Nonparametric statistics of image neighborhoods for unsupervised texture segmentation

technical reportIn this paper, we present a novel approach to unsupervised texture segmentation that is based on a very general statistical model of image neighborhoods. We treat image neighborhoods as samples from an underlying, high-dimensional probability density function (PDF). We obtain an optimal segmentation via the minimization of an entropy-based metric on the neighborhood PDFs conditioned on the classification. Unlike previous work in this area, we model image neighborhoods directly without preprocessing or the construction of intermediate features. We represent the underlying PDFs nonparametrically, using Parzen windowing, thus enabling the method to model a wide variety of textures. The entropy minimization drives a level-set evolution that provides a degree of spatial homogeneity. We show that the proposed approach easily generalizes, from the two-class case, to an arbitrary number of regions by incorporating an efficient multi-phase level-set framework. This paper presents results on synthetic and real images from the literature, including segmentations of electron microscopy images of cellular structures

A Survey on Metric Learning for Feature Vectors and Structured Data

The need for appropriate ways to measure the distance or similarity between data is ubiquitous in machine learning, pattern recognition and data mining, but handcrafting such good metrics for specific problems is generally difficult. This has led to the emergence of metric learning, which aims at automatically learning a metric from data and has attracted a lot of interest in machine learning and related fields for the past ten years. This survey paper proposes a systematic review of the metric learning literature, highlighting the pros and cons of each approach. We pay particular attention to Mahalanobis distance metric learning, a well-studied and successful framework, but additionally present a wide range of methods that have recently emerged as powerful alternatives, including nonlinear metric learning, similarity learning and local metric learning. Recent trends and extensions, such as semi-supervised metric learning, metric learning for histogram data and the derivation of generalization guarantees, are also covered. Finally, this survey addresses metric learning for structured data, in particular edit distance learning, and attempts to give an overview of the remaining challenges in metric learning for the years to come.Comment: Technical report, 59 pages. Changes in v2: fixed typos and improved presentation. Changes in v3: fixed typos. Changes in v4: fixed typos and new method

Deep Extreme Multi-label Learning

Extreme multi-label learning (XML) or classification has been a practical and important problem since the boom of big data. The main challenge lies in the exponential label space which involves $2^L$ possible label sets especially when the label dimension $L$ is huge, e.g., in millions for Wikipedia labels. This paper is motivated to better explore the label space by originally establishing an explicit label graph. In the meanwhile, deep learning has been widely studied and used in various classification problems including multi-label classification, however it has not been properly introduced to XML, where the label space can be as large as in millions. In this paper, we propose a practical deep embedding method for extreme multi-label classification, which harvests the ideas of non-linear embedding and graph priors-based label space modeling simultaneously. Extensive experiments on public datasets for XML show that our method performs competitive against state-of-the-art result

Hyperbolic Interaction Model For Hierarchical Multi-Label Classification

Different from the traditional classification tasks which assume mutual exclusion of labels, hierarchical multi-label classification (HMLC) aims to assign multiple labels to every instance with the labels organized under hierarchical relations. Besides the labels, since linguistic ontologies are intrinsic hierarchies, the conceptual relations between words can also form hierarchical structures. Thus it can be a challenge to learn mappings from word hierarchies to label hierarchies. We propose to model the word and label hierarchies by embedding them jointly in the hyperbolic space. The main reason is that the tree-likeness of the hyperbolic space matches the complexity of symbolic data with hierarchical structures. A new Hyperbolic Interaction Model (HyperIM) is designed to learn the label-aware document representations and make predictions for HMLC. Extensive experiments are conducted on three benchmark datasets. The results have demonstrated that the new model can realistically capture the complex data structures and further improve the performance for HMLC comparing with the state-of-the-art methods. To facilitate future research, our code is publicly available