Motivated by the important archaeological application of exploring cultural heritage objects, in this paper we study the challenging problem of automatically segmenting curve structures that are very weakly stamped or carved on an object surface in the form of a highly noisy depth map. Different from most classical low-level image segmentation methods that are known to be very sensitive to the noise and occlusions, we propose a new supervised learning algorithm based on Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to implicitly learn and utilize more curve geometry and pattern information for addressing this challenging problem. More specifically, we first propose a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) to estimate the skeleton of curve structures and at each skeleton pixel, a scale value is estimated to reflect the local curve width. Then we propose a dense prediction network to refine the estimated curve skeletons. Based on the estimated scale values, we finally develop an adaptive thresholding algorithm to achieve the final segmentation of curve structures. In the experiment, we validate the performance of the proposed method on a dataset of depth images scanned from unearthed pottery shards dating to the Woodland period of Southeastern North America.

Cross-view person identification (CVPI) from multiple temporally synchronized videos taken by multiple wearable cameras from different, varying views is a very challenging but important problem, which has attracted more interests recently. Current state-of-the-art performance of CVPI is achieved by matching appearance and motion features across videos, while the matching of pose features does not work effectively given the high inaccuracy of the 3D human pose estimation on videos/images collected in the wild. In this paper, we introduce a new metric of confidence to the 3D human pose estimation and show that the combination of the inaccurately estimated human pose and the inferred confidence metric can be used to boost the CVPI performance---the estimated pose information can be integrated to the appearance and motion features to achieve the new state-of-the-art CVPI performance. More specifically, the estimated confidence metric is measured at each human-body joint and the joints with higher confidence are weighted more in the pose matching for CVPI. In the experiments, we validate the proposed method on three wearable-camera video datasets and compare the performance against several other existing CVPI methods.

Kernel selection aims at choosing an appropriate kernel function for kernel-based learning algorithms to avoid either underfitting or overfitting of the resulting hypothesis. One of the main problems faced by kernel selection is the evaluation of the goodness of a kernel, which is typically difficult and computationally expensive. In this paper, we propose a randomized kernel selection approach to evaluate and select the kernel with the spectra of the specifically designed multilevel circulant matrices (MCMs), which is statistically sound and computationally efficient. Instead of constructing the kernel matrix, we construct the randomized MCM to encode the kernel function and all data points together with labels. We build a one-to-one correspondence between all candidate kernel functions and the spectra of the randomized MCMs by Fourier transform. We prove the statistical properties of the randomized MCMs and the randomized kernel selection criteria, which theoretically qualify the utility of the randomized criteria in kernel selection. With the spectra of the randomized MCMs, we derive a series of randomized criteria to conduct kernel selection, which can be computed in log-linear time and linear space complexity by fast Fourier transform (FFT). Experimental results demonstrate that our randomized kernel selection criteria are significantly more efficient than the existing classic and widely-used criteria while preserving similar predictive performance.

With the rapid growth of microblogging services, such as Twitter, a vast of short and noisy messages are produced by millions of users, which makes people difficult to quickly grasp essential information of their interested topics. In this paper, we study extractive topic-oriented Twitter summarization as a solution to address this problem. Traditional summarization methods only consider text information, which is insufficient in social media situation. Existing Twitter summarization techniques rarely explore relations between tweets explicitly, ignoring that information can spread along the social network. Inspired by social theories that expression consistence and expression contagion are observed in social network, we propose a novel approach for Twitter summarization in short and noisy situation by integrating Social Network and Sparse Reconstruction (SNSR). We explore whether social relations can help Twitter summarization, modeling relations between tweets described as the social regularization and integrating it into the group sparse optimization framework. It conducts a sparse reconstruction process by selecting tweets that can best reconstruct the original tweets in a specific topic, with considering coverage and sparsity. We simultaneously design the diversity regularization to remove redundancy. In particular, we present a mathematical optimization formulation and develop an efficient algorithm to solve it. Due to the lack of public corpus, we construct the gold standard twitter summary datasets for 12 different topics. Experimental results on this datasets show the effectiveness of our framework for handling the large scale short and noisy messages in social media.

The pattern satisfiability is a fundamental problem for SPARQL. This paper provides a complete analysis of decidability/undecidability of satisfiability problems for SPARQL 1.1 patterns. A surprising result is the undecidability of satisfiability for SPARQL 1.1 patterns when only AND and MINUS are expressible. Also, it is shown that any fragment of SPARQL 1.1 without expressing both AND and MINUS is decidable. These results provide a guideline for future SPARQL query language design and implementation.

