Omnidirectional edge detection

In this paper we propose a new method for extending 1-D step edge detection filters to two dimensions via complex-valued filtering. Complex-valued filtering allows us to obtain edge magnitude and direction simultaneously. Our method can be viewed either as an extension of n-directional complex filtering of Paplinski to infinite directions or as a variant of Canny’s gradient-based approach. In the second view, the real part of our filter computes the gradient in the x direction and the imaginary part computes the gradient in the y direction. Paplinski claimed that n-directional filtering is an improvement over the gradient-based method, which computes gradient only in two directions. We show that our omnidirectional and Canny’s gradient-based extensions of the 1-D DoG coincide. In contrast to Paplinski’s claim, this coincidence shows that both approaches suffer from being confined to the subspace of two 2-D filters, even though n-directional filtering hides these filters in a single complex-valued filter. Aside from these theoretical results, the omnidirectional method has practical advantages over both n-directional and gradient-based approaches. Our experiments on synthetic and real-world images show the superiority of omnidirectional and gradient-based methods over n-directional approach. In comparison with the gradient-based method, the advantage of omnidirectional method lies mostly in freeing the user from specifying the smoothing window and its parameter. Since the omnidirectional and Canny’s gradient-based extensions of the 1-D DoG coincide, we have based our experiments on extending the 1-D Demigny filter. This filter has been proposed by Demigny as the optimal edge detection filter in sampled images.     

Discovering relationship types between users using profiles and shared photos in a social network

In this paper, we propose a new approach to discover the relationship types between a user and her contacts in a social network. This is of key importance for many applications in the domain of photo sharing, privacy protection, information enriching, etc. Our approach is based, on one hand, on information extracted from users’ profiles and their shared photos, and, on the other hand, on a set of predefined rules validated by the main user before being mined and derived according to her preferences and social network content. The contribution of our method is twofold: 1) it is user-based enabling the user to set her preferences and give her feedbacks on the derived rules and results, and 2) it is multi-criteria that exploits and combines several attributes and features from user profiles and shared photos respectively. It also allows the user to define new relationship types. We conducted a set of experiments to validate our approach. The obtained results show the accuracy of our approach in different scenarios.     

基于Lansat7 ETM+影像的城市道路信息提取研究

道路信息是遥感卫星影像中一种重要的地理专题信息，道路信息的提取在卫星数字图像自动解译方面具有理论与方法意义，如果能自动地从遥感卫星影像中提取出道路网，将会简化城市地物目标的分类和测量过程。研究结合了计算机和人在自动检测和识别上的优势，以ETM＋为数据源，提出了遥感卫星影像中道路特征半自动提取的一种方法。研究首先对ETM＋的多光谱影像和15m分辨率的全色影像进行融合，然后通过设计一个高通滤波器和统计滤波器，完成道路信息的检测与识别（其中高通滤波突出地物的线性特征、统计滤波则是消除高通滤波后的一些噪音），最后进行矢量化跟踪完成道路信息的提取。实践结果表明，该方法能够从中等分辨率遥感卫星影像中提取道路信息，取得了较好的精度效果。     

Geotag propagation in social networks based on user trust model

In the past few years sharing photos within social networks has become very popular. In order to make these huge collections easier to explore, images are usually tagged with representative keywords such as persons, events, objects, and locations. In order to speed up the time consuming tag annotation process, tags can be propagated based on the similarity between image content and context. In this paper, we present a system for efficient geotag propagation based on a combination of object duplicate detection and user trust modeling. The geotags are propagated by training a graph based object model for each of the landmarks on a small tagged image set and finding its duplicates within a large untagged image set. Based on the established correspondences between these two image sets and the reliability of the user, tags are propagated from the tagged to the untagged images. The user trust modeling reduces the risk of propagating wrong tags caused by spamming or faulty annotation. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated through a set of experiments on an image database containing various landmarks.     

Refining search results using a mining framework

Today’s major search engines return ranked search results that match the keywords the user specifies. There have been many proposals to rank the search results such that they match the user’s intentions and needs more closely. Despite good advances during the past decade, this problem still requires considerable research, as the number of search results has become ever larger. We define the collection of each search result and all the Web pages that are linked to the result as a search-result drilldown. We hypothesize that by mining and analyzing the top terms in the search-result drilldown of search results, it may be possible to make each search result more meaningful to the user, so that the user may select the desired search results with higher confidence. In this paper, we describe this technique, and show the results of preliminary validation work that we have done.     

