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Computational visual aesthetics has recently become an active research area. Existing state-of-art methods formulate this as a binary classification task where a given image is predicted to be beautiful or not. In many applications such as image retrieval and enhancement, it is more important to rank images based on their

Computational visual aesthetics has recently become an active research area. Existing state-of-art methods formulate this as a binary classification task where a given image is predicted to be beautiful or not. In many applications such as image retrieval and enhancement, it is more important to rank images based on their aesthetic quality instead of binary-categorizing them. Furthermore, in such applications, it may be possible that all images belong to the same category. Hence determining the aesthetic ranking of the images is more appropriate. To this end, a novel problem of ranking images with respect to their aesthetic quality is formulated in this work. A new data-set of image pairs with relative labels is constructed by carefully selecting images from the popular AVA data-set. Unlike in aesthetics classification, there is no single threshold which would determine the ranking order of the images across the entire data-set.

This problem is attempted using a deep neural network based approach that is trained on image pairs by incorporating principles from relative learning. Results show that such relative training procedure allows the network to rank the images with a higher accuracy than a state-of-art network trained on the same set of images using binary labels. Further analyzing the results show that training a model using the image pairs learnt better aesthetic features than training on same number of individual binary labelled images.

Additionally, an attempt is made at enhancing the performance of the system by incorporating saliency related information. Given an image, humans might fixate their vision on particular parts of the image, which they might be subconsciously intrigued to. I therefore tried to utilize the saliency information both stand-alone as well as in combination with the global and local aesthetic features by performing two separate sets of experiments. In both the cases, a standard saliency model is chosen and the generated saliency maps are convoluted with the images prior to passing them to the network, thus giving higher importance to the salient regions as compared to the remaining. Thus generated saliency-images are either used independently or along with the global and the local features to train the network. Empirical results show that the saliency related aesthetic features might already be learnt by the network as a sub-set of the global features from automatic feature extraction, thus proving the redundancy of the additional saliency module.
ContributorsGattupalli, Jaya Vijetha (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Davulcu, Hasan (Committee member) / Liang, Jianming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
High-level inference tasks in video applications such as recognition, video retrieval, and zero-shot classification have become an active research area in recent years. One fundamental requirement for such applications is to extract high-quality features that maintain high-level information in the videos.

Many video feature extraction algorithms have been purposed, such

High-level inference tasks in video applications such as recognition, video retrieval, and zero-shot classification have become an active research area in recent years. One fundamental requirement for such applications is to extract high-quality features that maintain high-level information in the videos.

Many video feature extraction algorithms have been purposed, such as STIP, HOG3D, and Dense Trajectories. These algorithms are often referred to as “handcrafted” features as they were deliberately designed based on some reasonable considerations. However, these algorithms may fail when dealing with high-level tasks or complex scene videos. Due to the success of using deep convolution neural networks (CNNs) to extract global representations for static images, researchers have been using similar techniques to tackle video contents. Typical techniques first extract spatial features by processing raw images using deep convolution architectures designed for static image classifications. Then simple average, concatenation or classifier-based fusion/pooling methods are applied to the extracted features. I argue that features extracted in such ways do not acquire enough representative information since videos, unlike images, should be characterized as a temporal sequence of semantically coherent visual contents and thus need to be represented in a manner considering both semantic and spatio-temporal information.

