Abstract

Many computer vision tasks require efficient evaluation of Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers on large image databases. Our goal is to efficiently evaluate SVM classifiers on a large number of images. We propose a novel Error Space Encoding (ESE) scheme for SVM evaluation which utilizes large number of classifiers already evaluated on the similar data set. We model this problem as an encoding of a novel classifier (query) in terms of the existing classifiers (query logs). With sufficiently large query logs, we show that ESE performs far better than any other existing encoding schemes. With this method we are able to retrieve nearly 100% correct top-k images from a dataset of 1 Million images spanning across 1000 categories. We also demonstrate application of our method in terms of relevance feedback and query expansion mechanism and show that our method achieves the same accuracy 90 times faster than exhaustive SVM evaluations.

Abstract

In this paper, we present an application for recognizing currency bills using computer vision techniques, that can run on a low-end smartphone. The application runs on the device without the need for any remote server. It is intended for robust, practical use by the visually impaired. Though we use the paper bills of Indian National Rupee (|) as a working example, our method is generic and scalable to multiple domains including those beyond the currency bills. Our solution uses a visual Bag of Words (BoW) based method for recognition. To enable robust recognition in a cluttered environment, we first segment the bill from the background using an algorithm based on iterative graph cuts. We formulate the recognition problem as an instance retrieval task. This is an example of fine-grained instance retrieval that can run on mobile devices. We evaluate the performance on a set of images captured in diverse natural environments, and report an accuracy of 96.7% on 2584 images

Abstract

In this work, we propose a method to identify the ragas of an Indian Carnatic music signal. This has several interesting applications in digital music indexing, recommendation and retrieval. However, this problem is hard due to (i) the absence of a fixed frequency for a note (ii) relative scale of notes (iii) oscillations around a note, and (iv) improvisations. In this work, we attempt the raga classification problem in a non-linear SVM framework using a combination of two kernels that represent the similarities of a music signal using two different featurespitch-class profile and n-gram distribution of notes. This differs from the previous pitch-class profile based approaches where the temporal information of notes is ignored. We evaluated the proposed approach on our own raga dataset and CompMusic dataset and show an improvement of 10.19% by combining the information from two features relevant to Indian Carnatic music.

Abstract

The problem of ranking a set of visual samples according to their relevance to a query plays an important role in computer vision. The traditional approach for ranking is to train a binary classifier such as a support vector machine (svm). Binary classifiers suffer from two main deficiencies: (i) they do not optimize a ranking-based loss function, for example, the average precision (ap) loss; and (ii) they cannot incorporate high-order information such as the a priori correlation between the relevance of two visual samples (for example, two persons in the same image tend to perform the same action). We propose two novel learning formulations that allow us to incorporate high-order information for ranking. The first framework, called high-order binary svm (hob-svm), allows for a structured input. The parameters of hob-svm are learned by minimizing a convex upper bound on a surrogate 0-1 loss function. In order to obtain the ranking of the samples that form the structured input, hobsvm sorts the samples according to their max-marginals. The second framework, called high-order average precision svm (hoap-svm), also allows for a structured input and uses the same ranking criterion. However, in contrast to hob-svm, the parameters of hoap-svm are learned by minimizing a difference-of-convex upper bound on the ap loss. Using a standard, publicly available dataset for the challenging problem of action classification, we show that both hob-svm and hoap-svm outperform the baselines that ignore high-order information.

Abstract

Real world applicability of many computer vision solutions is constrained by the mismatch between the training and test domains. This mismatch might arise because of factors such as change in pose, lighting conditions, quality of imaging devices, intra-class variations inherent in object categories etc. In this work, we present a dictionary learning based approach to tackle the problem of domain mismatch. In our approach, we jointly learn dictionaries for the source and the target domains. The dictionaries are partially shared, i.e. some elements are common across both the dictionaries. These shared elements can represent the information which is common across both the domains. The dictionaries also have some elements to represent the domain specific information. Using these dictionaries, we separate the domain specific information and the information which is common across the domains. We use the latter for training cross-domain classifiers i.e., we build classifiers that work well on a new target domain while using labeled examples only in the source domain. We conduct cross-domain object recognition experiments on popular benchmark datasets and show improvement in results over the existing state of art domain adaptation approaches.

