Rationalising the Renormalisation Method of Kanatani

The renormalisation technique of Kanatani is intended to iteratively minimise a cost function of a certain form while avoiding systematic bias inherent in the common method of minimisation due to Sampson. Within the computer vision community, the technique has generally proven difficult to absorb. This work presents an alternative derivation of the technique, and places it in the context of other approaches. We first show that the minimiser of the cost function must satisfy a special variational equation. A Newton-like, fundamental numerical scheme is presented with the property that its theoretical limit coincides with the minimiser. Standard statistical techniques are then employed to derive afresh several renormalisation schemes. The fundamental scheme proves pivotal in the rationalising of the renormalisation and other schemes, and enables us to show that the renormalisation schemes do not have as their theoretical limit the desired minimiser. The various minimisation schemes are finally subjected to a comparative performance analysis under controlled conditions.     

Closed loop parameter identifiability and adaptive control of a linear stochastic system

We show that if the parameters of a linear stochastic control system are identifiable using a persistently existing input then the same systems remains parameter identifiable if the system operates under closed loop in a certain way. We assume that the controller itself depends on the test value of the system parameters, and as usual the control signal is dithered. The estimation problem is formulated as the problem of minimizing an appropriate asymptotic cost function. It is shown that a suitable modification of the gradient of the cost function converts our problem into another problem for which Ljung's scheme can be applied. Thus the theorem provides a general method for the solution of the local adaptive control problem.     

Model-based Crowd Behaviours in Human-solution Space

Realistic crowd simulation has been pursued for decades, but it still necessitates tedious human labour and a lot of trial and error. The majority of currently used crowd modelling is either empirical (model-based) or data-driven (model-free). Model-based methods cannot fit observed data precisely, whereas model-free methods are limited by the availability/quality of data and are uninterpretable. In this paper, we aim at taking advantage of both model-based and data-driven approaches. In order to accomplish this, we propose a new simulation framework built on a physics-based model that is designed to be data-friendly. Both the general prior knowledge about crowds encoded by the physics-based model and the specific real-world crowd data at hand jointly influence the system dynamics. With a multi-granularity physics-based model, the framework combines microscopic and macroscopic motion control. Each simulation step is formulated as an energy optimization problem, where the minimizer is the desired crowd behaviour. In contrast to traditional optimization-based methods which seek the theoretical minimizer, we designed an acceleration-aware data-driven scheme to compute the minimizer from real-world data in order to achieve higher realism by parameterizing both velocity and acceleration. Experiments demonstrate that our method can produce crowd animations that are more realistically behaved in a variety of scales and scenarios when compared to the earlier methods.     

Discounted Iterative Adaptive Critic Designs With Novel Stability Analysis for Tracking Control

The core task of tracking control is to make the controlled plant track a desired trajectory. The traditional performance index used in previous studies cannot eliminate completely the tracking error as the number of time steps increases. In this paper, a new cost function is introduced to develop the value-iteration-based adaptive critic framework to solve the tracking control problem. Unlike the regulator problem, the iterative value function of tracking control problem cannot be regarded as a Lyapunov function. A novel stability analysis method is developed to guarantee that the tracking error converges to zero. The discounted iterative scheme under the new cost function for the special case of linear systems is elaborated. Finally, the tracking performance of the present scheme is demonstrated by numerical results and compared with those of the traditional approaches.      

Finite dimensional approximation and Newton-based algorithm for stochastic approximation in Hilbert space

This paper presents a finite dimensional approach to stochastic approximation in infinite dimensional Hilbert space. The problem was motivated by applications in the field of stochastic programming wherein we minimize a convex function defined on a Hilbert space. We define a finite dimensional approximation to the Hilbert space minimizer. A justification is provided for this finite dimensional approximation. Estimates of the dimensionality needed are also provided. The algorithm presented is a two time-scale Newton-based stochastic approximation scheme that lives in this finite dimensional space. Since the finite dimensional problem can be prohibitively large dimensional, we operate our Newton scheme in a projected, randomly chosen smaller dimensional subspace.     

