Abstract

We study the dynamics of quantum dissension for three qubit states in various dissipative channels such as amplitude damping, dephasing and depolarizing. Our study is solely based on Markovian environments where quantum channels are without memory and each qubit is coupled to its own environment. We start with mixed GHZ, mixed W, mixture of separable states, a mixed biseparable state, as the initial states and mostly observe that the decay of quantum dissension is asymptotic in contrast to sudden death of quantum entanglement in similar environments. This is a clear indication of the fact that quantum correlation in general is more robust against the effect of noise. However, for a given class of initial mixed states we find a temporary leap in quantum dissension for a certain interval of time. More precisely, we observe the revival of quantum correlation to happen for certain time period. This signifies that the measure of quantum correlation such as quantum discord, quantum dissension, defined from the information theoretic perspective is different from the correlation defined from the entanglement-separability paradigm and can increase under the effect of the local noise. We also study the effects of these channels on the monogamy score of each of these initial states. Interestingly, we find that for certain class of states and channels, there is change from negative values to positive values of the monogamy score with classical randomness as well as with time. This gives us an important insight in obtaining states which are freely sharable (polygamous state) from the states which are not freely sharable (monogamous). This is indeed a remarkable feature, as we can create monogamous states from polygamous states Monogamous states are considered to have more signatures of quantum ness and can be used for security purpose.

Abstract

Optic nerve head (ONH) segmentation problem has been of interest for automated glaucoma assessment. Although various segmentation methods have been proposed in the recent past, it is difficult to evaluate and compare the performance of individual methods due to a lack of a benchmark dataset. The problem of segmentation involves segmentation of optic disk and cup region within ONH region. Available datasets do not incorporate challenges present in this problem. In this data paper, we present a comprehensive dataset of retinal images which include both normal and glaucomatous eyes and manual segmentations from multiple human experts. Both area and boundary-based evaluation measures are presented to evaluate a method on various aspects relevant to the problem of glaucoma assessment.

Abstract

Optic disk (OD) and macula are anatomical structures in retinal images. Their detection is of interest in computer assisted diagnostic (CAD) algorithm development. We propose a joint detection algorithm which exploits the bilateral symmetry present in retinal images and present a method to detect OD and macula. A vessel density based metric is proposed to determine the axis of symmetry which is used along with appearance features and geometric constraint on the OD and macula for their detection. The proposed method has been evaluated on a large number of images drawn from 4 public and one private dataset. Obtained results show that our method has consistently high detection rate across the datasets. Since the detection is also very fast, the proposed method offers a good solution for CAD based disease screening.

Abstract

We present a novel framework for depth based optic cup boundary extraction from asingle2D color fundus photograph per eye.Multiple depth estimates from shading, color and texture gradients in the image are correlated with Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT)based depth using a coupled sparse dictionary, trained on image-depth pairs. Finally, a Markov Random Field is formulated on the depth map to model the relative depth and discontinuity at the cup boundary. Leave-one-out validation of depth estimation on the INSPIRE dataset gave average correlation coefficient of 0.80. Our cup segmentation out performs several state-of-the-art methods on the DRISHTI-GS dataset with an average F-score of 0.81 and boundary-error of 21.21 pixels on test set against manual expert markings. Evaluation on an additional set of 28images against OCT scanner provided ground truth showed an average rms error of 0.11 on Cup-Disk diameter and 0.19 on Cup-disk area ratios.

Abstract

Traditional engineering disciplines like electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, metallurgical engineering have focused on the design of artifacts. However most the modern day software engineering course with in the undergraduate-computing curriculum focuses on teaching software processes rather than design of software artifacts. This paper argues the need for introducing software product engineering, i.e., a course that extensively deals with design of software artifacts in undergraduate computing curriculum. At a broader level, we also argue the need for more undergraduate software engineering programs in India.

Abstract

Refactoring tools suffer from usability in the areas of automating mundane tasks, providing user customization, and providing strategies for error recovery. The automation of refactoring tools can be a risky undertaking since user intervention is required in many scenarios to maintain the internal quality of the system. Any type of design level refactoring requires complex changes to the code, the validation of preconditions, and could potentially harm the system. Smaller refactorings that handle code-smells can be carried out automatically with considerably lower risk. This paper discusses the current state of automated refactoring tools, and the development of an automated refactoring tool to extract and propagate Java literal expressions in IntelliJ IDEA.

