Framework for Performance Evaluation of Face, Text, and Vehicle Detection and Tracking in Video: Data, Metrics, and Protocol
Common benchmark data sets, standardized performance metrics, and baseline algorithms have demonstrated considerable impact on research and development in a variety of application domains. These resources provide both consumers and developers of technology with a common framework to objectively compare the performance of different algorithms and algorithmic improvements. In this paper, we present such a framework for evaluating object detection and tracking in video: specifically for face, text, and vehicle objects. This framework includes the source video data, ground-truth annotations (along with guidelines for annotation), performance metrics, evaluation protocols, and tools including scoring software and baseline algorithms. For each detection and tracking task and supported domain, we developed a 50-clip training set and a 50-clip test set. Each data clip is approximately 2.5 minutes long and has been completely spatially/temporally annotated at the I-frame level. Each task/domain, therefore, has an associated annotated corpus of approximately 450,000 frames. The scope of such annotation is unprecedented and was designed to begin to support the necessary quantities of data for robust machine learning approaches, as well as a statistically significant comparison of the performance of algorithms. The goal of this work was to systematically address the challenges of object detection and tracking through a common evaluation framework that permits a meaningful objective comparison of techniques, provides the research community with sufficient data for the exploration of automatic modeling techniques, encourages the incorporation of objective evaluation into the development process, and contributes useful lasting resources of a scale and magnitude that will prove to be extremely useful to the computer vision research community for years to come.

title: A Pixel-level Statistical Structural Descriptor for Shape Measure and Recognition
abstract: A novel shape descriptor based on the histogram matrix of pixel-level structural features is presented. First, length ratios and angles between the centroid and contour points of a shape are calculated as two structural attributes. Then, the attributes are combined to construct a new histogram matrix in the feature space statistically. The proposed shape descriptor can measure circularity, smoothness, and symmetry of shapes, and be used to recognize shapes. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

title: Extraction of Text Objects in Video Documents: Recent Progress
abstract: Text extraction in video documents, as an important research field of content-based information indexing and retrieval, has been developing rapidly since 1990s. This has led to much progress in text extraction, performance evaluation, and related applications. By reviewing the approaches proposed during the past five years, this paper introduces the progress made in this area and discusses promising directions for future research.

title: Adaptive Noise Reduction for Engineering Drawings Based on Primitives and Noise Assessment
abstract: In this paper, a novel adaptive noise reduction method for engineering drawings is proposed based on the assessment of both primitives and noise. Unlike the current approaches, our method takes into account the special features of engineering drawings and assesses the characteristics of primitives and noise such that adaptive procedures and parameters are applied for noise reduction. For this purpose, we first analyze and categorize various types of noise in engineering drawings. The algorithms for average linewidth assessment, noise distribution assessment and noise level assessment are then proposed. These three assessments are combined to describe the features of the noise of each individual engineering drawing. Finally, median filters and morphological filters, which can adjust their template size and structural element adaptively according to different noise level and type, are used for adaptive noise reduction. Preliminary experimental results show that our approach is effective for noise reduction of engineering drawings.

title: A PDA-based sign translator
abstract: We propose an effective approach for a PDA-based sign system and present the sign translator. Its main functions include three parts: detection, recognition and translation. Automatic detection and recognition of text in natural scenes is a prerequisite for the automatic sign translator. In order to make the system robust for text detection in various natural scenes, the detection approach efficiently embeds multi-resolution, adaptive search in a hierarchical framework with different emphases at each layer. We also introduce an intensity-based OCR method to recognize characters in various fonts and lighting conditions, where we employ the Gabor transform to obtain local features, and LDA for selection and classification of features. The recognition rate is 92.4% for the testing set obtained from the natural sign. A sign is different from the normal used sentence. It is brief with a lot of abbreviations and place nouns. We only briefly introduce a rule-based place name translation. We have integrated all these functions in a PDA, which can capture sign images, auto segment and recognize the Chinese sign, and translate it into English.

