Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA) is one of the most popular dimensionality reduction techniques in existing handwritten Chinese character (HCC) recognition systems. However, when used for unconstrained handwritten Chinese character recognition, the traditional LDA algorithm is prone to two problems, namely, the class separation problem and multimodal sample distributions. To deal with these problems,we propose a new locally linear discriminant analysis (LLDA) method for handwritten Chinese character recognition.Our algorithm operates as follows. (1) Using the clustering algorithm, find clusters for the samples of each class. (2) Find the nearest neighboring clusters from the remaining classes for each cluster of one class. Then, use the corresponding cluster means to compute the between-class scatter matrix in LDA while keeping the within-class scatter matrix unchanged. (3) Finally, apply feature vector normalization to further improve the class separation problem. A series of experiments on both the HCL2000 and CASIA Chinese character handwriting databases show that our method can effectively improve recognition performance, with a reduction in error rate of 28.7% (HCL2000) and 16.7% (CASIA) compared with the traditional LDA method.Our algorithm also outperforms DLA (Discriminative Locality Alignment,one of the representative manifold learning-based dimensionality reduction algorithms proposed recently). Large-set handwritten Chinese character recognition experiments also verified the effectiveness of our proposed approach.

An algorithm for the discrimination between human upstairs and downstairs using a tri-axial accelerometer is presented in this paper, which consists of vertical acceleration calibration, extraction of two kinds of features (Interquartile Range and Wavelet Energy), effective feature subset selection with the wrapper approach, and SVM classification. The proposed algorithm can recognize upstairs and downstairs with 95.64% average accuracy for different sensor locations, i.e. located on the subject's waist belt, in the trousers pocket, and in the shirt pocket. Even for the mixed data from all sensor locations, the average recognition accuracy can reach 94.84%. Experimental results have successfully validated the effectiveness of the proposed method.

With the development of personal electronic equipment, the use of a smartphone with a tri-axial accelerometer to detect human physical activity is becoming popular. In this paper, we propose a new feature based on FFT for activity recognition from tri-axial acceleration signals. To improve the classification performance, two fusion methods, minimal distance optimization (MDO) and variance contribution ranking (VCR), are proposed. The new proposed feature achieves a recognition rate of 92.41%, which outperforms six traditional time- or frequency-domain features. Furthermore, the proposed fusion methods effectively improve the recognition rates. In particular, the average accuracy based on class fusion VCR (CFVCR) is 97.01%, which results in an improvement in accuracy of 4.14% compared with the results without any fusion. Experiments confirm the effectiveness of the new proposed feature and fusion methods.

We propose a new face relighting method using an illuminance template generated from a single reference portrait. First, the reference is wrapped according to the shape of the target. Second, we employ a new spatially variant edge-preserving smoothing filter to remove the facial identity and texture details of the wrapped reference, and obtain the illumination template. Finally, we relight the target with the template in CIELAB color space. Experiments show the effectiveness of our method for both grayscale and color faces taken from different databases, and the comparisons with previous works demonstrate a better relighting effect produced by our method.

The Laplacian support vector machine (LSVM) is a semi-supervised framework that uses manifold regularization for learning from labeled and unlabeled data. However, the optimal kernel parameters of LSVM are difficult to obtain. In this paper, we propose a multi-kernel LSVM (MK-LSVM) method using multi-kernel learning formulations in combination with the LSVM. Our learning formulations assume that a set of base kernels are grouped, and employ l2 norm regularization for automatically seeking the optimal linear combination of base kernels. Experimental testing reveals that our method achieves better performance than the LSVM alone using synthetic data, the UCI Machine Learning Repository, and the Caltech database of Generic Object Classification.