Meta-Classification of Multimedia Classifiers
Combining multiple classifiers is of particular interest in the multimedia systems, since there is usually data of very different types/modalities that should be mined or analyzed. Our wearable ‘experience collection’ system unobtrusively records the wearer’s conversation, recognizes the face of the dialog partner and remembers his/her voice. When the system sees the same person’s face or hears the same voice it can then use a summary of the last conversation with this person to remind the wearer. To correctly identify a person from a mixture of video and audio stream, classification judgments from individual modality classifiers must be combined effectively to yield a more accurate decision. To address the problems of combination strategy in previous studies, a meta-classification strategy using Support Vector Machine is proposed. Preliminary results show that combining different face recognition and speaker identification technology by meta-classification is dramatically more effective than weighted interpolation. Meta-classification is general enough to be applied to any application that needs to combine multiple classifiers without much modification.

title: Identifying Perspectives at the Document and Sentence Levels Using Statistical Models
abstract: In this paper we investigate the problem of identifying the perspective from which a document was written. By perspective we mean a point of view, for example, from the perspective of Democrats or Republicans. Can computers learn to identify the perspective of a document? Furthermore, can computers identify which sentences in a document strongly convey a particular perspective? We develop statistical models to capture how perspectives are expressed at the document and sentence levels, and evaluate the proposed models on a collection of articles on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The results show that the statistical models can successfully learn how perspectives are reflected in word usage and identify the perspective of a document with very high accuracy.

title: Web image retrieval re-ranking with relevance model
abstract: Web image retrieval is a challenging task that requires efforts from image processing, link structure analysis, and Web text retrieval. Since content-based image retrieval is still considered very difficult, most current large-scale Web image search engines exploit text and link structure to "understand" the content of the Web images. However, local text information, such as caption, filenames and adjacent text, is not always reliable and informative. Therefore, global information should be taken into account when a Web image retrieval system makes relevance judgment. We propose a re-ranking method to improve Web image retrieval by reordering the images retrieved from an image search engine. The re-ranking process is based on a relevance model, which is a probabilistic model that evaluates the relevance of the HTML document linking to the image, and assigns a probability of relevance. The experiment results showed that the re-ranked image retrieval achieved better performance than original Web image retrieval, suggesting the effectiveness of the re-ranking method. The relevance model is learned from the Internet without preparing any training data and independent of the underlying algorithm of the image search engines. The re-ranking process should be applicable to any image search engines with little effort.

title: News video classification using SVM-based multimodal classifiers and combination strategies
abstract: Video classification is the first step toward multimedia content understanding. When video is classified into conceptual categories, it is usually desirable to combine evidence from multiple modalities. However, combination strategies in previous studies were usually ad hoc. We investigate a meta-classification combination strategy using Support Vector Machine, and compare it with probability-based strategies. Text features from closed-captions and visual features from images are combined to classify broadcast news video. The experimental results show that combining multimodal classifiers can significantly improve recall and precision, and our meta-classification strategy gives better precision than the approach of taking the product of the posterior probabilities.

title: A wearable digital library of personal conversations
abstract: We have developed a wearable, personalized digital library system, which unobtrusively records the wearer's part of a conversation, recognizes the face of the current dialog partner and remembers his/her voice. The next time the system sees the same person and hears the same voice, it can replay parts of the last conversation in compressed form. Results from a prototype system show the effectiveness of combining of face recognition and speaker identification for retrieving conversations.

title: Speaker Adaptation of Fuzzy-Perceptron-Based Speech Recognition
abstract: In this paper, we propose a speech recognition algorithm which utilizes hidden Markov models (HMM) and Viterbi algorithm for segmenting the input speech sequence, such that the variable-dimensional speech signal is converted into a fixed-dimensional speech signal, called TN vector. We then use the fuzzy perceptron to generate hyperplanes which separate patterns of each class from the others. The proposed speech recognition algorithm is easy for speaker adaptation when the idea of "supporting pattern" is used. The supporting patterns are those patterns closest to the hyperplane. When a recognition error occurs, we include all the TN vectors of the input speech sequence with respect to the segmentations of all HMM models as the supporting patterns. The supporting patterns are then used by the fuzzy perceptron to tune the hyperplane that can cause correct recognition, and also tune the hyperplane that resulted in wrong recognition. Since only two hyperplane need to be tuned for a recognition error, the proposed adaptation scheme is time-economic and suitable for on-line adaptation. Although the adaptation scheme cannot ensure to correct the wrong recognition right after adaptation, the hyperplanes are tuned in the direction for correct recognition iteratively and the speed of adaptation can be adjusted by a "belief" parameter set by the user. Several examples are used to show the performance of the proposed speech recognition algorithm and the speaker adaptation scheme.

