Abstract

We aim to learn local orientation field patterns in fingerprints and correct distorted field patterns in noisy fingerprint images. This is formulated as a learning problem and achieved using two continuous restricted Boltzmann machines. The learnt orientation fields are then used in conjunction with traditional Gabor based algorithms for fingerprint enhancement. Orientation fields extracted by gradient-based methods are local, and do not consider neighboring orientations. If some amount of noise is present in a fingerprint, then these methods perform poorly when enhancing the image, affecting fingerprint matching. This paper presents a method to correct the resulting noisy regions over patches of the fingerprint by training two continuous restricted Boltzmann machines. The continuous RBMs are trained with clean fingerprint images and applied to overlapping patches of the input fingerprint. Experimental results show that one can successfully restore patches of noisy fingerprint images.

Abstract

Binarization of text in natural scene images is a challenging task due to the variations in color, size, and font of the text and the results are often affected by complex back-grounds, different lighting conditions, shadows and reflections.A robust solution to this problem can significantly enhance the accuracy of scene text recognition algorithms leading to a variety of applications such as scene understanding, automatic localization and navigation, and image retrieval. In this paper,we propose a method to extract and binarize text from images that contains complex background. We use an Independent Component Analysis (ICA) based technique to map out the text region, which is inherently uniform in nature, while removing shadows, specularity and reflections, which are included in the background. The technique identifies the text regions from the components extracted by ICA using a global thresholding method to isolate the foreground text. We show the results of our algorithm on some of the most complex word images from the ICDAR 2003 Robust Word Recognition Dataset and compare with previously reported methods

Abstract

Sparse representations have emerged as a powerful approach for encoding images in a large class of machine recognition problems including face recognition. These methods rely on the use of an over-complete basis set for representing an image. This often assumes the availability of a large number of labeled training images, especially for high dimensional data. In many practical problems, the number of labeled training samples are very limited leading to significant degradations in classification performance. To address the problem of lack of training samples, we propose a semi-supervised algorithm that labels the unlabeled samples through a multi-stage label propagation combined with sparse representation. In this representation, each image is decomposed as a linear combination of its nearest basis images, which has the advantage of both locality and sparsity.Extensive experiments on publicly available face databases show that the results are significantly better compared to state-of-the-art face recognition methods in semi-supervised setting and are on par with fully supervised techniques

Abstract

Reconstructing geometric models of relief carv-ings are of great importance in preserving cultural heritages digitally. In case of reliefs, using laser scanners and structured lighting techniques is not always feasible or are very expensive given the uncontrolled environment. Single image shape from shading is an under-constrained problem that tries to solve for the surface normals given the intensity image. Various constraints are used to make the problem tractable. To avoid the uncontrolled lighting, we use a pair of images with and without the flash and compute an image under a known illumination.This image is used as an input to the shape reconstruction algorithms. We present techniques that try to reconstruct theshape from relief images using the prior information learned from examples. We learn the variations in geometric shape corresponding to image appearances under different lighting conditions using sparse representations. Given a new image,we estimate the most appropriate shape that will result in the given appearance under the specified lighting conditions. We integrate the prior with the normals computed from reflectance equation in a MAP framework. We test our approach on relief images and compare them with the state-of-the-art shape from shading algorithms.

Abstract

n this paper we present a max-flow min-cut based salient object detection in 3D point cloud that results from Struc-ture from Motion (SfM) pipeline. The SfM pipeline generates noisy point cloud due to the unwanted scenes captured along with the object in the image dataset of SfM. The background points being sparse and not meaningful, it becomes necessary to remove them. Hence, any further processes (like surface reconstruction)utilizing the cleaned up model will have no hinderance from the noise removed. We present a novel approach where the camera centers are used to segment out the salient object. The algorithm is completely autonomous and does not need any user input. We test our proposed method on Indian historical models reconstructed through SfM. We evaluate the results in terms of selectivity and specificity.

