Data Mining Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques

MUCKE aims to mine a large volume of images, to structure them conceptually and to use this conceptual structuring in order to improve large-scale image retrieval. The last decade witnessed important progress concerning low-level image representations. However, there are a number problems which need to be solved in order to unleash the full potential of image mining in applications. The central problem with low-level representations is the mismatch between them and the human interpretation of image content. This problem can be instantiated, for instance, by the incapability of existing descriptors to capture spatial relationships between the concepts represented or by their incapability to convey an explanation of why two images are similar in a content-based image retrieval framework. We start by assessing existing local descriptors for image classification and by proposing to use co-occurrence matrices to better capture spatial relationships in images. The main focus in MUCKE is on cleaning large scale Web image corpora and on proposing image representations which are closer to the human interpretation of images. Consequently, we introduce methods which tackle these two problems and compare results to state of the art methods. Note: some aspects of this deliverable are withheld at this time as they are pending review. Please contact the authors for a preview.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel2/4524/12820/00592460.pdf

Image Processing

A survey of content-based image retrieval with high-level semantics

An experimental comparison of a large number of different image descriptors for content-based image retrieval is presented. Many of the papers describing new techniques and descriptors for content-based image retrieval describe their newly proposed methods as most appropriate without giving an in-depth comparison with all methods that were proposed earlier. In this paper, we first give an overview of a large variety of features for content-based image retrieval and compare them quantitatively on four different tasks: stock photo retrieval, personal photo collection retrieval, building retrieval, and medical image retrieval. For the experiments, five different, publicly available image databases are used and the retrieval performance of the features is analyzed in detail. This allows for a direct comparison of all features considered in this work and furthermore will allow a comparison of newly proposed features to these in the future. Additionally, the correlation of the features is analyzed, which opens the way for a simple and intuitive method to find an initial set of suitable features for a new task. The article concludes with recommendations which features perform well for what type of data. Interestingly, the often used, but very simple, color histogram performs well in the comparison and thus can be recommended as a simple baseline for many applications.

/pdf/features-for-image-retrieval-an-experimental-comparison-2j58q4zw3d.pdf

Features for image retrieval: an experimental comparison

Inference and Disputed Authorship: The Federalist

One of the most significant differences between automatic sign language recognition (ASLR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) is due to the computer vision problems, whereas the corresponding problems in speech signal processing have been solved due to intensive research in the last 30 years. We present our approach where we start from a large vocabulary speech recognition system to profit from the insights that have been obtained in ASR research. The system developed is able to recognize sentences of continuous sign language independent of the speaker. The features used are obtained from standard video cameras without any special data acquisition devices. In particular, we focus on feature and model combination techniques applied in ASR, and the usage of pronunciation and language models (LM) in sign language. These techniques can be used for all kind of sign language recognition systems, and for many video analysis problems where the temporal context is important, e.g. for action or gesture recognition. On a publicly available benchmark database consisting of 201 sentences and 3 signers, we can achieve a 17% WER.

/pdf/speech-recognition-techniques-for-a-sign-language-1fa5ipsy42.pdf

Speech recognition techniques for a sign language recognition system.

We present an approach to automatically recognize sign language and translate it into a spoken language. A system to address these tasks is created based on state-ofthe-art techniques from statistical machine translation, speech recognition, and image processing research. Such a system is necessary for communication between deaf and hearing people. The communication is otherwise nearly impossible due to missing sign language skills on the hearing side, and the low reading and writing skills on the deaf side. As opposed to most current approaches, which focus on the recognition of isolated signs only, we present a system that recognizes complete sentences in sign language. Similar to speech recognition, we have to deal with temporal sequences. Instead of the acoustic signal in speech recognition, we process a video signal as input. Therefore, we use a speech recognition system to obtain a textual representation of the signed sentences. This intermediate representation is then fed into a statistical machine translation system to create a translation into a spoken language. To achieve good results, some particularities of sign languages are considered in both systems. We use a publicly available corpus to show the performance of the proposed system and report very promising results.

/pdf/spoken-language-processing-techniques-for-sign-language-4mqiuyc5um.pdf

Spoken language processing techniques for sign language recognition and translation

Brain tissue segmentation in MR images based on a hybrid of MRF and social algorithms.

In this paper, we employ a zero-order local deformation model to model the visual variability of video streams of American sign language (ASL) words. We discuss two possible ways of combining the model with the tangent distance used to compensate for affine global transformations. The integration of the deformation model into our recognition system improves the error rate on a database of ASL words from 22.2% to 17.2%.

Combination of tangent distance and an image distortion model for appearance-based sign language recognition

/pdf/combination-of-local-descriptors-and-global-features-for-cusy8z8a75.pdf

Morteza Zahedi

Papers

Speech recognition techniques for a sign language recognition system.

Spoken language processing techniques for sign language recognition and translation

Brain tissue segmentation in MR images based on a hybrid of MRF and social algorithms.

Combination of tangent distance and an image distortion model for appearance-based sign language recognition

Combination of Local Descriptors and Global Features for Leaf Recognition