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  • Plotting algorithms for the Mandelbrot set

    Plotting algorithms for the Mandelbrot set

    There are many programs and algorithms used to plot the Mandelbrot set and other fractals, some of which are described in fractal-generating software. These programs use a variety of algorithms to determine the color of individual pixels efficiently. == Escape time algorithm == The simplest algorithm for generating a representation of the Mandelbrot set is known as the "escape time" algorithm. A repeating calculation is performed for each x, y point in the plot area and based on the behavior of that calculation, a color is chosen for that pixel. === Unoptimized naïve escape time algorithm === In both the unoptimized and optimized escape time algorithms, the x and y locations of each point are used as starting values in a repeating, or iterating calculation (described in detail below). The result of each iteration is used as the starting values for the next. The values are checked during each iteration to see whether they have reached a critical "escape" condition, or "bailout". If that condition is reached, the calculation is stopped, the pixel is drawn, and the next x, y point is examined. For some starting values, escape occurs quickly, after only a small number of iterations. For starting values very close to but not in the set, it may take hundreds or thousands of iterations to escape. For values within the Mandelbrot set, escape will never occur. The programmer or user must choose how many iterations–or how much "depth"–they wish to examine. The higher the maximal number of iterations, the more detail and subtlety emerge in the final image, but the longer time it will take to calculate the fractal image. Escape conditions can be simple or complex. Because no complex number with a real or imaginary part greater than 2 can be part of the set, a common bailout is to escape when either coefficient exceeds 2. A more computationally complex method that detects escapes sooner, is to compute distance from the origin using the Pythagorean theorem, i.e., to determine the absolute value, or modulus, of the complex number. If this value exceeds 2, or equivalently, when the sum of the squares of the real and imaginary parts exceed 4, the point has reached escape. More computationally intensive rendering variations include the Buddhabrot method, which finds escaping points and plots their iterated coordinates. The color of each point represents how quickly the values reached the escape point. Often black is used to show values that fail to escape before the iteration limit, and gradually brighter colors are used for points that escape. This gives a visual representation of how many cycles were required before reaching the escape condition. To render such an image, the region of the complex plane we are considering is subdivided into a certain number of pixels. To color any such pixel, let c {\displaystyle c} be the midpoint of that pixel. We now iterate the critical point 0 under P c {\displaystyle P_{c}} , checking at each step whether the orbit point has modulus larger than 2. When this is the case, we know that c {\displaystyle c} does not belong to the Mandelbrot set, and we color our pixel according to the number of iterations used to find out. Otherwise, we keep iterating up to a fixed number of steps, after which we decide that our parameter is "probably" in the Mandelbrot set, or at least very close to it, and color the pixel black. In pseudocode, this algorithm would look as follows. The algorithm does not use complex numbers and manually simulates complex-number operations using two real numbers, for those who do not have a complex data type. The program may be simplified if the programming language includes complex-data-type operations. for each pixel (Px, Py) on the screen do x0 := scaled x coordinate of pixel (scaled to lie in the Mandelbrot X scale (-2.00, 0.47)) y0 := scaled y coordinate of pixel (scaled to lie in the Mandelbrot Y scale (-1.12, 1.12)) x := 0.0 y := 0.0 iteration := 0 max_iteration := 1000 while (xx + yy ≤ 22 AND iteration < max_iteration) do xtemp := xx - yy + x0 y := 2xy + y0 x := xtemp iteration := iteration + 1 color := palette[iteration] plot(Px, Py, color) Here, relating the pseudocode to c {\displaystyle c} , z {\displaystyle z} and P c {\displaystyle P_{c}} : z = x + i y {\displaystyle z=x+iy\ } z 2 = x 2 + 2 i x y {\displaystyle z^{2}=x^{2}+2ixy} - y 2 {\displaystyle y^{2}\ } c = x 0 + i y 0 {\displaystyle c=x_{0}+iy_{0}\ } and so, as can be seen in the pseudocode in the computation of x and y: x = R e ⁡ ( z 2 + c ) = x 2 − y 2 + x 0 {\displaystyle x=\mathop {\mathrm {Re} } (z^{2}+c)=x^{2}-y^{2}+x_{0}} and y = I m ⁡ ( z 2 + c ) = 2 x y + y 0 . {\displaystyle y=\mathop {\mathrm {Im} } (z^{2}+c)=2xy+y_{0}.\ } To get colorful images of the set, the assignment of a color to each value of the number of executed iterations can be made using one of a variety of functions (linear, exponential, etc.). One practical way, without slowing down calculations, is to use the number of executed iterations as an entry to a palette initialized at startup. If the color table has, for instance, 500 entries, then the color selection is n mod 500, where n is the number of iterations. === Optimized escape time algorithms === The code in the previous section uses an unoptimized inner while loop for clarity. In the unoptimized version, one must perform five multiplications per iteration. To reduce the number of multiplications the following code for the inner while loop may be used instead: x2:= 0 y2:= 0 w:= 0 while (x2 + y2 ≤ 4 and iteration < max_iteration) do x:= x2 - y2 + x0 y:= w - x2 - y2 + y0 x2:= x x y2:= y y w:= (x + y) (x + y) iteration:= iteration + 1 The above code works via some algebraic simplification of the complex multiplication: ( i y + x ) 2 = − y 2 + 2 i y x + x 2 = x 2 − y 2 + 2 i y x {\displaystyle {\begin{aligned}(iy+x)^{2}&=-y^{2}+2iyx+x^{2}\\&=x^{2}-y^{2}+2iyx\end{aligned}}} Using the above identity, the number of multiplications can be reduced to three instead of five. The above inner while loop can be further optimized by expanding w to w = x 2 + 2 x y + y 2 {\displaystyle w=x^{2}+2xy+y^{2}} Substituting w into y = w − x 2 − y 2 + y 0 {\displaystyle y=w-x^{2}-y^{2}+y_{0}} yields y = 2 x y + y 0 {\displaystyle y=2xy+y_{0}} and hence calculating w is no longer needed. The further optimized pseudocode for the above is: x:= 0 y:= 0 x2:= 0 y2:= 0 while (x2 + y2 ≤ 4 and iteration < max_iteration) do x2:= x x y2:= y y y:= 2 x y + y0 x:= x2 - y2 + x0 iteration:= iteration + 1 Note that in the above pseudocode, 2 x y {\displaystyle 2xy} seems to increase the number of multiplications by 1, but since 2 is the multiplier the code can be optimized via ( x + x ) y {\displaystyle (x+x)y} . == Coloring algorithms == In addition to plotting the set, a variety of algorithms have been developed to efficiently color the set in an aesthetically pleasing way show structures of the data (scientific visualisation) === Histogram coloring === A more complex coloring method involves using a histogram which pairs each pixel with said pixel's maximum iteration count before escape/bailout. This method will equally distribute colors to the same overall area, and, importantly, is independent of the maximum number of iterations chosen. This algorithm has four passes. The first pass involves calculating the iteration counts associated with each pixel (but without any pixels being plotted). These are stored in an array IterationCounts[x][y], where x and y are the x and y coordinates of said pixel on the screen respectively. The first step of the second pass is to create an array NumIterationsPerPixel[n], where the array size n is the maximum iteration count. Next, one must iterate over the array of pixel-iteration count pairs IterationCounts[x][y], and retrieve each pixel's saved iteration count, i, via e.g. i = IterationCounts[x][y]. After each pixel's iteration count i is retrieved, it is necessary to index the NumIterationsPerPixel array at i and increment the indexed value (which is initially zero) -- e.g. NumIterationsPerPixel[i] = NumIterationsPerPixel[i] + 1. for (x = 0; x < width; x++) do for (y = 0; y < height; y++) do i:= IterationCounts[x][y] NumIterationsPerPixel[i]++ The third pass iterates through the NumIterationsPerPixel array and adds up all the stored values, saving them in total. The array index represents the number of pixels that reached that iteration count before bailout. total: = 0 for (i = 0; i < max_iterations; i++) do total += NumIterationsPerPixel[i] After this, the fourth pass begins and all the values in the IterationCounts array are indexed, and, for each iteration count i, associated with each pixel, the count is added to a global sum of all the iteration counts from 1 to i in the NumIterationsPerPixel array . This value is then normalized by dividing the sum by the total value computed earlier. hue[][]:= 0.0 for (x = 0; x < width; x++) do for (y = 0; y < height; y++) do iteration:= Iteration

