Advanced correlation-based character recognition applied to the Archimedes Palimpsest

The Archimedes Palimpsest is a manuscript containing the partial text of seven treatises by Archimedes that were copied onto parchment and bound in the tenth-century AD. This work is aimed at providing tools that allow scholars of ancient Greek mathematics to retrieve as much information as possible from images of the remaining degraded text. Acorrelation pattern recognition (CPR) system has been developed to recognize distorted versions of Greek characters in problematic regions of the palimpsest imagery, which have been obscured by damage from mold and fire, overtext, and natural aging. Feature vectors for each class of characters are constructed using a series of spatial correlation algorithms and corresponding performance metrics. Principal components analysis (PCA) is employed prior to classification to remove features corresponding to filtering schemes that performed poorly for the spatial characteristics of the selected region-of-interest. A probability is then assigned to each class, forming a character probability distribution based on relative distances from the class feature vectors to the ROI feature vector in principal component (PC) space. However, the current CPR system does not produce a single classification decision, as is common in most target detection problems, but instead has been designed to provide intermediate results that allow the user to apply his or her own decisions (or evidence) to arrive at a conclusion. To achieve this result, a probabilistic network has been incorporated into the recognition system. A probabilistic network represents a method for modeling the uncertainty in a system, and for this application, it allows information from the existing iv partial transcription and contextual knowledge from the user to be an integral part of the decision-making process. The CPR system was designed to provide a framework for future research in the area of spatial pattern recognition by accommodating a broad range of applications and the development of new filtering methods. For example, during preliminary testing, the CPR system was used to confirm the publication date of a fifteenth-century Hebrew colophon, and demonstrated success in the detection of registration markers in three-dimensional MRI breast imaging. In addition, a new correlation algorithm that exploits the benefits of linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and the inherent shift invariance of spatial correlation has been derived, implemented, and tested. Results show that this composite filtering method provides a high level of class discrimination while maintaining tolerance to withinclass distortions. With the integration of this algorithm into the existing filter library, this work completes each stage of a cyclic workflow using the developed CPR system, and provides the necessary tools for continued experimentation

Recognizing complex faces and gaits via novel probabilistic models

In the field of computer vision, developing automated systems to recognize people under unconstrained scenarios is a partially solved problem. In unconstrained sce- narios a number of common variations and complexities such as occlusion, illumi- nation, cluttered background and so on impose vast uncertainty to the recognition process. Among the various biometrics that have been emerging recently, this dissertation focus on two of them namely face and gait recognition. Firstly we address the problem of recognizing faces with major occlusions amidst other variations such as pose, scale, expression and illumination using a novel PRObabilistic Component based Interpretation Model (PROCIM) inspired by key psychophysical principles that are closely related to reasoning under uncertainty. The model basically employs Bayesian Networks to establish, learn, interpret and exploit intrinsic similarity mappings from the face domain. Then, by incorporating e cient inference strategies, robust decisions are made for successfully recognizing faces under uncertainty. PROCIM reports improved recognition rates over recent approaches. Secondly we address the newly upcoming gait recognition problem and show that PROCIM can be easily adapted to the gait domain as well. We scienti cally de ne and formulate sub-gaits and propose a novel modular training scheme to e ciently learn subtle sub-gait characteristics from the gait domain. Our results show that the proposed model is robust to several uncertainties and yields sig- ni cant recognition performance. Apart from PROCIM, nally we show how a simple component based gait reasoning can be coherently modeled using the re- cently prominent Markov Logic Networks (MLNs) by intuitively fusing imaging, logic and graphs. We have discovered that face and gait domains exhibit interesting similarity map- pings between object entities and their components. We have proposed intuitive probabilistic methods to model these mappings to perform recognition under vari- ous uncertainty elements. Extensive experimental validations justi es the robust- ness of the proposed methods over the state-of-the-art techniques.

FACE CLASSIFICATION FOR AUTHENTICATION APPROACH BY USING WAVELET TRANSFORM AND STATISTICAL FEATURES SELECTION

This thesis consists of three parts: face localization, features selection and classification process. Three methods were proposed to locate the face region in the input image. Two of them based on pattern (template) Matching Approach, and the other based on clustering approach. Five datasets of faces namely: YALE database, MIT-CBCL database, Indian database, BioID database and Caltech database were used to evaluate the proposed methods. For the first method, the template image is prepared previously by using a set of faces. Later, the input image is enhanced by applying n-means kernel to decrease the image noise. Then Normalized Correlation (NC) is used to measure the correlation coefficients between the template image and the input image regions. For the second method, instead of using n-means kernel, an optimized metrics are used to measure the difference between the template image and the input image regions. In the last method, the Modified K-Means Algorithm was used to remove the non-face regions in the input image. The above-mentioned three methods showed accuracy of localization between 98% and 100% comparing with the existed methods. In the second part of the thesis, Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) utilized to transform the input image into number of wavelet coefficients. Then, the coefficients of weak statistical energy less than certain threshold were removed, and resulted in decreasing the primary wavelet coefficients number up to 98% out of the total coefficients. Later, only 40% statistical features were extracted from the hight energy features by using the variance modified metric. During the experimental (ORL) Dataset was used to test the proposed statistical method. Finally, Cluster-K-Nearest Neighbor (C-K-NN) was proposed to classify the input face based on the training faces images. The results showed a significant improvement of 99.39% in the ORL dataset and 100% in the Face94 dataset classification accuracy. Moreover, a new metrics were introduced to quantify the exactness of classification and some errors of the classification can be corrected. All the above experiments were implemented in MATLAB environment

