Collaborative representation with reduced residual for face recognition

Collaboration representation-based classification (CRC) was proposed as an alternative approach to the sparse representation method with similar efficiency. The CRC is essentially a competition scheme for the training samples to compete with each other in representing the test sample, and the training class with the minimum representation residual from the test sample wins the competition in the classification. However, the representation error is usually calculated based on the Euclidean distance between a test sample and the weighted sum of all the same-class samples. This paper exploits alternative methods of calculating the representation error in the CRC methods to reduce the representation residual in a more optimal way, so that the sample classes compete with each other in a closer range to represent the test sample. A large number of face recognition experiments on three face image databases show that the CRC methods with optimized presentation residual achieve better performance than the original CRC, and the maximum improvement in classification accuracy is up to 12 %.     

Stability-based preference selection in affinity propagation

Recently, as one of the most popular exemplar-based clustering algorithms, affinity propagation has attracted a great amount of attention in various fields. The advantages of affinity propagation include the efficiency, insensitivity to cluster initialization and capability of finding clusters with less error. However, one shortcoming of the affinity propagation algorithm is that, the clustering results generated by affinity propagation strongly depend on the selection of exemplar preferences, which is a challenging model selection task. To tackle this problem, this paper investigates the clustering stability of affinity propagation for automatically selecting appropriate exemplar preferences. The basic idea is to define a novel stability measure for affinity propagation, based on which we can select exemplar preferences that generate the most stable clustering results. Consequently, the proposed approach is termed stability-based affinity propagation (SAP). Experimental results conducted on extensive real-world datasets have validated the effectiveness of the proposed SAP algorithm.     

Research of semi-supervised spectral clustering algorithm based on pairwise constraints

Clustering is often considered as an unsupervised data analysis method, but making full use of the prior information in the process of clustering will significantly improve the performance of the clustering algorithm. Spectral clustering algorithm can well use the prior pairwise constraint information to cluster and has become a new hot spot of machine learning research in recent years. In this paper, we propose an effective clustering algorithm, called a semi-supervised spectral clustering algorithm based on pairwise constraints, in which the similarity matrix of data points is adjusted and optimized by pairwise constraints. The experiments on real-world data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of this algorithm.     

A novel self-adaptive extreme learning machine based on affinity propagation for radial basis function neural network

In this paper, a novel self-adaptive extreme learning machine (ELM) based on affinity propagation (AP) is proposed to optimize the radial basis function neural network (RBFNN). As is well known, the parameters of original ELM which developed by G.-B. Huang are randomly determined. However, that cannot objectively obtain a set of optimal parameters of RBFNN trained by ELM algorithm for different realistic datasets. The AP algorithm can automatically produce a set of clustering centers for the different datasets. According to the results of AP, we can, respectively, get the cluster number and the radius value of each cluster. In that case, the above cluster number and radius value can be used to initialize the number and widths of hidden layer neurons in RBFNN and that is also the parameters of coefficient matrix H of ELM. This may successfully avoid the subjectivity prior knowledge and randomness of training RBFNN. Experimental results show that the method proposed in this thesis has a more powerful generalization capability than conventional ELM for an RBFNN.     

Wavelet twin support vector machine

Twin support vector machine (TWSVM) is a research hot spot in the field of machine learning in recent years. Although its performance is better than traditional support vector machine (SVM), the kernel selection problem still affects the performance of TWSVM directly. Wavelet analysis has the characteristics of multivariate interpolation and sparse change, and it is suitable for the analysis of local signals and the detection of transient signals. The wavelet kernel function based on wavelet analysis can approximate any nonlinear functions. Based on the wavelet kernel features and the kernel function selection problem, wavelet twin support vector machine (WTWSVM) is proposed by this paper. It introduces the wavelet kernel function into TWSVM to make the combination of wavelet analysis techniques and TWSVM come true. The experimental results indicate that WTWSVM is feasible, and it improves the classification accuracy and generalization ability of TWSVM significantly.     

