An oscillatory correlation model of human motion perception
An oscillatory correlation model of human motion perception is proposed based on the integration of motion and luminance information. The model is composed of two parallel pathways that segment the input scene based on motion and luminance, respectively. Combining these segmentations, the model refines the motion estimates in the integration stage to obtain the final segmentation in the motion pathway. For segmentation, LEGION (locally excitatory globally inhibitory oscillator network) is employed whereby the phases of oscillators are used for region labeling. The model performance is demonstrated using a set of psychophysical data.

title: Binary and ratio time-frequency masks for robust speech recognition
abstract: A time-varying Wiener filter specifies the ratio of a target signal and a noisy mixture in a local time-frequency unit. We estimate this ratio using a binaural processor and derive a ratio time-frequency mask. This mask is used to extract the speech signal, which is then fed to a conventional speech recognizer operating in the cepstral domain. We compare the performance of this system with a missing-data recognizer that operates in the spectral domain using the time-frequency units that are dominated by speech. To apply the missing-data recognizer, the same binaural processor is used to estimate an ideal binary time-frequency mask, which selects a local time-frequency unit if the speech signal within the unit is stronger than the interference. We find that the performance of the missing data recognizer is better on a small vocabulary recognition task but the performance of the conventional recognizer is substantially better when the vocabulary size is increased.

title: A schema-based model for phonemic restoration
abstract: Phonemic restoration is the perceptual synthesis of phonemes when masked by appropriate replacement sounds by utilizing linguistic context. Current models attempting to accomplish acoustic restoration of phonemes, however, use only temporal continuity and produce poor restoration of unvoiced phonemes, and are also limited in their ability to restore voiced phonemes. We present a schema-based model for phonemic restoration. The model employs a missing data speech recognition system to decode speech based on intact portions and activates word templates corresponding to the words containing the masked phonemes. An activated template is dynamically time warped to the noisy word and is then used to restore the speech frames corresponding to the masked phoneme, thereby synthesizing it. The model is able to restore both voiced and unvoiced phonemes with a high degree of naturalness. Systematic testing shows that this model outperforms a Kalman-filter based model.

title: Synchrony and Desynchrony in Neural Oscillator Networks
abstract: An novel class of locally excitatory, globally inhibitory oscillator networks is proposed. The model of each oscillator corresponds to a standard relaxation oscillator with two time scales. The network exhibits a mechanism of selective gating, whereby an oscillator jumping up to its active phase rapidly recruits the oscillators stimulated by the same pattern, while preventing others from jumping up. We show analytically that with the selective gating mechanism the network rapidly achieves both synchronization within blocks of oscillators that are stimulated by connected regions and desynchronization between different blocks. Computer simulations demonstrate the network's promising ability for segmenting multiple input patterns in real time. This model lays a physical foundation for the oscillatory correlation theory of feature binding, and may provide an effective computational framework for scene segmentation and figure/ground segregation.

title: Singing Voice Separation from Monaural Recordings
abstract: Separating singing voice from music accompaniment has wide applications in areas such as automatic lyrics recognition and alignment, singer identification, and music information retrieval. Compared to the extensive studies of speech separation, singing voice separation has been little explored. We propose a system to separate singing voice from music accompaniment from monaural recordings. The system has three stages. The singing voice detection stage partitions and classifies an input into vocal and non-vocal portions. Then the predominant pitch detection stage detects the pitch contour of the singing voice for vocal portions. Finally the separation stage uses the detected pitch contour to group the time-frequency segments of the singing voice. Quantitative results show that the system performs well in singing voice separation.

