We propose a privacy-preserving machine learning scheme with encryption-then-compression (EtC) images, where EtC images are images encrypted by using a block-based encryption method proposed for EtC systems with JPEG compression. In this paper, a novel property of EtC images is first discussed, although EtC ones was already shown to be compressible as a property. The novel property allows us to directly apply EtC images to machine learning algorithms non-specialized for computing encrypted data. In addition, the proposed scheme is demonstrated to provide no degradation in the performance of some typical machine learning algorithms including the support vector machine algorithm with kernel trick and random forests under the use of z-score normalization. A number of facial recognition experiments with are carried out to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

We propose an appearance-based proficiency evaluation methodology based on fine-motion analysis. We consider the effects of individual habit in evaluating proficiency and analyze the fine motion of guitar-picking. We first extract multiple features on a large number of dense trajectories of fine motion. To facilitate analysis, we then generate a histogram of motion features using a bag-of-words model and change the number of visual words as appropriate. To remove the effects of individual habit, we extract the common principal histogram elements corresponding to experts or beginners according to discrimination's contribution rates using random forests. We finally calculate the similarity of the histograms to evaluate the proficiency of a guitar-picking motion. By optimizing the number of visual words for proficiency evaluation, we demonstrate that our method distinguishes experts from beginners with an accuracy of about 86%. Moreover, we verify experimentally that our proposed methodology can evaluate proficiency while removing the effects of individual habit.

Tracking algorithms for arbitrary objects are widely researched in the field of computer vision. At the beginning, an initialized bounding box is given as the input. After that, the algorithms are required to track the objective in the later frames on-the-fly. Tracking-by-detection is one of the main research branches of online tracking. However, there still exist two issues in order to improve the performance. 1) The limited processing time requires the model to extract low-dimensional and discriminative features from the training samples. 2) The model is required to be able to balance both the prior and new objectives' appearance information in order to maintain the relocation ability and avoid the drifting problem. In this paper, we propose a real-time tracking algorithm called coupled randomness tracking (CRT) which focuses on dealing with these two issues. One randomness represents random projection, and the other randomness represents online random forests (ORFs). In CRT, the gray-scale feature is compressed by a sparse measurement matrix, and ORFs are used to train the sample sequence online. During the training procedure, we introduce a tree discarding strategy which helps the ORFs to adapt fast appearance changes caused by illumination, occlusion, etc. Our method can constantly adapt to the objective's latest appearance changes while keeping the prior appearance information. The experimental results show that our algorithm performs robustly with many publicly available benchmark videos and outperforms several state-of-the-art algorithms. Additionally, our algorithm can be easily utilized into a parallel program.

In recent years, there has been a significant growth in the importance of data mining of graph-structured data due to this technology's rapid increase in both scale and application areas. Many previous studies have investigated decision tree learning on Semantic Web-based linked data to uncover implicit knowledge. In the present paper, we suggest a new random forest algorithm for linked data to overcome the underlying limitations of the decision tree algorithm, such as local optimal decisions and generalization error. Moreover, we designed a parallel processing environment for random forest learning to manage large-size linked data and increase the efficiency of multiple tree generation. For this purpose, we modified the previous candidate feature searching method of the decision tree algorithm for linked data to reduce the feature searching space of random forest learning and developed feature selection methods that are adjusted to linked data. Using a distributed index-based search engine, we designed a parallel random forest learning system for linked data to generate random forests in parallel. Our proposed system enables users to simultaneously generate multiple decision trees from distributed stored linked data. To evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, we performed experiments to compare the classification accuracy when using the single decision tree algorithm. The experimental results revealed that our random forest algorithm is more accurate than the single decision tree algorithm.

In this paper, we propose N-Dimensional (ND) Tensor Supervised Neighborhood Embedding (ND TSNE) for discriminant feature representation, which is used for view-based object recognition. ND TSNE uses a general Nth order tensor discriminant and neighborhood-embedding analysis approach for object representation. The benefits of ND TSNE include: (1) a natural way of representing data without losing structure information, i.e., the information about the relative positions of pixels or regions; (2) a reduction in the small sample size problem, which occurs in conventional supervised learning because the number of training samples is much less than the dimensionality of the feature space; (3) preserving a neighborhood structure in tensor feature space for object recognition and a good convergence property in training procedure. With Tensor-subspace features, the random forests is used as a multi-way classifier for object recognition, which is much easier for training and testing compared with multi-way SVM. We demonstrate the performance advantages of our proposed approach over existing techniques using experiments on the COIL-100 and the ETH-80 datasets.

Scene-context plays an important role in scene analysis and object recognition. Among various sources of scene-context, we focus on scene-context scale, which means the effective scale of local context to classify an image pixel in a scene. This paper presents random forests based image categorization using the scene-context scale. The proposed method uses random forests, which are ensembles of randomized decision trees. Since the random forests are extremely fast in both training and testing, it is possible to perform classification, clustering and regression in real time. We train multi-scale texton forests which efficiently provide both a hierarchical clustering into semantic textons and local classification in various scale levels. The scene-context scale can be estimated by the entropy of the leaf node in the multi-scale texton forests. For image categorization, we combine the classified category distributions in each scale and the estimated scene-context scale. We evaluate on the MSRC21 segmentation dataset and find that the use of the scene-context scale improves image categorization performance. Our results have outperformed the state-of-the-art in image categorization accuracy.