Machine Learning is the study of methods for programming computers to learn. Computers are applied to a wide range of tasks, and for most of these it is relatively easy for programmers to design and implement the necessary software. However, there are many tasks for which this is difficult or impossible. These can be divided into four general categories. First, there are problems for which there exist no human experts. For example, in modern automated manufacturing facilities, there is a need to predict machine failures before they occur by analyzing sensor readings. Because the machines are new, there are no human experts who can be interviewed by a programmer to provide the knowledge necessary to build a computer system. A machine learning system can study recorded data and subsequent machine failures and learn prediction rules. Second, there are problems where human experts exist, but where they are unable to explain their expertise. This is the case in many perceptual tasks, such as speech recognition, hand-writing recognition, and natural language understanding. Virtually all humans exhibit expert-level abilities on these tasks, but none of them can describe the detailed steps that they follow as they perform them. Fortunately, humans can provide machines with examples of the inputs and correct outputs for these tasks, so machine learning algorithms can learn to map the inputs to the outputs. Third, there are problems where phenomena are changing rapidly. In finance, for example, people would like to predict the future behavior of the stock market, of consumer purchases, or of exchange rates. These behaviors change frequently, so that even if a programmer could construct a good predictive computer program, it would need to be rewritten frequently. A learning program can relieve the programmer of this burden by constantly modifying and tuning a set of learned prediction rules. Fourth, there are applications that need to be customized for each computer user separately. Consider, for example, a program to filter unwanted electronic mail messages. Different users will need different filters. It is unreasonable to expect each user to program his or her own rules, and it is infeasible to provide every user with a software engineer to keep the rules up-to-date. A machine learning system can learn which mail messages the user rejects and maintain the filtering rules automatically. Machine learning addresses many of the same research questions as the fields of statistics, data mining, and psychology, but with differences of emphasis. Statistics focuses on understanding the phenomena that have generated the data, often with the goal of testing different hypotheses about those phenomena. Data mining seeks to find patterns in the data that are understandable by people. Psychological studies of human learning aspire to understand the mechanisms underlying the various learning behaviors exhibited by people (concept learning, skill acquisition, strategy change, etc.).

Machine learning

In the real world, a realistic setting for computer vision or multimedia recognition problems is that we have some classes containing lots of training data and many classes contain a small amount of training data. Therefore, how to use frequent classes to help learning rare classes for which it is harder to collect the training data is an open question. Learning with Shared Information is an emerging topic in machine learning, computer vision and multimedia analysis. There are different level of components that can be shared during concept modeling and machine learning stages, such as sharing generic object parts, sharing attributes, sharing transformations, sharing regularization parameters and sharing training examples, etc. Regarding the specific methods, multi-task learning, transfer learning and deep learning can be seen as using different strategies to share information. These learning with shared information methods are very effective in solving real-world large-scale problems. This special issue aims at gathering the recent advances in learning with shared information methods and their applications in computer vision and multimedia analysis. Both state-of-the-art works, as well as literature reviews, are welcome for submission. Papers addressing interesting real-world computer vision and multimedia applications are especially encouraged. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:  • Multi-task learning or transfer learning for large-scale computer vision and multimedia analysis • Deep learning for large-scale computer vision and multimedia analysis • Multi-modal approach for large-scale computer vision and multimedia analysis • Different sharing strategies, e.g., sharing generic object parts, sharing attributes, sharing transformations, sharing regularization parameters and sharing training examples, • Real-world computer vision and multimedia applications based on learning with shared information, e.g., event detection, object recognition, object detection, action recognition, human head pose estimation, object tracking, location-based services, semantic indexing. • New datasets and metrics to evaluate the benefit of the proposed sharing ability for the specific computer vision or multimedia problem. • Survey papers regarding the topic of learning with shared information.  Authors who are unsure whether their planned submission is in scope may contact the guest editors prior to the submission deadline with an abstract, in order to receive feedback.

IEEE transactions on pattern analysis and machine intelligence

A mobile terminal including a body; a touchscreen provided to a front and extending to side of the body and configured to display content; and a controller configured to detect one side of the body comes into contact with one side of an external terminal, display a first area on the touchscreen corresponding to a contact area of the body and the external terminal and a second area including the content, receive an input of moving the content displayed in the second area to the first area, display the content in the first area, and share the content in the first area with the external terminal.

