In recent years, covariance descriptors have received considerable attention as a strong representation of a set of points. In this research, we propose a new metric learning algorithm for covariance descriptors based on the Dykstra algorithm, in which the current solution is projected onto a half-space at each iteration, and which runs in O(n3) time. We empirically demonstrate that randomizing the order of half-spaces in the proposed Dykstra-based algorithm significantly accelerates convergence to the optimal solution. Furthermore, we show that the proposed approach yields promising experimental results for pattern recognition tasks.

Automatic detection of immunoreactive areas in fluorescence microscopic images is becoming a key technique in the field of biology including neuroscience, although it is still challenging because of several reasons such as low signal-to-noise ratio and contrast variation within an image. In this study, we developed a new algorithm that exhaustively detects co-localized areas in multi-channel fluorescence images, where shapes of target objects may differ among channels. Different adaptive binarization thresholds for different local regions in different channels are introduced and the condition of each segment is assessed to recognize the target objects. The proposed method was applied to detect immunoreactive spots that labeled membrane receptors on dendritic spines of mouse cerebellar Purkinje cells. Our method achieved the best detection performance over five pre-existing methods.

In order to examine the validity of Mott-Schottky model at organic/metal interfaces, the position of the vacuum level of N,N'-bis(3-methylphenyl)-N,N'-diphenyl -[1,1'-biphenyl]-4,4'-diamine (TPD) film formed on various metal substrates (Au, Cu, Ag, Mg and Ca) was measured as a function of the film-thickness by Kelvin probe method in ultrahigh vacuum (UHV). TPD is a typical hole-injecting material for organic electroluminescent devices. At all the interfaces, sharp shifts of the vacuum level were observed within 1 nm thickness. Further deposition of TPD up to 100 nm did not change the position of the vacuum level indicating no band bending at these interfaces. These findings clearly demonstrate the Fermi level alignment between metal and bulk TPD solid is not established within typical thickness of real devices.

Classification tasks in computer vision and brain-computer interface research have presented several applications such as biometrics and cognitive training. However, like in any other discipline, determining suitable representation of data has been challenging, and recent approaches have deviated from the familiar form of one vector for each data sample. This paper considers a kernel between vector sets, the mean polynomial kernel, motivated by recent studies where data are approximated by linear subspaces, in particular, methods that were formulated on Grassmann manifolds. This kernel takes a more general approach given that it can also support input data that can be modeled as a vector sequence, and not necessarily requiring it to be a linear subspace. We discuss how the kernel can be associated with the Projection kernel, a Grassmann kernel. Experimental results using face image sequences and physiological signal data show that the mean polynomial kernel surpasses existing subspace-based methods on Grassmann manifolds in terms of predictive performance and efficiency.

Web page segmentation has a variety of benefits and potential web applications. Early techniques of web page segmentation are mainly based on machine learning algorithms and rule-based heuristics, which cannot be used for large-scale page segmentation. In this paper, we propose a formulated page segmentation method using visual semantics. Instead of analyzing the visual cues of web pages, this method utilizes three measures to formulate the visual semantics: layout tree is used to recognize the visual similar blocks; seam degree is used to describe how neatly the blocks are arranged; content similarity is used to describe the content coherent degree between blocks. A comparison experiment was done using the VIPS algorithm as a baseline. Experiment results show that the proposed method can divide a Web page into appropriate semantic segments.