Abstract

In this paper we propose a framework for recognition and retrieval tasks in the context of scene text images. In contrast to many of the recent works, we focus on the case where an image-specific list of words, known as the small lexicon setting, is unavailable. We present a conditional random field model defined on potential character locations and the interactions between them. Observing that the interaction potentials computed in the large lexicon setting are less effective than in the case of a small lexicon, we propose an iterative method, which alternates between finding the most likely solution and refining the interaction potentials. We evaluate our method on public datasets and show that it improves over baseline and state-of-the-art approaches. For example, we obtain nearly 15% improvement in recognition accuracy and precision for our retrieval task over baseline methods on the IIIT-5K word dataset, with a large lexicon containing 0.5 million words.

Abstract

In this paper, we present a solution to generate semantically richer descriptions and instructions for driver assistance and safety. Our solution builds upon a set of computer vision and machine learning modules. We start with low-level image processing and finally generate high-level descriptions. We do this by combining the results of the image pattern recognition module with the prior knowledge on traffic rules and larger context present in the video sequence. For recognition of road markings, we use a SVM based classifier and HOG based classifier. We test our method on real data captured in urban settings, and report impressive performance. Qualitative and quantitative performance of various modules are presented.

Abstract

Proteins display characteristic dynamical signatures that appear to be universal across all proteins regardless of topology and size. Here, we systematically characterize the universal features of fast side chain motions in proteins by examining the conformational energy surfaces of individual residues obtained using enhanced sampling molecular dynamics simulation (618 free energy surfaces obtained from 0.94 μs MD simulation). The side chain conformational free energy surfaces obtained using the adaptive biasing force (ABF) method for a set of eight proteins with different molecular weights and secondary structures are used to determine the methyl axial NMR order parameters (Oaxis 2), populations of side chain rotamer states (ρ), conformational entropies (Sconf), probability fluxes, and activation energies for side chain interrotameric transitions. The free energy barriers separating side chain rotamer states range from 0.3 to 12 kcal/mol in all proteins and follow a trimodal distribution with an intense peak at∼ 5 kcal/mol and two shoulders at∼ 3 and∼ 7.5 kcal/mol, indicating that some barriers are more favored than others by proteins to maintain a balance between their conformational stability and flexibility. The origin and the influences of the trimodal barrier distribution on the distribution of Oaxis 2 and the side chain conformational entropy are discussed. A hierarchical grading of rotamer states based on the conformational free energy barriers, entropy, and probability flux reveals three distinct classes of side chains in proteins. A unique nonlinear correlation is established between Oaxis 2 and the side chain rotamer populations (ρ). The …

Abstract

Entity Disambiguation is the task of associating entity name mentions in text to the correct referent entities in the knowledge base, with the goal of understanding and extracting useful information from the document. Entity disambiguation is a critical component of systems designed to harness information shared by users on microblogging sites like Twitter. However, noise and lack of context in tweets makes disambiguation a difficult task. In this paper, we describe an Entity Disambiguation system, EDIUM, which uses User interest Models to disambiguate the entities in the user’s tweets. Our system jointly models the user’s interest scores and the context disambiguation scores, thus compensating the sparse context in the tweets for a given user. We evaluated the system’s entity linking capabilities on tweets from multiple users and showed that improvement can be achieved by combining the user models and the context based models.

Abstract

The last two decades have witnessed an exponential rise in web content from a plethora of domains, which has necessitated the use of domain-specific search engines. Diversity of crawled content is one of the crucial aspects of a domain-specific search engine. To a large extent, diversity is governed by the initial set of seed URLs. Most of the existing approaches rely on manual effort for seed selection. In this work we automate this process using URLs posted on Twitter. We propose an algorithm to get a set of diverse seed URLs from a Twitter URL graph. We compare the performance of our approach against the baseline zero similarity seed selection method and find that our approach beats the baseline by a significant margin.