Calibration of an active binocular head
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: Self-organizing fuzzy control of multi-variable systems using learning vector quantization network
abstract: Using learning vector quantization (LVQ) network to construct a self-organizing fuzzy controller (SOFC) for multi-variable nonlinear composite systems is developed in this paper. The LVQ network is used to provide information about the better locations of the IF-part membership functions through un-supervised learning. The generated fuzzy rule base is applied to the SOFC and updated by a self-learning procedure. Using Lyapunov stability methods, the proposed adaptive scheme is proven to provide the SOFC some degree of robust properties and guarantee uniform ultimate boundedness in the presence of disturbances, measurement noise and perturbed initialization error. The effectiveness of the proposed controller has been demonstrated numerically by applying to control a two-link manipulator.

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: 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: 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: 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: 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