TrendsSummary: a platform for retrieving and summarizing trendy multimedia contents

With the flood and popularity of various multimedia contents on the Internet, searching for appropriate contents and representing them effectively has become an essential part for user satisfaction. So far, many contents recommendation systems have been proposed for this purpose. A popular approach is to select hot or popular contents for recommendation using some popularity metric. Recently, various social network services (SNSs) such as Facebook and Twitter have become a widespread social phenomenon owing to the smartphone boom. Considering the popularity and user participation, SNS can be a good source for finding social interests or trends. In this study, we propose a platform called TrendsSummary for retrieving trendy multimedia contents and summarizing them. To identify trendy multimedia contents, we select candidate keywords from raw data collected from Twitter using a syntactic feature-based filtering method. Then, we merge various keyword variants based on several heuristics. Next, we select trend keywords and their related keywords from the merged candidate keywords based on term frequency and expand them semantically by referencing portal sites such as Wikipedia and Google. Based on the expanded trend keywords, we collect four types of relevant multimedia contents—TV programs, videos, news articles, and images—from various websites. The most appropriate media type for the trend keywords is determined based on a naïve Bayes classifier. After classification, appropriate contents are selected from among the contents of the selected media type. Finally, both trend keywords and their related multimedia contents are displayed for effective browsing. We implemented a prototype system and experimentally demonstrated that our scheme provides satisfactory results.     

Relevance feedback based on n-tuplewise comparison and the ELECTRE methodology and an application in content-based image retrieval

In this article we propose a method for information retrieval based on relational Multi-Criteria Decision Making. We assume that a user cannot define precise search criteria so that these criteria must be found based on the user’s assessment of several sample alternatives (‘alternatives’ here are database records, e.g. images). This situation is common in Content-based Image Retrieval, where it is easier for a user to indicate relevant images than to describe a proper query, especially in formal language. The proposed algorithm for the elicitation of criteria is based on ELECTRE III—a method originally designed for ranking a set of alternatives according to defined criteria. In our algorithm, however, the direction of reasoning is reversed: we start with several sample alternatives that have been assigned a rank by the user and then we select criteria that are compatible (in the sense of ELECTRE methodology) with the user’s preferences expressed on a sample set. Then, having determined the user’s criteria, we apply classical ELECTRE III to retrieve the relevant solutions from the database. We implemented the method in Matlab and tested it on the Microsoft Cambridge Image Database.     

面向用户需求的动态QoS服务选择方法研究

高效、准确地为用户选择满足其需求的软件服务一直是近年来的研究热点。服务质量（Quality of Service,QoS）是衡量软件服务性能的关键指标之一,考虑到同一服务在不同网络环境下QoS值的动态性,提出一种面向用户需求的动态QoS服务选择方法,简称URDQ方法。URDQ方法采用区间数的形式记录动态环境下候选服务的属性值范围,并基于用户需求对候选服务进行初步过滤;通过区间数模型对候选服务属性区间和用户需求区间进行相对优势度计算,将属性区间数转化为易于计算的实数;使用Skyline方法对候选服务集进行过滤,减小搜索空间;根据熵权法得到的客观权重并结合用户给定的主观权重,使用TOPSIS方法对Skyline服务集进行排序。仿真实验和对比实验验证了URDQ方法在动态网络环境下的可行性和有效性。     

Where are you going? Using human locomotion models for target estimation

To explore virtual environments that are larger than the available physical tracking space by real walking, it is necessary to use so-called redirected walking. Redirection techniques allow the user to explore an unlimited virtual environment in a limited tracking space by introducing a small mismatch between a user’s real and virtual movement, thus preventing the user from colliding with the physical walls of the tracking space. Steering algorithms are used to select the most suitable redirection technique at any given time, depending on the geometry of the real and virtual environment. Together with prediction of a user’s future walking path, these algorithms select the best redirection strategy by an optimal control scheme. In this paper, a new approach for the prediction of a person’s locomotion target is presented. We use various models of human locomotion together with a set of possible targets to create a set of expected paths. These paths are then compared to the real path the user already traveled to calculate the probability of a certain target being the one the user is heading for. A new approach for comparing paths with each other is introduced and is compared to three others. For describing the human’s path to a given target, four different models are used and compared. To gather data for the comparison of the models against the real path, a user study was conducted. Based on the results of the user study, the paper concludes with a discussion on the prediction performance of the different approaches.     

