Masoud Mazloom

Querying for video events by semantic signatures from few examples

We aim to query web video for complex events using only a handful of video query examples, where the standard approach learns a ranker from hundreds of examples. We consider a semantic signature representation, consisting of off-the-shelf concept detectors, to capture the variance in semantic appearance of events. Since it is unknown what similarity metric and query fusion to use in such an event retrieval setting, we perform three experiments on unconstrained web videos from the TRECVID event detection task. It reveals that: retrieval with semantic signatures using normalized correlation as similarity metric outperforms a low-level bag-of-words alternative, multiple queries are best combined using late fusion with an average operator, and event retrieval is preferred over event classification when less than eight positive video examples are available.

Searching informative concept banks for video event detection

An emerging trend in video event detection is to learn an event from a bank of concept detector scores. Different from existing work, which simply relies on a bank containing all available detectors, we propose in this paper an algorithm that learns from examples what concepts in a bank are most informative per event. We model finding this bank of informative concepts out of a large set of concept detectors as a rare event search. Our proposed approximate solution finds the optimal concept bank using a cross-entropy optimization. We study the behavior of video event detection based on a bank of informative concepts by performing three experiments on more than 1,000 hours of arbitrary internet video from the TRECVID multimedia event detection task. Starting from a concept bank of 1,346 detectors we show that 1.)some concept banks are more informative than others for specific events, 2.) event detection using an automatically obtained informative concept bank is more robust than using all available concepts, 3.) even for small amounts of training examples an informative concept bank outperforms a full bank and a bag-of-word event representation, and 4.) we show qualitatively that the informative concept banks make sense for the events of interest, without being programmed to do so. We conclude that for concept banks it pays to be informative.

Combinational Method for Face Recognition: Wavelet, PCA and ANN

This work presents a method to increase the face recognition accuracy using a combination of Wavelet, PCA, and Neural Networks. Preprocessing, feature extraction and classification rules are three crucial issues for face recognition. This paper presents a hybrid approach to employ these issues. For preprocessing and feature extraction steps, we apply a combination of wavelet transform and PCA. During the classification stage, the Neural Network (MLP) is explored to achieve a robust decision in presence of wide facial variations. The computational load of the proposed method is greatly reduced as comparing with the original PCA based method on the Yale and ORL face databases. Moreover, the accuracy of the proposed method is improved.

Conceptlets: Selective Semantics for Classifying Video Events

An emerging trend in video event classification is to learn an event from a bank of concept detector scores. Different from existing work, which simply relies on a bank containing all available detectors, we propose in this paper an algorithm that learns from examples what concepts in a bank are most informative per event, which we call the conceptlet. We model finding the conceptlet out of a large set of concept detectors as an importance sampling problem. Our proposed approximate algorithm finds the optimal conceptlet using a cross-entropy optimization. We study the behavior of video event classification based on conceptlets by performing four experiments on challenging internet video from the 2010 and 2012 TRECVID multimedia event detection tasks and Columbias consumer video dataset. Starting from a concept bank of more than thousand precomputed detectors, our experiments establish there are (sets of) individual concept detectors that are more discriminative and appear to be more descriptive for a particular event than others, event classification using an automatically obtained conceptlet is more robust than using all available concepts, and conceptlets obtained with our cross-entropy algorithm are better than conceptlets from state-of-the-art feature selection algorithms. What is more, the conceptlets make sense for the events of interest, without being programmed to do so.

TagBook: A Semantic Video Representation Without Supervision for Event Detection

We consider the problem of event detection in video for scenarios where only a few, or even zero, examples are available for training. For this challenging setting, the prevailing solutions in the literature rely on a semantic video representation obtained from thousands of pretrained concept detectors. Different from existing work, we propose a new semantic video representation that is based on freely available social tagged videos only, without the need for training any intermediate concept detectors. We introduce a simple algorithm that propagates tags from a videos nearest neighbors, similar in spirit to the ones used for image retrieval, but redesign it for video event detection by including video source set refinement and varying the video tag assignment. We call our approach TagBook and study its construction, descriptiveness, and detection performance on the TRECVID 2013 and 2014 multimedia event detection datasets and the Columbia Consumer Video dataset. Despite its simple nature, the proposed TagBook video representation is remarkably effective for few-example and zero-example event detection, even outperforming very recent state-of-the-art alternatives building on supervised representations.

