Identifying Perspectives at the Document and Sentence Levels Using Statistical Models
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: 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: 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: Modeling timing features in broadcast news video classification
abstract: Broadcast news programs are well-structured video, and timing can be a strong predictor for specific types of news reports. However, learning a classifier using timing features may not be an easy task when training data are noisy. We approach the problem from the generative model perspective, and approximate the class density in a non-parametric fashion. The results show that timing is a simple but extremely effective feature, and our method can achieve significantly better performance than a discriminative classifier.

title: Video Classification and Retrieval with the Informedia Digital Video Library System
abstract: This paper is organized in three parts. The first part details some of the lower level shot classification work, the second part describes the ‘manual’ retrieval systems while the last section details the interactive retrieval system for the Carnegie Mellon University TREC Video Retrieval Track runs. The description of the data can be found elsewhere in the proceedings of the 2002 TREC conference video track overview.

title: Extreme video retrieval: joint maximization of human and computer performance
abstract: We present an efficient system for video search that maximizes the use of human bandwidth, while at the same time exploiting the machine's ability to learn in real-time from user selected relevant video clips. The system exploits the human capability for rapidly scanning imagery augmenting it with an active learning loop, which attempts to always present the most relevant material based on the current information. Two versions of the human interface were evaluated, one with variable page sizes and manual paging, the other with a fixed page size and automatic paging. Both require absolute attention and focus of the user for optimal performance. In either case, as users search and find relevant results, the system can invisibly re-rank its previous best guesses using a number of knowledge sources, such as image similarity, text similarity, and temporal proximity. Experimental evidence shows a significant improvement using the combined extremes of human and machine power over either approach alone.

title: Calibration of an active binocular head
abstract: In this paper, we show how an active binocular head, the IIS head, can be easily calibrated with very high accuracy. Our calibration method can also be applied to many other binocular heads. In addition to the proposal and demonstration of a four-stage calibration process, there are three major contributions in this paper. First, we propose a motorized-focus lens (MFL) camera model which assumes constant nominal extrinsic parameters. The advantage of having constant extrinsic parameters is to having a simple head/eye relation. Second, a calibration method for the MFL camera model is proposed in this paper, which separates estimation of the image center and effective focal length from estimation of the camera orientation and position. This separation has been proved to be crucial; otherwise, estimates of camera parameters would be very noise-sensitive. Thirdly, we show that, once the parameters of the MFL camera model is calibrated, a nonlinear recursive least-square estimator can be used to refine all the 35 kinematic parameters. Real experiments have shown that the proposed method can achieve accuracy of one pixel prediction error and 0.2 pixel epipolar error, even when all the joints, including the left and right focus motors, are moved simultaneously. This accuracy is good enough for many 3D vision applications, such as navigation, object tracking and reconstruction.

title: A Top-Down Processor Allocation Scheme for Hypercube Computers
abstract: An efficient processor allocation policy is presented for hypercube computers. The allocation policy is called free list since it maintains a list of free subcubes available in the system. An incoming request of dimension k (2/sup k/ nodes) is allocated by finding a free subcube of dimension k or by decomposing an available subcube of dimension greater than k. This free list policy uses a top-down allocation rule in contrast to the bottom-up approach used by the previous bit-map allocation algorithms. This allocation scheme is compared to the buddy, gray code (GC), and modified buddy allocation policies reported for the hypercubes. It is shown that the free list policy is optimal in a static environment, as are the other policies, and it also gives better subcube recognition ability compared to the previous schemes in a dynamic environment. The performance of this policy, in terms of parameters such as average delay, system utilization, and time complexity, is compared to the other schemes to demonstrate its effectiveness. The extension of the algorithm for parallel implementation, noncubic allocation, and inclusion/exclusion allocation is also given.

title: Near-regular texture analysis and manipulation
abstract: A near-regular texture deviates geometrically and photometrically from a regular congruent tiling. Although near-regular textures are ubiquitous in the man-made and natural world, they present computational challenges for state of the art texture analysis and synthesis algorithms. Using regular tiling as our anchor point, and with user-assisted lattice extraction, we can explicitly model the deformation of a near-regular texture with respect to geometry, lighting and color. We treat a deformation field both as a function that acts on a texture and as a texture that is acted upon, and develop a multi-modal framework where each deformation field is subject to analysis, synthesis and manipulation. Using this formalization, we are able to construct simple parametric models to faithfully synthesize the appearance of a near-regular texture and purposefully control its regularity.

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: 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.