Building Visual Vocabulary for Image Indexation and Query Formulation

With advances in digital imaging, the amount of digital images will increase tremendously. To locate relevant images in a large collection of images presents a challenging and genuine problem for content-based retrieval research. This paper presents a novel framework called visual keywords for image indexation and query formulation. Visual keywords are flexible and intuitive visual prototypes specified perceptually from sample domain images. A visual content is described and indexed by flexible spatial aggregation of the soft presence of visual keywords. A new query method based on visual constraints is also proposed to allow direct and explicit content specification. Last but not least, we have developed a digital album prototype to demonstrate query and retrieval on both home photos and stock photos based on visual keywords.     

Stroke Style Analysis for Painterly Rendering

We propose a novel method that automatically analyzes stroke-related artistic styles of paintings.A set of adaptive interfaces are also developed to connect the style analysis with existing painterly rendering systems, so that the specific artistic style of a template painting can be effectively transferred to the input photo with minimal effort.Different from conventional texture-synthesis based rendering techniques that focus mainly on texture features, this work extracts, analyzes and simulates high-level style features expressed by artists’ brush stroke techniques.Through experiments, user studies and comparisons with ground truth, we demonstrate that the proposed style-orientated painting framework can significantly reduce tedious parameter adjustment, and it allows amateur users to efficiently create desired artistic styles simply by specifying a template painting.     

Seeking the user interface

User interface design and coding can be complex and messy. We describe a system that uses code search to simplify and automate the exploration of such code. We start with a simple sketch of the desired interface along with a set of keywords describing the application context. If necessary, we convert the sketch into a scalable vector graphics diagram. We then use existing code search engines to find results based on the keywords. We look for potential Java-based graphical user interface solutions within those results and apply a series of code transformations to the solutions to generate derivative solutions, aiming to get solutions that constitute only the user interface and that will compile and run. We run the resultant solutions and compare the generated interfaces to the user’s sketches. Finally, we let programmers interact with the matched solutions and return the running code for the solutions they choose. The system is useful for exploring alternative interfaces to the initial and for looking at graphical user interfaces in a code repository.     

Identifying elephant photos by multi-curve matching

We present in this paper an elephant photo identification system based on the shape comparison of the nicks characterizing the elephants’ ears. The method we propose can deal with very cluttered and noisy images as the ones commonly used by zoologists for wild elephant photo identification. Difficult segmentation problems are solved using rough position information input by the user. Such information is used by the system as a basis for a set of segmentation and normalization hypotheses aiming at comparing a query photo Q with different photos of the system's database possibly representing the same individual as Q. The proposed shape comparison method, based on matching multiple, non-connected curves, can be applied to different retrieval by shape problems. Examples with real wild elephant photos are shown.     

Predicting user click behaviour in search engine advertisements

According to the specific requirements and interests of users, search engines select and display advertisements that match user needs and have higher probability of attracting users’ attention based on their previous search history. New objects such as user, advertisement or query cause a deterioration of precision in targeted advertising due to their lack of history. This article surveys this challenge. In the case of new objects, we first extract similar observed objects to the new object and then we use their history as the history of new object. Similarity between objects is measured based on correlation, which is a relation between user and advertisement when the advertisement is displayed to the user. This method is used for all objects, so it has helped us to accurately select relevant advertisements for users’ queries. In our proposed model, we assume that similar users behave in a similar manner. We find that users with few queries are similar to new users. We will show that correlation between users and advertisements’ keywords is high. Thus, users who pay attention to advertisements’ keywords, click similar advertisements. In addition, users who pay attention to specific brand names might have similar behaviours too.     

