We address the problem of segmenting high angular resolution diffusion imaging (HARDI) data into multiple regions (or fiber tracts) with distinct diffusion properties. We use the orientation distribution function (ODF) to model diffusion and cast the ODF segmentation problem as a clustering problem in the space of ODFs. Our approach integrates tools from sparse representation theory and Riemannian geometry into a graph theoretic segmentation framework. By exploiting the Riemannian properties of the space of ODFs, we learn a sparse representation for each ODF and infer the segmentation by applying spectral clustering to a similarity matrix built from these representations. In cases where regions with similar (resp. distinct) diffusion properties belong to different (resp. same) fiber tracts, we obtain the segmentation by incorporating spatial and user-specified pairwise relationships into the formulation. Experiments on synthetic data evaluate the sensitivity of our method to image noise and to the concentration parameters, and show its superior performance compared to alternative methods when analyzing complex fiber configurations. Experiments on phantom and real data demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed method in segmenting simulated fibers and white matter fiber tracts of clinical importance.

The mean shift algorithm, which is a nonparametric density estimator for detecting the modes of a distribution on a Euclidean space, was recently extended to operate on analytic manifolds. The extension is extrinsic in the sense that the inherent optimization is performed on the tangent spaces of these manifolds. This approach specifically requires the use of the exponential map at each iteration. This paper presents an alternative mean shift formulation, which performs the iterative optimization “on” the manifold of interest and intrinsically locates the modes via consecutive evaluations of a mapping. In particular, these evaluations constitute a modified gradient ascent scheme that avoids the computation of the exponential maps for Stiefel and Grassmann manifolds. The performance of our algorithm is evaluated by conducting extensive comparative studies on synthetic data as well as experiments on object categorization and segmentation of multiple motions.

There have been several studies that jointly use audio, lip intensity, and lip geometry information for speaker identification and speech-reading applications. This paper proposes using explicit lip motion information, instead of or in addition to lip intensity and/or geometry information, for speaker identification and speech-reading within a unified feature selection and discrimination analysis framework, and addresses two important issues: 1) Is using explicit lip motion information useful, and, 2) if so, what are the best lip motion features for these two applications? The best lip motion features for speaker identification are considered to be those that result in the highest discrimination of individual speakers in a population, whereas for speech-reading, the best features are those providing the highest phoneme/word/phrase recognition rate. Several lip motion feature candidates have been considered including dense motion features within a bounding box about the lip, lip contour motion features, and combination of these with lip shape features. Furthermore, a novel two-stage, spatial, and temporal discrimination analysis is introduced to select the best lip motion features for speaker identification and speech-reading applications. Experimental results using an hidden-Markov-model-based recognition system indicate that using explicit lip motion information provides additional performance gains in both applications, and lip motion features prove more valuable in the case of speech-reading application.

The paper addresses the selection of robust lip-motion features for an audio-visual open-set speaker identification problem. We consider two alternatives for initial lip motion representation. In the first alternative, the feature vector is composed of the 2D-DCT coefficients of the motion vectors estimated within the detected rectangular mouth region, whereas in the second, lip boundaries are tracked over the video frames, and only the motion vectors around the lip contour are taken into account along with the shape of the lip boundary. Experimental results of the HMM-based identification system are included for performance comparison of the two lip motion representation alternatives.

This paper addresses the selection of best lip motion features for biometric open-set speaker identification. The best features are those that result in the highest discrimination of individual speakers in a population. We first detect the face region in each video frame. The lip region for each frame is then segmented following the registration of successive face regions by global motion compensation. The initial lip feature vector is composed of the 2D-DCT coefficients of the optical flow vectors within the lip region at each frame. We propose to select the most discriminative features from the full set of transform coefficients by using a probabilistic measure that maximizes the ratio of intra-class and inter-class probabilities. The resulting discriminative feature vector with reduced dimension is expected to maximize the identification performance. Experimental results are also included to demonstrate the performance.