Qionghai Dai

3-D Object Retrieval and Recognition With Hypergraph Analysis

View-based 3-D object retrieval and recognition has become popular in practice, e.g., in computer aided design. It is difficult to precisely estimate the distance between two objects represented by multiple views. Thus, current view-based 3-D object retrieval and recognition methods may not perform well. In this paper, we propose a hypergraph analysis approach to address this problem by avoiding the estimation of the distance between objects. In particular, we construct multiple hypergraphs for a set of 3-D objects based on their 2-D views. In these hypergraphs, each vertex is an object, and each edge is a cluster of views. Therefore, an edge connects multiple vertices. We define the weight of each edge based on the similarities between any two views within the cluster. Retrieval and recognition are performed based on the hypergraphs. Therefore, our method can explore the higher order relationship among objects and does not use the distance between objects. We conduct experiments on the National Taiwan University 3-D model dataset and the ETH 3-D object collection. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by comparing with the state-of-the-art methods.

Efficient Parallel Framework for HEVC Motion Estimation on Many-Core Processors

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) provides superior coding efficiency than previous video coding standards at the cost of increasing encoding complexity. The complexity increase of motion estimation (ME) procedure is rather significant, especially when considering the complicated partitioning structure of HEVC. To fully exploit the coding efficiency brought by HEVC requires a huge amount of computations. In this paper, we analyze the ME structure in HEVC and propose a parallel framework to decouple ME for different partitions on many-core processors. Based on local parallel method (LPM), we first use the directed acyclic graph (DAG)-based order to parallelize coding tree units (CTUs) and adopt improved LPM (ILPM) within each CTU (DAGILPM), which exploits the CTU-level and prediction unit (PU)-level parallelism. Then, we find that there exist completely independent PUs (CIPUs) and partially independent PUs (PIPUs). When the degree of parallelism (DP) is smaller than the maximum DP of DAGILPM, we process the CIPUs and PIPUs, which further increases the DP. The data dependencies and coding efficiency stay the same as LPM. Experiments show that on a 64-core system, compared with serial execution, our proposed scheme achieves more than 30 and 40 times speedup for 1920 × 1080 and 2560 × 1600 video sequences, respectively.

A Highly Parallel Framework for HEVC Coding Unit Partitioning Tree Decision on Many-core Processors

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) uses a very flexible tree structure to organize coding units, which leads to a superior coding efficiency compared with previous video coding standards. However, such a flexible coding unit tree structure also places a great challenge for encoders. In order to fully exploit the coding efficiency brought by this structure, huge amount of computational complexity is needed for an encoder to decide the optimal coding unit tree for each image block. One way to achieve this is to use parallel computing enabled by many-core processors. In this paper, we analyze the challenge to use many-core processors to make coding unit tree decision. Through in-depth understanding of the dependency among different coding units, we propose a parallel framework to decide coding unit trees. Experimental results show that, on the Tile64 platform, our proposed method achieves averagely more than 11 and 16 times speedup for 1920x1080 and 2560x1600 video sequences, respectively, without any coding efficiency degradation.

Covariance discriminative learning: A natural and efficient approach to image set classification

We propose a novel discriminative learning approach to image set classification by modeling the image set with its natural second-order statistic, i.e. covariance matrix. Since nonsingular covariance matrices, a.k.a. symmetric positive definite (SPD) matrices, lie on a Riemannian manifold, classical learning algorithms cannot be directly utilized to classify points on the manifold. By exploring an efficient metric for the SPD matrices, i.e., Log-Euclidean Distance (LED), we derive a kernel function that explicitly maps the covariance matrix from the Riemannian manifold to a Euclidean space. With this explicit mapping, any learning method devoted to vector space can be exploited in either its linear or kernel formulation. Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) and Partial Least Squares (PLS) are considered in this paper for their feasibility for our specific problem. We further investigate the conventional linear subspace based set modeling technique and cast it in a unified framework with our covariance matrix based modeling. The proposed method is evaluated on two tasks: face recognition and object categorization. Extensive experimental results show not only the superiority of our method over state-of-the-art ones in both accuracy and efficiency, but also its stability to two real challenges: noisy set data and varying set size.

Less is More: Efficient 3-D Object Retrieval With Query View Selection

The explosively increasing 3-D objects make their efficient retrieval technology highly desired. Extensive research efforts have been dedicated to view-based 3-D object retrieval for its advantage of using 2-D views to represent 3-D objects. In this paradigm, typically the retrieval is accomplished by matching the views of the query object with the objects in database. However, using all the query views may not only introduce difficulty in rapid retrieval but also degrade retrieval accuracy when there is a mismatch between the query views and the object views in the database. In this work, we propose an interactive 3-D object retrieval scheme. Given a set of query views, we first perform clustering to obtain several candidates. We then incrementally select query views for object matching: in each round of relevance feedback, we only add the query view that is judged to be the most informative one based on the labeling information. In addition, we also propose an efficient approach to learn a distance metric for the newly selected query view and the weights for combining all of the selected query views. We conduct experiments on the National Taiwan University 3D Model database, ETH 3D object collection, and Shape Retrieval Content of Non-Rigid 3D Model, and results demonstrated that our approach not only significantly speeds up the retrieval process but also achieves encouraging retrieval performance.