Relative image similarity learning with contextual information for Internet cross-media retrieval

With the fast explosive rate of the amount of image data on the Internet, how to efficiently utilize them in the cross-media scenario becomes an urgent problem. Images are usually accompanied with contextual textual information. These two heterogeneous modalities are mutually reinforcing to make the Internet content more informative. In most cases, visual information can be regarded as an enhanced content of the textual document. To make image-to-image similarity being more consistent with document-to-document similarity, this paper proposes a method to learn image similarities according to the relations of the accompanied textual documents. More specifically, instead of using the static quantitative relations, rank-based learning procedure by employing structural SVM is adopted in this paper, and the ranking structure is established by comparing the relative relations of textual information. The learning results are in more accordance with the human’s recognition. The proposed method in this paper can be used not only for the image-to-image retrieval, but also for cross-modality multimedia, where a query expansion framework is proposed to get more satisfactory results. Extensive experimental evaluations on large scale Internet dataset validate the performance of the proposed methods.     

Nonlinear multiobjective model-predictive control scheme for wastewater treatment process

A nonlinear multiobjective model-predictive control (NMMPC) scheme, consisting of self-organizing radial basis function (SORBF) neural network prediction and multiobjective gradient optimization, is proposed for wastewater treatment process (WWTP) in this paper. The proposed NMMPC comprises a SORBF neural network identifier and a multiple objectives controller via the multi-gradient method (MGM). The SORBF neural network with concurrent structure and parameter learning is developed as a model identifier for approximating on-line the states of WWTP. Then, this NMMPC optimizes the multiple objectives under different operating functions, where all the objectives are minimized simultaneously. The solution of optimal control is based on the MGM which can shorten the solution time. Moreover, the stability and control performance of the closed-loop control system are well studied. Numerical simulations reveal that the proposed control strategy gives satisfactory tracking and disturbance rejection performance for WWTP. Experimental results show the efficacy of the proposed method.     

A multi-document summarization system based on statistics and linguistic treatment

The massive quantity of data available today in the Internet has reached such a huge volume that it has become humanly unfeasible to efficiently sieve useful information from it. One solution to this problem is offered by using text summarization techniques. Text summarization, the process of automatically creating a shorter version of one or more text documents, is an important way of finding relevant information in large text libraries or in the Internet. This paper presents a multi-document summarization system that concisely extracts the main aspects of a set of documents, trying to avoid the typical problems of this type of summarization: information redundancy and diversity. Such a purpose is achieved through a new sentence clustering algorithm based on a graph model that makes use of statistic similarities and linguistic treatment. The DUC 2002 dataset was used to assess the performance of the proposed system, surpassing DUC competitors by a 50% margin of f-measure, in the best case.     

Automatic classification and prediction models for early Parkinson’s disease diagnosis from SPECT imaging

Early and accurate diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease (PD) is important for early management, proper prognostication and for initiating neuroprotective therapies once they become available. Recent neuroimaging techniques such as dopaminergic imaging using single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) with ¹²³I-Ioflupane (DaTSCAN) have shown to detect even early stages of the disease. In this paper, we use the striatal binding ratio (SBR) values that are calculated from the ¹²³I-Ioflupane SPECT scans (as obtained from the Parkinson’s progression markers initiative (PPMI) database) for developing automatic classification and prediction/prognostic models for early PD. We used support vector machine (SVM) and logistic regression in the model building process. We observe that the SVM classifier with RBF kernel produced a high accuracy of more than 96% in classifying subjects into early PD and healthy normal; and the logistic model for estimating the risk of PD also produced high degree of fitting with statistical significance indicating its usefulness in PD risk estimation. Hence, we infer that such models have the potential to aid the clinicians in the PD diagnostic process.     

Face recognition with Symmetric Local Graph Structure (SLGS)

Face recognition demonstrates the significant progress in the research field of biometric and computer vision. The fact is due to the current systems perform well under relatively control environments but tend to suffer when the present of variation in pose, illumination, and facial expression. In this work, a novel approach for face recognition called Symmetric Local Graph Structure (SLGS) is presented based on the Local Graph Structure (LGS). Each pixel is represented with a graph structure of its neighbours’ pixels. The histograms of the SLGS were used for recognition by using the nearest neighbour classifiers that include Euclidean distance, correlation coefficient and chi-square distance measures. AT&T and Yale face databases were used to be experimented with the proposed method. Extensive experiments on the face database clearly showed the superiority of the proposed approach over Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and LGS. The proposed SLGS is robust to variation in term of facial expressions, facial details, and illumination. Due to good performance of SLGS, it is expected that SLGS has a potential for application implementation in computer vision.