Sharif Digital Repository

A combined texture- and color-based skin detection is proposed in this paper. Nonsubsampled contourlet transform is used to represent texture of the whole image. Local neighbor contourlet coefficients of a pixel are used as feature vectors to classify each pixel. Dimensionality reduction is addressed through principal component analysis (PCA) to remedy the curse of dimensionality in the training phase. Before texture classification, the pixel is tested to determine whether it is skin-colored. Therefore, the classifier is learned to discriminate skin and non-skin texture for skin colored regions. A multi-layer perceptron is then trained using the feature vectors in the PCA reduced space. The... 

As an alternative to adaptive nonlinear schemes for dimensionality reduction, linear random projection has recently proved to be a reliable means for high-dimensional data processing. Widespread application of conventional random projection in the context of image analysis is, however, mainly impeded by excessive computational and memory requirements. In this paper, a two-dimensional random projection scheme is considered as a remedy to this problem, and the associated key notion of concentration of measure is closely studied. It is then applied in the contexts of image classification and sparse image reconstruction. Finally, theoretical results are validated within a comprehensive set of... 

This paper studies how to optimally embed a general metric, represented by a graph, into a target space while preserving the relative magnitudes of most distances. More precisely, in an ordinal embedding, we must preserve the relative order between pairs of distances (which pairs are larger or smaller), and not necessarily the values of the distances themselves. The relaxation of an ordinal embedding is the maximum ratio between two distances whose relative order is inverted by the embedding. We develop polynomial-time constant-factor approximation algorithms for minimizing the relaxation in an embedding of an unweighted graph into a line metric and into a tree metric. These two basic target... 

The problem of extracting low-dimensional structure from high-dimensional data arises in many applications such as machine learning, statistical pattern recognition, wireless sensor networks, and data compression. If the data is restricted to a lower dimensional subspace, then simple algorithms using linear projections can find the subspace and consequently estimate its dimensionality. However, if the data lies on a low-dimensional but nonlinear space (e.g., manifolds), then its structure may be highly nonlinear and, hence, linear methods are doomed to fail. In this paper, we introduce a new technique for dimensionality reduction based on point-wise operators. More precisely, let $ {bf A} n... 

Predicting the degree of compositionality of noun compounds such as snowball and butterfly is a crucial ingredient for lexicography and Natural Language Processing applications, to know whether the compound should be treated as a whole, or through its constituents, and what it means. Computational approaches for an automatic prediction typically represent and compare compounds and their constituents within a vector space and use distributional similarity as a proxy to predict the semantic relatedness between the compounds and their constituents as the compound's degree of compositionality. This paper provides a systematic evaluation of vector-space reduction variants across kinds, exploring... 

Internet traffic classification is important in many aspects of network management such as data exploitation detection, malicious user identification, and restricting application traffic. Previously, features such as port and protocol numbers have been used to classify traffic, but these features can now be changed easily, making their use in traffic classification inadequate. Consequently, traffic classification based on machine learning (ML) is now employed. The number of features used in an ML algorithm has a significant impact on performance, in particular accuracy. In this paper, a minimum best feature set is chosen using a supervised method to obtain uncorrelated features. Outlier... 

In the last few years there has been growing interest in the use of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) for brain mapping. To decode brain patterns in fMRI data, we need reliable and accurate classifiers. Towards this goal, we compared performance of eleven popular pattern recognition methods. Before performing pattern recognition, applying the dimensionality reduction methods can improve the classification performance; therefore, seven methods in region of interest (RDI) have been compared to answer the following question: which dimensionality reduction procedure performs best? In both tasks, in addition to measuring prediction accuracy, we estimated standard deviation of... 

Realistic description of fractured reservoirs demands primarily for a comprehensive understanding of fracture networks and their geometry including various individual fracture parameters as well as network connectivities. Newly developed multiple-point geostatistical simulation methods like SIMPAT and FILTERSIM are able to model connectivity and complexity of fracture networks more effectively than traditional variogrambased methods. This approach is therefore adopted to be used in this paper. Among the multiple-point statistics algorithms, FILTERSIM has the priority of less computational effort than does SIMPAT by applying filters and modern dimensionality reduction techniques to the... 

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) begins several years before the symptoms develop. It starts with Mild Cognitive Impairment (MCI) which can be separated into Early MCI and Late MCI (EMCI and LMCI). Functional connectivity analysis and classification are done among the different stages of illness with Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). In this study, in addition to the four stages including healthy, EMCI, LMCI, and AD, the patients have been tracked for a year. Indeed, the classification has been done among 7 groups to analyze the functional connectivity changes in one year in different stages. After generating the functional connectivity graphs for eliminating the weak links, three... 

The bronchial tree plays a main role in the human respiratory system because the air distribution throughout the lungs and gas exchange with blood occur in the airways whose dimensions vary from several centimeters to micrometers. Organization of about 60,000 conducting airways and 33 million respiratory airways in a limited space results in a complex structure. Due to this inherent complexity and a high number of airways, using target-oriented dimensional reduction is inevitable. In addition, there is no general reduced-order model for various types of problems. This necessitates coming up with an appropriate model from a variety of different reduced-order models to solve the desired... 

The bronchial tree plays a main role in the human respiratory system because the air distribution throughout the lungs and gas exchange with blood occur in the airways whose dimensions vary from several centimeters to micrometers. Organization of about 60,000 conducting airways and 33 million respiratory airways in a limited space results in a complex structure. Due to this inherent complexity and a high number of airways, using target-oriented dimensional reduction is inevitable. In addition, there is no general reduced-order model for various types of problems. This necessitates coming up with an appropriate model from a variety of different reduced-order models to solve the desired...