Adaptive Sampling for Nonlinear Dimensionality Reduction Based on Manifold Learning

We make use of the non-intrusive dimensionality reduction method Isomap in order to emulate nonlinear parametric flow problems that are governed by the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations. Isomap is a manifold learning approach that provides a low-dimensional embedding space that is approximately isometric to the manifold that is assumed to be formed by the high-fidelity Navier-Stokes flow solutions under smooth variations of the inflow conditions. The focus of the work at hand is the adaptive construction and refinement of the Isomap emulator: We exploit the non-Euclidean Isomap metric to detect and fill up gaps in the sampling in the embedding space. The performance of the proposed manifold filling method will be illustrated by numerical experiments, where we consider nonlinear parameter-dependent steady-state Navier-Stokes flows in the transonic regime

Structural Material Property Tailoring Using Deep Neural Networks

Advances in robotics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are ushering in a new age of automation, as machines match or outperform human performance. Machine intelligence can enable businesses to improve performance by reducing errors, improving sensitivity, quality and speed, and in some cases achieving outcomes that go beyond current resource capabilities. Relevant applications include new product architecture design, rapid material characterization, and life-cycle management tied with a digital strategy that will enable efficient development of products from cradle to grave. In addition, there are also challenges to overcome that must be addressed through a major, sustained research effort that is based solidly on both inferential and computational principles applied to design tailoring of functionally optimized structures. Current applications of structural materials in the aerospace industry demand the highest quality control of material microstructure, especially for advanced rotational turbomachinery in aircraft engines in order to have the best tailored material property. In this paper, deep convolutional neural networks were developed to accurately predict processing-structure-property relations from materials microstructures images, surpassing current best practices and modeling efforts. The models automatically learn critical features, without the need for manual specification and/or subjective and expensive image analysis. Further, in combination with generative deep learning models, a framework is proposed to enable rapid material design space exploration and property identification and optimization. The implementation must take account of real-time decision cycles and the trade-offs between speed and accuracy

Action unit classification using active appearance models and conditional random fields

In this paper, we investigate to what extent modern computer vision and machine learning techniques can assist social psychology research by automatically recognizing facial expressions. To this end, we develop a system that automatically recognizes the action units defined in the facial action coding system (FACS). The system uses a sophisticated deformable template, which is known as the active appearance model, to model the appearance of faces. The model is used to identify the location of facial feature points, as well as to extract features from the face that are indicative of the action unit states. The detection of the presence of action units is performed by a time series classification model, the linear-chain conditional random field. We evaluate the performance of our system in experiments on a large data set of videos with posed and natural facial expressions. In the experiments, we compare the action units detected by our approach with annotations made by human FACS annotators. Our results show that the agreement between the system and human FACS annotators is higher than 90% and underlines the potential of modern computer vision and machine learning techniques to social psychology research. We conclude with some suggestions on how systems like ours can play an important role in research on social signals.MediamaticsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Texton-based analysis of paintings

The visual examination of paintings is traditionally performed by skilled art historians using their eyes. Recent advances in intelligent systems may support art historians in determining the authenticity or date of creation of paintings. In this paper, we propose a technique for the examination of brushstroke structure that views the wildly overlapping brushstrokes as texture. The analysis of the painting texture is performed with the help of a texton codebook, i.e., a codebook of small prototypical textural patches. The texton codebook can be learned from a collection of paintings. Our textural analysis technique represents paintings in terms of histograms that measure the frequency by which the textons in the codebook occur in the painting (so-called texton histograms). We present experiments that show the validity and effectiveness of our technique for textural analysis on a collection of digitized high-resolution reproductions of paintings by Van Gogh and his contemporaries. As texton histograms cannot be easily be interpreted by art experts, the paper proposes two approaches to visualize the results on the textural analysis. The first approach visualizes the similarities between the histogram representations of paintings by employing a recently proposed dimensionality reduction technique, called t-SNE. We show that t-SNE (applied on texton histograms) separates paintings created by Van Gogh from those created by other painters. In addition, the period of creation is faithfully reflected in the t-SNE visualizations. The second approach visualizes the similarities and differences between paintings by highlighting regions in a painting in which the textural structure of the painting is unusual. We illustrate the validity of this approach by means of an experiment in which we highlight regions in a painting by Monet that are not very “Van Gogh-like”. Taken together, we believe the tools developed in this study are capable of assisting for art historians in support of their study of paintings.MediamaticsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

AU Classification using AAMs and CRFs (extended abstract)

Automatic facial expression recognition is an important problem in social signal processing that has applications ranging from treatment of autistic children to monitoring of conflict situations [6]. In psychology, facial expressions are generally described using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS; [2]), in which each facial muscle is referred to as an action unit (AU) that is present (i.e. muscle contracted) or not present (i.e. muscle relaxed). We developed a system that automatically classifies AUs based on (variations in) facial texture and shape features. The feature extraction is performed with the help of an active appearance model [1]. Detection of AU presence is performed by training a newly developed structured prediction algorithm [5] on the features thus obtained. A complete description of our system was published in [4].Intelligent SystemsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc

Capturing appearance variation in active appearance models

The paper presents an extension of active appearance models (AAMs) that is better capable of dealing with the large variation in face appearance that is encountered in large multi-person face data sets. Instead of the traditional PCA-based texture model, our extended AAM employs a mixture of probabilistic PCA to describe texture variation, leading to a richer model. The resulting extended AAM can be efficiently fitted to held-out test images using an adapted version of the inverse compositional algorithm: the computational complexity scales linearly with the number of components in the texture mixture. The results of our experiments on three face data sets illustrate the merits of our extended AAM.MediamaticsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc