Greedy Algorithms for Approximating the Diameter of Machine Learning Datasets in Multidimensional Euclidean Space: Experimental Results

Finding the diameter of a dataset in multidimensional Euclidean space is a well-established problem, with well-known algorithms. However, most of the algorithms found in the literature do not scale well with large values of data dimension, so the time complexity grows exponentially in most cases, which makes these algorithms impractical. Therefore, we implemented 4 simple greedy algorithms to be used for approximating the diameter of a multidimensional dataset; these are based on minimum/maximum l2 norms, hill climbing search, Tabu search and Beam search approaches, respectively. The time complexity of the implemented algorithms is near-linear, as they scale near-linearly with data size and its dimensions. The results of the experiments (conducted on different machine learning data sets) prove the efficiency of the implemented algorithms and can therefore be recommended for finding the diameter to be used by different machine learning applications when needed

Visual Passwords Using Automatic Lip Reading

This paper presents a visual passwords system to increase security. The system depends mainly on recognizing the speaker using the visual speech signal alone. The proposed scheme works in two stages: setting the visual password stage and the verification stage. At the setting stage the visual passwords system request the user to utter a selected password, a video recording of the user face is captured, and processed by a special words-based VSR system which extracts a sequence of feature vectors. In the verification stage, the same procedure is executed, the features will be sent to be compared with the stored visual password. The proposed scheme has been evaluated using a video database of 20 different speakers (10 females and 10 males), and 15 more males in another video database with different experiment sets. The evaluation has proved the system feasibility, with average error rate in the range of 7.63% to 20.51% at the worst tested scenario, and therefore, has potential to be a practical approach with the support of other conventional authentication methods such as the use of usernames and passwords

Visual Speech Recognition

Lip reading is used to understand or interpret speech without hearing it, a technique especially mastered by people with hearing difficulties. The ability to lip read enables a person with a hearing impairment to communicate with others and to engage in social activities, which otherwise would be difficult. Recent advances in the fields of computer vision, pattern recognition, and signal processing has led to a growing interest in automating this challenging task of lip reading. Indeed, automating the human ability to lip read, a process referred to as visual speech recognition (VSR) (or sometimes speech reading), could open the door for other novel related applications. VSR has received a great deal of attention in the last decade for its potential use in applications such as human-computer interaction (HCI), audio-visual speech recognition (AVSR), speaker recognition, talking heads, sign language recognition and video surveillance. Its main aim is to recognise spoken word(s) by using only the visual signal that is produced during speech. Hence, VSR deals with the visual domain of speech and involves image processing, artificial intelligence, object detection, pattern recognition, statistical modelling, etc.Comment: Speech and Language Technologies (Book), Prof. Ivo Ipsic (Ed.), ISBN: 978-953-307-322-4, InTech (2011

An improved discrete cosine transformation block based scheme for copy-move image forgery detection

Copy-moved forgery is a common method to manipulate images. Several attempts of image forgery have been discovered and involves a region been duplicated and copied and pasted on another region of the same image in other to achieve selfish gain. Generally, there are two classification of copy-move forgery detection technique such as the block-based and key point-based. The block-based division is mostly used and divides image into blocks during the stage of image pre-processing before features are extracted, whereas key-point based technique skips the division of image into blocks and directly extracts different local feature from the image. In this paper, we review various block based and key point approach which has been proposed by various researchers. There is a problem of achieving a balance between improving the detection accuracy and having minimal computational complexity. The proposed technique is based on an improved DCT based copy-move image forgery detection (IDB-CFD), which involves using an octagonal block to reduce the number of features for matching, thereby improving detection accuracy while having minimal complexity. The analysis of this work as compared to previous proposed works which is based on a robust detection algorithm for copy-move image forgery (RDA-CF) and involves using circle block to reduce the number of features, results show that previous work represents about 79% of the quantized DCT coefficients on each image block and this proposed work represents about 85% of quantized DCT coefficients, therefore, recovery of about 6% more features using the IDB-CFD technique was observed as the improvement over the previously proposed RDA-CF