Automatic Language Identification (LID) in music has received significantly less attention than LID in speech. Here, we study the problem of LID in music videos uploaded on YouTube. We use a “bag-of-words” approach based on state-of-the-art content based audio-visual features and linear SVM classifiers for automatic LID. Our system obtains 48% accuracy for a corpus of 25000 music videos and 25 different languages.

We consider the problem of large-scale video classification. Our attention is focused on online video services since they can provide rich cross-video signals derived from user behavior. These signals help us to extract correlated information across videos which are co-browsed, co-uploaded, co commented, co-queried, etc. Majority of the video classification methods omit this rich information and focus solely on a single test instance. In this paper, we propose a video classification system that exploits various cross-video signals offered by large-scale video databases. In our experiments, we show up to 4.5% absolute equal error rate (17% relative) improvement over the baseline on four video classification problems.

Our paper presents a novel high dimensional probability density estimation technique using any dimensionality reduction method. Our method first performs subspace reduction using any matrix factorization algorithm and estimates the density in the low-dimensional space using sample-point variable bandwidth kernel density estimation. Subsequently, the high dimensional density is approximated from the low dimensional density parameters. The reconstruction error due to dimensionality reduction process is also modeled in a principled and efficient manner to obtain the high dimensional density estimate. We show the effectiveness of our technique by using two popular dimensionality reduction tools, principal component analysis and non-negative matrix factorization. This technique is applied to AT&T, Yale, Pointing'04 and CMU-PIE face recognition datasets and improved performance compared to other dimensionality reduction and density estimation algorithms is obtained.

In this paper, we propose a novel approach for detecting highlights in sports videos. The videos are temporally decomposed into a series of events based on an unsupervised event discovery and detection framework. The framework solely depends on easy-to-extract low-level visual features such as color histogram (CH) or histogram of oriented gradients (HOG), which can potentially be generalized to different sports. The unigram and bigram statistics of the detected events are then used to provide a compact representation of the video. The effectiveness of the proposed representation is demonstrated on cricket video classification: Highlight vs. Non-Highlight for individual video clips (7000 training and 7000 test instances). We achieve a low equal error rate of 12.1% using event statistics based on CH and HOG features.

This paper focuses on contour tracking, an important problem in computer vision, and specifically on open contours that often directly represent a curvilinear object. Compelling applications are found in the field of bioimage analysis where blood vessels, dendrites, and various other biological structures are tracked over time. General open contour tracking, and biological images in particular, pose major challenges including scene clutter with similar structures (e.g., in the cell), and time varying contour length due to natural growth and shortening phenomena, which have not been adequately answered by earlier approaches based on closed and fixed end-point contours. We propose a model-based estimation algorithm to track open contours of time-varying length, which is robust to neighborhood clutter with similar structures. The method employs a deformable trellis in conjunction with a probabilistic (hidden Markov) model to estimate contour position, deformation, growth and shortening. It generates a maximum a posteriori estimate given observations in the current frame and prior contour information from previous frames. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world data demonstrate the effectiveness and performance gains of the proposed algorithm.

Simultaneous registration and segmentation (SRS) provides a powerful framework for tracking an object of interest in an image sequence. The state-of-the-art SRS-based tracking methods assume that the illumination is maintained constant across consecutive frames. However, this assumption does not hold in many natural image sequences due to dynamic light source and shadows. We propose a generalized model for SRS-based tracking in this paper to account for non-uniform additive illumination changes. More specifically, we introduce two new terms in the SRS energy functional which address the above mentioned problem. The first term couples the shape-based cue and intensity-based cue to establish a correspondence between them. The second term compensates for the illumination change which is complementary to the first term. We demonstrate that the proposed SRS energy functional yields superior performance over the state-of-the-art SRS-based methods for various indoor and outdoor image sequences.

Tracking of curvilinear structures is a task of fundamental importance in the quantitative analysis of biological structures such as neurons, blood vessels, retinal interconnects, microtubules, etc. The state of the art HMM-based contour tracking scheme for tracking microtubules, while performing well in most scenarios, can miss the track if, during its growth, it intersects another microtubule in its neighbourhood. In this paper we present a graphical model-based tracking algorithm which propagates across frames information about the dynamics of all the microtubules. This allows the algorithm to faithfully differentiate the contour of interest from others that contribute to the clutter, and maintain tracking accuracy. We present results of experiments on real microtubule images captured using fluorescence microscopy, and show that our proposed scheme outperforms the existing HMM-based scheme.

