MINIMAL BASIS REPRESENTATION FOR GENERAL MOTION SEGMENTATION

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Multiple structure recovery with maximum coverage

We present a general framework for geometric model fitting based on a set coverage formulation that caters for intersecting structures and outliers in a simple and principled manner. The multi-model fitting problem is formulated in terms of the optimization of a consensus-based global cost function, which allows to sidestep the pitfalls of preference approaches based on clustering and to avoid the difficult trade-off between data fidelity and complexity of other optimization formulations. Two especially appealing characteristics of this method are the ease with which it can be implemented and its modularity with respect to the solver and to the sampling strategy. Few intelligible parameters need to be set and tuned, namely the inlier threshold and the number of desired models. The summary of the experiments is that our method compares favourably with its competitors overall, and it is always either the best performer or almost on par with the best performer in specific scenarios

Real-time Sound Source Separation For Music Applications

Sound source separation refers to the task of extracting individual sound sources from some number of mixtures of those sound sources. In this thesis, a novel sound source separation algorithm for musical applications is presented. It leverages the fact that the vast majority of commercially recorded music since the 1950s has been mixed down for two channel reproduction, more commonly known as stereo. The algorithm presented in Chapter 3 in this thesis requires no prior knowledge or learning and performs the task of separation based purely on azimuth discrimination within the stereo field. The algorithm exploits the use of the pan pot as a means to achieve image localisation within stereophonic recordings. As such, only an interaural intensity difference exists between left and right channels for a single source. We use gain scaling and phase cancellation techniques to expose frequency dependent nulls across the azimuth domain, from which source separation and resynthesis is carried out. The algorithm is demonstrated to be state of the art in the field of sound source separation but also to be a useful pre-process to other tasks such as music segmentation and surround sound upmixing

MULTIPLE STRUCTURE RECOVERY VIA PREFERENCE ANALYSIS IN CONCEPTUAL SPACE

Finding multiple models (or structures) that fit data corrupted by noise and outliers is an omnipresent problem in empirical sciences, includingComputer Vision, where organizing unstructured visual data in higher level geometric structures is a necessary and basic step to derive better descriptions and understanding of a scene. This challenging problem has a chicken-and-egg pattern: in order to estimate models one needs to first segment the data, and in order to segment the data it is necessary to know which structure points belong to. Most of the multi-model fitting techniques proposed in the literature can be divided in two classes, according to which horn of the chicken-egg-dilemma is addressed first, namely consensus and preference analysis. Consensus-based methods put the emphasis on the estimation part of the problem and focus on models that describe has many points as possible. On the other side, preference analysis concentrates on the segmentation side in order to find a proper partition of the data, from which model estimation follows. The research conducted in this thesis attempts to provide theoretical footing to the preference approach and to elaborate it in term of performances and robustness. In particular, we derive a conceptual space in which preference analysis is robustly performed thanks to three different formulations of multiple structures recovery, i.e. linkage clustering, spectral analysis and set coverage. In this way we are able to propose new and effective strategies to link together consensus and preferences based criteria to overcome the limitation of both. In order to validate our researches, we have applied our methodologies to some significant Computer Vision tasks including: geometric primitive fitting (e.g. line fitting; circle fitting; 3D plane fitting), multi-body segmentation, plane segmentation, and video motion segmentation

R-Gada: a fast and flexible pipeline for copy number analysis in association studies

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) using Copy Number Variation (CNV) are becoming a central focus of genetic research. CNVs have successfully provided target genome regions for some disease conditions where simple genetic variation (i.e., SNPs) has previously failed to provide a clear association.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>Here we present a new R package, that integrates: (i) data import from most common formats of Affymetrix, Illumina and aCGH arrays; (ii) a fast and accurate segmentation algorithm to call CNVs based on Genome Alteration Detection Analysis (GADA); and (iii) functions for displaying and exporting the Copy Number calls, identification of recurrent CNVs, multivariate analysis of population structure, and tools for performing association studies. Using a large dataset containing 270 HapMap individuals (Affymetrix Human SNP Array 6.0 Sample Dataset) we demonstrate a flexible pipeline implemented with the package. It requires less than one minute per sample (3 million probe arrays) on a single core computer, and provides a flexible parallelization for very large datasets. Case-control data were generated from the HapMap dataset to demonstrate a GWAS analysis.</p> <p>Conclusions</p> <p>The package provides the tools for creating a complete integrated pipeline from data normalization to statistical association. It can effciently handle a massive volume of data consisting of millions of genetic markers and hundreds or thousands of samples with very accurate results.</p