Mobile terminal and method for controlling the same

Journal of the American Statistical Association: William S. Cleveland, Marylyn E. McGill and Robert McGill, “The shape parameter for a two variable graph” 83 (1988) 289–300

Robotics and autonomous systems

Remote photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a non-contact technique for measuring vital physiological signs, such as heart rate (HR) and respiratory rate (RR). HR is a medical index which is widely used in health monitoring and emotion detection applications. Therefore, HR measurement with rPPG methods offers a convenient and non-invasive method for these applications. The selection of Region Of Interest (ROI) is a critical first step of many rPPG techniques to obtain reliable pulse signals. The ROI should contain as many skin pixels as possible with a minimum of non-skin pixels. Moreover, it has been shown that rPPG signal is not distributed homogeneously on skin. Some skin regions contain more rPPG signal than others, mainly for physiological reasons. In this paper, we propose to explicitly favor areas where the information is more predominant using a spatially weighted average of skin pixels based on a trained model. The proposed method has been compared to several state of the art ROI segmentation methods using a public database, namely the UBFC-RPPG dataset (Bobbia et al., 2017). We have shown that this modification in how the spatial averaging of the ROI pixels is calculated can significantly increase the final performance of heart rate estimate.

Model-based Region of Interest Segmentation for Remote Photoplethysmography

Remote Photoplethysmography (rPPG) is a technique that consists in estimating physiological parameters such as heart rate from live or recorded video sequences taken by conventional camera or even webcams. This technique is increasingly used in many application fields thanks to its simplicity and affordability. The basic idea is that the arterial blood flow shows regularity due to the heartbeat. This regularity is manifested by very small periodic variations in the color of the skin, which can be isolated and quantified by signal and image processing methods. In this context, Independent Component Analysis (ICA) is largely used to separate the signal due to arterial flow from signals from other sources (skin, lighting, etc.). However, basic ICA is considered blind, i.e. it uses no a priori knowledge of the sources leading to issues in identification of the separated sources. We propose the constrained ICA (cICA) method where we take advantage of the knowledge about the periodicity of the blood flow signal along with the CHROM constraint. The periodicity is implemented by means of autocorrelation maximization and the CHROM constraint helps to automatically set some parameters. We tested our method with the MMSE-HR database for the measurement of rPPG where it showed better performance compared to conventional ICA and other state of the art methods in terms of accuracy and robustness.

Remote Photoplethysmography measurement using constrained ICA

PROBLEM TO BE SOLVED: To provide an acoustic processing device and an acoustic processing method that can improve the performances of identification of sound sources.SOLUTION: A sound source localization part estimates the direction of a sound source from acoustic signals of a plurality of channels. A sound source separation part separates the acoustic signals of the channels into acoustic signals according to sound sources, which indicate the components of the sound sources. A sound source identification part determines the types of the sound sources for the acoustic signals according to the sound sources, based on the directions of the sound sources estimated by the sound source localization part, using model data on the relation between the directions of the sound sources and the types of the sound sources. An embodiment of the present invention can be implemented as an acoustic processing device or an acoustic processing method.SELECTED DRAWING: Figure 1

Acoustic processing device and acoustic processing method

This paper investigates sound source mapping in a real environment using a mobile robot. Our approach is based on audio ray tracing which integrates occupancy grids and sound source localization using a laser range finder and a microphone array. Previous audio ray tracing approaches rely on all observed rays and grids. As such observation errors caused by sound reflection, sound occlusion, wall occlusion, sounds at misdetected grids, etc. can significantly degrade the ability to locate sound sources in a map. A three-layered selective audio ray tracing mechanism is proposed in this work. The first layer conducts frame-based unreliable ray rejection (sensory rejection) considering sound reflection and wall occlusion. The second layer introduces triangulation and audio tracing to detect falsely detected sound sources, rejecting audio rays associated to these misdetected sounds sources (short-term rejection). A third layer is tasked with rejecting rays using the whole history (long-term rejection) to disambiguate sound occlusion. Experimental results under various situations are presented, which proves the effectiveness of our method.

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Robust sound source mapping using three-layered selective audio rays for mobile robots

In this paper, we present our work in close-distance non-verbal communication with tabletop robot Haru through hand gestural interaction. We implemented a novel hand gestural understanding system by training a machine-learning architecture for real-time hand gesture recognition with the Leap Motion. The proposed system is activated based on the velocity of a user's palm and index finger movement, and subsequently labels the detected movement segments under an early classification scheme. Our system is able to combine multiple gesture labels for recognition of consecutive gestures without clear movement boundaries. System evaluation is conducted on data simulating real human-robot interaction conditions, taking into account relevant performance variables such as movement style, timing and posture. Our results show robustness in hand gesture classification performance under variant conditions. We furthermore examine system behavior under sequential data input, paving the way towards seamless and natural real-time close-distance hand-gestural communication in the future.

Keisuke Nakamura

Papers

Model-based Region of Interest Segmentation for Remote Photoplethysmography

Remote Photoplethysmography measurement using constrained ICA

Acoustic processing device and acoustic processing method

Robust sound source mapping using three-layered selective audio rays for mobile robots

Robust Real-Time Hand Gestural Recognition for Non-Verbal Communication with Tabletop Robot Haru