Abstract

his paper addresses the problem of reconstruction of specular surfaces using a combination of Dynamic Program­ming and Markov Random Fields formulation. Unlike traditional methods that require the exact position of environment points to be known, our method requires only the relative position of the environment points to be known for computing approximate normals and infer shape from them. We present an approach which estimates the depth from dynamic programming routine and MRF stereo matching and use MRF optimization to fuse the results to get the robust estimate of shape. We used smooth color gradient image as our environment texture so that shape can be recovered using just a single shot. We evaluate our method using synthetic experiments on 3D models like Stanford bunny and show the real experiment results on golden statue and silver coated statue.

Abstract

Online debate forums provide a rich collection of differing opinions on various topics. In dual-sided debates, users present their opinions or judge other’s opinions to support their stance. In this paper, we examine the use of users’ intentions and debate structure for stance classification of the debate posts. We propose a domain independent approach to capture users’ intent at sentence level using its dependency parse and sentiWordNet and to build the intention structure of the post to identify its stance. To aid the task of classification, we define the health of the debate structure and show that maximizing its value leads to better stance classification accuracies.

Abstract

Mangroves are high productive estuarine ecosystem, protect barrage and defend the impact of big storms. Numerous studies attempted to map the locations of mangroves and analyse changes using different sensors including optical sensors: LANDSAT, IRS, SPOT, and other from past four decades. The present work attempts to identify the mangroves at species level using high resolution remote sensing data with field based measurements. The lack of spatial quantitative mangroves maps for the west coast has led to overlooking of the importance of mangroves and also the implementation of restoration programmes. Mangroves planting in the small estuaries of the Uttara Kannada district of Karnataka State during the recent years have yielded desired results of better ecology and higher biological production. The RS data using 2010 IRS p6 L4 MX having resolution of 5 M is useful in mapping the distribution of adult mangroves. However for mapping juveniles and shrubby forms require higher spectral resolution data. Using open source GIS software (QGIS) and remote sensing software (GRASS) and IRS imageries mangrove areas and potential areas available for planting in three river estuaries in the Honnavar Forest Division of Uttara Kannada were mapped. Mangrove species are recommended for planting in suitable areas based on salinity regimes. The effective forest management in the region shows mangroves have expanded in several regions due to the conservation measures and supervision. The net gain in mangroves could be attributed to new plantations by the State Forest Department and effective protection; agriculture to mangroves; mudflat to mangroves. The overall accuracy of satellite imagery processing was 90.89% and the Kappa index was 0.89. The work demonstrates the potential of high resolution multi-temporal satellite remote sensing data with ground based measurements for effective mapping mangrove forests in coastal regions.

Abstract

Social networking sites provide users a virtual community interaction platform to share their thoughts, life experiences and opinions. Online debate forum is one such platform where people can take a stance and argue in support or opposition of debate topics. An important feature of such forums is that, they are dynamic and increase rapidly. In such situations, e↵ective opinion summarization approaches are needed so that readers need not go through the entire debate. This paper aims to summarize online debates by extracting highly topic relevant and sentiment rich sentences. The proposed approach takes into account topic relevant, document relevant and sentiment based features to capture topic opinionated sentences. ROUGE scores are used to evaluate our system. Our system significantly outperforms several baseline systems and show 5.2% (ROUGE-1), 7.3%(ROUGE-2) and 5.5% (ROUGE-L) improvement over the state-of-the-art opinion summarization system. The results verify that topic directed sentiment features are most important to generate e↵ective debate summaries.

Abstract

This paper presents a novel approach to categorize, model and identify contextual information in natural language interface to database (NLIDB) systems. The interactions between user and system are categorized and modeled based on the way in which the contextual information is utilized in the interactions. A relationship schema among the responses (user and system responses) is proposed. We present a novel method to identify contextual information in one specific type of usersystem interaction. We report on results of experiments with the university related queries.