Primal explicit max margin feature selection for nonlinear support vector machines

Embedding feature selection in nonlinear support vector machines (SVMs) leads to a challenging non-convex minimization problem, which can be prone to suboptimal solutions. This paper develops an effective algorithm to directly solve the embedded feature selection primal problem. We use a trust-region method, which is better suited for non-convex optimization compared to line-search methods, and guarantees convergence to a minimizer. We devise an alternating optimization approach to tackle the problem efficiently, breaking it down into a convex subproblem, corresponding to standard SVM optimization, and a non-convex subproblem for feature selection. Importantly, we show that a straightforward alternating optimization approach can be susceptible to saddle point solutions. We propose a novel technique, which shares an explicit margin variable to overcome saddle point convergence and improve solution quality. Experiment results show our method outperforms the state-of-the-art embedded SVM feature selection method, as well as other leading filter and wrapper approaches.     

A Framework for Moving Least Squares Method with Total Variation Minimizing Regularization

In this paper, we propose a computational framework to incorporate regularization terms used in regularity based variational methods into least squares based methods. In the regularity based variational approach, the image is a result of the competition between the fidelity term and a regularity term, while in the least squares based approach the image is computed as a minimizer to a constrained least squares problem. The total variation minimizing denoising scheme is an exemplary scheme of the former approach with the total variation term as the regularity term, while the moving least squares method is an exemplary scheme of the latter approach. Both approaches have appeared in the literature of image processing independently. By putting schemes from both approaches into a single framework, the resulting scheme benefits from the advantageous properties of both parties. As an example, in this paper, we propose a new denoising scheme, where the total variation minimizing term is adopted by the moving least squares method. The proposed scheme is based on splitting methods, since they make it possible to express the minimization problem as a linear system. In this paper, we employed the split Bregman scheme for its simplicity. The resulting denoising scheme overcomes the drawbacks of both schemes, i.e., the staircase artifact in the total variation minimizing based denoising and the noisy artifact in the moving least squares based denoising method. The proposed computational framework can be utilized to put various combinations of both approaches with different properties together.     

传感器网络中的分布式滚动时域状态估计

利用分布式滚动时域方法对无线传感器网络的状态估计问题进行研究,给出了基于量化测量值的滚动时域估计算法。在无线传感器网络的环境下处理分布式状态估计问题时,减少通信的成本是非常重要的一个环节,需要将观测值量化后再传送。以往的滚动时域估计方法无法处理量化观测值的状态估计问题,而本文的方法考虑了最严格的观测值量化情况即传感器只发送一个比特至融合中心的状态估计问题。与其它传感器网络中的状态估计方法相比,该方法减少了每一步的计算量。仿真结果验证了该算法的有效性。     

On adaptive boundary control for stochastic parabolic systems withunknown potential coefficient

An adaptive boundary control problem for a stochastic heat diffusion equation is studied. The considered system contains an unknown potential coefficient which is a function of the spatial variables. The estimation algorithm for the unknown potential coefficient is proposed by using the stochastic approximation technique. After showing the strong consistency of the estimated parameter, the cost for the adaptive control scheme presented here is shown to converge to the optimal ergodic cost. Finally some numerical examples are shown     

Practical output tracking of switched nonlinear systems in p-normal form with unstable subsystems

This paper studies practical output tracking of switched nonlinear systems in p-normal form. No solvability of the practical output tracking problem for subsystems is required. A constructive scheme to solve the problem for a switched nonlinear system is set up by exploiting the single Lyapunov function method and the tool of adding a power integrator. Also, we design a proper switching law and construct state-feedback controllers of subsystems. A two inverted pendulums as a practical example, which cannot be handled by the existing approaches, illustrates our theoretical result.