Multimodal Popularity Prediction of Brand-related Social Media Posts

Brand-related user posts on social networks are growing at a staggering rate, where users express their opinions about brands by sharing multimodal posts. However, while some posts become popular, others are ignored. In this paper, we present an approach for identifying what aspects of posts determine their popularity. We hypothesize that brand-related posts may be popular due to several cues related to factual information, sentiment, vividness and entertainment parameters about the brand. We call the ensemble of cues engagement parameters. In our approach, we propose to use these parameters for predicting brand-related user post popularity. Experiments on a collection of fast food brand-related user posts crawled from Instagram show that: visual and textual features are complementary in predicting the popularity of a post; predicting popularity using our proposed engagement parameters is more accurate than predicting popularity directly from visual and textual features; and our proposed approach makes it possible to understand what drives post popularity in general as well as isolate the brand specific drivers.

Encoding Concept Prototypes for Video Event Detection and Summarization

This paper proposes a new semantic video representation for few and zero example event detection and unsupervised video event summarization. Different from existing works, which obtain a semantic representation by training concepts over images or entire video clips, we propose an algorithm that learns a set of relevant frames as the concept prototypes from web video examples, without the need for frame-level annotations, and use them for representing an event video. We formulate the problem of learning the concept prototypes as seeking the frames closest to the densest region in the feature space of video frames from both positive and negative training videos of a target concept. We study the behavior of our video event representation based on concept prototypes by performing three experiments on challenging web videos from the TRECVID 2013 multimedia event detection task and the MED-summaries dataset. Our experiments establish that i) Event detection accuracy increases when mapping each video into concept prototype space. ii) Zero-example event detection increases by analyzing each frame of a video individually in concept prototype space, rather than considering the holistic videos. iii) Unsupervised video event summarization using concept prototypes is more accurate than using video-level concept detectors.

Few-Example Video Event Retrieval using Tag Propagation

An emerging topic in multimedia retrieval is to detect a complex event in video using only a handful of video examples. Different from existing work which learns a ranker from positive video examples and hundreds of negative examples, we aim to query web video for events using zero or only a few visual examples. To that end, we propose in this paper a tag-based video retrieval system which propagates tags from a tagged video source to an unlabeled video collection without the need of any training examples. Our algorithm is based on weighted frequency neighbor voting using concept vector similarity. Once tags are propagated to unlabeled video we can rely on off-the-shelf language models to rank these videos by the tag similarity. We study the behavior of our tag-based video event retrieval system by performing three experiments on web videos from the TRECVID multimedia event detection corpus, with zero, one and multiple query examples that beats a recent alternative.

Solving Cryptarithmetic Problems Using Parallel Genetic Algorithm

Cryptarithmetic is a class of constraint satisfaction problems which includes making mathematical relations between meaningful words using simple arithmetic operators like ‘plus’ in a way that the result is conceptually true, and assigning digits to the letters of these words and generating numbers in order to make correct arithmetic operations as well. A simple way to solve such problems is by depth first search (DFS) algorithm which has a big search space even for quite small problems. In this paper we proposed a solution to this problem with genetic algorithm and then optimized it by using parallelism. We also showed that the algorithm reaches a solution faster and in a smaller number of iterations than similar algorithms.

Construction and Application of SVM Model and Wavelet-PCA for Face Recognition

This work presents a method to increase the face recognition accuracy using a combination of Wavelet, PCA, and SVM. Pre-processing, feature extraction and classification rules are three crucial issues for face recognition. This paper presents a hybrid approach to employ these issues. For preprocessing and feature extraction steps, we apply a combination of wavelet transform and PCA. During the classification stage, SVMs incorporated with a binary tree recognition strategy are applied to tackle the multi-class face recognition problem to achieve a robust decision in presence of wide facial variations. The binary trees extend naturally, the pairwise discrimination capability of the SVMs to the multiclass scenario. Two face databases are used to evaluate the proposed method. The computational load of the proposed method is greatly reduced as comparing with the original PCA based method on the ORL and Compound face databases. Moreover, the accuracy of the proposed method is improved.