Coupling-and-decoupling: A hierarchical model for occlusion-free object detection

Handling occlusion is a very challenging problem in object detection. This paper presents a method of learning a hierarchical model for X-to-X occlusion-free object detection (e.g., car-to-car and person-to-person occlusions in our experiments). The proposed method is motivated by an intuitive coupling-and-decoupling strategy. In the learning stage, the pair of occluding X?s (e.g., car pairs or person pairs) is represented directly and jointly by a hierarchical And–Or directed acyclic graph (AOG) which accounts for the statistically significant co-occurrence (i.e., coupling). The structure and the parameters of the AOG are learned using the latent structural SVM (LSSVM) framework. In detection, a dynamic programming (DP) algorithm is utilized to find the best parse trees for all sliding windows with detection scores being greater than the learned threshold. Then, the two single X?s are decoupled from the declared detections of X-to-X occluding pairs together with some non-maximum suppression (NMS) post-processing. In experiments, our method is tested on both a roadside-car dataset collected by ourselves (which will be released with this paper) and two public person datasets, the MPII-2Person dataset and the TUD-Crossing dataset. Our method is compared with state-of-the-art deformable part-based methods, and obtains comparable or better detection performance.     

Bayesian estimation of Dirichlet mixture model with variational inference

In statistical modeling, parameter estimation is an essential and challengeable task. Estimation of the parameters in the Dirichlet mixture model (DMM) is analytically intractable, due to the integral expressions of the gamma function and its corresponding derivatives. We introduce a Bayesian estimation strategy to estimate the posterior distribution of the parameters in DMM. By assuming the gamma distribution as the prior to each parameter, we approximate both the prior and the posterior distribution of the parameters with a product of several mutually independent gamma distributions. The extended factorized approximation method is applied to introduce a single lower-bound to the variational objective function and an analytically tractable estimation solution is derived. Moreover, there is only one function that is maximized during iterations and, therefore, the convergence of the proposed algorithm is theoretically guaranteed. With synthesized data, the proposed method shows the advantages over the EM-based method and the previously proposed Bayesian estimation method. With two important multimedia signal processing applications, the good performance of the proposed Bayesian estimation method is demonstrated.     

Ellipsoidal neighbourhood outlier factor for distributed anomaly detection in resource constrained networks

Anomaly detection in resource constrained wireless networks is an important challenge for tasks such as intrusion detection, quality assurance and event monitoring applications. The challenge is to detect these interesting events or anomalies in a timely manner, while minimising energy consumption in the network. We propose a distributed anomaly detection architecture, which uses multiple hyperellipsoidal clusters to model the data at each sensor node, and identify global and local anomalies in the network. In particular, a novel anomaly scoring method is proposed to provide a score for each hyperellipsoidal model, based on how remote the ellipsoid is relative to their neighbours. We demonstrate using several synthetic and real datasets that our proposed scheme achieves a higher detection performance with a significant reduction in communication overhead in the network compared to centralised and existing schemes.     

A fuzzy neural network approach for online fault detection in waste water treatment process

In this paper, an effective strategy for fault detection of sludge volume index (SVI) sensor is proposed and tested on an experimental hardware setup in waste water treatment process (WWTP). The main objective of this fault detection strategy is to design a system which consists of the online sensors, the SVI predicting plant and fault diagnosis method. The SVI predicting plant is designed utilizing a fuzzy neural network (FNN), which is trained by a historical set of data collected during fault-free operation of WWTP. The fault diagnosis method, based on the difference between the measured concentration values and FNN predictions, allows a quick revealing of the faults. Then this proposed fault detection method is applied to a real WWTP and compared with other approaches. Experimental results show that the proposed fault detection strategy can obtain the fault signals of the SVI sensor online.     

Target detection based on a dynamic subspace

For hyperspectral target detection, it is usually the case that only part of the targets pixels can be used as target signatures, so can we use them to construct the most proper background subspace for detecting all the probable targets? In this paper, a dynamic subspace detection (DSD) method which establishes a multiple detection framework is proposed. In each detection procedure, blocks of pixels are calculated by the random selection and the succeeding detection performance distribution analysis. Manifold analysis is further used to eliminate the probable anomalous pixels and purify the subspace datasets, and the remaining pixels construct the subspace for each detection procedure. The final detection results are then enhanced by the fusion of target occurrence frequencies in all the detection procedures. Experiments with both synthetic and real hyperspectral images (HSI) evaluate the validation of our proposed DSD method by using several different state-of-the-art methods as the basic detectors. With several other single detectors and multiple detection methods as comparable methods, improved receiver operating characteristic curves and better separability between targets and backgrounds by the DSD methods are illustrated. The DSD methods also perform well with the covariance-based detectors, showing their efficiency in selecting covariance information for detection.     