title: A Novel Method for Detecting Outlying Subspaces in High-dimensional Databases Using Genetic Algorithm
abstract: Detecting outlying subspaces is a relatively new research problem in outlier-ness analysis for high-dimensional data. An outlying subspace for a given data point p is the sub- space in which p is an outlier. Outlying subspace detection can facilitate a better characterization process for the detected outliers. It can also enable outlier mining for high- dimensional data to be performed more accurately and efficiently. In this paper, we proposed a new method using genetic algorithm paradigm for searching outlying subspaces efficiently. We developed a technique for efficiently computing the lower and upper bounds of the distance between a given point and its kth nearest neighbor in each possible subspace. These bounds are used to speed up the fitness evaluation of the designed genetic algorithm for outlying subspace detection. We also proposed a random sampling technique to further reduce the computation of the genetic algorithm. The optimal number of sampling data is specified to ensure the accuracy of the result. We show that the proposed method is efficient and effective in handling outlying subspace detection problem by a set of experiments conducted on both synthetic and real-life datasets.

title: An Information-Driven Framework for Image Mining
abstract: Image mining systems that can automatically extract semantically meaningful information (knowledge) from image data are increasingly in demand. The fundamental challenge in image mining is to determine how lowlevel, pixel representation contained in a raw image or image sequence can be processed to identify high-level spatial objects and relationships. To meet this challenge, we propose an efficient information-driven framework for image mining. We distinguish four levels of information: the Pixel Level, the Object Level, the Semantic Concept Level, and the Pattern and Knowledge Level. High-dimensional indexing schemes and retrieval techniques are also included in the framework to support the flow of information among the levels. We believe this framework represents the first step towards capturing the different levels of information present in image data and addressing the issues and challenges of discovering useful patterns/knowledge from each level.

title: Automatic detection and recognition of signs from natural scenes
abstract: In this paper, we present an approach to automatic detection and recognition of signs from natural scenes, and its application to a sign translation task. The proposed approach embeds multiresolution and multiscale edge detection, adaptive searching, color analysis, and affine rectification in a hierarchical framework for sign detection, with different emphases at each phase to handle the text in different sizes, orientations, color distributions and backgrounds. We use affine rectification to recover deformation of the text regions caused by an inappropriate camera view angle. The procedure can significantly improve text detection rate and optical character recognition (OCR) accuracy. Instead of using binary information for OCR, we extract features from an intensity image directly. We propose a local intensity normalization method to effectively handle lighting variations, followed by a Gabor transform to obtain local features, and finally a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) method for feature selection. We have applied the approach in developing a Chinese sign translation system, which can automatically detect and recognize Chinese signs as input from a camera, and translate the recognized text into English.

title: Towards outlier detection for high-dimensional data streams using projected outlier analysis strategy
abstract: Outlier detection is an important research problem in data mining that aims to discover useful abnormal and irregular patterns hidden in large data sets. Most existing outlier detection methods only deal with static data with relatively low dimensionality. Recently, outlier detection for high-dimensional stream data became a new emerging research problem. A key observation that motivates this research is that outliers in high-dimensional data are projected outliers, i.e., they are embedded in lower-dimensional subspaces. Detecting projected outliers from high-dimensional stream data is a very challenging task for several reasons. First, detecting projected outliers is difficult even for high-dimensional static data. The exhaustive search for the outlying subspaces where projected outliers are embedded is a NP problem. Second, the algorithms for handling data streams are constrained to take only one pass to process the streaming data with the conditions of space limitation and time criticality. The currently existing methods for outlier detection are found to be ineffective for detecting projected outliers in high-dimensional data streams. 
In this thesis, we present a new technique, called the Stream Project Outlier deTector (SPOT), which attempts to detect projected outliers in high-dimensional data streams. SPOT employs an innovative window-based time model in capturing dynamic statistics from stream data, and a novel data structure containing a set of top sparse subspaces to detect projected outliers effectively. SPOT also employs a multi-objective genetic algorithm as an effective search method for finding the outlying subspaces where most projected outliers are embedded. The experimental results demonstrate that SPOT is efficient and effective in detecting projected outliers for high-dimensional data streams. The main contribution of this thesis is that it provides a backbone in tackling the challenging problem of outlier detection for high-dimensional data streams. SPOT can facilitate the discovery of useful abnormal patterns and can be potentially applied to a variety of high demand applications, such as for sensor network data monitoring, online transaction protection, etc.