1,344 research outputs found
Fertility and its Meaning: Evidence from Search Behavior
Fertility choices are linked to the different preferences and constraints of
individuals and couples, and vary importantly by socio-economic status, as well
by cultural and institutional context. The meaning of childbearing and
child-rearing, therefore, differs between individuals and across groups. In
this paper, we combine data from Google Correlate and Google Trends for the
U.S. with ground truth data from the American Community Survey to derive new
insights into fertility and its meaning. First, we show that Google Correlate
can be used to illustrate socio-economic differences on the circumstances
around pregnancy and birth: e.g., searches for "flying while pregnant" are
linked to high income fertility, and "paternity test" are linked to non-marital
fertility. Second, we combine several search queries to build predictive models
of regional variation in fertility, explaining about 75% of the variance.
Third, we explore if aggregated web search data can also be used to model
fertility trends.Comment: This is a preprint of a short paper accepted at ICWSM'17. Please cite
that version instea
Face Detection with Effective Feature Extraction
There is an abundant literature on face detection due to its important role
in many vision applications. Since Viola and Jones proposed the first real-time
AdaBoost based face detector, Haar-like features have been adopted as the
method of choice for frontal face detection. In this work, we show that simple
features other than Haar-like features can also be applied for training an
effective face detector. Since, single feature is not discriminative enough to
separate faces from difficult non-faces, we further improve the generalization
performance of our simple features by introducing feature co-occurrences. We
demonstrate that our proposed features yield a performance improvement compared
to Haar-like features. In addition, our findings indicate that features play a
crucial role in the ability of the system to generalize.Comment: 7 pages. Conference version published in Asian Conf. Comp. Vision
201
LBP and irregular graph pyramids
In this paper, a new codification of Local Binary Patterns (LBP) is given using graph pyramids. The LBP code characterizes the topological category (local max, min, slope, saddle) of the gray level landscape around the center region. Given a 2D grayscale image I, our goal is to obtain a simplified image which can be seen as “minimal” representation in terms of topological characterization of I. For this, a method is developed based on merging regions and Minimum Contrast Algorithm
Multi-resolution texture classification based on local image orientation
The aim of this paper is to evaluate quantitatively the discriminative power of the image orientation in the texture classification process. In this regard, we have evaluated the performance of two texture classification schemes where the image orientation is extracted using the partial derivatives of the Gaussian function. Since the texture descriptors are dependent on the observation scale, in this study the main emphasis is placed on the implementation of multi-resolution texture analysis schemes. The experimental results were obtained when the analysed texture descriptors were applied to standard texture databases
Topological descriptors for 3D surface analysis
We investigate topological descriptors for 3D surface analysis, i.e. the
classification of surfaces according to their geometric fine structure. On a
dataset of high-resolution 3D surface reconstructions we compute persistence
diagrams for a 2D cubical filtration. In the next step we investigate different
topological descriptors and measure their ability to discriminate structurally
different 3D surface patches. We evaluate their sensitivity to different
parameters and compare the performance of the resulting topological descriptors
to alternative (non-topological) descriptors. We present a comprehensive
evaluation that shows that topological descriptors are (i) robust, (ii) yield
state-of-the-art performance for the task of 3D surface analysis and (iii)
improve classification performance when combined with non-topological
descriptors.Comment: 12 pages, 3 figures, CTIC 201
Nerve Detection in Ultrasound Images Using Median Gabor Binary Pattern
International audienceUltrasound in regional anesthesia (RA) has increased in pop-ularity over the last years. The nerve localization presents a key step for RA practice, it is therefore valuable to develop a tool able to facilitate this practice. The nerve detection in the ultrasound images is a challeng-ing task, since the noise and other artifacts corrupt the visual properties of such kind of tissue. In this paper we propose a new method to address this problem. The proposed technique operates in two steps. As the me-dian nerve belongs to a hyperechoic region, the first step consists in the segmentation of this type of region using the k-means algorithm. The second step is more critical; it deals with nerve structure detection in noisy data. For that purpose, a new descriptor is developed. It combines tow methods median binary pattern (MBP) and Gabor filter to obtain the median Gabor binary pattern (MGBP). The method was tested on 173 ultrasound images of the median nerve obtained from three patients. The results showed that the proposed approach achieves better accuracy than the original MBP, Gabor descriptor and other popular descriptors
Surface reconstruction of wear in carpets by using a wavelet edge detector
Carpet manufacturers have wear labels assigned to their products by human experts who evaluate carpet samples subjected to accelerated wear in a test device. There is considerable industrial and academic interest in going from human to automated evaluation, which should be less cumbersome and more objective. In this paper, we present image analysis research on videos of carpet surfaces scanned with a 3D laser. The purpose is obtaining good depth Images for an automated system that should have a high percentage of correct assessments for a wide variety of carpets. The innovation is the use of a wavelet edge detector to obtain a more continuously defined surface shape. The evaluation is based on how well the algorithms allow a good linear ranking and a good discriminance of consecutive wear labels. The results show an improved linear ranking for most carpet types, for two carpet types the results are quite significant
AVEC 2011 – the first international Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge
Abstract. The Audio/Visual Emotion Challenge andWorkshop (AVEC 2011) is the first competition event aimed at comparison of multimedia processing and machine learning methods for automatic audio, visual and audiovisual emotion analysis, with all participants competing under strictly the same conditions. This paper first describes the challenge par-ticipation conditions. Next follows the data used – the SEMAINE corpus – and its partitioning into train, development, and test partitions for the challenge with labelling in four dimensions, namely activity, expectation, power, and valence. Further, audio and video baseline features are intro-duced as well as baseline results that use these features for the three sub-challenges of audio, video, and audiovisual emotion recognition
An edge-based approach for robust foreground detection
Foreground segmentation is an essential task in many image processing applications and a commonly used approach to obtain foreground objects from the background. Many techniques exist, but due to shadows and changes in illumination the segmentation of foreground objects from the background remains challenging. In this paper, we present a powerful framework for detections of moving objects in real-time video processing applications under various lighting changes. The novel approach is based on a combination of edge detection and recursive smoothing techniques.We use edge dependencies as statistical features of foreground and background regions and define the foreground as regions containing moving edges. The background is described by short- and long-term estimates. Experiments prove the robustness of our method in the presence of lighting changes in sequences compared to other widely used background subtraction techniques
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