Interactions between immunoglobulin-like and catalytic modules in Clostridium thermocellum cellulosomal cellobiohydrolase CbhA

Cellobiohydrolase CbhA from Clostridium thermocellum cellulosome is a multi-modular protein composed starting from the N-terminus of a carbohydrate-binding module (CBM) of family 4, an immunoglobulin(Ig)-like module, a catalytic module of family 9 glycoside hydrolases (GH9), X1(1) and X1(2) modules, a CBM of family 3 and a dockerin module. Deletion of the Ig-like module from the Ig-GH9 construct results in complete inactivation of the GH9 module. The crystal structure of the Ig-GH9 module pair reveals the existence of an extensive module interface composed of over 40 amino acid residues of both modules and maintained through a large number of hydrophilic and hydrophobic interactions. To investigate the importance of these interactions between the two modules, we compared the secondary and tertiary structures and thermostabilities of the individual Ig-like and GH9 modules and the Ig-GH9 module pair using both circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy and differential scanning calorimetry (DSC). Thr230, Asp262 and Asp264 of the Ig-like module are located in the module interface of the Ig-GH9 module pair and are suggested to be important in 'communication' between the modules. These residues were mutated to alanyl residues. The structure, stability and catalytic properties of the native Ig-GH9 and its D264A and T230A/D262A mutants were compared. The results indicate that despite being able to fold relatively independently, the Ig-like and GH9 modules interact and these interactions affect the final fold and stability of each module. Mutations of one or two amino acid residues lead to destabilization and change of the mechanism of thermal unfolding of the polypeptides. The enzymatic properties of native Ig-GH9, D264A and T230A/D262A mutants are similar. The results indicate that inactivation of the GH9 module occurs as a result of multiple structural disturbances finally affecting the topology of the catalytic center.     

What you get is what you see: revisiting the evaluator effect in usability tests

Usability evaluation is essential to user-centred design; yet, evaluators who analyse the same usability test sessions have been found to identify substantially different sets of usability problems. We revisit this evaluator effect by having 19 experienced usability professionals analyse video-recorded test sessions with five users. Nine participants analysed moderated sessions; 10 participants analysed unmoderated sessions. For the moderated sessions, participants reported an average of 33% of the problems reported by all nine of these participants and 50% of the subset of problems reported as critical or serious by at least one participant. For the unmoderated sessions, the percentages were 32% and 40%. Thus, the evaluator effect was similar for moderated and unmoderated sessions, and it was substantial for the full set of problems and still present for the most severe problems. In addition, participants disagreed in their severity ratings. As much as 24% (moderated) and 30% (unmoderated) of the problems reported by multiple participants were rated as critical by one participant and minor by another. The majority of the participants perceived an evaluator effect when merging their individual findings into group evaluations. We discuss reasons for the evaluator effect and recommend ways of managing it.     

Continuous Self‐Collision Detection for Deformable Surfaces Interacting with Solid Models

In this paper, we propose a new continuous self‐collision detection (CSCD) method for a deformable surface that interacts with a simple solid model. The method is developed based on the radial‐view‐based culling method. Our method is suitable for the deformable surface that has large contact region with the solid model. The deformable surface may consist of small round‐shaped holes. At the pre‐processing stage, the holes of the deformable surface are filled with ghost triangles so as to make the mesh of the deformable surface watertight. An observer primitive (i.e. a point or a line segment) is computed so that it lies inside the solid model. At the runtime stage, the orientations of triangles with respect to the observer primitive are evaluated. The collision status of the deformable surface is then determined. We evaluated our method for several animations including virtual garments. Experimental results show that our method improves the process of CSCD.     

Spline multiresolution and wavelet-like decompositions

Splines are useful tools to represent, modify and analyze curves and they play an important role in various practical applications. We present a multiresolution approach to spline curves with arbitrary knots that provides good feature detection and localization properties for non-equally distributed geometric data. In addition, we show how equidistributed data and knot sequences can be efficiently handled using signal processing techniques.