Similarity retrieval of iconic image database

The perception of spatial relationships among objects in a picture is one of the important selection criteria to discriminate and retrieve the images in an iconic image database system. The data structure called 2D string, proposed by Chang et al., is adopted to represent symbolic pictures. The 2D string preserves the objects' spatial knowledge embedded in images. Since spatial relationship is a fuzzy concept, the capability of similarity retrieval for the retrieval by subpicture is essential. In this paper, similarity measure based on 2D string longest common subsequence is defined. The algorithm for similarity retrieval is also proposed. Similarity retrieval provides the iconic image database with the distinguishing function different from a conventional database.     

A view-invariant and anti-reflection algorithm for car body extraction and color classification

This study proposes an intelligent algorithm with tri-state architecture for real-time car body extraction and color classification. The algorithm is capable of managing both the difficulties of viewpoint and light reflection. Because the influence of light reflection is significantly different on bright, dark, and colored cars, three different strategies are designed for various color categories to acquire a more intact car body. A SARM (Separating and Re-Merging) algorithm is proposed to separate the car body and the background, and recover the entire car body more completely. A robust selection algorithm is also performed to determine the correct color category and car body. Then, the color type of the vehicle is decided only by the pixels in the extracted car body. The experimental results show that the tri-state method can extract almost 90% of car body pixels from a car image. Over 98% of car images are distinguished correctly in their categories, and the average accuracy of the 10-color-type classification is higher than 93%. Furthermore, the computation load of the proposed method is light; therefore it is applicable for real-time systems.     

On-line signature verification using LPC cepstrum and neuralnetworks

An on-line signature verification scheme based on linear prediction coding (LPC) cepstrum and neural networks is proposed. Cepstral coefficients derived from linear predictor coefficients of the writing trajectories are calculated as the features of the signatures. These coefficients are used as inputs to the neural networks. A number of single-output multilayer perceptrons (MLPs), as many as the number of words in the signature, are equipped for each registered person to verify the input signature. If the summation of output values of all MLPs is larger than the verification threshold, the input signature is regarded as a genuine signature; otherwise, the input signature is a forgery. Simulations show that this scheme can detect the genuineness of the input signatures from a test database with an error rate as low as 4%     

HMM-based ball hitting event exploration system for broadcast baseball video

With the dramatic growth of fandom population, a considerable amount of research efforts have been devoted to baseball video processing. However, little work focuses on the detailed follow-ups of ball hitting events. This paper proposes a HMM-based ball hitting event exploration system for broadcast baseball video. Utilizing the strictly-defined layout of the baseball field, the proposed system first detects the game-specific spatial patterns in the field, such as the field lines, the bases, the pitch mound, etc. Then, the play region—the currently camera-focused region of the baseball field is identified for frame type classification. Since the temporal patterns of presenting the game progress follow a prototypical order, we consider the classified frame types as observation symbols and recognize ball hitting events using HMM. Experiments conducted on broadcast baseball video show encouraging results in frame type classification and ball hitting event recognition. Three practical applications, including highlight clip extraction by user-designated query, storyboard construction, and similar event retrieval, are introduced to address the applicability of our system.     

Fast and memory efficient mining of high-utility itemsets from data streams: with and without negative item profits

Mining utility itemsets from data steams is one of the most interesting research issues in data mining and knowledge discovery. In this paper, two efficient sliding window-based algorithms, MHUI-BIT (Mining High-Utility Itemsets based on BITvector) and MHUI-TID (Mining High-Utility Itemsets based on TIDlist), are proposed for mining high-utility itemsets from data streams. Based on the sliding window-based framework of the proposed approaches, two effective representations of item information, Bitvector and TIDlist, and a lexicographical tree-based summary data structure, LexTree-2HTU, are developed to improve the efficiency of discovering high-utility itemsets with positive profits from data streams. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms outperform than the existing approaches for discovering high-utility itemsets from data streams over sliding windows. Beside, we also propose the adapted approaches of algorithms MHUI-BIT and MHUI-TID in order to handle the case when we are interested in mining utility itemsets with negative item profits. Experiments show that the variants of algorithms MHUI-BIT and MHUI-TID are efficient approaches for mining high-utility itemsets with negative item profits over stream transaction-sensitive sliding windows.     

Car model recognition by utilizing symmetric property to overcome severe pose variation

This paper presents a mirror morphing scheme to deal with the challenging pose variation problem in car model recognition. Conventionally, researchers adopt pose estimation techniques to overcome the pose problem, whereas it is difficult to obtain very accurate pose estimation. Moreover, slight deviation in pose estimation degrades the recognition performance dramatically. The mirror morphing technique utilizes the symmetric property of cars to normalize car images of any orientation into a typical view. Therefore, the pose error and center bias can be eliminated and satisfactory recognition performance can be obtained. To support mirror morphing, active shape model (ASM) is used to acquire car shape information. An effective pose and center estimation approach is also proposed to provide a good initialization for ASM. In experiments, our proposed car model recognition system can achieve very high recognition rate (>95%) with very low probability of false alarm even when it is dealing with the severe pose problem in the cases of cars with similar shape and color.     

DSM-FI: an efficient algorithm for mining frequent itemsets in data streams

Online mining of data streams is an important data mining problem with broad applications. However, it is also a difficult problem since the streaming data possess some inherent characteristics. In this paper, we propose a new single-pass algorithm, called DSM-FI (data stream mining for frequent itemsets), for online incremental mining of frequent itemsets over a continuous stream of online transactions. According to the proposed algorithm, each transaction of the stream is projected into a set of sub-transactions, and these sub-transactions are inserted into a new in-memory summary data structure, called SFI-forest (summary frequent itemset forest) for maintaining the set of all frequent itemsets embedded in the transaction data stream generated so far. Finally, the set of all frequent itemsets is determined from the current SFI-forest. Theoretical analysis and experimental studies show that the proposed DSM-FI algorithm uses stable memory, makes only one pass over an online transactional data stream, and outperforms the existing algorithms of one-pass mining of frequent itemsets.

Approximate mining of maximal frequent itemsets in data streams with different window models

A data stream is a massive, open-ended sequence of data elements continuously generated at a rapid rate. Mining data streams is more difficult than mining static databases because the huge, high-speed and continuous characteristics of streaming data. In this paper, we propose a new one-pass algorithm called DSM-MFI (stands for Data Stream Mining for Maximal Frequent Itemsets), which mines the set of all maximal frequent itemsets in landmark windows over data streams. A new summary data structure called summary frequent itemset forest (abbreviated as SFI-forest) is developed for incremental maintaining the essential information about maximal frequent itemsets embedded in the stream so far. Theoretical analysis and experimental studies show that the proposed algorithm is efficient and scalable for mining the set of all maximal frequent itemsets over the entire history of the data streams.