We present a method for object tracking over time sequence imagery. The image plane is represented with a 4-connected planar graph where vertices are associated with pixels. On each image, the outer contour of the object is localized by finding the optimal cycle in the graph such that a cost function based on temporal, appearance and shape priors is minimized. Our contribution is the particle filtering-based framework to integrate the shape cue with the temporal and appearance cues. We demonstrate that incorporating the shape prior yields promising performance improvement over temporal and appearance priors on various object tracking scenarios.

The number of video clips available online is growing at a tremendous pace. Conventionally, user-supplied metadata text, such as the title of the video and a set of keywords, has been the only source of indexing information for user-uploaded videos. Automated extraction of video content for unconstrained and large scale video databases is a challenging and yet unsolved problem. In this paper, we present an audiovisual celebrity recognition system towards automatic tagging of unconstrained Web videos. Prior work on audiovisual person recognition relied on the fact that the person in the video is speaking and the features extracted from audio and visual domain are associated with each other throughout the video. However, this assumption is not valid on unconstrained Web videos. Proposed method finds the audiovisual mapping and hence improve upon the association assumption. Considering the scale of the application, all pieces of the system are trained automatically without any human supervision. We present the results on 26,000 videos and show the effectiveness of the method per-celebrity basis.

We introduce a dynamical model for simultaneous registration and segmentation in a variational framework for image sequences, where the dynamics is incorporated using a Bayesian formulation. A linear stochastic equation relating the tracked object (or a region of interest) is first derived under the assumption that the successive images in the sequence are related by a dense and possibly non-linear displacement field. This derivation allows for the use of a computationally efficient and recursive implementation of the Bayesian formulation in this framework. The contour of the tracked object returned by the dynamical model is not only close to the previously detected shape but is also consistent with the temporal statistics of the tracked object. The performance of the proposed approach is evaluated on real image sequences. It is shown that, with respect to a variety of error metrics such as F-measure, mean absolute deviation and Hausdorff distance, the proposed approach outperforms the state-of-the art approach without the dynamical model.

In this paper, we present an algorithm for occlusion boundary detection. The main contribution is a probabilistic detection framework defined on spatio-temporal lattices, which enables joint analysis of image frames. For this purpose, we introduce two complementary cost functions for creating the spatio-temporal lattice and for performing global inference of the occlusion boundaries, respectively. In addition, a novel combination of low-level occlusion features is discriminatively learnt in the detection framework. Simulations on the CMU Motion Dataset provide ample evidence that proposed algorithm outperforms the leading existing methods.

This paper presents an open contour tracking method that employs an arc-emission hidden Markov model (HMM). The algorithm encodes the shape information of the structure in a spatially deformable trellis model that is iteratively modified to account for observations in subsequent frames. As the open contour is determined on the trellis of an HMM, a dynamic programming procedure reduces the computational complexity to linear in the length of the structure (or contour). The method was developed for tracking general curvilinear structures, and tested on subcellular image sequences, where microtubules grow, shrink and undergo lateral motion from frame to frame. Microtubule length changes are modeled by the addition of appropriate transient and absorbing states to the HMM. Our results provide experimental evidence for the proposed algorithm's capability to track non-rigid curvilinear objects in challenging environments in terms of noise and clutter.

Two dimensional hidden markov models (2D-HMMs) provide substantial benefits for many computer vision and image analysis applications. Many fundamental image analysis problems, including segmentation and classification, are target applications for the 2D- HMMs. As opposed to the i.i.d. assumption of the image observations, the naturally existing spatial correlations can be readily modeled by solving the 2D-HMM decoding problem. However, computational complexity of the 2D-HMM decoding grows exponentially with the image size and is known to be NP-hard. In this paper, we present a conditional iterative decoding (CID) algorithm for the approximate decoding of 2D-HMMs. We compare the performance of the CID algorithm to the Turbo-HMM (T-HMM) decoding algorithm and show that CID gives promising results. We demonstrate the proposed algorithm on modeling spatial deformations of human faces in recognizing people across their different facial expressions.

