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Abstract: This paper presents an automatic approach to reconstruct human motion using noisy depth data from multiple views. Although multi-view constraints are provided by this setup, it still exhibits great challenges to robustly reconstruct dynamic human performances due to inherent complexity and self-occlusion of human motion. In the insight that the semantics of human motion will supply strong prior in motion reconstruction, we therefore propose a SCAPE-based motion reconstruction algorithm. As the building blocks of this main algorithm, we (1) re-train a SCAPE model based on an expanded human pose database containing human poses collected from different databases to enlarge the tracking space, (2) develop a correspondence estimation method based on articulated ICP to improve the robustness of SCAPE tracking. We conduct experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, and show that our system is able to capture and reconstruct accurate human motion. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Most existing color constancy algorithms assume uniform illumination. However, in real-world scenes, this is not often the case. Thus, we propose a novel framework for estimating the colors of multiple illuminants and their spatial distribution in the scene. We formulate this problem as an energy minimization task within a conditional random field over a set of local illuminant estimates. In order to quantitatively evaluate the proposed method, we created a novel data set of two-dominant-illuminant images comprised of laboratory, indoor, and outdoor scenes. Unlike prior work, our database includes accurate pixel-wise ground truth illuminant information. The performance of our method is evaluated on multiple data sets. Experimental results show that our framework clearly outperforms single illuminant estimators as well as a recently proposed multi-illuminant estimation approach. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Abstract: Accurate estimation of mass transport parameters is necessary for overall design and evaluation processes of the waste disposal facilities. The mass transport parameters, such as effective diffusion coefficient, retardation factor and diffusion accessible porosity, are estimated from observed diffusion data by inverse analysis. Recently, particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm has been used to develop inverse model for estimating these parameters that alleviated existing limitations in the inverse analysis. However, PSO solver yields different solutions in successive runs because of the stochastic nature of the algorithm and also because of the presence of multiple optimum solutions. Thus the estimated mean solution from independent runs is significantly different from the best solution. In this paper, two variants of the PSO algorithms are proposed to improve the performance of the inverse analysis. The proposed algorithms use perturbation equation for the gbest particle to gain information around gbest region on the search space and catfish particles in alternative iterations to improve exploration capabilities. Performance comparison of developed solvers on synthetic test data for two different diffusion problems reveals that one of the proposed solvers, CPPSO, significantly improves overall performance with improved best, worst and mean fitness values. The developed solver is further used to estimate transport parameters from 12 sets of experimentally observed diffusion data obtained from three diffusion problems and compared with published values from the literature. The proposed solver is quick, simple and robust on different diffusion problems. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: In an asymmetrical interval data set, the error ranges of the upper and lower interval ends are different. This situation is common in practice because of the usual presence of uncertain influences. In prior “crisp input and interval output” regression analysis, a crude symmetrical estimation is obtained, and the asymmetrical character of training data cannot be depicted exactly. In this paper, an asymmetrical interval data analysis is proposed for the first time. The two interval ends are studied independently, and a set of regression models and -insensitive functions are proposed to strengthen the description of the interval ends. The support vector machine (SVM) is imported into this approach (for its model-free character in nonlinear regression) and further extended by -insensitive functions to the extended -SVM. A robust algorithm is presented to eliminate the effect of outliers. Experiments are then presented to verify the quality of performance of the extended -SVM. Advantages over other approaches are considered in the conclusion. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]