Abstract

Association rule mining among itemsets is a fundamental task and is of great importance in many data mining applications including attacks in network data, stock market, financial applications, bioinformatics to find genetic disorders, etc. However, association rule extraction from a reasonable-sized database produces a large number of rules. As a result, many of them are redundant to other rules, and they are practically useless. To overcome this issue, methods for mining non-redundant rules are essentially required. To address such problem, we initially propose a definition for redundancy in sense of minimal knowledge and then a compact representation of non-redundant association rules which we call as compact informative generic basis. We also provide an improved version of the existing DCI_CLOSED algorithm (DCI_PLUS) to find out the frequent closed itemsets (FCI) with their minimal representative generators in combination with BitTable which represents a compact database form in a single scan of the original database. We further introduce an algorithm for constructing the compact informative generic basis from the FCI and their generators in an efficient way. We finally present an inference mechanism in which all association rules can be generated without accessing the database. Experiments are performed on the proposed method. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the other existing related methods.

Abstract

Representation of fingerprints is one of the key factors that limits the accuracy and efficiency of matching algorithms. Most popular methods represent each fingerprint as an unordered set of minutiae with variable cardinality and the matching algorithms are left with the task of finding the best correspondence between the two sets of minutiae. While this makes the representation more flexible and matching more accurate, the task becomes computationally intensive. Fixed length representations with aligned features are highly efficient to match. However, creating an aligned representation without the knowledge of the sample to which it is to be matched, makes the problem of representation more complex. Some of the fixed-length representations only provide partial alignment, leaving the rest to the matching stage. In this paper, we propose a fixed length representation for fingerprints that provides exact alignment between the features, thus enabling high-speed matching with minimal computational effort. The representation extends the idea of object representation using bag of words into a bag of minutiae neighborhoods. The representation is provably invariant to affine transformations (rotation, translation and uniform scaling), and is shown to be highly discriminative for the task of verification. Experimental results on FVC 2002 and 2004 datasets clearly show the superiority of the representation with competing methods. As the proposed representation can be computed from the standard minutiae templates, the method is applicable to existing datasets, where the original fingerprint images are not available.

Abstract

The ability to detect floor regions from an image enables a variety of applications such as indoor scene understanding, mobility assessment, robot navigation, path planning and surveillance. In this work, we propose a framework for estimating floor regions in cluttered indoor environments. The problem of floor detection and segmentation is challenging in situations where floor and non-floor regions have similar appearances. It is even harder to segment floor regions when clutter, specular reflections, shadows and textured floors are present within the scene. Our framework utilizes a generic classifier trained from appearance cues as well as floor density estimates, both trained from a variety of indoor images. The results of the classifier is then adapted to a specific test image where we integrate appearance, position and geometric cues in an iterative framework. A Markov Random Field framework is used to integrate the cues to segment floor regions. In contrast to previous settings that relied on optical flow, depth sensors or multiple images in a calibrated setup, our method can work on a single image. It is also more flexible as we avoid assumptions like Manhattan world scene or restricting clutter only to wall-floor boundaries. Experimental results on the public MIT Scene dataset as well as a more challenging dataset that we acquired, demonstrate the robustness and efficiency of our framework on the above mentioned complex situations.

Abstract

We consider the problem of automatic identification of faces in videos such as movies, given a dictionary of known faces from a public or an alternate database. This has applications in video indexing, content based search, surveillance, and real time recognition on wearable computers. We propose a two stage approach for this problem. First, we recognize the faces in a video using a sparse representation framework using l1-minimization and select a few key-frames based on a robust confidence measure.We then use transductive learning to propagate the labels from the key-frames to the remaining frames by incorporating constraints simultaneously in temporal and feature spaces. This is in contrast to some of the previous approaches where every test frame/track is identified independently, ignoring the correlation between the faces in video tracks. Having a few key frames belonging to few subjects for label propagation rather than a large dictionary of actors reduces the amount of confusion. We evaluate the performance of our algorithm on Movie Trailer face dataset and five movie clips, and achieve a significant improvement in labeling accuracy compared to previous approaches