We propose a new two-stage framework for joint analysis of head gesture and speech prosody patterns of a speaker towards automatic realistic synthesis of head gestures from speech prosody. In the first stage analysis, we perform Hidden Markov Model (HMM) based unsupervised temporal segmentation of head gesture and speech prosody features separately to determine elementary head gesture and speech prosody patterns, respectively, for a particular speaker. In the second stage, joint analysis of correlations between these elementary head gesture and prosody patterns is performed using Multi-Stream HMMs to determine an audio-visual mapping model. The resulting audio-visual mapping model is then employed to synthesize natural head gestures from arbitrary input test speech given a head model for the speaker. In the synthesis stage, the audio-visual mapping model is used to predict a sequence of gesture patterns from the prosody pattern sequence computed for the input test speech. The Euler angles associated with each gesture pattern are then applied to animate the speaker head model. Objective and subjective evaluations indicate that the proposed synthesis by analysis scheme provides natural looking head gestures for the speaker with any input test speech, as well as in "prosody transplant" and gesture transplant" scenarios.

We present a new framework for joint analysis of head gesture and speech prosody patterns of a speaker towards automatic realistic synthesis of head gestures from speech prosody. The proposed two-stage analysis aims to "learn" both elementary prosody and head gesture patterns for a particular speaker, as well as the correlations between these head gesture and prosody patterns from a training video sequence. The resulting audio-visual mapping model is then employed to synthesize natural head gestures from arbitrary input test speech given a head model for the speaker. Objective and subjective evaluations indicate that the proposed synthesis by analysis scheme provides natural looking head gestures for the speaker with any input test speech.

Tracing of curvilinear structures is one of the fundamental tools in the quantitative analysis of biological images, for extracting information about structures such as blood vessels, neurons, microtubules, and similar entities. Due to the limitations in biological sample preparation and fluorescence imaging, typical images in live cell studies exhibit severe noise and considerable clutter. These images are manually analyzed through a laborious and approximate set of quantification tasks. In this paper, we describe a constrained optimization method for extracting curvilinear structures from live cell fluorescence images. We show that the proposed method is largely insensitive to frequent intersections, intensity variations along the curve, and generates successful traces within noisy regions. We demonstrate the results of our approach on live cell microtubule images.

It is well-known that early integration (also called data fusion) is effective when the modalities are correlated, and late integration (also called decision or opinion fusion) is optimal when modalities are uncorrelated. In this paper, we propose a new multimodal fusion strategy for open-set speaker identification using a combination of early and late integration following canonical correlation analysis (CCA) of speech and lip texture features. We also propose a method for high precision synchronization of the speech and lip features using CCA prior to the proposed fusion. Experimental results show that i) the proposed fusion strategy yields the best equal error rates (EER), which are used to quantify the performance of the fusion strategy for open-set speaker identification, and ii) precise synchronization prior to fusion improves the EER; hence, the best EER is obtained when the proposed synchronization scheme is employed together with the proposed fusion strategy. We note that the proposed fusion strategy outperforms others because the features used in the late integration are truly uncorrelated, since they are output of the CCA analysis.

In this work, we explore the use of canonical correlation analysis to improve the performance of multimodal recognition systems that involve multiple correlated modalities. More specifically, we consider the audiovisual speaker identification problem, where speech and lip texture (or intensity) modalities are fused in an open-set identification framework. Our motivation is based on the following observation. The late integration strategy, which is also referred to as decision or opinion fusion, is effective especially in case the contributing modalities are uncorrelated and thus the resulting partial decisions are statistically independent. Early integration techniques on the other hand can be favored only if a couple of modalities are highly correlated. However, coupled modalities such as audio and lip texture also consist of some components that are mutually independent. Thus we first perform a cross-correlation analysis on the audio and lip modalities so as to extract the correlated part of the information, and then employ an optimal combination of early and late integration techniques to fuse the extracted features. The results of the experiments testing the performance of the proposed system are also provided

Multimodal speech and speaker modeling and recognition are widely accepted as vital aspects of state of the art human-machine interaction systems. While correlations between speech and lip motion as well as speech and facial expressions are widely studied, relatively little work has been done to investigate the correlations between speech and gesture. Detection and modeling of head, hand and arm gestures of a speaker have been studied extensively and these gestures were shown to carry linguistic information. A typical example is the head gesture while saying "yes/no". In this study, correlation between gestures and speech is investigated. In speech signal analysis, keyword spotting and prosodic accent event detection has been performed. In gesture analysis, hand positions and parameters of global head motion are used as features. The detection of gestures is based on discrete pre-designated symbol sets, which are manually labeled during the training phase. The gesture-speech correlation is modeled by examining the co-occurring speech and gesture patterns. This correlation can be used to fuse gesture and speech modalities for edutainment applications (i.e. video games, 3-D animations) where natural gestures of talking avatars are animated from speech. A speech driven gesture animation example has been implemented for demonstration