universal manifold embedding for geometrically deformed functions assume we have a set of observations for example images of different objects each undergoing a different geometric deformation yet all the deformations belong to the same family as a result of the action of these deformations the set of different observations on each object is generally a manifold in the ambient space of observations in this paper we show that in those cases where the set of deformations admits a finite dimensional representation there is a mapping from the space of observations to a low dimensional linear space the manifold corresponding to each object is mapped to a distinct linear subspace of euclidean space the dimension of the subspace is the same as that of the manifold this mapping which we call universal manifold embedding enables the estimation of geometric deformations using the classical linear theory the universal manifold embedding further enables the representation of the object classification and detection problems in a linear subspace matching framework the embedding of the space of observations depends on the deformation model and is independent of the specific observed object hence it is universal we study two cases of this embedding that of elastic deformations of 1 d signals and the case of affine deformations of n dimensional signals

image clustering based on sparse patch alignment framework image clustering methods are efficient tools for applications such as content based image retrieval and image annotation recently graph based manifold learning methods have shown promising performance in extracting features for image clustering typical manifold learning methods adopt appropriate neighborhood size to construct the neighborhood graph which captures local geometry of data distribution because the density of data points distribution may be different in different regions of the manifold a fixed neighborhood size may be inappropriate in building the manifold in this paper we propose a novel algorithm named sparse patch alignment framework for the embedding of data lying in multiple manifolds specifically we assume that for each data point there exists a small neighborhood in which only the points that come from the same manifold lie approximately in a low dimensional affine subspace based on the patch alignment framework we propose an optimization strategy for constructing local patches which adopt sparse representation to select a few neighbors of each data point that span a low dimensional affine subspace passing near that point after that the whole alignment strategy is utilized to build the manifold experiments are conducted on four real world datasets and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method

a multibody factorization method for independently moving objects the structure from motion problem has been extensively studied in the field of computer vision yet the bulk of the existing work assumes that the scene contains only a single moving object the more realistic case where an unknown number of objects move in the scene has received little attention especially for its theoretical treatment in this paper we present a new method for separating and recovering the motion and shape of multiple independently moving objects in a sequence of images the method does not require prior knowledge of the number of objects nor is dependent on any grouping of features into an object at the image level for this purpose we introduce a mathematical construct of object shapes called the shape interaction matrix which is invariant to both the object motions and the selection of coordinate systems this invariant structure is computable solely from the observed trajectories of image features without grouping them into individual objects once the matrix is computed it allows for segmenting features into objects by the process of transforming it into a canonical form as well as recovering the shape and motion of each object the theory works under a broad set of projection models scaled orthography paraperspective and affine but they must be linear so it excludes projective cameras

least squares quantization in pcm it has long been realized that in pulse code modulation pcm with a given ensemble of signals to handle the quantum values should be spaced more closely in the voltage regions where the signal amplitude is more likely to fall it has been shown by panter and dite that in the limit as the number of quanta becomes infinite the asymptotic fractional density of quanta per unit voltage should vary as the one third power of the probability density per unit voltage of signal amplitudes in this paper the corresponding result for any finite number of quanta is derived that is necessary conditions are found that the quanta and associated quantization intervals of an optimum finite quantization scheme must satisfy the optimization criterion used is that the average quantization noise power be a minimum it is shown that the result obtained here goes over into the panter and dite result as the number of quanta become large the optimum quautization schemes for 2 b quanta b 1 2 cdots 7 are given numerically for gaussian and for laplacian distribution of signal amplitudes

estimation of subspace arrangements with applications in modeling and segmenting mixed data recently many scientific and engineering applications have involved the challenging task of analyzing large amounts of unsorted high dimensional data that have very complicated structures from both geometric and statistical points of view such unsorted data are considered mixed as different parts of the data have significantly different structures which cannot be described by a single model in this paper we propose to use subspace arrangements a union of multiple subspaces for modeling mixed data each subspace in the arrangement is used to model just a homogeneous subset of the data thus multiple subspaces together can capture the heterogeneous structures within the data set in this paper we give a comprehensive introduction to a new approach for the estimation of subspace arrangements this is known as generalized principal component analysis gpca in particular we provide a comprehensive summary of important algebraic properties and statistical facts that are crucial for making the inference of subspace arrangements both efficient and robust even when the given data are corrupted by noise or contaminated with outliers this new method in many ways improves and generalizes extant methods for modeling or clustering mixed data there have been successful applications of this new method to many real world problems in computer vision image processing and system identification in this paper we will examine several of those representative applications this paper is intended to be expository in nature however in order that this may serve as a more complete reference for both theoreticians and practitioners we take the liberty of filling in several gaps between the theory and the practice in the existing literature