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  • Stochastic parrot

    Stochastic parrot

    In machine learning, the term stochastic parrot is a metaphor that frames large language models as systems that statistically mimic text without real understanding. The word "stochastic" – from the ancient Greek "στοχαστικός" (stokhastikos, 'based on guesswork') – is a term from probability theory meaning "randomly determined". The word "parrot" refers to parrots' ability to mimic human speech. The term was introduced in a 2021 paper on AI ethics titled "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜" and authored by Timnit Gebru, Emily M. Bender, Angelina McMillan-Major, and Margaret Mitchell. The paper outlined possible risks associated with large language models (LLMs). In December 2020, it was the subject of a workplace dispute between Gebru (then co-leader of Google's Ethical Artificial Intelligence Team) and Google, which had requested the retraction of the paper. The incident culminated in Gebru's controversial departure from the company. The paper was later presented at the 2021 ACM Conference, and the term "stochastic parrot" has seen widespread use in academic research concerning generative AI and LLMs. The term has been interpreted negatively as an insult towards AI. == Background == Timnit Gebru is an AI ethics researcher, Emily M. Bender is a linguist specializing in computational linguistics, and Margaret Mitchell is a computer scientist specializing in algorithmic bias. Gebru had joined Google in 2018, where she co-led a team on the ethics of artificial intelligence with Mitchell. In late 2020, the paper "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜" was co-written by Gebru and five other researchers, four of whom were Google employees. The paper argues that large language models (LLMs) present significant risks such as environmental and financial costs, inscrutability leading to unknown dangerous biases, and potential for deception as LLMs do not understand the concepts underlying what they learn. The paper states that LLMs are "stitching together sequences of linguistic forms ... observed in its vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, but without any reference to meaning." Therefore, they are labeled "stochastic parrots". === Dismissal of Gebru by Google === After the paper was submitted for consideration to the 2021 ACM Conference, Google requested that Gebru either retract the paper from the conference or remove the names of Google employees from it. Gebru refused to do so without further discussion, and emailed Google Research vice president Megan Kacholia that if the company could not explain the request for retraction and address other concerns regarding similar projects, she would plan to resign after a transition period, stating that they could "work on a last date". The following day, on December 2, 2020, Gebru received an email saying that Google was "accepting her resignation". Her abrupt firing sparked protests by Google employees and negative publicity for the company. == Usage == The phrase has been used by AI skeptics to signify that LLMs lack understanding of the meaning of their outputs. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, used the term shortly after the release of ChatGPT in December 2022, tweeting "i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u". The term was nominated as the 2023 AI-related Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. == Debate == Some LLMs, such as ChatGPT, have become capable of interacting with users in convincingly human-like conversations. The development of these new systems has deepened the discussion of the extent to which LLMs understand or are simply "parroting". According to machine learning researchers Lindholm, Wahlström, Lindsten, and Schön, the term "stochastic parrot" highlights two vital limitations of LLMs: LLMs are limited by the data they are trained on and are simply stochastically repeating contents of datasets. Because they are just making up outputs based on training data, LLMs do not understand if they are saying something incorrect or inappropriate. Lindholm et al. noted that, with poor quality datasets and other limitations, a learning machine might produce results that are "dangerously wrong". === Subjective experience === In the mind of a human being, words and language correspond to things one has experienced. For LLMs, according to proponents of the theory, words correspond only to other words and patterns of usage fed into their training data. Proponents of the idea of stochastic parrots thus conclude that statements about LLMs are due to "the human tendency to attribute meaning to text", and claim this occurs despite the LLMs not actually understanding language. === Fine-tuning === Kelsey Piper argued that the claim that LLMs are stochastic parrots or mere "next-token predictors" focuses on pre-training, ignoring that modern LLMs are also fine-tuned to follow instructions and to prefer accurate answers. === Hallucinations and mistakes === The tendency of LLMs to pass off false information as fact is held as support. Called hallucinations or confabulations, LLMs will occasionally synthesize information that matches some pattern. LLMs may fail to distinguish fact and fiction, which leads to the claim that they can't connect words to a comprehension of the world, as humans do. Furthermore, LLMs may fail to decipher complex or ambiguous grammar cases that rely on understanding the meaning of language. For example: The wet newspaper that fell down off the table is my favorite newspaper. But now that my favorite newspaper fired the editor I might not like reading it anymore. Can I replace 'my favorite newspaper' by 'the wet newspaper that fell down off the table' in the second sentence? GPT-4, an LLM released in March 2023, responded yes, not understanding that the meaning of "newspaper" is different in these two contexts; it is first an object and second an institution. === Benchmarks and experiments === One argument against the hypothesis that LLMs are stochastic parrot is their results on benchmarks for reasoning, common sense and language understanding. In 2023, some LLMs have shown good results on many language understanding tests, such as the Super General Language Understanding Evaluation (SuperGLUE). GPT-4 scored in the >90th-percentile on the Uniform Bar Examination and achieved 93% accuracy on the MATH benchmark of high-school Olympiad problems, results that exceed rote pattern-matching expectations. Such tests, and the smoothness of many LLM responses, help as many as 51% of AI professionals believe they can truly understand language with enough data, according to a 2022 survey. === Expert rebuttals === Some AI researchers dispute the notion that LLMs merely "parrot" their training data. Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneering figure in neural networks, counters that the metaphor misunderstands the prerequisite for accurate language prediction. He argues that "to predict the next word accurately, you have to understand the sentence", a view he presented on 60 Minutes in 2023. From this perspective, understanding is not an alternative to statistical prediction, but rather an emergent property required to perform it effectively at scale. Hinton also uses logical puzzles to demonstrate that LLMs actually understand language. A 2024 Scientific American investigation described a closed Berkeley workshop where state-of-the-art models solved novel tier-4 mathematics problems and produced coherent proofs, indicating reasoning abilities beyond memorization. The GPT-4 Technical Report showed human-level results on professional and academic exams (e.g., the Uniform Bar Exam and USMLE), challenging the "parrot" characterization. Anthropic conducted mechanistic interpretability research on Claude, using attribution graphs to identify circuits. The research showed how the LLM processes information via chains of fuzzy logical inference, and indicated an ability to plan ahead. They found that Claude 3.5 Haiku "employs remarkably general abstractions", forms "internally generated plans for its future outputs" and "works backwards from its longer-term goals". They noted that "The mechanisms of the model can apparently only be faithfully described using an overwhelmingly large causal graph." They also found that the model includes "mechanisms that could underlie a simple form of metacognition", in that it "thinks about" the level of its own knowledge before reaching its answer. === Interpretability === Another line of evidence against the 'stochastic parrot' claim comes from mechanistic interpretability, a research field dedicated to reverse-engineering LLMs to understand their internal workings. Rather than only observing the model's input-output behavior, these techniques probe the model's internal activations, which can be used to determine if they contain structured representations of the world. The goal is to investigate whether LLMs are merely manipulating surface statistics or if t

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  • Scale space implementation

