Comparison between visual and passive acoustic detection of finless porpoises in the Yangtze river, China

Recently, sonar signals and other sounds produced by cetaceans have been used for acoustic detection of individuals and groups in the wild. However, the detection probability ascertained by concomitant visual survey has not been demonstrated extensively. The finless porpoises (Neophocaena phocaenoides) have narrow band and high-frequency sonar signals, which are distinctive from background noises. Underwater sound monitoring with hydrophones (B&K8103) placed along the sides of a research vessel, concurrent with visual observations was conducted in the Yangtze River from Wuhan to Poyang Lake in 1998 in China. The peak to peak detection threshold was set at 133 dB re 1 mu Pa. With this threshold level, porpoises could be detected reliably within 300 m of the hydrophone. In a total of 774-km cruise, 588 finless porpoises were sighted by visual observation and 44 864 ultrasonic pulses were recorded by the acoustical observation system. The acoustic monitoring system could detect the presence of the finless porpoises 82% of the time. A false alarm in the system occurred with a frequency of 0.9%. The high-frequency acoustical observation is suggested as an effective method for field surveys of small cetaceans, which produce high-frequency sonar signals. (C) 2001 Acoustical Society of America.

Incremental pairwise discriminant analysis based visual tracking

The distinguishment between the object appearance and the background is the useful cues available for visual tracking in which the discriminant analysis is widely applied However due to the diversity of the background observation there are not adequate negative samples from the background which usually lead the discriminant method to tracking failure Thus a natural solution is to construct an object-background pair constrained by the spatial structure which could not only reduce the neg-sample number but also make full use of the background information surrounding the object However this Idea is threatened by the variant of both the object appearance and the spatial-constrained background observation especially when the background shifts as the moving of the object Thus an Incremental pairwise discriminant subspace is constructed in this paper to delineate the variant of the distinguishment In order to maintain the correct the ability of correctly describing the subspace we enforce two novel constraints for the optimal adaptation (1) pairwise data discriminant constraint and (2) subspace smoothness The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach can alleviate adaptation drift and achieve better visual tracking results for a large variety of nonstationary scenes (C) 2010 Elsevier B V All rights reserved

A Video Quality Assessment Metric Based on Human Visual System

It is important for practical application to design an effective and efficient metric for video quality. The most reliable way is by subjective evaluation. Thus, to design an objective metric by simulating human visual system (HVS) is quite reasonable and available. In this paper, the video quality assessment metric based on visual perception is proposed. Three-dimensional wavelet is utilized to decompose video and then extract features to mimic the multichannel structure of HVS. Spatio-temporal contrast sensitivity function (S-T CSF) is employed to weight coefficient obtained by three-dimensional wavelet to simulate nonlinearity feature of the human eyes. Perceptual threshold is exploited to obtain visual sensitive coefficients after S-T CSF filtered. Visual sensitive coefficients are normalized representation and then visual sensitive errors are calculated between reference and distorted video. Finally, temporal perceptual mechanism is applied to count values of video quality for reducing computational cost. Experimental results prove the proposed method outperforms the most existing methods and is comparable to LHS and PVQM.

Color to Gray: Visual Cue Preservation

Both commercial and scientific applications often need to transform color images into gray-scale images, e. g., to reduce the publication cost in printing color images or to help color blind people see visual cues of color images. However, conventional color to gray algorithms are not ready for practical applications because they encounter the following problems: 1) Visual cues are not well defined so it is unclear how to preserve important cues in the transformed gray-scale images; 2) some algorithms have extremely high time cost for computation; and 3) some require human-computer interactions to have a reasonable transformation. To solve or at least reduce these problems, we propose a new algorithm based on a probabilistic graphical model with the assumption that the image is defined over a Markov random field. Thus, color to gray procedure can be regarded as a labeling process to preserve the newly well-defined visual cues of a color image in the transformed gray-scale image. Visual cues are measurements that can be extracted from a color image by a perceiver. They indicate the state of some properties of the image that the perceiver is interested in perceiving. Different people may perceive different cues from the same color image and three cues are defined in this paper, namely, color spatial consistency, image structure information, and color channel perception priority. We cast color to gray as a visual cue preservation procedure based on a probabilistic graphical model and optimize the model based on an integral minimization problem. We apply the new algorithm to both natural color images and artificial pictures, and demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms representative conventional algorithms in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. In addition, it requires no human-computer interactions.

Visual-Context Boosting for Eye Detection

Eye detection plays an important role in many practical applications. This paper presents a novel two-step scheme for eye detection. The first step models an eye by a newly defined visual-context pattern (VCP), and the second step applies semisupervised boosting for precise detection. VCP describes both the space and appearance relations between an eye region (region of eye) and a reference region (region of reference). The context feature of a VCP is extracted by using the integral image. Aiming to reduce the human labeling efforts, we apply semisupervised boosting, which integrates the context feature and the Haar-like features for precise eye detection. Experimental results on several standard face data sets demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective, robust, and efficient. We finally show that this approach is ready for practical applications.

Hydrogen-Bonding Recognition-Induced Color Change of Gold Nanoparticles for Visual Detection of Melamine in Raw Milk and Infant Formula

The color change induced by triple hydrogen-bonding recognition between melamine and a cyanuric acid derivative grafted on the surface of gold nanoparticles can be used for reliable detection of melamine. Since such a color change can be readily seen by the naked eye, the method enables on-site and real-time detection of melamine in raw milk and infant formula even at a concentration as low as 2.5 ppb without the aid of any advanced instruments.