Local Descriptor Approach to Wrist Vein Recognition with DVH-LBP Domain Feature Selection Scheme

Local Binary Pattern (LBP) is one of the well-known image recognition descriptors for texture-based images due to its superiority. LBP can represent texture well due to its ability to discriminate and compute efficiency. However, when it is used to describe textures that are barely visible, such as vein images (especially contactless vein), its discrimination ability is reduced, which leads to lower performance. LBP has extensively been implemented for features extraction in recognition system of hand, eye, face, eye, and other images. Nowadays, there are a lot of developments of hand recognition systems as a hand is a part of the body that can be easily used in the recognition process and it is easier to contact the sensor when taking the image (user-friendly). In particular, a hand consists of various parts that can be used, such as palm and fingers. Other parts like dorsal and wrist can also be used as they have unique characteristics, i.e., they are different from each other, and they do not change with ages. Changes in pixel intensity can be derived from skeletal vein images to distinguish individuals in palm vein recognition. In the previous paper, we proposed a method diagonal, vertical, horizontal local binary pattern (DVH-LBP) for implementing the palm vein recognition system successfully. Through this work, we improve our previous procedure and implement the improved method for recognizing wrist. In particular, this study proposes a new and robust directional extraction technique for encoding the functions of the wrist vein in a simple representation of binary numbers. Simulation results show the low equal error rate (ERR) of the proposed technique is 0.012, and the recognition rate is 99.4%

An exploration into the sparse representation of spectra

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 73-76)This thesis describes an exploration in achieving sparse representations of object, with special focus on spectral data. Given a database of objects one would like to know the actual aspects of each class that distinguish it from any other class in the database. We explore the hypothesis that simple abstractions (descriptions) that humans normally make, especially based on the visual phenomenology or physics on the problem, can be helpful in extracting and formulating useful sparse representations of the observed objects. In this thesis we focus on the discovery of such underlying features, employing a number of recent methods from machine learning. Firstly we find that an approach to automatic feature discovery recently proposed in the literature (Non Negative Matrix Factorization) is not as it seems. We show the limitations of this approach and demonstrate a more efficient method on a synthetic problem. Secondly we explore a more empirical approach to extracting visually attractive features of spectra from which we formulate simple re-representation of spectral data and show that the identification and discovery of certain intuitive features at various scales can be sufficient to describe a spectrum profile. Finally we explore a more traditional and principled automatic method of analyzing a spectrum at different resolutions (Wavelets). We find that certain classes of spectra can easily be discriminated between by a simple approximation of the spectrum profile while in other cases only the finer profile details are important. Throughout this thesis we employ a measure called the separability index as our measure of how easy it is to discriminate objects in a database with the proposed representations

FACE CLASSIFICATION FOR AUTHENTICATION APPROACH BY USING WAVELET TRANSFORM AND STATISTICAL FEATURES SELECTION

This thesis consists of three parts: face localization, features selection and classification process. Three methods were proposed to locate the face region in the input image. Two of them based on pattern (template) Matching Approach, and the other based on clustering approach. Five datasets of faces namely: YALE database, MIT-CBCL database, Indian database, BioID database and Caltech database were used to evaluate the proposed methods. For the first method, the template image is prepared previously by using a set of faces. Later, the input image is enhanced by applying n-means kernel to decrease the image noise. Then Normalized Correlation (NC) is used to measure the correlation coefficients between the template image and the input image regions. For the second method, instead of using n-means kernel, an optimized metrics are used to measure the difference between the template image and the input image regions. In the last method, the Modified K-Means Algorithm was used to remove the non-face regions in the input image. The above-mentioned three methods showed accuracy of localization between 98% and 100% comparing with the existed methods. In the second part of the thesis, Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) utilized to transform the input image into number of wavelet coefficients. Then, the coefficients of weak statistical energy less than certain threshold were removed, and resulted in decreasing the primary wavelet coefficients number up to 98% out of the total coefficients. Later, only 40% statistical features were extracted from the hight energy features by using the variance modified metric. During the experimental (ORL) Dataset was used to test the proposed statistical method. Finally, Cluster-K-Nearest Neighbor (C-K-NN) was proposed to classify the input face based on the training faces images. The results showed a significant improvement of 99.39% in the ORL dataset and 100% in the Face94 dataset classification accuracy. Moreover, a new metrics were introduced to quantify the exactness of classification and some errors of the classification can be corrected. All the above experiments were implemented in MATLAB environment