    Scale space implementation

    In the areas of computer vision, image analysis and signal processing, the notion of scale-space representation is used for processing measurement data at multiple scales, and specifically enhance or suppress image features over different ranges of scale (see the article on scale space). A special type of scale-space representation is provided by the Gaussian scale space, where the image data in N dimensions is subjected to smoothing by Gaussian convolution. Most of the theory for Gaussian scale space deals with continuous images, whereas one when implementing this theory will have to face the fact that most measurement data are discrete. Hence, the theoretical problem arises concerning how to discretize the continuous theory while either preserving or well approximating the desirable theoretical properties that lead to the choice of the Gaussian kernel (see the article on scale-space axioms). This article describes basic approaches for this that have been developed in the literature, see also for an in-depth treatment regarding the topic of approximating the Gaussian smoothing operation and the Gaussian derivative computations in scale-space theory, and for a complementary treatment regarding hybrid discretization methods. == Statement of the problem == The Gaussian scale-space representation of an N-dimensional continuous signal, f C ( x 1 , ⋯ , x N , t ) , {\displaystyle f_{C}\left(x_{1},\cdots ,x_{N},t\right),} is obtained by convolving fC with an N-dimensional Gaussian kernel: g N ( x 1 , ⋯ , x N , t ) . {\displaystyle g_{N}\left(x_{1},\cdots ,x_{N},t\right).} In other words: L ( x 1 , ⋯ , x N , t ) = ∫ u 1 = − ∞ ∞ ⋯ ∫ u N = − ∞ ∞ f C ( x 1 − u 1 , ⋯ , x N − u N , t ) ⋅ g N ( u 1 , ⋯ , u N , t ) d u 1 ⋯ d u N . {\displaystyle L\left(x_{1},\cdots ,x_{N},t\right)=\int _{u_{1}=-\infty }^{\infty }\cdots \int _{u_{N}=-\infty }^{\infty }f_{C}\left(x_{1}-u_{1},\cdots ,x_{N}-u_{N},t\right)\cdot g_{N}\left(u_{1},\cdots ,u_{N},t\right)\,du_{1}\cdots du_{N}.} However, for implementation, this definition is impractical, since it is continuous. When applying the scale space concept to a discrete signal fD, different approaches can be taken. This article is a brief summary of some of the most frequently used methods. == Separability == Using the separability property of the Gaussian kernel g N ( x 1 , … , x N , t ) = G ( x 1 , t ) ⋯ G ( x N , t ) {\displaystyle g_{N}\left(x_{1},\dots ,x_{N},t\right)=G\left(x_{1},t\right)\cdots G\left(x_{N},t\right)} the N-dimensional convolution operation can be decomposed into a set of separable smoothing steps with a one-dimensional Gaussian kernel G along each dimension L ( x 1 , ⋯ , x N , t ) = ∫ u 1 = − ∞ ∞ ⋯ ∫ u N = − ∞ ∞ f C ( x 1 − u 1 , ⋯ , x N − u N , t ) G ( u 1 , t ) d u 1 ⋯ G ( u N , t ) d u N , {\displaystyle L(x_{1},\cdots ,x_{N},t)=\int _{u_{1}=-\infty }^{\infty }\cdots \int _{u_{N}=-\infty }^{\infty }f_{C}(x_{1}-u_{1},\cdots ,x_{N}-u_{N},t)G(u_{1},t)\,du_{1}\cdots G(u_{N},t)\,du_{N},} where G ( x , t ) = 1 2 π t e − x 2 2 t {\displaystyle G(x,t)={\frac {1}{\sqrt {2\pi t}}}e^{-{\frac {x^{2}}{2t}}}} and the standard deviation of the Gaussian σ is related to the scale parameter t according to t = σ2. Separability will be assumed in all that follows, even when the kernel is not exactly Gaussian, since separation of the dimensions is the most practical way to implement multidimensional smoothing, especially at larger scales. Therefore, the rest of the article focuses on the one-dimensional case. == The sampled Gaussian kernel == When implementing the one-dimensional smoothing step in practice, the presumably simplest approach is to convolve the discrete signal fD with a sampled Gaussian kernel: L ( x , t ) = ∑ n = − ∞ ∞ f ( x − n ) G ( n , t ) {\displaystyle L(x,t)=\sum _{n=-\infty }^{\infty }f(x-n)\,G(n,t)} where G ( n , t ) = 1 2 π t e − n 2 2 t {\displaystyle G(n,t)={\frac {1}{\sqrt {2\pi t}}}e^{-{\frac {n^{2}}{2t}}}} (with t = σ2) which in turn is truncated at the ends to give a filter with finite impulse response L ( x , t ) = ∑ n = − M M f ( x − n ) G ( n , t ) {\displaystyle L(x,t)=\sum _{n=-M}^{M}f(x-n)\,G(n,t)} for M chosen sufficiently large (see error function) such that 2 ∫ M ∞ G ( u , t ) d u = 2 ∫ M t ∞ G ( v , 1 ) d v < ε . {\displaystyle 2\int _{M}^{\infty }G(u,t)\,du=2\int _{\frac {M}{\sqrt {t}}}^{\infty }G(v,1)\,dv<\varepsilon .} A common choice is to set M to a constant C times the standard deviation of the Gaussian kernel M = C σ + 1 = C t + 1 {\displaystyle M=C\sigma +1=C{\sqrt {t}}+1} where C is often chosen somewhere between 3 and 6. Using the sampled Gaussian kernel can, however, lead to implementation problems, in particular when computing higher-order derivatives at finer scales by applying sampled derivatives of Gaussian kernels. When accuracy and robustness are primary design criteria, alternative implementation approaches should therefore be considered. For small values of ε (10−6 to 10−8) the errors introduced by truncating the Gaussian are usually negligible. For larger values of ε, however, there are many better alternatives to a rectangular window function. For example, for a given number of points, a Hamming window, Blackman window, or Kaiser window will do less damage to the spectral and other properties of the Gaussian than a simple truncation will. Notwithstanding this, since the Gaussian kernel decreases rapidly at the tails, the main recommendation is still to use a sufficiently small value of ε such that the truncation effects are no longer important. == The discrete Gaussian kernel == A more refined approach is to convolve the original signal with the discrete Gaussian kernel T(n, t) L ( x , t ) = ∑ n = − ∞ ∞ f ( x − n ) T ( n , t ) {\displaystyle L(x,t)=\sum _{n=-\infty }^{\infty }f(x-n)\,T(n,t)} where T ( n , t ) = e − t I n ( t ) {\displaystyle T(n,t)=e^{-t}I_{n}(t)} and I n ( t ) {\displaystyle I_{n}(t)} denotes the modified Bessel functions of integer order, n. This is the discrete counterpart of the continuous Gaussian in that it is the solution to the discrete diffusion equation (discrete space, continuous time), just as the continuous Gaussian is the solution to the continuous diffusion equation. This filter can be truncated in the spatial domain as for the sampled Gaussian L ( x , t ) = ∑ n = − M M f ( x − n ) T ( n , t ) {\displaystyle L(x,t)=\sum _{n=-M}^{M}f(x-n)\,T(n,t)} or can be implemented in the Fourier domain using a closed-form expression for its discrete-time Fourier transform: T ^ ( θ , t ) = ∑ n = − ∞ ∞ T ( n , t ) e − i θ n = e t ( cos ⁡ θ − 1 ) . {\displaystyle {\widehat {T}}(\theta ,t)=\sum _{n=-\infty }^{\infty }T(n,t)\,e^{-i\theta n}=e^{t(\cos \theta -1)}.} With this frequency-domain approach, the scale-space properties transfer exactly to the discrete domain, or with excellent approximation using periodic extension and a suitably long discrete Fourier transform to approximate the discrete-time Fourier transform of the signal being smoothed. Moreover, higher-order derivative approximations can be computed in a straightforward manner (and preserving scale-space properties) by applying small support central difference operators to the discrete scale space representation. As with the sampled Gaussian, a plain truncation of the infinite impulse response will in most cases be a sufficient approximation for small values of ε, while for larger values of ε it is better to use either a decomposition of the discrete Gaussian into a cascade of generalized binomial filters or alternatively to construct a finite approximate kernel by multiplying by a window function. If ε has been chosen too large such that effects of the truncation error begin to appear (for example as spurious extrema or spurious responses to higher-order derivative operators), then the options are to decrease the value of ε such that a larger finite kernel is used, with cutoff where the support is very small, or to use a tapered window. == Recursive filters == Since computational efficiency is often important, low-order recursive filters are often used for scale-space smoothing. For example, Young and van Vliet use a third-order recursive filter with one real pole and a pair of complex poles, applied forward and backward to make a sixth-order symmetric approximation to the Gaussian with low computational complexity for any smoothing scale. By relaxing a few of the axioms, Lindeberg concluded that good smoothing filters would be "normalized Pólya frequency sequences", a family of discrete kernels that includes all filters with real poles at 0 < Z < 1 and/or Z > 1, as well as with real zeros at Z < 0. For symmetry, which leads to approximate directional homogeneity, these filters must be further restricted to pairs of poles and zeros that lead to zero-phase filters. To match the transfer function curvature at zero frequency of the discrete Gaussian, which ensures an approximate semi-group property of additive t, two poles at Z = 1 + 2 t − ( 1 + 2 t ) 2 − 1 {\displaystyle

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  • Colloquis

    Colloquis

    Colloquis, previously known as ActiveBuddy and Conversagent, was a company that created conversation-based interactive agents originally distributed via instant messaging platforms. The company had offices in New York, New York, and Sunnyvale, California. == History == Founded in 2000, the company was the brainchild of Robert Hoffer, Timothy Kay, and Peter Levitan. The idea for interactive agents (also known as Internet bots) came from the team's vision to add functionality to increasingly popular instant messaging services. The original implementation took shape as a word-based adventure game but quickly grew to include a wide range of database applications, including access to news, weather, stock information, movie times, Yellow Pages listings, and detailed sports data, as well as a variety of tools (calculators, translator, etc.). These various applications were bundled into one entity and launched as SmarterChild in 2001. SmarterChild acted as a showcase for the quick data access and possibilities for fun conversation that the company planned to turn into customized, niche-specific products. The rapid success of SmarterChild led to targeted promotional products for Radiohead, Austin Powers, The Sporting News, and others. ActiveBuddy sought to strengthen its hold on the interactive agent market for the future by filing for, and receiving, a controversial patent on their creation in 2002. The company also released the BuddyScript SDK, a free developer kit that allow programmers to design and launch their own interactive agents using ActiveBuddy's proprietary scripting language, in 2002. Ultimately, however, the decline in ad spending in 2001 and 2002 led to a shift in corporate strategy towards business focused Automated Service Agents, building products for clients including Cingular, Comcast and Cox Communications. The company subsequently changed its name from ActiveBuddy to Conversagent in 2003, and then again to Colloquis in 2006. Colloquis was purchased by Microsoft in October 2006.

