Abstract: Non-linear dimensionality reduction techniques are affected by two critical aspects: (i) the design of the adjacency graphs, and (ii) the embedding of new test data-the out-of-sample problem. For the first aspect, the proposed solutions, in general, were heuristically driven. For the second aspect, the difficulty resides in finding an accurate mapping that transfers unseen data samples into an existing manifold. Past works addressing these two aspects were heavily parametric in the sense that the optimal performance is only achieved for a suitable parameter choice that should be known in advance. In this paper, we demonstrate that the sparse representation theory not only serves for automatic graph construction as shown in recent works, but also represents an accurate alternative for out-of-sample embedding. Considering for a case study the Laplacian Eigenmaps, we applied our method to the face recognition problem. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed out-of-sample embedding, experiments are conducted using the K-nearest neighbor (KNN) and Kernel Support Vector Machines (KSVM) classifiers on six public face datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed model is able to achieve high categorization effectiveness as well as high consistency with non-linear embeddings/manifolds obtained in batch modes.

Abstract: PATREC5825
We present a methodology to address the problem of human gesture segmentation and recognition in video and depth image sequences. A Bag-of-Visual-and-Depth-Words (BoVDW) model is introduced as an extension of the Bag-of-Visual-Words (BoVW) model. State-of-the-art RGB and depth features, including a newly proposed depth descriptor, are analysed and combined in a late fusion form. The method is integrated in a Human Gesture Recognition pipeline, together with a novel probability-based Dynamic Time Warping (PDTW) algorithm which is used to perform prior segmentation of idle gestures. The proposed DTW variant uses samples of the same gesture category to build a Gaussian Mixture Model driven probabilistic model of that gesture class. Results of the whole Human Gesture Recognition pipeline in a public data set show better performance in comparison to both standard BoVW model and DTW approach.