title: Circular chromatic numbers of some distance graphs
abstract: Given a set D of positive integers, the distance graph G(Z,D) has vertices all integers Z, and two vertices j and j^' in Z are adjacent if and only if |j-j^'|@?D. This paper determines the circular chromatic numbers of some distance graphs.

title: A Lattice-Based MRF Model for Dynamic Near-Regular Texture Tracking
abstract: A near-regular texture (NRT) is a geometric and photometric deformation from its regular origin - a congruent wallpaper pattern formed by 2D translations of a single tile. A dynamic NRT is an NRT under motion. Although NRTs are pervasive in man-made and natural environments, effective computational algorithms for NRTs are few. This paper addresses specific computational challenges in modeling and tracking dynamic NRTs, including ambiguous correspondences, occlusions, and drastic illumination and appearance variations. We propose a lattice-based Markov-random-field (MRF) model for dynamic NRTs in a 3D spatiotemporal space. Our model consists of a global lattice structure that characterizes the topological constraint among multiple textons and an image observation model that handles local geometry and appearance variations. Based on the proposed MRF model, we develop a tracking algorithm that utilizes belief propagation and particle filtering to effectively handle the special challenges of the dynamic NRT tracking without any assumption on the motion types or lighting conditions. We provide quantitative evaluations of the proposed method against existing tracking algorithms and demonstrate its applications in video editing

title: A Space-Time Delay Neural Network for Motion Recognition and its Application to Lipreading
abstract: Motion recognition has received increasing attention in recent years owing to heightened demand for computer vision in many domains, including the surveillance system, multimodal human computer interface, and traffic control system. Most conventional approaches classify the motion recognition task into partial feature extraction and time-domain recognition subtasks. However, the information of motion resides in the space-time domain instead of the time domain or space domain independently, implying that fusing the feature extraction and classification in the space and time domains into a single framework is preferred. Based on this notion, this work presents a novel Space-Time Delay Neural Network (STDNN) capable of handling the space-time dynamic information for motion recognition. The STDNN is unified structure, in which the low-level spatiotemporal feature extraction and high-level space-time-domain recognition are fused. The proposed network possesses the spatiotemporal shift-invariant recognition ability that is inherited from the time delay neural network (TDNN) and space displacement neural network (SDNN), where TDNN and SDNN are good at temporal and spatial shift-invariant recognition, respectively. In contrast to multilayer perceptron (MLP), TDNN, and SDNN, STDNN is constructed by vector-type nodes and matrix-type links such that the spatiotemporal information can be accurately represented in a neural network. Also evaluated herein is the performance of the proposed STDNN via two experiments. The moving Arabic numerals (MAN) experiment simulates the object's free movement in the space-time domain on image sequences. According to these results, STDNN possesses a good generalization ability with respect to the spatiotemporal shift-invariant recognition. In the lipreading experiment, STDNN recognizes the lip motions based on the inputs of real image sequences. This observation confirms that STDNN yields a better performance than the existing TDNN-based system, particularly in terms of the generalization ability. In addition to the lipreading application, the STDNN can be applied to other problems since no domain-dependent knowledge is used in the experiment.

title: Analysis of two restart algorithms
abstract: Since the backpropagation algorithm used for neural network training suffers from a slow convergence and often sticking in local minima, the restart mechanism has been introduced, whose strategy is to cut off the training process and restart it with a fresh initialization when it seems unlikely to converge in a relatively short time. In this paper, we give detailed mathematical analysis on two versions of the restart algorithms. By deriving analytic expressions of the expected convergence time and the success rate, we illustrate why the restart algorithms work well and gain insights into the proper use of restarting. Numerical simulations are performed on the XOR problem, symmetry detection, parity problem and Arabic numeral recognition. We show the effectiveness of the restart algorithms, and compare them with simulated annealing. The analysis can also be applied to many other fields.