title: Texture classification using spectral histograms
abstract: Based on a local spatial/frequency representation,we employ a spectral histogram as a feature statistic for texture classification. The spectral histogram consists of marginal distributions of responses of a bank of filters and encodes implicitly the local structure of images through the filtering stage and the global appearance through the histogram stage. The distance between two spectral histograms is measured using chi(2)-statistic. The spectral histogram with the associated distance measure exhibits several properties that are necessary for texture classification. A filter selection algorithm is proposed to maximize classification performance of a given dataset. Our classification experiments using natural texture images reveal that the spectral histogram representation provides a robust feature statistic for textures and generalizes well. Comparisons show that our method produces a marked improvement in classification performance. Finally we point out the relationships between existing texture features and the spectral histogram, suggesting that the latter may provide a unified texture feature.

title: Semantics modeling based image retrieval system using neural networks
abstract: Semantics based image retrieval techniques show a promising direction to the development of CBIR systems. To design such systems, semantics modeling is one of the most difficult tasks. This paper aims to develop a semantics modeling approach using neural networks. In our work, a neural network is utilized to memorize the semantic patterns within the images. An intelligent image retrieval system is designed based on this model. User's relevance feedback is used for enhancing the retrieval performance. Experimental results from the prototype system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

title: Using Combinatorial Optimization Methods for Quantification Scheduling
abstract: Model checking is the process of verifying whether a model of a concurrent system satisfies a specified temporal property. Symbolic algorithms based on Binary Decision Diagrams (BDDs) have significantly increased the size of the models that can be verified. The main problem in symbolic model checking is the image computation problem, i.e., efficiently computing the successors or predecessors of a set of states. This paper is an in-depth study of the image computation problem. We analyze and evaluate several newheuristics, metrics, and algorithms for this problem. The algorithms use combinatorial optimization techniques such as hill climbing, simulated annealing, and ordering by recursive partitioning to obtain better results than was previously the case. Theoretical analysis and systematic experimentation are used to evaluate the algorithms.

title: Gene Selection Through Sensitivity Analysis of Support Vector Machines
abstract: We present a novel approach to gene selection for microarry data through the sensitivity analysis of support vector machines (SVMs). A new measurement (sensitivity) is defined to quantify the saliencies of individual features (genes) by analyzing the discriminative function in SVMs. Our feature selection strategy is first to select the features with higher sensitivities but meanwhile keep the remaining ones, and then refine the selected subset by tentatively substituting some part with fragments of the previously rejected features. The accuracy of our method is validated experimentally on the benchmark microarray datasets.

title: Learning Semantic Concepts from Visual Data Using Neural Networks
abstract: For content-based image retrieval techniques, query image is used to pick up and rank some relevant images from a database using some certain similarity metric. If semantic features are not involved in the modeling of visual data, the resulting system may demonstrate a disability of retrieving images likely associated with interesting semantic concepts of objects in the images. Therefore, issues on semantics representation, automatic extraction of semantic concepts from visual data, and effects of window size on the concepts recogni- tion are needed to study. This paper describes an approach towards these prob- lems. We first define a set of semantic concepts characterizing the outdoor im- ages. Then, a neural network is employed to memory the semantic concepts through pattern learning techniques. Lastly, the well-trained neural networks will perform as a classifier to identify the predefined semantics within an image. Empirical studies and comparison with decision tree techniques are carried out.

title: An Edge-Preserving Image Reconstruction Using Neural Network
abstract: This paper presents an image restoration model based on the implicit function theorem and edge-preserving regularization. We then apply the model on the subband-coded images using the artificial neural network. The edge information is extracted from the source image as a priori nowledge to recover the details and reduce the ringing artifact of the subband-coded image. The multilayer perceptron model is employed to implement the restoration process. The main merit of the presented approach is that the neural network model is massively parallel with strong robustness for the transmission noise and parameter or structure perturbation, and it can be realized by VLSI technologies for real-time applications. To evaluate the performance of the proposed approach, a comparative study with the set partitioning in hierarchical tree (SPIHT) has been made by using a set of gray-scale digital images. The experimental results showed that the proposed approach could result in compatible performances compared with SPIHT on both objective and subjective quality for lower compression ratio subband coded image.