Movies provide us with a mass of visual content as well as attracting stories. Existing methods have illustrated that understanding movie stories through only visual content is still a hard problem. In this paper, for answering questions about movies, we put forward a Layered Memory Network (LMN) that represents frame-level and clip-level movie content by the Static Word Memory module and the Dynamic Subtitle Memory module, respectively. Particularly, we firstly extract words and sentences from the training movie subtitles. Then the hierarchically formed movie representations, which are learned from LMN, not only encode the correspondence between words and visual content inside frames, but also encode the temporal alignment between sentences and frames inside movie clips. We also extend our LMN model into three variant frameworks to illustrate the good extendable capabilities. We conduct extensive experiments on the MovieQA dataset. With only visual content as inputs, LMN with frame-level representation obtains a large performance improvement. When incorporating subtitles into LMN to form the clip-level representation, we achieve the state-of-the-art performance on the online evaluation task of 'Video+Subtitles'. The good performance successfully demonstrates that the proposed framework of LMN is effective and the hierarchically formed movie representations have good potential for the applications of movie question answering.

Community detection has been extensively studied for various applications, focusing primarily on network topologies. Recent research has started to explore node contents to identify semantically meaningful communities and interpret their structures using selected words. However, links in real networks typically have semantic descriptions, e.g., comments and emails in social media, supporting the notion of communities of links. Indeed, communities of links can better describe multiple roles that nodes may play and provide a richer characterization of community behaviors than communities of nodes. The second issue in community finding is that most existing methods assume network topologies and descriptive contents to be consistent and to carry the compatible information of node group membership, which is generally violated in real networks. These methods are also restricted to interpret one community with one topic. The third problem is that the existing methods have used top ranked words or phrases to label topics when interpreting communities. However, it is often difficult to comprehend the derived topics using words or phrases, which may be irrelevant. To address these issues altogether, we propose a new unified probabilistic model that can be learned by a dual nested expectation-maximization algorithm. Our new method explores the intrinsic correlation between communities and topics to discover link communities robustly and extract adequate community summaries in sentences instead of words for topic labeling at the same time. It is able to derive more than one topical summary per community to provide rich explanations. We present experimental results to show the effectiveness of our new approach, and evaluate the quality of the results by a case study.

Recently, saliency detection in a single image and co-saliency detection in multiple images have drawn extensive research interest in the vision community. In this paper, we investigate a new problem of co-saliency detection within a single image, i.e., detecting within-image co-saliency. By identifying common saliency within an image, e.g., highlighting multiple occurrences of an object class with similar appearance, this work can benefit many important applications, such as the detection of objects of interest, more robust object recognition, reduction of information redundancy, and animation synthesis. We propose a new bottom-up method to address this problem. Specifically, a large number of object proposals are first detected from the image. Then we develop an optimization algorithm to derive a set of proposal groups, each of which contains multiple proposals showing good common saliency in the original image. For each proposal group, we calculate a co-saliency map and then use a low-rank based algorithm to fuse the maps calculated from all the proposal groups for the final co-saliency map in the image. In the experiment, we collect a new dataset of 364 color images with within-image cosaliency. Experiment results show that the proposed method can better detect the within-image co-saliency than existing algorithms.

Existential rules, a family of expressive ontology languages, inherit desired expressive and reasoning properties from both description logics and logic programming. On the other hand, forgetting is a well studied operation for ontology reuse, obfuscation and analysis. Yet it is challenging to establish a theory of forgetting for existential rules. In this paper, we lay the foundation for a theory of forgetting for existential rules by developing a novel notion of unfolding. In particular, we introduce a definition of forgetting for existential rules in terms of query answering and provide a characterisation of forgetting by the unfolding. A result of forgetting may not be expressible in existential rules, and we then capture the expressibility of forgetting by a variant of boundedness. While the expressibility is undecidable in general, we identify a decidable fragment. Finally, we provide an algorithm for forgetting in this fragment.

Quantum Theory (QT) has been applied in a number of fields outside physics, e.g. Information Retrieval (IR). A series of pioneering works have verified the necessity to employ QT in IR user models. In this paper, we explore the process of relevance judgement from a novel perspective of the two state vector quantum weak measurement (WM) by considering context information in time domain. Experiments are carried out to verify our arguments.