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  • Digital image correlation and tracking

    Digital image correlation and tracking

    Digital image correlation and tracking is an optical method that employs tracking and image registration techniques for accurate 2D and 3D measurements of changes in 2D images or 3D volumes. This method is often used to measure full-field displacement and strains, and it is widely applied in many areas of science and engineering. Compared to strain gauges and extensometers, digital image correlation methods provide finer details about deformation, due to the ability to provide both local and average data. == Overview == Digital image correlation (DIC) techniques have been increasing in popularity, especially in micro- and nano-scale mechanical testing applications due to their relative ease of implementation and use. Advances in computer technology and digital cameras have been the enabling technologies for this method and while white-light optics has been the predominant approach, DIC can be and has been extended to almost any imaging technology. The concept of using cross-correlation to measure shifts in datasets has been known for a long time, and it has been applied to digital images since at least the early 1970s. The present-day applications are almost innumerable, including image analysis, image compression, velocimetry, and strain estimation. Much early work in DIC in the field of mechanics was led by researchers at the University of South Carolina in the early 1980s and has been optimized and improved in recent years. Commonly, DIC relies on finding the maximum of the correlation array between pixel intensity array subsets on two or more corresponding images, which gives the integer translational shift between them. It is also possible to estimate shifts to a finer resolution than the resolution of the original images, which is often called "sub-pixel" registration because the measured shift is smaller than an integer pixel unit. For sub-pixel interpolation of the shift, other methods do not simply maximize the correlation coefficient. An iterative approach can also be used to maximize the interpolated correlation coefficient by using non-linear optimization techniques. The non-linear optimization approach tends to be conceptually simpler and can handle large deformations more accurately, but as with most nonlinear optimization techniques, it is slower. The two-dimensional discrete cross correlation r i j {\displaystyle r_{ij}} can be defined in several ways, one possibility being: r i j = ∑ m ∑ n [ f ( m + i , n + j ) − f ¯ ] [ g ( m , n ) − g ¯ ] ∑ m ∑ n [ f ( m , n ) − f ¯ ] 2 ∑ m ∑ n [ g ( m , n ) − g ¯ ] 2 . {\displaystyle r_{ij}={\frac {\sum _{m}\sum _{n}[f(m+i,n+j)-{\bar {f}}][g(m,n)-{\bar {g}}]}{\sqrt {\sum _{m}\sum _{n}{[f(m,n)-{\bar {f}}]^{2}}\sum _{m}\sum _{n}{[g(m,n)-{\bar {g}}]^{2}}}}}.} Here f(m, n) is the pixel intensity or the gray-scale value at a point (m, n) in the original image, g(m, n) is the gray-scale value at a point (m, n) in the translated image, f ¯ {\displaystyle {\bar {f}}} and g ¯ {\displaystyle {\bar {g}}} are mean values of the intensity matrices f and g respectively. However, in practical applications, the correlation array is usually computed using Fourier-transform methods, since the fast Fourier transform is a much faster method than directly computing the correlation. F = F { f } , G = F { g } . {\displaystyle \mathbf {F} ={\mathcal {F}}\{f\},\quad \mathbf {G} ={\mathcal {F}}\{g\}.} Then taking the complex conjugate of the second result and multiplying the Fourier transforms together elementwise, we obtain the Fourier transform of the correlogram, R {\displaystyle \ R} : R = F ∘ G ∗ , {\displaystyle R=\mathbf {F} \circ \mathbf {G} ^{},} where ∘ {\displaystyle \circ } is the Hadamard product (entry-wise product). It is also fairly common to normalize the magnitudes to unity at this point, which results in a variation called phase correlation. Then the cross-correlation is obtained by applying the inverse Fourier transform: r = F − 1 { R } . {\displaystyle \ r={\mathcal {F}}^{-1}\{R\}.} At this point, the coordinates of the maximum of r i j {\displaystyle r_{ij}} give the integer shift: ( Δ x , Δ y ) = arg ⁡ max ( i , j ) { r } . {\displaystyle (\Delta x,\Delta y)=\arg \max _{(i,j)}\{r\}.} == Deformation mapping == For deformation mapping, the mapping function that relates the images can be derived from comparing a set of subwindow pairs over the whole images. (Figure 1). The coordinates or grid points (xi, yj) and (xi, yj) are related by the translations that occur between the two images. If the deformation is small and perpendicular to the optical axis of the camera, then the relation between (xi, yj) and (xi, yj) can be approximated by a 2D affine transformation such as: x ∗ = x + u + ∂ u ∂ x Δ x + ∂ u ∂ y Δ y , {\displaystyle x^{}=x+u+{\frac {\partial u}{\partial x}}\Delta x+{\frac {\partial u}{\partial y}}\Delta y,} y ∗ = y + v + ∂ v ∂ x Δ x + ∂ v ∂ y Δ y . {\displaystyle y^{}=y+v+{\frac {\partial v}{\partial x}}\Delta x+{\frac {\partial v}{\partial y}}\Delta y.} Here u and v are translations of the center of the sub-image in the X and Y directions respectively. The distances from the center of the sub-image to the point (x, y) are denoted by Δ x {\displaystyle \Delta x} and Δ y {\displaystyle \Delta y} . Thus, the correlation coefficient rij is a function of displacement components (u, v) and displacement gradients ∂ u ∂ x , ∂ u ∂ y , ∂ v ∂ x , ∂ v ∂ y . {\displaystyle {\frac {\partial u}{\partial x}},{\frac {\partial u}{\partial y}},{\frac {\partial v}{\partial x}},{\frac {\partial v}{\partial y}}.} DIC has proven to be very effective at mapping deformation in macroscopic mechanical testing, where the application of specular markers (e.g. paint, toner powder) or surface finishes from machining and polishing provide the needed contrast to correlate images well. However, these methods for applying surface contrast do not extend to the application of free-standing thin films for several reasons. First, vapor deposition at normal temperatures on semiconductor grade substrates results in mirror-finish quality films with RMS roughnesses that are typically on the order of several nanometers. No subsequent polishing or finishing steps are required, and unless electron imaging techniques are employed that can resolve microstructural features, the films do not possess enough useful surface contrast to adequately correlate images. Typically this challenge can be circumvented by applying paint that results in a random speckle pattern on the surface, although the large and turbulent forces resulting from either spraying or applying paint to the surface of a free-standing thin film are too high and would break the specimens. In addition, the sizes of individual paint particles are on the order of μms, while the film thickness is only several hundred nanometers, which would be analogous to supporting a large boulder on a thin sheet of paper. == Digital volume correlation == Digital Volume Correlation (DVC, and sometimes called Volumetric-DIC) extends the 2D-DIC algorithms into three dimensions to calculate the full-field 3D deformation from a pair of 3D images. This technique is distinct from 3D-DIC, which only calculates the 3D deformation of an exterior surface using conventional optical images. The DVC algorithm is able to track full-field displacement information in the form of voxels instead of pixels. The theory is similar to above except that another dimension is added: the z-dimension. The displacement is calculated from the correlation of 3D subsets of the reference and deformed volumetric images, which is analogous to the correlation of 2D subsets described above. DVC can be performed using volumetric image datasets. These images can be obtained using confocal microscopy, X-ray computed tomography, Magnetic Resonance Imaging or other techniques. Similar to the other DIC techniques, the images must exhibit a distinct, high-contrast 3D "speckle pattern" to ensure accurate displacement measurement. DVC was first developed in 1999 to study the deformation of trabecular bone using X-ray computed tomography images. Since then, applications of DVC have grown to include granular materials, metals, foams, composites and biological materials. To date it has been used with images acquired by MRI imaging, Computer Tomography (CT), micro-CT, confocal microscopy, and lightsheet microscopy. DVC is currently considered to be ideal in the research world for 3D quantification of local displacements, strains, and stress in biological specimens. It is preferred because of the non-invasiveness of the method over traditional experimental methods. Two of the key challenges are improving the speed and reliability of the DVC measurement. The 3D imaging techniques produce noisier images than conventional 2D optical images, which reduces the quality of the displacement measurement. Computational speed is restricted by the file sizes of 3D images, which are significantly larger than 2D images. For example, an

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  • LanguageWare

    LanguageWare

    LanguageWare is a natural language processing (NLP) technology developed by IBM, which allows applications to process natural language text. It comprises a set of Java libraries that provide a range of NLP functions: language identification, text segmentation/tokenization, normalization, entity and relationship extraction, and semantic analysis and disambiguation. The analysis engine uses a finite-state machine approach at multiple levels, which aids its performance characteristics while maintaining a reasonably small footprint. The behaviour of the system is driven by a set of configurable lexico-semantic resources which describe the characteristics and domain of the processed language. A default set of resources comes as part of LanguageWare and these describe the native language characteristics, such as morphology, and the basic vocabulary for the language. Supplemental resources have been created that capture additional vocabularies, terminologies, rules and grammars, which may be generic to the language or specific to one or more domains. A set of Eclipse-based customization tooling, LanguageWare Resource Workbench, is available on IBM's alphaWorks site, and allows domain knowledge to be compiled into these resources and thereby incorporated into the analysis process. LanguageWare can be deployed as a set of UIMA-compliant annotators, Eclipse plug-ins or Web Services.