云计算下支持语义的可搜索加密方法研究

传统的云计算下的可搜索加密算法没有对查询关键词进行语义扩展,导致了用户查询意图与返回结果存在语义偏差,并且对检索结果的相关度排序不够合理,无法满足用户对智能搜索的需求。对此,提出了一种支持语义的可搜索加密方法。该方法利用本体知识库实现了用户查询的语义拓展,并通过语义相似度来控制扩展词的个数,防止因拓展词过多影响检索的精确度。同时,该方法利用文档向量、查询向量分块技术构造出对应的标记向量,以过滤无关文档,并在查询-文档的相似度得分中引入了语义相似度、关键词位置加权评分及关键词-文档相关度等影响因子,实现了检索结果的有效排序。实验结果表明,该方法在提高检索效率的基础上显著改善了检索结果的排序效果,提高了用户满意度。     

Inhibition-augmented trainable COSFIRE filters for keypoint detection and object recognition

The shape and meaning of an object can radically change with the addition of one or more contour parts. For instance, a T-junction can become a crossover. We extend the COSFIRE trainable filter approach which uses a positive prototype pattern for configuration by adding a set of negative prototype patterns. The configured filter responds to patterns that are similar to the positive prototype but not to any of the negative prototypes. The configuration of such a filter comprises selecting given channels of a bank of Gabor filters that provide excitatory or inhibitory input and determining certain blur and shift parameters. We compute the response of such a filter as the excitatory input minus a fraction of the maximum of inhibitory inputs. We use three applications to demonstrate the effectiveness of inhibition: the exclusive detection of vascular bifurcations (i.e., without crossovers) in retinal fundus images (DRIVE data set), the recognition of architectural and electrical symbols (GREC’11 data set) and the recognition of handwritten digits (MNIST data set).     

Interactive Sketch‐Driven Image Synthesis

We present an interactive system for composing realistic images of an object under arbitrary pose and appearance specified by sketching. Our system draws inspiration from a traditional illustration workflow: The user first sketches rough ‘masses’ of the object, as ellipses, to define an initial abstract pose that can then be refined with more detailed contours as desired. The system is made robust to partial or inaccurate sketches using a reduced‐dimensionality model of pose space learnt from a labelled collection of photos. Throughout the composition process, interactive visual feedback is provided to guide the user. Finally, the user's partial or complete sketch, complemented with appearance requirements, is used to constrain the automatic synthesis of a novel, high‐quality, realistic image.     

Semantic Photo Synthesis

Composite images are synthesized from existing photographs by artists who make concept art, e.g., storyboards for movies or architectural planning. Current techniques allow an artist to fabricate such an image by digitally splicing parts of stock photographs. While these images serve mainly to “quickly”convey how a scene should look, their production is laborious. We propose a technique that allows a person to design a new photograph with substantially less effort. This paper presents a method that generates a composite image when a user types in nouns, such as “boat”and “sand.”The artist can optionally design an intended image by specifying other constraints. Our algorithm formulates the constraints as queries to search an automatically annotated image database. The desired photograph, not a collage, is then synthesized using graph‐cut optimization, optionally allowing for further user interaction to edit or choose among alternative generated photos. An implementation of our approach, shown in the associated video, demonstrates our contributions of (1) a method for creating specific images with minimal human effort, and (2) a combined algorithm for automatically building an image library with semantic annotations from any photo collection.     

Generalized mosaicing: polarization panorama

We present an approach to image the polarization state of object points in a wide field of view, while enhancing the radiometric dynamic range of imaging systems by generalizing image mosaicing. The approach is biologically inspired, as it emulates spatially varying polarization sensitivity of some animals. In our method, a spatially varying polarization and attenuation filter is rigidly attached to a camera. As the system moves, it senses each scene point multiple times, each time filtering it through a different filter polarizing angle, polarizance, and transmittance. Polarization is an additional dimension of the generalized mosaicing paradigm, which has recently yielded high dynamic range images and multispectral images in a wide field of view using other kinds of filters. The image acquisition is as easy as in traditional image mosaics. The computational algorithm can easily handle nonideal polarization filters (partial polarizers), variable exposures, and saturation in a single framework. The resulting mosaic represents the polarization state at each scene point. Using data acquired by this method, we demonstrate attenuation and enhancement of specular reflections and semi reflection separation in an image mosaic.