self regularized fixed rank representation for subspace segmentation abstract consider a set of data points generated from various linear subspaces subspace segmentation tasks which are important in fields such as computer vision and image processing aim to partition the set of data points so as to recover these subspaces the subspace segmentation method fixed rank representation frr was introduced to remedy the problem of insufficient sampling in classical low rank representation lrr in many subspace segmentation applications frr has achieved much better results than those of lrr in this paper a new frr related algorithm called self regularized fixed rank representation srfrr is proposed in srfrr a laplacian regularizer is constructed using the coefficient matrix obtained by srfrr itself further by proving that the laplacian regularizer can be transformed into a structure constraint on the coefficient matrix we show that another existing method sparse frr sfrr is a special case of srfrr to implement the srfrr method we present two optimization algorithms experiments on both synthetic and real databases show that srfrr outperforms some existing frr and lrr related algorithms

minimum error entropy based sparse representation for robust subspace clustering this paper addresses the problem of clustering data points that are approximately drawn from multiple subspaces recently a large family of spectral clustering based methods such as sparse subspace clustering ssc and low rank representation lrr have been proposed in this paper we present a general formulation to unify many of them within a common framework based on atomic representation since mean square error mse relies heavily on the gaussianity assumption the previous mse based subspace clustering methods have the limitation of being sensitive to non gaussian noise in this paper we develop a novel subspace clustering method termed meessc by specifying the minimum error entropy mee as the loss function and the sparsity inducing atomic set we show that meessc can well overcome the above limitation the experimental results on both synthetic and real data verify the effectiveness of the proposed method

model selection and the principle of minimum description length this article reviews the principle of minimum description length mdl for problems of model selection by viewing statistical modeling as a means of generating descriptions of observed data the mdl framework discriminates between competing models based on the complexity of each description this approach began with kolmogorov s theory of algorithmic complexity matured in the literature on information theory and has recently received renewed attention within the statistics community here we review both the practical and the theoretical aspects of mdl as a tool for model selection emphasizing the rich connections between information theory and statistics at the boundary between these two disciplines we find many interesting interpretations of popular frequentist and bayesian procedures as we show mdl provides an objective umbrella under which rather disparate approaches to statistical modeling can coexist and be compared we illustrate the mdl principle by considering problems in regression nonpar

segmentation of multivariate mixed data via lossy data coding and compression in this paper based on ideas from lossy data coding and compression we present a simple but effective technique for segmenting multivariate mixed data that are drawn from a mixture of gaussian distributions which are allowed to be almost degenerate the goal is to find the optimal segmentation that minimizes the overall coding length of the segmented data subject to a given distortion by analyzing the coding length rate of mixed data we formally establish some strong connections of data segmentation to many fundamental concepts in lossy data compression and rate distortion theory we show that a deterministic segmentation is approximately the asymptotically optimal solution for compressing mixed data we propose a very simple and effective algorithm that depends on a single parameter the allowable distortion at any given distortion the algorithm automatically determines the corresponding number and dimension of the groups and does not involve any parameter estimation simulation results reveal intriguing phase transition like behaviors of the number of segments when changing the level of distortion or the amount of outliers finally we demonstrate how this technique can be readily applied to segment real imagery and bioinformatic data

