A remote control training system for rat navigation in complicated environment

A remote control system has been developed to deliver stimuli into the rat brain through a wireless micro-stimulator for animal behavior training. The system consists of the following main components： an integrated PC control program, a transmitter and a receiver based on Bluetooth （BT） modules, a stimulator controlled by C8051 microprocessor, as well as an operant chamber and an eight-arm radial maze. The micro-stimulator is featured with its changeable amplitude of pulse output for both constant-voltage and constant-current mode, which provides an easy way to set the proper suitable stimulation intensity for different training. The system has been used in behavior experiments for monitoring and recording bar-pressing in the operant chamber, controlling rat roaming in the eight-arm maze, as well as navigating rats through a 3D obstacle route. The results indicated that the system worked stably and that the stimulation was effective for different types of rat behavior controls. In addition, the results showed that stimulation in the whisker barrel region of rat primary somatosensory cortex （SI） acted like a cue. The animals can be trained to take different desired turns upon the association between the SI cue stimulation and the reward stimulation in the medial forehrain bundle （MFB）.

Data-driven facial animation based on manifold Bayesian regression

Driving facial animation based on tens of tracked markers is a challenging task due to the complex topology and to the non-rigid nature of human faces. We propose a solution named manifold Bayesian regression. First a novel distance metric, the geodesic manifold distance, is introduced to replace the Euclidean distance. The problem of facial animation can be formulated as a sparse warping kernels regression problem, in which the geodesic manifold distance is used for modelling the topology and discontinuities of the face models. The geodesic manifold distance can be adopted in traditional regression methods, e.g. radial basis functions without much tuning. We put facial animation into the framework of Bayesian regression. Bayesian approaches provide an elegant way of dealing with noise and uncertainty. After the covariance matrix is properly modulated, Hybrid Monte Carlo is used to approximate the integration of probabilities and get deformation results. The experimental results showed that our algorithm can robustly produce facial animation with large motions and complex face models.

Multi-sensor image registration using multi-resolution shape analysis

Multi-sensor image registration has been widely used in remote sensing and medical image field, but registration performance is degenerated when heterogeneous images are involved. An image registration method based on multi-resolution shape analysis is proposed in this paper, to deal with the problem that the shape of similar objects is always invariant. The contours of shapes are first detected as visual features using an extended contour search algorithm in order to reduce effects of noise, and the multi-resolution shape descriptor is constructed through Fourier curvature representation of the contour’s chain code. Then a minimum distance function is used to judge the similarity between two contours. To avoid the effect of different resolution and intensity distribution, suitable resolution of each image is selected by maximizing the consistency of its pyramid shapes. Finally, the transformation parameters are estimated based on the matched control-point pairs which are the centers of gravity of the closed contours. Multi-sensor Landsat TM imagery and infrared imagery have been used as experimental data for comparison with the classical contour-based registration. Our results have been shown to be superior to the classical ones.

Ensemble learning HMM for motion recognition and retrieval by Isomap dimension reduction

Along with the development of motion capture technique, more and more 3D motion databases become available. In this paper, a novel approach is presented for motion recognition and retrieval based on ensemble HMM (hidden Markov model) learning. Due to the high dimensionality of motion’s features, Isomap nonlinear dimension reduction is used for training data of ensemble HMM learning. For handling new motion data, Isomap is generalized based on the estimation of underlying eigen- functions. Then each action class is learned with one HMM. Since ensemble learning can effectively enhance supervised learning, ensembles of weak HMM learners are built. Experiment results showed that the approaches are effective for motion data recog- nition and retrieval.

Sample based 3D face reconstruction from a single frontal image by adaptive locally linear embedding

In this paper, we propose a highly automatic approach for 3D photorealistic face reconstruction from a single frontal image. The key point of our work is the implementation of adaptive manifold learning approach. Beforehand, an active appearance model (AAM) is trained for automatic feature extraction and adaptive locally linear embedding (ALLE) algorithm is utilized to reduce the dimensionality of the 3D database. Then, given an input frontal face image, the corresponding weights between 3D samples and the image are synthesized adaptively according to the AAM selected facial features. Finally, geometry reconstruction is achieved by linear weighted combination of adaptively selected samples. Radial basis function (RBF) is adopted to map facial texture from the frontal image to the reconstructed face geometry. The texture of invisible regions between the face and the ears is interpolated by sampling from the frontal image. This approach has several advantages: (1) Only a single frontal face image is needed for highly automatic face reconstruction; (2) Compared with former works, our reconstruction approach provides higher accuracy; (3) Constraint based RBF texture mapping provides natural appearance for reconstructed face.

Content subscribing mechanism in P2P streaming based on gamma distribution prediction

P2P systems are categorized into tree-based and mesh-based systems according to their topologies. Mesh-based systems are considered more suitable for large-scale lnternet applications, but require optimization on latency issue. This paper proposes a content subscribing mechanism （CSM） to eliminate unnecessary time delays during data relaying. A node can send content data to its neighbors as soon as it receives the data segment. No additional time is taken during the interactive stages prior to data segment transmission of streaming content. CSM consists of three steps. First, every node records its historical segments latency, and adopts gamma distribution, which possesses powerful expression ability, to express latency statistics. Second, a node predicts subscribing success ratio of every neighbor by comparing the gamma distribution parameters of the node and its neighbors before selecting a neighbor node to subscribe a data segment. The above steps would not increase latency as they are executed before the data segments are ready at the neighbor nodes. Finally, the node, which was subscribed to, sends the subscribed data segment to the subscriber immediately when it has the data segment. Experiments show that CSM significantly reduces the content data transmission latency.