Circulant temporal encoding for video retrieval and temporal alignment

We address the problem of specific video event retrieval. Given a query video of a specific event, e.g., a concert of Madonna, the goal is to retrieve other videos of the same event that temporally overlap with the query. Our approach encodes the frame descriptors of a video to jointly represent their appearance and temporal order. It exploits the properties of circulant matrices to efficiently compare the videos in the frequency domain. This offers a significant gain in complexity and accurately localizes the matching parts of videos. The descriptors can be compressed in the frequency domain with a product quantizer adapted to complex numbers. In this case, video retrieval is performed without decompressing the descriptors. We also consider the temporal alignment of a set of videos. We exploit the matching confidence and an estimate of the temporal offset computed for all pairs of videos by our retrieval approach. Our robust algorithm aligns the videos on a global timeline by maximizing the set of temporally consistent matches. The global temporal alignment enables synchronous playback of the videos of a given scene

Reconstruction of the Antenna Near-Field

Cílem disertační práce je navrhnout efektivně pracující algoritmus, který na základě bezfázového měření v blízkém poli antény bude schopen zrekonstruovat komplexní blízké pole antény resp. vyzařovací diagram antény ve vzdáleném poli. Na základě těchto úvah byly zkoumány vlastnosti minimalizačního algoritmu. Zejména byl analyzován a vhodně zvolen minimalizační přistup, optimalizační metoda a v neposlední řadě i optimalizační funkce tzv. funkcionál. Dále pro urychlení celého minimalizačního procesu byly uvažovány prvotní odhady. A na závěr byla do minimalizačního algoritmu zahrnuta myšlenka nahrazující hledané elektrické pole několika koeficienty. Na základě předchozích analýz byla navržená bezfázová metoda pro charakterizaci vyzařovacích vlastností antén. Tato metoda kombinuje globální optimalizaci s obrazovou kompresní metodou a s lokální metodou ve spojení s konvečním amplitudovým měřením na dvou površích. V našem případě je globální optimalizace použita k nalezení globálního minima minimalizovaného funkcionálu, kompresní metoda k redukci neznámých proměnných na apertuře antény a lokální metoda zajišťuje přesnější nalezení minima. Navržená metoda je velmi robustní a mnohem rychlejší než jiné dostupné minimalizační algoritmy. Další výzkum byl zaměřen na možnosti využití měřených amplitud pouze z jednoho měřícího povrchu pro rekonstrukci vyzařovacích charakteristik antén a využití nového algoritmu pro rekonstrukci fáze na válcové geometrii.The aim of this dissertation thesis is to design a very effective algorithm, which is able to reconstruct the antenna near-field and radiation patterns, respectively, from amplitude-only measurements. Under these circumstances, the properties of minimization algorithm were researched. The selection of the minimization approach, optimization technique and the appropriate functional were investigated and appropriately chosen. To reveal the global minimum area faster, the possibilities in the form of initial estimates for accelerating minimization algorithm were also considered. And finally, the idea to represent the unknown electric field distribution by a few coefficients was implicated into the minimization algorithm. The designed near-field phaseless approach for the antenna far-field characterization combines a global optimization, an image compression method and a local optimization in conjunction with conventional two-surface amplitude measurements. The global optimization method is used to minimize the functional, the image compression method is used to reduce the number of unknown variables, and the local optimization method is used to improve the estimate achieved by the previous method. The proposed algorithm is very robust and faster than comparable algorithms available. Other investigations were focused on possibilities of using amplitude from only single scanning surface for reconstruction of radiation patterns and the application of the novel phase retrieval algorithm for cylindrical geometry.

Towards an All-Purpose Content-Based Multimedia Information Retrieval System

The growth of multimedia collections - in terms of size, heterogeneity, and variety of media types - necessitates systems that are able to conjointly deal with several forms of media, especially when it comes to searching for particular objects. However, existing retrieval systems are organized in silos and treat different media types separately. As a consequence, retrieval across media types is either not supported at all or subject to major limitations. In this paper, we present vitrivr, a content-based multimedia information retrieval stack. As opposed to the keyword search approach implemented by most media management systems, vitrivr makes direct use of the object's content to facilitate different types of similarity search, such as Query-by-Example or Query-by-Sketch, for and, most importantly, across different media types - namely, images, audio, videos, and 3D models. Furthermore, we introduce a new web-based user interface that enables easy-to-use, multimodal retrieval from and browsing in mixed media collections. The effectiveness of vitrivr is shown on the basis of a user study that involves different query and media types. To the best of our knowledge, the full vitrivr stack is unique in that it is the first multimedia retrieval system that seamlessly integrates support for four different types of media. As such, it paves the way towards an all-purpose, content-based multimedia information retrieval system

Motion-corrected Fourier ptychography

Fourier ptychography (FP) is a recently proposed computational imaging technique for high space-bandwidth product imaging. In real setups such as endoscope and transmission electron microscope, the common sample motion largely degrades the FP reconstruction and limits its practicability. In this paper, we propose a novel FP reconstruction method to efficiently correct for unknown sample motion. Specifically, we adaptively update the sample's Fourier spectrum from low spatial-frequency regions towards high spatial-frequency ones, with an additional motion recovery and phase-offset compensation procedure for each sub-spectrum. Benefiting from the phase retrieval redundancy theory, the required large overlap between adjacent sub-spectra offers an accurate guide for successful motion recovery. Experimental results on both simulated data and real captured data show that the proposed method can correct for unknown sample motion with its standard deviation being up to 10% of the field-of-view scale. We have released our source code for non-commercial use, and it may find wide applications in related FP platforms such as endoscopy and transmission electron microscopy

Undersampled Phase Retrieval with Outliers

We propose a general framework for reconstructing transform-sparse images from undersampled (squared)-magnitude data corrupted with outliers. This framework is implemented using a multi-layered approach, combining multiple initializations (to address the nonconvexity of the phase retrieval problem), repeated minimization of a convex majorizer (surrogate for a nonconvex objective function), and iterative optimization using the alternating directions method of multipliers. Exploiting the generality of this framework, we investigate using a Laplace measurement noise model better adapted to outliers present in the data than the conventional Gaussian noise model. Using simulations, we explore the sensitivity of the method to both the regularization and penalty parameters. We include 1D Monte Carlo and 2D image reconstruction comparisons with alternative phase retrieval algorithms. The results suggest the proposed method, with the Laplace noise model, both increases the likelihood of correct support recovery and reduces the mean squared error from measurements containing outliers. We also describe exciting extensions made possible by the generality of the proposed framework, including regularization using analysis-form sparsity priors that are incompatible with many existing approaches.Comment: 11 pages, 9 figure