impsac synthesis of importance sampling and random sample consensus this paper proposes a new method for recovery of epipolar geometry and feature correspondence between images which have undergone a significant deformation either due to large rotation or wide baseline of the cameras the method also encodes the uncertainty by providing an arbitrarily close approximation to the posterior distribution of the two view relation the method operates on a pyramid from coarse to fine resolution thus raising the problem of how to propagate information from one level to another in a statistically consistent way the distribution of the parameters at each resolution is encoded nonparametrically as a set of particles at the coarsest level a random sample consensus monte carlo markov chain ransac mcmc estimator is used to initialize this set of particles the posterior can then be approximated as a mixture of gaussians fitted to these particles the distribution at a coarser level influences the distribution at a finer level using the technique of sampling importance resampling sir and mcmc which allows for asymptotically correct approximations of the posterior distribution the estimate of the posterior distribution at the level above is being used as the importance sampling function to generate a new set of particles which can be further improved by mcmc it is shown that the method is superior to previous single resolution ransac style feature matchers

enhancing low rank subspace clustering by manifold regularization recently low rank representation lrr method has achieved great success in subspace clustering sc which aims to cluster the data points that lie in a union of low dimensional subspace given a set of data points lrr seeks the lowest rank representation among the many possible linear combinations of the bases in a given dictionary or in terms of the data itself however lrr only considers the global euclidean structure while the local manifold structure which is often important for many real applications is ignored in this paper to exploit the local manifold structure of the data a manifold regularization characterized by a laplacian graph has been incorporated into lrr leading to our proposed laplacian regularized lrr laplrr an efficient optimization procedure which is based on alternating direction method of multipliers admm is developed for laplrr experimental results on synthetic and real data sets are presented to demonstrate that the performance of lrr has been enhanced by using the manifold regularization

transformation invariant subspace clustering subspace clustering has achieved great success in many computer vision applications however most subspace clustering algorithms require well aligned data samples which is often not straightforward to achieve this paper proposes a transformation invariant subspace clustering framework by jointly aligning data samples and learning subspace representation by alignment the transformed data samples become highly correlated and a better affinity matrix can be obtained the joint problem can be reduced to a sequence of least squares regression problems which can be efficiently solved we verify the effectiveness of the proposed method with extensive experiments on unaligned real data demonstrating its higher clustering accuracy than the state of the art subspace clustering and transformation invariant clustering algorithms highlightsa transformation invariant subspace clustering algorithm is proposed alignment and subspace clustering are mutually dependent state of the art clustering results on the unconstrained face dataset

robust parameter estimation in computer vision estimation techniques in computer vision applications must estimate accurate model parameters despite small scale noise in the data occasional large scale measurement errors outliers and measurements from multiple populations in the same data set increasingly robust estimation techniques some borrowed from the statistics literature and others described in the computer vision literature have been used in solving these parameter estimation problems ideally these techniques should effectively ignore the outliers and measurements from other populations treating them as outliers when estimating the parameters of a single population two frequently used techniques are least median of squares lms p j rousseeuw j amer statist assoc 79 1984 pp 871 880 and m estimators robust statistics the approach based on influence functions f r hampel et al john wiley 1986 robust statistics p j huber john wiley 1981 lms handles large fractions of outliers up to the theoretical limit of 50 for estimators invariant to affine changes to the data but has low statistical efficiency m estimators have higher statistical efficiency but tolerate much lower percentages of outliers unless properly initialized while robust estimators have been used in a variety of computer vision applications three are considered here in analysis of range images images containing depth or x y z measurements at each pixel instead of intensity measurements robust estimators have been used successfully to estimate surface model parameters in small image regions in stereo and motion analysis they have been used to estimate parameters of what is called the fundamental matrix which characterizes the relative imaging geometry of two cameras imaging the same scene recently robust estimators have been applied to estimating a quadratic image to image transformation model necessary to create a composite mosaic image from a series of images of the human retina in each case a straightforward application of standard robust estimators is insufficient and carefully developed extensions are used to solve the problem

invariants of graphs in three space par association d une collection de n uds et d aretes a un graphe dans un espace tridimensionnel on obtient des invariants calculables du type de plongement du graphe on considere deux types d isotopie