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  • Virtual Woman

    Virtual Woman

    Virtual Woman is a software program that has elements of a chatbot, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, a video game, and a virtual human. It claims to be the oldest form of virtual life in existence, as it has been distributed since the late 1980s. Recent releases of the program can update their intelligence by connecting online and downloading newer personalities and histories. == Program play == When Virtual Woman starts, the user is presented with a list of options and then may choose their Virtual Woman's ethnic type, personality, location, clothing, etc. or load a pre-built Virtual Woman from a Digital DNA file. Once the options are determined, the user is presented with a 3-D animated Virtual Woman of their selection and then can engage them in conversation, progressing in a manner similar to that of its predecessor, ELIZA and its successors, the chatbots. In most versions of Virtual Woman, this is done through the keyboard, but some versions also support voice input. == In popular culture == Software sales and usage statistics from private companies are difficult to verify. WinSite, an independent Internet shareware distribution site that does publish public download counts, has for some time now listed some version of Virtual Woman in their top three shareware downloads of all time with well over seven hundred thousand downloads. == Compadre == The group of beta testers and advisers for Virtual Woman are referred to as Compadre and have their own beta testing site and forum. == Criticisms == As Virtual Woman has developed the ability to conduct longer and more realistic interactions, particularly in recent beta releases, criticism has arisen that this may lead some users to social isolation, or to use the program as a substitute for real human interaction. However, these are criticisms that have been leveled at all video games and at the use of the Internet itself. == Release history == Versions of Virtual Woman with rough release dates and PC platforms for which they were designed: Virtual Woman (????) (DOS) Virtual Woman for Windows (1991) (Windows 3.0) Virtual Woman 95 (1995) (Windows 3X, Windows 95) Virtual Woman 98 (1998) (Windows 3X, Windows 95) Virtual Woman 2000 (2000) (Windows 95+) Virtual Woman Millennium (Windows 95, XP) Virtual Woman Net ( Windows XP/Vista specific)

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  • Cache language model

    Cache language model

    A cache language model is a type of statistical language model. These occur in the natural language processing subfield of computer science and assign probabilities to given sequences of words by means of a probability distribution. Statistical language models are key components of speech recognition systems and of many machine translation systems: they tell such systems which possible output word sequences are probable and which are improbable. The particular characteristic of a cache language model is that it contains a cache component and assigns relatively high probabilities to words or word sequences that occur elsewhere in a given text. The primary, but by no means sole, use of cache language models is in speech recognition systems. To understand why it is a good idea for a statistical language model to contain a cache component one might consider someone who is dictating a letter about elephants to a speech recognition system. Standard (non-cache) N-gram language models will assign a very low probability to the word "elephant" because it is a very rare word in English. If the speech recognition system does not contain a cache component, the person dictating the letter may be annoyed: each time the word "elephant" is spoken another sequence of words with a higher probability according to the N-gram language model may be recognized (e.g., "tell a plan"). These erroneous sequences will have to be deleted manually and replaced in the text by "elephant" each time "elephant" is spoken. If the system has a cache language model, "elephant" will still probably be misrecognized the first time it is spoken and will have to be entered into the text manually; however, from this point on the system is aware that "elephant" is likely to occur again – the estimated probability of occurrence of "elephant" has been increased, making it more likely that if it is spoken it will be recognized correctly. Once "elephant" has occurred several times, the system is likely to recognize it correctly every time it is spoken until the letter has been completely dictated. This increase in the probability assigned to the occurrence of "elephant" is an example of a consequence of machine learning and more specifically of pattern recognition. There exist variants of the cache language model in which not only single words but also multi-word sequences that have occurred previously are assigned higher probabilities (e.g., if "San Francisco" occurred near the beginning of the text subsequent instances of it would be assigned a higher probability). The cache language model was first proposed in a paper published in 1990, after which the IBM speech-recognition group experimented with the concept. The group found that implementation of a form of cache language model yielded a 24% drop in word-error rates once the first few hundred words of a document had been dictated. A detailed survey of language modeling techniques concluded that the cache language model was one of the few new language modeling techniques that yielded improvements over the standard N-gram approach: "Our caching results show that caching is by far the most useful technique for perplexity reduction at small and medium training data sizes". The development of the cache language model has generated considerable interest among those concerned with computational linguistics in general and statistical natural language processing in particular: recently, there has been interest in applying the cache language model in the field of statistical machine translation. The success of the cache language model in improving word prediction rests on the human tendency to use words in a "bursty" fashion: when one is discussing a certain topic in a certain context, the frequency with which one uses certain words will be quite different from their frequencies when one is discussing other topics in other contexts. The traditional N-gram language models, which rely entirely on information from a very small number (four, three, or two) of words preceding the word to which a probability is to be assigned, do not adequately model this "burstiness". Recently, the cache language model concept – originally conceived for the N-gram statistical language model paradigm – has been adapted for use in the neural paradigm. For instance, recent work on continuous cache language models in the recurrent neural network (RNN) setting has applied the cache concept to much larger contexts than before, yielding significant reductions in perplexity. Another recent line of research involves incorporating a cache component in a feed-forward neural language model (FN-LM) to achieve rapid domain adaptation.

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  • Multimodal representation learning

    Multimodal representation learning

    Multimodal representation learning is a subfield of representation learning focused on integrating and interpreting information from different modalities, such as text, images, audio, or video, by projecting them into a shared latent space. This allows for semantically similar content across modalities to be mapped to nearby points within that space, facilitating a unified understanding of diverse data types. By automatically learning meaningful features from each modality and capturing their inter-modal relationships, multimodal representation learning enables a unified representation that enhances performance in cross-media analysis tasks such as video classification, event detection, and sentiment analysis. It also supports cross-modal retrieval and translation, including image captioning, video description, and text-to-image synthesis. == Motivation == The primary motivations for multimodal representation learning arise from the inherent nature of real-world data and the limitations of unimodal approaches. Since multimodal data offers complementary and supplementary information about an object or event from different perspectives, it is more informative than relying on a single modality. A key motivation is to narrow the heterogeneity gap that exists between different modalities by projecting their features into a shared semantic subspace. This allows semantically similar content across modalities to be represented by similar vectors, facilitating the understanding of relationships and correlations between them. Multimodal representation learning aims to leverage the unique information provided by each modality to achieve a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of concepts. These unified representations are crucial for improving performance in various cross-media analysis tasks such as video classification, event detection, and sentiment analysis. They also enable cross-modal retrieval, allowing users to search and retrieve content across different modalities. Additionally, it facilitates cross-modal translation, where information can be converted from one modality to another, as seen in applications like image captioning and text-to-image synthesis. The abundance of ubiquitous multimodal data in real-world applications, including understudied areas like healthcare, finance, and human-computer interaction (HCI), further motivates the development of effective multimodal representation learning techniques. == Approaches and methods == === Canonical-correlation analysis based methods === Canonical-correlation analysis (CCA) was first introduced in 1936 by Harold Hotelling and is a fundamental approach for multimodal learning. CCA aims to find linear relationships between two sets of variables. Given two data matrices X ∈ R n × p {\displaystyle X\in \mathbb {R} ^{n\times p}} and Y ∈ R n × q {\displaystyle Y\in \mathbb {R} ^{n\times q}} representing different modalities, CCA finds projection vectors w x ∈ R p {\displaystyle w_{x}\in \mathbb {R} ^{p}} and w y ∈ R q {\displaystyle w_{y}\in \mathbb {R} ^{q}} that maximizes the correlation between the projected variables: ρ = max w x , w y w x ⊤ Σ x y w y w x ⊤ Σ x x w x w y ⊤ Σ y y w y {\displaystyle \rho =\max _{w_{x},w_{y}}{\frac {w_{x}^{\top }\Sigma _{xy}w_{y}}{{\sqrt {w_{x}^{\top }\Sigma _{xx}w_{x}}}{\sqrt {w_{y}^{\top }\Sigma _{yy}w_{y}}}}}} such that Σ x x {\displaystyle \Sigma _{xx}} and Σ y y {\displaystyle \Sigma _{yy}} are the within-modality covariance matrices, and Σ x y {\displaystyle \Sigma _{xy}} is the between-modality covariance matrix. However, standard CCA is limited by its linearity, which led to the development of nonlinear extensions, such as kernel CCA and deep CCA. ==== Kernel CCA ==== Kernel canonical correlation analysis (KCCA) extends traditional CCA to capture nonlinear relationships between modalities by implicitly mapping the data into high dimensional feature spaces using kernel functions. Given kernel functions K x {\displaystyle K_{x}} and K y {\displaystyle K_{y}} with corresponding Gram matrices K x ∈ R n × n {\displaystyle K_{x}\in \mathbb {R} ^{n\times n}} and K y ∈ R n × n {\displaystyle K_{y}\in \mathbb {R} ^{n\times n}} , KCCA seeks coefficients α {\displaystyle \alpha } and β {\displaystyle \beta } that maximize: ρ = max α , β α ⊤ K x K y β α ⊤ K x 2 α β ⊤ K y 2 β {\displaystyle \rho =\max _{\alpha ,\beta }{\frac {\alpha ^{\top }K_{x}Ky\beta }{{\sqrt {\alpha ^{\top }K_{x}^{2}\alpha }}{\sqrt {\beta ^{\top }K_{y}^{2}\beta }}}}} To prevent overfitting, regularization terms are typically added, resulting in: ρ = max α , β α T K x K y β α T ( K x 2 + λ x K x ) α β T ( K y 2 + λ y K y ) β {\displaystyle \rho =\max _{\alpha ,\beta }{\frac {\alpha ^{T}K_{x}K_{y}\beta }{{\sqrt {\alpha ^{T}\left(K_{x}^{2}+\lambda _{x}K_{x}\right)\alpha }}{\sqrt {\;\beta ^{T}\left(K_{y}^{2}+\lambda _{y}K_{y}\right)\beta }}}}} where λ x {\displaystyle \lambda _{x}} and λ y {\displaystyle \lambda _{y}} are regularization parameters. KCCA has proven effective for tasks such as cross-modal retrieval and semantic analysis, though it faces computational challenges with large datasets due to its O ( n 2 ) {\displaystyle O(n^{2})} memory requirement for sorting kernel matrices. KCCA was proposed independently by several researchers. ==== Deep CCA ==== Deep canonical correlation analysis (DCCA), introduced in 2013, employs neural networks to learn nonlinear transformations for maximizing the correlation between modalities. DCCA uses separate neural networks f x {\displaystyle f_{x}} and f y {\displaystyle f_{y}} for each modality to transform the original data before applying CCA: max W x , W y , θ x , θ y corr ⁡ ( f x ( X ; θ x ) , f y ( Y ; θ y ) ) {\displaystyle \max _{W_{x},W_{y},\theta _{x},\theta _{y}}\operatorname {corr} \left(f_{x}(X;\theta _{x}),f_{y}(Y;\theta _{y})\right)} where θ x {\displaystyle \theta _{x}} and θ y {\displaystyle \theta _{y}} represent the parameters of the neural networks, and W x {\displaystyle W_{x}} and W y {\displaystyle W_{y}} are the CCA projection matrices. The correlation objective is computed as: corr ⁡ ( H x , H y ) = tr ⁡ ( T − 1 / 2 H x T H y S − 1 / 2 ) {\displaystyle \operatorname {corr} (H_{x},H_{y})=\operatorname {tr} \left(T^{-1/2}H_{x}^{T}H_{y}S^{-1/2}\right)} where H x = f x ( X ) {\displaystyle H_{x}=f_{x}(X)} and H y = f y ( Y ) {\displaystyle H_{y}=f_{y}(Y)} are the network outputs, T = H x T H x + r x I {\displaystyle T=H_{x}^{T}H_{x}+r_{x}I} , S = H y T H y + r y I {\displaystyle S=H_{y}^{T}H_{y}+r_{y}I} and r x , r y {\displaystyle r_{x},r_{y}} are the regularization parameters. DCCA overcomes the limitations of linear CCA and kernel CCA by learning complex nonlinear relationships while maintaining computational efficiency for large datasets through mini-batch optimization. === Graph-based methods === Graph-based approaches for multimodal representation learning leverage graph structure to model relationships between entities across different modalities. These methods typically represent each modality as a graph and then learn embedding that preserve cross-modal similarities, enabling more effective joint representation of heterogeneous data. One such method is cross-modal graph neural networks (CMGNNs) that extend traditional graph neural networks (GNNs) to handle data from multiple modalities by constructing graphs that capture both intra-modal and inter-modal relationships. These networks model interactions across modalities by representing them as nodes and their relationships as edges. Other graph-based methods include Probabilistic Graphical Models (PGMs) such as deep belief networks (DBN) and deep Boltzmann machines (DBM). These models can learn a joint representation across modalities, for instance, a multimodal DBN achieves this by adding a shared restricted Boltzmann Machine (RBM) hidden layer on top of modality-specific DBNs. Additionally, the structure of data in some domains like Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), such as the view hierarchy of app screens, can potentially be modeled using graph-like structures. The field of graph representation learning is also relevant, with ongoing progress in developing evaluation benchmarks. === Diffusion maps === Another set of methods relevant to multimodal representation learning are based on diffusion maps and their extensions to handle multiple modalities. ==== Multi-view diffusion maps ==== Multi-view diffusion maps address the challenge of achieving multi-view dimensionality reduction by effectively utilizing the availability of multiple views to extract a coherent low-dimensional representation of the data. The core idea is to exploit both the intrinsic relations within each view and the mutual relations between the different views, defining a cross-view model where a random walk process implicitly hops between objects in different views. A multi-view kernel matrix is constructed by combining these relations, defining a cross-view diffusion process and associ

