quality fingerprint images. First, we combine two orientation field estimation methods in order to obtain a more robust estimation for very noisy images. Next, curved regions are constructed by following the respective local orientation and they are used for estimating the local ridge frequency. Lastly, curved Gabor filters are defined based on curved regions and they are applied for the enhancement of low-quality fingerprint images. Experimental results on the FVC2004 databases show improvements of this approach in comparison to state-of-the-art enhancement methods

Direct kernel biased discriminant analysis: a new content-based image retrieval relevance feedback algorithm

In recent years, a variety of relevance feedback (RF) schemes have been developed to improve the performance of content-based image retrieval (CBIR). Given user feedback information, the key to a RF scheme is how to select a subset of image features to construct a suitable dissimilarity measure. Among various RF schemes, biased discriminant analysis (BDA) based RF is one of the most promising. It is based on the observation that all positive samples are alike, while in general each negative sample is negative in its own way. However, to use BDA, the small sample size (SSS) problem is a big challenge, as users tend to give a small number of feedback samples. To explore solutions to this issue, this paper proposes a direct kernel BDA (DKBDA), which is less sensitive to SSS. An incremental DKBDA (IDKBDA) is also developed to speed up the analysis. Experimental results are reported on a real-world image collection to demonstrate that the proposed methods outperform the traditional kernel BDA (KBDA) and the support vector machine (SVM) based RF algorithms

Detection based low frame rate human tracking

Tracking by association of low frame rate detection responses is not trivial, as motion is less continuous and hence ambiguous. The problem becomes more challenging when occlusion occurs. To solve this problem, we firstly propose a robust data association method that explicitly differentiates ambiguous tracklets that are likely to introduce incorrect linking from other tracklets, and deal with them effectively. Secondly, we solve the long-time occlusion problem by detecting inter-track relationship and performing track split and merge according to appearance similarity and occlusion order. Experiment on a challenging human surveillance dataset shows the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2010 IEEE.published_or_final_versionThe 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR 2010), Istanbul, Turkey, 23-26 August 2010. In Proceedings of 20th ICPR, 2010, p. 3529-353