The HERON Project -- Multimedia Database Support for History and Human Sciences

The interdisciplinary HERON project investigates the impact of multimedia applications from the humanities, in particular heraldry, on future database technology. We present first evaluation results of querying image databases by visual content. Also the requirements of a digital workbench for art historians are described. Herewepresent an approach how to tackle the complex problem of exchanging multimedia documents over the internet

Eye Detection and Face Recognition Using Evolutionary Computation

. This chapter introduces evolutionary computation (EC) and genetic algorithms (GAs) for face recognition tasks. We first address eye detection as a visual routine and show how to implement it using a hybrid approach integrating learning and evolution. The goals of the novel architecture for eye detection are twofold: (i) derivation of the saliency attention map using consensus between navigation routines encoded as finite state automata (FSA) evolved using GAs and (ii) selection of optimal features using GAs and induction of DT (decision trees) for possibly classifying as eyes the most salient locations identified earlier. Experimental results, using 30 face images from the FERET data base show the feasibility of our hybrid approach. We then introduce the Optimal Projection Axes (OPA) method for face recognition. OPA works by searching through all the rotations defined over whitened Principal Component Analysis (PCA) subspaces. Whitening, which does not preserve norms, plays a dual ro..