The Promise and Perils of Near-Regular Texture
Motivated by the low structural fidelity for near-regular textures in current texture synthesis algorithms, we propose and implement an alternative texture synthesis method for near-regular texture. We view such textures as statistical departures from regular patterns and argue that a thorough understanding of their structures in terms of their translation symmetries can enhance existing methods of texture synthesis. We demonstrate the perils of texture synthesis for near-regular texture and the promise of faithfully preserving the regularity as well as the randomness in a near-regular texture sample.

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: Some star extremal circulant graphs
abstract: The circular chromatic number @g"c(G) and the fractional chromatic number @g"f(G) are two generalizations of the ordinary chromatic number of a graph G. A graph is called star extremal if its circular chromatic number equals its fractional chromatic number. Gao and Zhu ( (1996) 147-156), Lih et al. ( (1999) 491-499) gave many classes of circulant graphs which are star extremal. In this paper, we study the star extremality of circulant graphs whose generating sets are of the form {1,2,...,m-1,k,k+1,...,k+m-2}, {k,k+1,...,k'}, and {k,k+1,...,k"1,k"2,k"2+1,...,@?p/[email protected]?}, where p is the vertex number of the graph. As a corollary, we give an improvement of a result of Gao and Zhu ( (1996) 147-156).

title: Exploring the Synergy of Humans and Machines in Extreme Video Retrieval
abstract: We introduce an interface for efficient video search that exploits the human ability to quickly scan visual content, after automatic retrieval has arrange the images in expected order of relevance. While extreme video retrieval is taxing to the human, it is also extremely effective. Two variants of extreme retrieval are demonstrated, 1) RSVP which automatically pages through images with user-control of the paging speed, while the user marks relevant shots and 2) MBRP where the user manually controls paging and adjusts the number of images per page, depending on the density of relevant shots.

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: Assessing Effectiveness in Video Retrieval
abstract: This paper examines results from the last two years of the TRECVID video retrieval evaluations. While there is encouraging evidence about progress in video retrieval, there are several major disappointments confirming that the field of video retrieval is still in its infancy. Many publications blithely attribute improvements in retrieval tasks to the different techniques without paying much attention to the statistical reliability of the comparisons. We conduct an analysis of the official TRECVID evaluation results, using both retrieval experiment error rates and ANOVA measures, and demonstrate that the difference between many systems is not statistically significant. We conclude the paper with the lessons learned from both results with and without statistically significant difference.

title: Reconfiguration Procedures for a Polymorphic and Partitionable Multiprocessor
abstract: This correspondence presents a collection of reconfiguration procedures for a multiprocessor which employs multistage interconnection networks. These procedures are used to dynamically partitipn the multiprocessor into many subsystems, and reconfigure them to form a variety commonly used topologies to match task graphs. By examining the switching capability of the interconnection network, design rules for avoiding connection conflicts are exploited. Then, on the basis of these rules, parallel procedures are designed. With the procedures, a subsystem can be reconfigured in the form of the desired topologies without interfering with other subsystems. In addition, the reconfiguration of a subsystem can be accomplished in constant time, independently of subsystem size.