Camera Constraint-Free View-Based 3-D Object Retrieval

Recently, extensive research efforts have been dedicated to view-based methods for 3-D object retrieval due to the highly discriminative property of multiviews for 3-D object representation. However, most of state-of-the-art approaches highly depend on their own camera array settings for capturing views of 3-D objects. In order to move toward a general framework for 3-D object retrieval without the limitation of camera array restriction, a camera constraint-free view-based (CCFV) 3-D object retrieval algorithm is proposed in this paper. In this framework, each object is represented by a free set of views, which means that these views can be captured from any direction without camera constraint. For each query object, we first cluster all query views to generate the view clusters, which are then used to build the query models. For a more accurate 3-D object comparison, a positive matching model and a negative matching model are individually trained using positive and negative matched samples, respectively. The CCFV model is generated on the basis of the query Gaussian models by combining the positive matching model and the negative matching model. The CCFV removes the constraint of static camera array settings for view capturing and can be applied to any view-based 3-D object database. We conduct experiments on the National Taiwan University 3-D model database and the ETH 3-D object database. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve better performance than state-of-the-art methods.

3-D Object Retrieval With Hausdorff Distance Learning

In view-based 3-D object retrieval, each object is described by a set of views. Group matching thus plays an important role. Previous research efforts have shown the effectiveness of Hausdorff distance in group matching. In this paper, we propose a 3-D object retrieval scheme with Hausdorff distance learning. In our approach, relevance feedback information is employed to select positive and negative view pairs with a probabilistic strategy, and a view-level Mahalanobis distance metric is learned. This Mahalanobis distance metric is adopted in estimating the Hausdorff distances between objects, based on which the objects in the 3-D database are ranked. We conduct experiments on three testing data sets, and the results demonstrate that the proposed Hausdorff learning approach can improve 3-D object retrieval performance.

A novel approach to fuzzy rough sets based on a fuzzy covering

This paper proposes an approach to fuzzy rough sets in the framework of lattice theory. The new model for fuzzy rough sets is based on the concepts of both fuzzy covering and binary fuzzy logical operators (fuzzy conjunction and fuzzy implication). The conjunction and implication are connected by using the complete lattice-based adjunction theory. With this theory, fuzzy rough approximation operators are generalized and fundamental properties of these operators are investigated. Particularly, comparative studies of the generalized fuzzy rough sets to the classical fuzzy rough sets and Pawlak rough set are carried out. It is shown that the generalized fuzzy rough sets are an extension of the classical fuzzy rough sets as well as a fuzzification of the Pawlak rough set within the framework of complete lattices. A link between the generalized fuzzy rough approximation operators and fundamental morphological operators is presented in a translation-invariant additive group.

3D model comparison using spatial structure circular descriptor

This paper proposes a 3D model comparison algorithm based on a 3D model descriptor: spatial structure circular descriptor (SSCD). The spatial structure is important in content-based 3D model analysis. Within the SSCD, the spatial structure of a 3D model is described by 2D images, and the attribute values of each pixel represent 3D spatial information. Hence, SSCD can preserve the global spatial structure of 3D models, and is invariant to rotation and scaling. In addition, by using 2D images to describe the spatial information of 3D models, all spatial information of the 3D models can be represented by SSCD without redundancy. Thus, SSCD can be applied to many scenarios which utilize spatial information. In this paper, an SSCD-based 3D model comparison algorithm is presented. The proposed algorithm has been tested on 3D model retrieval experiments. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

A Fine-Grained Image Categorization System by Cellet-Encoded Spatial Pyramid Modeling

In this paper, a new fine-grained image categorization system that improves spatial pyramid matching is developed. In this method, multiple cells are combined into cellets in the proposed categorization model, which are highly responsive to an objects fine categories. The object components are represented by cellets that can connect spatially adjacent cells within the same pyramid level. Here, image categorization can be formulated as the matching between the cellets of corresponding images. Toward an effective matching process, an active learning algorithm that can effectively select a few representative cells for constructing the cellets is adopted. A linear-discriminant-analysis-like scheme is employed to select discriminative cellets. Then, fine-grained image categorization can be conducted with a trained linear support vector machine. Experimental results on three real-world data sets demonstrate that our proposed system outperforms the state of the art.