geometry and radiometry invariant matched manifold detection consider a set of deformable objects undergoing geometric and radiometric transformations as a result of the action of these transformations the set of different realizations of each object is generally a manifold in the space of observations assuming the geometric deformations an object undergoes belong to some finite dimensional family it has been shown that the universal manifold embedding ume provides a set of nonlinear operators that universally maps each of the different manifolds where each manifold is generated by the set all of possible appearances of a single object into a distinct linear subspace of an euclidean space in this paper we generalize this framework to the case where the observed object undergoes both an affine geometric transformation and a monotonic radiometric transformation and present a novel framework for the detection and recognition of the deformable objects applying to each of the observations an operator that makes it invariant to monotonic amplitude transformations but is geometry covariant with the affine transformation the set of all possible observations on that object is mapped by the ume into a single linear subspace invariant with respect to both the geometric and radiometric transformations the embedding of the space of observations is independent of the specific observed object hence it is universal the invariant representation of the object is the basis of a matched manifold detection and tracking framework of objects that undergo complex geometric and radiometric deformations the observed surface is tessellated into a set of tiles such that the deformation of each one is well approximated by an affine geometric transformation and a monotonic transformation of the measured intensities since each tile is mapped by the radiometry invariant ume to a distinct linear subspace the detection and tracking problems are solved by evaluating distances between linear subspaces classification in this context becomes a problem of determining which labeled subspace in a grassmannian is closest to a subspace in the same grassmannian where the latter has been generated by radiometry invariant ume from an unlabeled observation

generalized principal component analysis gpca this paper presents an algebro geometric solution to the problem of segmenting an unknown number of subspaces of unknown and varying dimensions from sample data points we represent the subspaces with a set of homogeneous polynomials whose degree is the number of subspaces and whose derivatives at a data point give normal vectors to the subspace passing through the point when the number of subspaces is known we show that these polynomials can be estimated linearly from data hence subspace segmentation is reduced to classifying one point per subspace we select these points optimally from the data set by minimizing certain distance function thus dealing automatically with moderate noise in the data a basis for the complement of each subspace is then recovered by applying standard pca to the collection of derivatives normal vectors extensions of gpca that deal with data in a high dimensional space and with an unknown number of subspaces are also presented our experiments on low dimensional data show that gpca outperforms existing algebraic algorithms based on polynomial factorization and provides a good initialization to iterative techniques such as k subspaces and expectation maximization we also present applications of gpca to computer vision problems such as face clustering temporal video segmentation and 3d motion segmentation from point correspondences in multiple affine views

some comments on cp i study the typical configuration of a cp plot when the number of variables in the regression problem is large and there are many weak effects i show that a particular configuration that is very commonly seen can arise in a simple way i give a formula by means of which the risk incurred by the minimum cp rule can be estimated

blessing of dimensionality recovering mixture data via dictionary pursuit this paper studies the problem of recovering the authentic samples that lie on a union of multiple subspaces from their corrupted observations due to the high dimensional and massive nature of today s data driven community it is arguable that the target matrix i e authentic sample matrix to recover is often low rank in this case the recently established robust principal component analysis rpca method already provides us a convenient way to solve the problem of recovering mixture data however in general rpca is not good enough because the incoherent condition assumed by rpca is not so consistent with the mixture structure of multiple subspaces namely when the subspace number grows the row coherence of data keeps heightening and accordingly rpca degrades to overcome the challenges arising from mixture data we suggest to consider lrr in this paper we elucidate that lrr can well handle mixture data as long as its dictionary is configured appropriately more precisely we mathematically prove that lrr can weaken the dependence on the row coherence provided that the dictionary is well conditioned and has a rank of not too high in particular if the dictionary itself is sufficiently low rank then the dependence on the row coherence can be completely removed these provide some elementary principles for dictionary learning and naturally lead to a practical algorithm for recovering mixture data our experiments on randomly generated matrices and real motion sequences show promising results