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  • Superellipsoid

    Superellipsoid

    In mathematics, a superellipsoid (or super-ellipsoid) is a solid whose horizontal sections are superellipses (Lamé curves) with the same squareness parameter ϵ 2 {\displaystyle \epsilon _{2}} , and whose vertical sections through the center are superellipses with the squareness parameter ϵ 1 {\displaystyle \epsilon _{1}} . It is a generalization of an ellipsoid, which is a special case when ϵ 1 = ϵ 2 = 1 {\displaystyle \epsilon _{1}=\epsilon _{2}=1} . Superellipsoids as computer graphics primitives were popularized by Alan H. Barr (who used the name "superquadrics" to refer to both superellipsoids and supertoroids). In modern computer vision and robotics literatures, superquadrics and superellipsoids are used interchangeably, since superellipsoids are the most representative and widely utilized shape among all the superquadrics. Superellipsoids have a rich shape vocabulary, including cuboids, cylinders, ellipsoids, octahedra and their intermediates. It becomes an important geometric primitive widely used in computer vision, robotics, and physical simulation. The main advantage of describing objects and environment with superellipsoids is its conciseness and expressiveness in shape. Furthermore, a closed-form expression of the Minkowski sum between two superellipsoids is available. This makes it a desirable geometric primitive for robot grasping, collision detection, and motion planning. == Special cases == A handful of notable mathematical figures can arise as special cases of superellipsoids given the correct set of values, which are depicted in the above graphic: Cylinder Sphere Steinmetz solid Bicone Regular octahedron Cube, as a limiting case where the exponents tend to infinity Piet Hein's supereggs are also special cases of superellipsoids. == Formulas == === Basic (normalized) superellipsoid === The basic superellipsoid is defined by the implicit function f ( x , y , z ) = ( x 2 ϵ 2 + y 2 ϵ 2 ) ϵ 2 / ϵ 1 + z 2 ϵ 1 {\displaystyle f(x,y,z)=\left(x^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{2}}}+y^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{2}}}\right)^{\epsilon _{2}/\epsilon _{1}}+z^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{1}}}} The parameters ϵ 1 {\displaystyle \epsilon _{1}} and ϵ 2 {\displaystyle \epsilon _{2}} are positive real numbers that control the squareness of the shape. The surface of the superellipsoid is defined by the equation: f ( x , y , z ) = 1 {\displaystyle f(x,y,z)=1} For any given point ( x , y , z ) ∈ R 3 {\displaystyle (x,y,z)\in \mathbb {R} ^{3}} , the point lies inside the superellipsoid if f ( x , y , z ) < 1 {\displaystyle f(x,y,z)<1} , and outside if f ( x , y , z ) > 1 {\displaystyle f(x,y,z)>1} . Any "parallel of latitude" of the superellipsoid (a horizontal section at any constant z between -1 and +1) is a Lamé curve with exponent 2 / ϵ 2 {\displaystyle 2/\epsilon _{2}} , scaled by a = ( 1 − z 2 ϵ 1 ) ϵ 1 2 {\displaystyle a=(1-z^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{1}}})^{\frac {\epsilon _{1}}{2}}} , which is ( x a ) 2 ϵ 2 + ( y a ) 2 ϵ 2 = 1. {\displaystyle \left({\frac {x}{a}}\right)^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{2}}}+\left({\frac {y}{a}}\right)^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{2}}}=1.} Any "meridian of longitude" (a section by any vertical plane through the origin) is a Lamé curve with exponent 2 / ϵ 1 {\displaystyle 2/\epsilon _{1}} , stretched horizontally by a factor w that depends on the sectioning plane. Namely, if x = u cos ⁡ θ {\displaystyle x=u\cos \theta } and y = u sin ⁡ θ {\displaystyle y=u\sin \theta } , for a given θ {\displaystyle \theta } , then the section is ( u w ) 2 ϵ 1 + z 2 ϵ 1 = 1 , {\displaystyle \left({\frac {u}{w}}\right)^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{1}}}+z^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{1}}}=1,} where w = ( cos 2 ϵ 2 ⁡ θ + sin 2 ϵ 2 ⁡ θ ) − ϵ 2 2 . {\displaystyle w=(\cos ^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{2}}}\theta +\sin ^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{2}}}\theta )^{-{\frac {\epsilon _{2}}{2}}}.} In particular, if ϵ 2 {\displaystyle \epsilon _{2}} is 1, the horizontal cross-sections are circles, and the horizontal stretching w {\displaystyle w} of the vertical sections is 1 for all planes. In that case, the superellipsoid is a solid of revolution, obtained by rotating the Lamé curve with exponent 2 / ϵ 1 {\displaystyle 2/\epsilon _{1}} around the vertical axis. === Superellipsoid === The basic shape above extends from −1 to +1 along each coordinate axis. The general superellipsoid is obtained by scaling the basic shape along each axis by factors a x {\displaystyle a_{x}} , a y {\displaystyle a_{y}} , a z {\displaystyle a_{z}} , the semi-diameters of the resulting solid. The implicit function is F ( x , y , z ) = ( ( x a x ) 2 ϵ 2 + ( y a y ) 2 ϵ 2 ) ϵ 2 ϵ 1 + ( z a z ) 2 ϵ 1 {\displaystyle F(x,y,z)=\left(\left({\frac {x}{a_{x}}}\right)^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{2}}}+\left({\frac {y}{a_{y}}}\right)^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{2}}}\right)^{\frac {\epsilon _{2}}{\epsilon _{1}}}+\left({\frac {z}{a_{z}}}\right)^{\frac {2}{\epsilon _{1}}}} . Similarly, the surface of the superellipsoid is defined by the equation F ( x , y , z ) = 1 {\displaystyle F(x,y,z)=1} For any given point ( x , y , z ) ∈ R 3 {\displaystyle (x,y,z)\in \mathbb {R} ^{3}} , the point lies inside the superellipsoid if f ( x , y , z ) < 1 {\displaystyle f(x,y,z)<1} , and outside if f ( x , y , z ) > 1 {\displaystyle f(x,y,z)>1} . Therefore, the implicit function is also called the inside-outside function of the superellipsoid. The superellipsoid has a parametric representation in terms of surface parameters η ∈ [ − π / 2 , π / 2 ) {\displaystyle \eta \in [-\pi /2,\pi /2)} , ω ∈ [ − π , π ) {\displaystyle \omega \in [-\pi ,\pi )} . x ( η , ω ) = a x cos ϵ 1 ⁡ η cos ϵ 2 ⁡ ω {\displaystyle x(\eta ,\omega )=a_{x}\cos ^{\epsilon _{1}}\eta \cos ^{\epsilon _{2}}\omega } y ( η , ω ) = a y cos ϵ 1 ⁡ η sin ϵ 2 ⁡ ω {\displaystyle y(\eta ,\omega )=a_{y}\cos ^{\epsilon _{1}}\eta \sin ^{\epsilon _{2}}\omega } z ( η , ω ) = a z sin ϵ 1 ⁡ η {\displaystyle z(\eta ,\omega )=a_{z}\sin ^{\epsilon _{1}}\eta } === General posed superellipsoid === In computer vision and robotic applications, a superellipsoid with a general pose in the 3D Euclidean space is usually of more interest. For a given Euclidean transformation of the superellipsoid frame g = [ R ∈ S O ( 3 ) , t ∈ R 3 ] ∈ S E ( 3 ) {\displaystyle g=[\mathbf {R} \in SO(3),\mathbf {t} \in \mathbb {R} ^{3}]\in SE(3)} relative to the world frame, the implicit function of a general posed superellipsoid surface defined the world frame is F ( g − 1 ∘ ( x , y , z ) ) = 1 {\displaystyle F\left(g^{-1}\circ (x,y,z)\right)=1} where ∘ {\displaystyle \circ } is the transformation operation that maps the point ( x , y , z ) ∈ R 3 {\displaystyle (x,y,z)\in \mathbb {R} ^{3}} in the world frame into the canonical superellipsoid frame. === Volume of superellipsoid === The volume encompassed by the superelllipsoid surface can be expressed in terms of the beta functions β ( ⋅ , ⋅ ) {\displaystyle \beta (\cdot ,\cdot )} , V ( ϵ 1 , ϵ 2 , a x , a y , a z ) = 2 a x a y a z ϵ 1 ϵ 2 β ( ϵ 1 2 , ϵ 1 + 1 ) β ( ϵ 2 2 , ϵ 2 + 2 2 ) {\displaystyle V(\epsilon _{1},\epsilon _{2},a_{x},a_{y},a_{z})=2a_{x}a_{y}a_{z}\epsilon _{1}\epsilon _{2}\beta ({\frac {\epsilon _{1}}{2}},\epsilon _{1}+1)\beta ({\frac {\epsilon _{2}}{2}},{\frac {\epsilon _{2}+2}{2}})} or equivalently with the Gamma function Γ ( ⋅ ) {\displaystyle \Gamma (\cdot )} , since β ( m , n ) = Γ ( m ) Γ ( n ) Γ ( m + n ) {\displaystyle \beta (m,n)={\frac {\Gamma (m)\Gamma (n)}{\Gamma (m+n)}}} == Recovery from data == Recoverying the superellipsoid (or superquadrics) representation from raw data (e.g., point cloud, mesh, images, and voxels) is an important task in computer vision, robotics, and physical simulation. Traditional computational methods model the problem as a least-square problem. The goal is to find out the optimal set of superellipsoid parameters θ ≐ [ ϵ 1 , ϵ 2 , a x , a y , a z , g ] {\displaystyle \theta \doteq [\epsilon _{1},\epsilon _{2},a_{x},a_{y},a_{z},g]} that minimize an objective function. Other than the shape parameters, g ∈ {\displaystyle g\in } SE(3) is the pose of the superellipsoid frame with respect to the world coordinate. There are two commonly used objective functions. The first one is constructed directly based on the implicit function G 1 ( θ ) = a x a y a z ∑ i = 1 N ( F ϵ 1 ( g − 1 ∘ ( x i , y i , z i ) ) − 1 ) 2 {\displaystyle G_{1}(\theta )=a_{x}a_{y}a_{z}\sum _{i=1}^{N}\left(F^{\epsilon _{1}}\left(g^{-1}\circ (x_{i},y_{i},z_{i})\right)-1\right)^{2}} The minimization of the objective function provides a recovered superellipsoid as close as possible to all the input points { ( x i , y i , z i ) ∈ R 3 , i = 1 , 2 , . . . , N } {\displaystyle \{(x_{i},y_{i},z_{i})\in \mathbb {R} ^{3},i=1,2,...,N\}} . At the mean time, the scalar value a x , a y , a z {\displaystyle a_{x},a_{y},a_{z}} is positively proportional to the volume of the superellipsoid, and thus have the effect of minimizing the volume as well. The other objective function tries to minimized the radial distance between the points and the superellipsoid. That is G 2 ( θ ) = ∑ i = 1 N ( | r

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  • Textual entailment

    Textual entailment

    In natural language processing, textual entailment (TE), also known as natural language inference (NLI), is a directional relation between text fragments. The relation holds whenever the truth of one text fragment follows from another text. == Definition == In the TE framework, the entailing and entailed texts are termed text (t) and hypothesis (h), respectively. Textual entailment is not the same as pure logical entailment – it has a more relaxed definition: "t entails h" (t ⇒ h) if, typically, a human reading t would infer that h is most likely true. (Alternatively: t ⇒ h if and only if, typically, a human reading t would be justified in inferring the proposition expressed by h from the proposition expressed by t.) The relation is directional because even if "t entails h", the reverse "h entails t" is much less certain. Determining whether this relationship holds is an informal task, one which sometimes overlaps with the formal tasks of formal semantics (satisfying a strict condition will usually imply satisfaction of a less strict conditioned); additionally, textual entailment partially subsumes word entailment. == Examples == Textual entailment can be illustrated with examples of three different relations: An example of a positive TE (text entails hypothesis) is: text: If you help the needy, God will reward you. hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man has good consequences. An example of a negative TE (text contradicts hypothesis) is: text: If you help the needy, God will reward you. hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man has no consequences. An example of a non-TE (text does not entail nor contradict) is: text: If you help the needy, God will reward you. hypothesis: Giving money to a poor man will make you a better person. == Ambiguity of natural language == A characteristic of natural language is that there are many different ways to state what one wants to say: several meanings can be contained in a single text and the same meaning can be expressed by different texts. This variability of semantic expression can be seen as the dual problem of language ambiguity. Together, they result in a many-to-many mapping between language expressions and meanings. The task of paraphrasing involves recognizing when two texts have the same meaning and creating a similar or shorter text that conveys almost the same information. Textual entailment is similar but weakens the relationship to be unidirectional. Mathematical solutions to establish textual entailment can be based on the directional property of this relation, by making a comparison between some directional similarities of the texts involved. == Approaches == Textual entailment measures natural language understanding as it asks for a semantic interpretation of the text, and due to its generality remains an active area of research. Many approaches and refinements of approaches have been considered, such as word embedding, logical models, graphical models, rule systems, contextual focusing, and machine learning. Practical or large-scale solutions avoid these complex methods and instead use only surface syntax or lexical relationships, but are correspondingly less accurate. As of 2005, state-of-the-art systems are far from human performance; a study found humans to agree on the dataset 95.25% of the time. Algorithms from 2016 had not yet achieved 90%. == Applications == Many natural language processing applications, like question answering, information extraction, summarization, multi-document summarization, and evaluation of machine translation systems, need to recognize that a particular target meaning can be inferred from different text variants. Typically entailment is used as part of a larger system, for example in a prediction system to filter out trivial or obvious predictions. Textual entailment also has applications in adversarial stylometry, which has the objective of removing textual style without changing the overall meaning of communication. == Datasets == Some of available English NLI datasets include: SNLI MultiNLI SciTail SICK MedNLI QA-NLI In addition, there are several non-English NLI datasets, as follows: XNLI DACCORD, RTE3-FR, SICK-FR for French FarsTail for Farsi OCNLI for Chinese SICK-NL for Dutch IndoNLI for Indonesian