In this thesis, I propose a novel architecture to learn semantic spatio-temporal embedding for videos to support high-level video analysis. The proposed method encodes video spatial and temporal information separately by employing a deep architecture consisting of two channels of convolutional neural networks (capturing appearance and local motion) followed by their corresponding Fully Connected Gated Recurrent Unit (FC-GRU) encoders for capturing longer-term temporal structure of the CNN features. The resultant spatio-temporal representation (a vector) is used to learn a mapping via a Fully Connected Multilayer Perceptron (FC-MLP) to the word2vec semantic embedding space, leading to a semantic interpretation of the video vector that supports high-level analysis. I evaluate the usefulness and effectiveness of this new video representation by conducting experiments on action recognition, zero-shot video classification, and semantic video retrieval (word-to-video) retrieval, using the UCF101 action recognition dataset.
ContributorsHu, Sheng-Hung (Author) / Li, Baoxin (Thesis advisor) / Turaga, Pavan (Committee member) / Liang, Jianming (Committee member) / Tong, Hanghang (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016
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Description
Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disease is a progressive disease that affects the brain gradually with time and worsens. Reliable and early diagnosis of AD and its prodromal stages (i.e. Mild Cognitive Impairment(MCI)) is essential. Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) measures the decline in the regional cerebral metabolic rate

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), a neurodegenerative disease is a progressive disease that affects the brain gradually with time and worsens. Reliable and early diagnosis of AD and its prodromal stages (i.e. Mild Cognitive Impairment(MCI)) is essential. Fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) positron emission tomography (PET) measures the decline in the regional cerebral metabolic rate for glucose, offering a reliable metabolic biomarker even on presymptomatic AD patients. PET scans provide functional information that is unique and unavailable using other types of imaging. The computational efficacy of FDG-PET data alone, for the classification of various Alzheimer’s Diagnostic categories (AD, MCI (LMCI, EMCI), Control) has not been studied. This serves as motivation to correctly classify the various diagnostic categories using FDG-PET data. Deep learning has recently been applied to the analysis of structural and functional brain imaging data. This thesis is an introduction to a deep learning based classification technique using neural networks with dimensionality reduction techniques to classify the different stages of AD based on FDG-PET image analysis.

This thesis develops a classification method to investigate the performance of FDG-PET as an effective biomarker for Alzheimer's clinical group classification. This involves dimensionality reduction using Probabilistic Principal Component Analysis on max-pooled data and mean-pooled data, followed by a Multilayer Feed Forward Neural Network which performs binary classification. Max pooled features result into better classification performance compared to results on mean pooled features. Additionally, experiments are done to investigate if the addition of important demographic features such as Functional Activities Questionnaire(FAQ), gene information helps improve performance. Classification results indicate that our designed classifiers achieve competitive results, and better with the additional of demographic features.
ContributorsSingh, Shibani (Author) / Wang, Yalin (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Liang, Jianming (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2017
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Description
There is intense interest in adopting computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems, particularly those developed based on deep learning algorithms, for applications in a number of medical specialties. However, success of these CAD systems relies heavily on large annotated datasets; otherwise, deep learning often results in algorithms that perform poorly and lack

There is intense interest in adopting computer-aided diagnosis (CAD) systems, particularly those developed based on deep learning algorithms, for applications in a number of medical specialties. However, success of these CAD systems relies heavily on large annotated datasets; otherwise, deep learning often results in algorithms that perform poorly and lack generalizability. Therefore, this dissertation seeks to address this critical problem: How to develop efficient and effective deep learning algorithms for medical applications where large annotated datasets are unavailable. In doing so, we have outlined three specific aims: (1) acquiring necessary annotations efficiently from human experts; (2) utilizing existing annotations effectively from advanced architecture; and (3) extracting generic knowledge directly from unannotated images. Our extensive experiments indicate that, with a small part of the dataset annotated, the developed deep learning methods can match, or even outperform those that require annotating the entire dataset. The last part of this dissertation presents the importance and application of imaging in healthcare, elaborating on how the developed techniques can impact several key facets of the CAD system for detecting pulmonary embolism. Further research is necessary to determine the feasibility of applying these advanced deep learning technologies in clinical practice, particularly when annotation is limited. Progress in this area has the potential to enable deep learning algorithms to generalize to real clinical data and eventually allow CAD systems to be employed in clinical medicine at the point of care.
ContributorsZhou, Zongwei (Author) / Liang, Jianming (Thesis advisor) / Shortliffe, Edward H (Committee member) / Greenes, Robert A (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021