Exploiting surroundedness for saliency detection: a boolean map approach

We demonstrate the usefulness of surroundedness for eye fixation prediction by proposing a Boolean Map based Saliency model (BMS). In our formulation, an image is characterized by a set of binary images, which are generated by randomly thresholding the image's feature maps in a whitened feature space. Based on a Gestalt principle of figure-ground segregation, BMS computes a saliency map by discovering surrounded regions via topological analysis of Boolean maps. Furthermore, we draw a connection between BMS and the Minimum Barrier Distance to provide insight into why and how BMS can properly captures the surroundedness cue via Boolean maps. The strength of BMS is verified by its simplicity, efficiency and superior performance compared with 10 state-of-the-art methods on seven eye tracking benchmark datasets.US National Science Foundation; 1059218; 1029430http://cs-people.bu.edu/jmzhang/BMS/BMS_iccv13_preprint.pdfAccepted manuscrip

Large size LYSO crystals for future high energy physics experiments

Because of their high stopping power and fast bright scintillation, cerium doped silicate based heavy crystal scintillators, such as GSO, LSO, and LYSO, have been developed for medical instruments. Their applications in high energy and nuclear physics, however, are limited by lacking high quality crystals in sufficiently large size. The optical and scintillation properties, including the transmittance, emission and excitation spectra and the light output, decay kinetics and light response uniformity, as well as their degradation under /spl gamma/-ray irradiation were measured for two long (2.5/spl times/2.5/spl times/20 cm) LYSO samples from CPI and Saint-Gobain, and were compared to a BGO sample of the same size from SIC. Possible applications for crystal calorimetry in future high energy and nuclear physics experiments are discussed

Visual saliency computation for image analysis

Visual saliency computation is about detecting and understanding salient regions and elements in a visual scene. Algorithms for visual saliency computation can give clues to where people will look in images, what objects are visually prominent in a scene, etc. Such algorithms could be useful in a wide range of applications in computer vision and graphics. In this thesis, we study the following visual saliency computation problems. 1) Eye Fixation Prediction. Eye fixation prediction aims to predict where people look in a visual scene. For this problem, we propose a Boolean Map Saliency (BMS) model which leverages the global surroundedness cue using a Boolean map representation. We draw a theoretic connection between BMS and the Minimum Barrier Distance (MBD) transform to provide insight into our algorithm. Experiment results show that BMS compares favorably with state-of-the-art methods on seven benchmark datasets. 2) Salient Region Detection. Salient region detection entails computing a saliency map that highlights the regions of dominant objects in a scene. We propose a salient region detection method based on the Minimum Barrier Distance (MBD) transform. We present a fast approximate MBD transform algorithm with an error bound analysis. Powered by this fast MBD transform algorithm, our method can run at about 80 FPS and achieve state-of-the-art performance on four benchmark datasets. 3) Salient Object Detection. Salient object detection targets at localizing each salient object instance in an image. We propose a method using a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model for proposal generation and a novel subset optimization formulation for bounding box filtering. In experiments, our subset optimization formulation consistently outperforms heuristic bounding box filtering baselines, such as Non-maximum Suppression, and our method substantially outperforms previous methods on three challenging datasets. 4) Salient Object Subitizing. We propose a new visual saliency computation task, called Salient Object Subitizing, which is to predict the existence and the number of salient objects in an image using holistic cues. To this end, we present an image dataset of about 14K everyday images which are annotated using an online crowdsourcing marketplace. We show that an end-to-end trained CNN subitizing model can achieve promising performance without requiring any localization process. A method is proposed to further improve the training of the CNN subitizing model by leveraging synthetic images. 5) Top-down Saliency Detection. Unlike the aforementioned tasks, top-down saliency detection entails generating task-specific saliency maps. We propose a weakly supervised top-down saliency detection approach by modeling the top-down attention of a CNN image classifier. We propose Excitation Backprop and the concept of contrastive attention to generate highly discriminative top-down saliency maps. Our top-down saliency detection method achieves superior performance in weakly supervised localization tasks on challenging datasets. The usefulness of our method is further validated in the text-to-region association task, where our method provides state-of-the-art performance using only weakly labeled web images for training

The boolean map distance: theory and efficient computation

We propose a novel distance function, the boolean map distance (BMD), that defines the distance between two elements in an image based on the probability that they belong to different components after thresholding the image by a randomly selected threshold value. This concept has been explored in a number of recent publications, and has been proposed as an approximation of another distance function, the minimum barrier distance (MBD). The purpose of this paper is to introduce the BMD as a useful distance function in its own right. As such it shares many of the favorable properties of the MBD, while offering some additional advantages such as more efficient distance transform computation and straightforward extension to multi-channel images

Response to Comments on PCA Based Hurst Exponent Estimator for fBm Signals Under Disturbances

In this response, we try to give a repair to our previous proof for PCA Based Hurst Exponent Estimator for fBm Signals by using orthogonal projection. Moreover, we answer the question raised recently: If a centered Gaussian process $G_t$ admits two series expansions on different Riesz bases, we may possibly study the asymptotic behavior of one eigenvalue sequence from the knowledge on the asymptotic behaviors of another.Comment: This is a response for a mistake in Li Li, Jianming Hu, Yudong Chen, Yi Zhang, PCA based Hurst exponent estimator for fBm signals under disturbances, IEEE Transactions on Signal Processing, vol. 57, no. 7, pp. 2840-2846, 200

Mining heterogeneous information graph for health status classification

In the medical domain, there exists a large volume of data from multiple sources such as electronic health records, general health examination results, and surveys. The data contain useful information reflecting people’s health and provides great opportunities for studies to improve the quality of healthcare. However, how to mine these data effectively and efficiently still remains a critical challenge. In this paper, we propose an innovative classification model for knowledge discovery from patients’ personal health repositories. By based on analytics of massive data in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the study builds a classification model to classify patients’health status and reveal the specific disease potentially suffered by the patient. This paper makes significant contributions to the advancement of knowledge in data mining with an innovative classification model specifically crafted for domain-based data. Moreover, this research contributes to the healthcare community by providing a deep understanding of people’s health with accessibility to the patterns in various observations

A Radiation Damage and Recovery Study for Lead Tungstate Crystals from BTCP and SIC

This paper presents result of a study on radiation damage and recovery for lead tungstate crystals produced at BTCP and SIC. Correlations were observed between initial light output and initial longitudinal transmittance at 360 nm, between the loss of longitudinal transmittance at 440 nm and the loss of light output, and between radiation damages levels at different dose rates. No correlations, however, were found between crystal’s initial optical properties and radiation hardness. Excellent linearity was observed between the variations of crystal’s light output and its longitudinal transmittance at 440 nm in several cycles of irradiation followed by recovery, indicating these PWO crystals can be monitored in situ at LHC