In recent years, there has been a lot of interest in the study of kernel methods [1].

A novel approach to combining clustering and feature selection is presented. Itimplements a wrapper strategy for feature selection, in the sense that the features are directly selected by optimizing the discriminative powerof the used partitioning algorithm. On the technical side, we present an efficient optimization algorithm with guaranteed local convergence property.The only free parameter of this method is selected by a resampling-based stability analysis. Experiments with real-world datasets demonstrate that our method is able to infer both meaningful partitions and meaningful subsets of features.

One of the central problems of pattern recognition is the exploitation of known invariances in the pattern domain.

The detection and pose estimation of people in images and video is made challenging by the variability of human appearance, the complexity of natural scenes, and the high dimensionality of articulated body models. Tocope with these problems we represent the 3D human body as a graphical model in which the relationships between the body parts are represented by conditional probability distributions. We formulate the pose estimation problem as one of probabilistic inference over a graphical modelwhere the random variables correspond to the individual limb parameters (position and orientation). Because the limbs are described by 6-dimensional vectors encoding pose in 3-space, discretization is impractical andthe random variables in our model must be continuousvalued. To approximate belief propagation in such a graph we exploit a recently introduced generalization of the particle filter. This framework facilitates the automatic initialization of the body-model from low level cues and is robust to occlusion of body parts and scene clutter.

Spectral clustering refers to a class of techniques which rely on the eigenstructure ofa similarity matrix to partition points into disjoint clusters with points in the same cluster having high similarity and points in different clustershaving low similarity. In this paper, we derive a new cost function for spectral clustering based on a measure of error between a given partition and a solution of the spectral relaxation of a minimum normalized cut problem. Minimizing this cost function with respect to the partition leads to a new spectral clustering algorithm. Minimizing with respect to the similarity matrix leads to an algorithm for learning the similarity matrix. We develop a tractable approximation of our cost function that is based on the power method of computing eigenvectors.

Curve data arises naturally in a variety of applications.

The problem of "Structure From Motion" is a central problem in vision: given the 2D locations of certain points we wish to recover the camera motion and the 3D coordinates of the points. Under simplifiedcamera models, the problem reduces to factorizing a measurement matrix into the product of two low rank matrices. Each element of the measurement matrix contains the position of a point in a particular image. When all elements are observed, the problem can be solved trivially using SVD, but in any realistic situation manyelements of the matrix are missing and the ones that are observed have a different directional uncertainty. Under these conditions, most existing factorization algorithms fail while human perception is relatively unchanged. In this paper we use the well known EM algorithm for factor analysis toperform factorization. This allows us to easily handle missing data and measurement uncertainty and more importantly allows us to place a prior on the temporal trajectory of the latent variables (the camera position). We show that incorporating this prior gives a significant improvement in performance in challenging image sequences.

We delive the limiting form of the eigenvalue spectrum for sample covariance matrices produced from non-isotropic data.

When clustering a dataset, the right number k of clusters to use is often not obvious, and choosing k automatically is a hard algorithmic problem. Inthis paper we present an improved algorithm for learning k while clustering. The G-means algorithm is based on a statistical test for the hypothesis that a subset of data follows a Gaussian distribution. G-means runs k-means with increasing k in a hierarchical fashion until the test accepts thehypothesis that the data assigned to each k-means center are Gaussian. Two key advantages are that the hypothesis test does not limit the covariance of the data and does not compute a full covariance matrix. Additionally, G-means only requires one intuitive parameter, the standard statisticalsignificance level α. We present results from experiments showing that the algorithm works well, and better than a recent method based on the BIC penalty for model complexity. In these experiments, we show that the BIC is ineffective as a scoring function, since it does not penalize strongly enough the model's complexity.

Standard approaches to object detection focus on local patches of the image, and try to classify them as background or not. We propose to use the scene context (image as a whole) as an extra source of (global) information, to help resolve local ambiguities. We present a conditional random field for jointly solving the tasks of object detection and scene classification.