Key Frames Extraction for Sign Language Video Analysis and Recognition

In this paper we proposed a method for finding video frames representing one sign in the finger alphabet. The method is based on determining hands location, segmentation and the use of standard video quality evaluation metrics. Metric calculation is performed only in regions of interest. Sliding mechanism for finding local extrema and adaptive threshold based on local averaging is used for key frames selection. The success rate is evaluated by recall, precision and F1 measure. The method effectiveness is compared with metrics applied to all frames. Proposed method is fast, effective and relatively easy to realize by simple input video preprocessing and subsequent use of tools designed for video quality measuring.

Detection of Action Potentials in the Presence of Noise Using Phase-Space Techniques

Emerging Bio-engineering fields such as Brain Computer Interfaces, neuroprothesis devices and modeling and simulation of neural networks have led to increased research activity in algorithms for the detection, isolation and classification of Action Potentials (AP) from noisy data trains. Current techniques in the field of 'unsupervised no-prior knowledge' biosignal processing include energy operators, wavelet detection and adaptive thresholding. These tend to bias towards larger AP waveforms, AP may be missed due to deviations in spike shape and frequency and correlated noise spectrums can cause false detection. Also, such algorithms tend to suffer from large computational expense. A new signal detection technique based upon the ideas of phasespace diagrams and trajectories is proposed based upon the use of a delayed copy of the AP to highlight discontinuities relative to background noise. This idea has been used to create algorithms that are computationally inexpensive and address the above problems. Distinct AP have been picked out and manually classified from real physiological data recorded from a cockroach. To facilitate testing of the new technique, an Auto Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) noise model has been constructed bases upon background noise of the recordings. Along with the AP classification means this model enables generation of realistic neuronal data sets at arbitrary signal to noise ratio (SNR).

An Efficient Adaptive Thresholding Technique for Wavelet Based Image Denoising

This frame work describes a computationally more efficient and adaptive threshold estimation method for image denoising in the wavelet domain based on Generalized Gaussian Distribution (GGD) modeling of subband coefficients. In this proposed method, the choice of the threshold estimation is carried out by analysing the statistical parameters of the wavelet subband coefficients like standard deviation, arithmetic mean and geometrical mean. The noisy image is first decomposed into many levels to obtain different frequency bands. Then soft thresholding method is used to remove the noisy coefficients, by fixing the optimum thresholding value by the proposed method. Experimental results on several test images by using this method show that this method yields significantly superior image quality and better Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR). Here, to prove the efficiency of this method in image denoising, we have compared this with various denoising methods like wiener filter, Average filter, VisuShrink and BayesShrink.