simultaneous two view epipolar geometry estimation and motion segmentation by 4d tensor voting we address the problem of simultaneous two view epipolar geometry estimation and motion segmentation from nonstatic scenes given a set of noisy image pairs containing matches of n objects we propose an unconventional efficient and robust method 4d tensor voting for estimating the unknown n epipolar geometries and segmenting the static and motion matching pairs into n independent motions by considering the 4d isotropic and orthogonal joint image space only two tensor voting passes are needed and a very high noise to signal ratio up to five can be tolerated epipolar geometries corresponding to multiple rigid motions are extracted in succession only two uncalibrated frames are needed and no simplifying assumption such as affine camera model or homographic model between images other than the pin hole camera model is made our novel approach consists of propagating a local geometric smoothness constraint in the 4d joint image space followed by global consistency enforcement for extracting the fundamental matrices corresponding to independent motions we have performed extensive experiments to compare our method with some representative algorithms to show that better performance on nonstatic scenes are achieved results on challenging data sets are presented

the development and comparison of robust methodsfor estimating the fundamental matrix this paper has two goals the first is to develop a variety of robust methods for the computation of the fundamental matrix the calibration free representation of camera motion the methods are drawn from the principal categories of robust estimators viz case deletion diagnostics m estimators and random sampling and the paper develops the theory required to apply them to non linear orthogonal regression problems although a considerable amount of interest has focussed on the application of robust estimation in computer vision the relative merits of the many individual methods are unknown leaving the potential practitioner to guess at their value the second goal is therefore to compare and judge the methods comparative tests are carried out using correspondences generated both synthetically in a statistically controlled fashion and from feature matching in real imagery in contrast with previously reported methods the goodness of fit to the synthetic observations is judged not in terms of the fit to the observations per se but in terms of fit to the ground truth a variety of error measures are examined the experiments allow a statistically satisfying and quasi optimal method to be synthesized which is shown to be stable with up to 50 percent outlier contamination and may still be used if there are more than 50 percent outliers performance bounds are established for the method and a variety of robust methods to estimate the standard deviation of the error and covariance matrix of the parameters are examined the results of the comparison have broad applicability to vision algorithms where the input data are corrupted not only by noise but also by gross outliers

least median of squares regression abstract classical least squares regression consists of minimizing the sum of the squared residuals many authors have produced more robust versions of this estimator by replacing the square by something else such as the absolute value in this article a different approach is introduced in which the sum is replaced by the median of the squared residuals the resulting estimator can resist the effect of nearly 50 of contamination in the data in the special case of simple regression it corresponds to finding the narrowest strip covering half of the observations generalizations are possible to multivariate location orthogonal regression and hypothesis testing in linear models

estimation of planar curves surfaces and nonplanar space curves defined by implicit equations with applications to edge and range image segmentation the author addresses the problem of parametric representation and estimation of complex planar curves in 2 d surfaces in 3 d and nonplanar space curves in 3 d curves and surfaces can be defined either parametrically or implicitly with the latter representation used here a planar curve is the set of zeros of a smooth function of two variables x y a surface is the set of zeros of a smooth function of three variables x y z and a space curve is the intersection of two surfaces which are the set of zeros of two linearly independent smooth functions of three variables x y z for example the surface of a complex object in 3 d can be represented as a subset of a single implicit surface with similar results for planar and space curves it is shown how this unified representation can be used for object recognition object position estimation and segmentation of objects into meaningful subobjects that is the detection of interest regions that are more complex than high curvature regions and hence more useful as features for object recognition

algebraic clustering of affine subspaces subspace clustering is an important problem in machine learning with many applications in computer vision and pattern recognition prior work has studied this problem using algebraic iterative statistical low rank and sparse representation techniques while these methods have been applied to both linear and affine subspaces theoretical results have only been established in the case of linear subspaces for example algebraic subspace clustering asc is guaranteed to provide the correct clustering when the data points are in general position and the union of subspaces is transversal in this paper we study in a rigorous fashion the properties of asc in the case of affine subspaces using notions from algebraic geometry we prove that the homogenization trick which embeds points in a union of affine subspaces into points in a union of linear subspaces preserves the general position of the points and the transversality of the union of subspaces in the embedded space thus establishing the correctness of asc for affine subspaces

influence in principal components analysis summary in linear regression the theoretical influence function and the various sample versions of it have an established place as diagnostic tools these same functions are developed here to provide methods for the detection of influential observations in principal components analysis the perturbation theory of real symmetric matrices unifies this development some interesting points of contrast with the regression case are noted and explained theoretically