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  • Text simplification

    Text simplification

    Text simplification is an aspect of natural language processing that involves modifying, organizing, or categorizing existing text to make it easier to understand while retaining its original meaning. This process is essential in today's world, where communication is increasingly complex due to advancements in science, technology, and media. Human languages are inherently intricate, with extensive vocabularies and complex structures that can be challenging for machines to handle efficiently. Researchers have found that semantic compression techniques can help streamline and simplify text by reducing linguistic diversity and simplifying the vocabulary used in a given context. == Example == Text simplification involves modifying complex sentences into simpler ones to enhance readability and comprehension. Siddharthan (2006) provides an example to illustrate this process. The original sentence contains multiple clauses and phrases, which can be broken down into simpler sentences for better understanding. Also contributing to the firmness in copper, the analyst noted, was a report by Chicago purchasing agents, which precedes the full purchasing agents report that is due out today and gives an indication of what the full report might hold. Also contributing to the firmness in copper, the analyst noted, was a report by Chicago purchasing agents. The Chicago report precedes the full purchasing agents report. The Chicago report gives an indication of what the full report might hold. The full report is due out today. An approach to text simplification involves lexical simplification via lexical substitution, a process that replaces complex words with simpler synonyms. Identifying complex words is a challenge addressed by machine learning classifiers trained on labeled data. Researchers have found that asking labelers to sort words by complexity levels yields more consistent results than the traditional method of categorizing words as simple or complex.

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  • Flexidraw

    Flexidraw

    Flexidraw is a 1985 graphics computer program published by Inkwell Systems. == Gameplay == Flexidraw is a graphics program that allows users to produce drawings using a light pen and print them. == Reception == Roy Wagner reviewed the product for Computer Gaming World, and stated that "Of the many graphics programs available Flexidraw is certainly the best supported by it's [sic] parent company."

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  • Language identification

    Language identification

    In natural language processing, language identification or language guessing is the problem of determining which natural language a given content is in. Computational approaches to this problem view it as a special case of text categorization, solved with various statistical methods. == Overview == === Logical approach === A common non-statistical intuitive approach (though highly uncertain) is to look for common letter combinations, or distinctive diacritics or punctuation. === Statistical approach === There are several statistical approaches to language identification. An older statistical method by Grefenstette was based on the frequency of short n-grams, which are often function morphemes. For example, "ing" is more common in English than in French, while the sequence "que" is more common in French. Given a new page found on the Web, one counts the number of occurrences of each such short sequence and picks the language whose frequency table it matches the most. One technique is to compare the compressibility of the text to the compressibility of texts in a set of known languages. This approach is known as mutual information based distance measure. The same technique can also be used to empirically construct family trees of languages which closely correspond to the trees constructed using historical methods. Mutual information based distance measure is essentially equivalent to more conventional model-based methods and is not generally considered to be either novel or better than simpler techniques. Another technique, as described by Cavnar and Trenkle (1994) and Dunning (1994) is to create a language n-gram model from a "training text" for each of the languages. These models can be based on characters (Cavnar and Trenkle) or encoded bytes (Dunning); in the latter, language identification and character encoding detection are integrated. Then, for any piece of text needing to be identified, a similar model is made, and that model is compared to each stored language model. The most likely language is the one with the model that is most similar to the model from the text needing to be identified. This approach can be problematic when the input text is in a language for which there is no model. In that case, the method may return another, "most similar" language as its result. Also problematic for any approach are pieces of input text that are composed of several languages, as is common on the Web. As of 2025, a commonly used baseline method is via the fastText library, which has comparable classification accuracy as deep learning techniques, but much faster. == Identifying similar languages == One of the great bottlenecks of language identification systems is to distinguish between closely related languages. Similar languages like Bulgarian and Macedonian or Indonesian and Malay present significant lexical and structural overlap, making it challenging for systems to discriminate between them. In 2014 the DSL shared task has been organized providing a dataset (Tan et al., 2014) containing 13 different languages (and language varieties) in six language groups: Group A (Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian), Group B (Indonesian, Malaysian), Group C (Czech, Slovak), Group D (Brazilian Portuguese, European Portuguese), Group E (Peninsular Spanish, Argentine Spanish), Group F (American English, British English). The best system reached performance of over 95% results (Goutte et al., 2014). Results of the DSL shared task are described in Zampieri et al. 2014. == Software == Apache OpenNLP includes char n-gram based statistical detector and comes with a model that can distinguish 103 languages Apache Tika contains a language detector for 18 languages

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  • Harris corner detector

    Harris corner detector

    The Harris corner detector is a corner detection operator that is commonly used in computer vision algorithms to extract corners and infer features of an image. It was first introduced by Chris Harris and Mike Stephens in 1988 upon the improvement of Moravec's corner detector. Compared to its predecessor, Harris' corner detector takes the differential of the corner score into account with reference to direction directly, instead of using shifting patches for every 45 degree angles, and has been proved to be more accurate in distinguishing between edges and corners. Since then, it has been improved and adopted in many algorithms to preprocess images for subsequent applications. == Introduction == A corner is a point whose local neighborhood stands in two dominant and different edge directions. In other words, a corner can be interpreted as the junction of two edges, where an edge is a sudden change in image brightness. Corners are the important features in the image, and they are generally termed as interest points which are invariant to translation, rotation and illumination. Although corners are only a small percentage of the image, they contain the most important features in restoring image information, and they can be used to minimize the amount of processed data for motion tracking, image stitching, building 2D mosaics, stereo vision, image representation and other related computer vision areas. In order to capture the corners from the image, researchers have proposed many different corner detectors including the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi (KLT) operator and the Harris operator which are most simple, efficient and reliable for use in corner detection. These two popular methodologies are both closely associated with and based on the local structure matrix. Compared to the Kanade-Lucas-Tomasi corner detector, the Harris corner detector provides good repeatability under changing illumination and rotation, and therefore, it is more often used in stereo matching and image database retrieval. Although there still exist drawbacks and limitations, the Harris corner detector is still an important and fundamental technique for many computer vision applications. == Development of Harris corner detection algorithm == Source: Without loss of generality, we will assume a grayscale 2-dimensional image is used. Let this image be given by I {\displaystyle I} . Consider taking an image patch ( x , y ) ∈ W {\displaystyle (x,y)\in W} (window) and shifting it by ( Δ x , Δ y ) {\displaystyle (\Delta x,\Delta y)} . The sum of squared differences (SSD) between these two patches, denoted f {\displaystyle f} , is given by: f ( Δ x , Δ y ) = ∑ ( x k , y k ) ∈ W ( I ( x k , y k ) − I ( x k + Δ x , y k + Δ y ) ) 2 {\displaystyle f(\Delta x,\Delta y)={\underset {(x_{k},y_{k})\in W}{\sum }}\left(I(x_{k},y_{k})-I(x_{k}+\Delta x,y_{k}+\Delta y)\right)^{2}} I ( x + Δ x , y + Δ y ) {\displaystyle I(x+\Delta x,y+\Delta y)} can be approximated by a Taylor expansion. Let I x {\displaystyle I_{x}} and I y {\displaystyle I_{y}} be the partial derivatives of I {\displaystyle I} , such that I ( x + Δ x , y + Δ y ) ≈ I ( x , y ) + I x ( x , y ) Δ x + I y ( x , y ) Δ y {\displaystyle I(x+\Delta x,y+\Delta y)\approx I(x,y)+I_{x}(x,y)\Delta x+I_{y}(x,y)\Delta y} This produces the approximation f ( Δ x , Δ y ) ≈ ∑ ( x , y ) ∈ W ( I x ( x , y ) Δ x + I y ( x , y ) Δ y ) 2 , {\displaystyle f(\Delta x,\Delta y)\approx {\underset {(x,y)\in W}{\sum }}\left(I_{x}(x,y)\Delta x+I_{y}(x,y)\Delta y\right)^{2},} which can be written in matrix form: f ( Δ x , Δ y ) ≈ ( Δ x Δ y ) M ( Δ x Δ y ) , {\displaystyle f(\Delta x,\Delta y)\approx {\begin{pmatrix}\Delta x&\Delta y\end{pmatrix}}M{\begin{pmatrix}\Delta x\\\Delta y\end{pmatrix}},} where M is the structure tensor, M = ∑ ( x , y ) ∈ W [ I x 2 I x I y I x I y I y 2 ] = [ ∑ ( x , y ) ∈ W I x 2 ∑ ( x , y ) ∈ W I x I y ∑ ( x , y ) ∈ W I x I y ∑ ( x , y ) ∈ W I y 2 ] {\displaystyle M={\underset {(x,y)\in W}{\sum }}{\begin{bmatrix}I_{x}^{2}&I_{x}I_{y}\\I_{x}I_{y}&I_{y}^{2}\end{bmatrix}}={\begin{bmatrix}{\underset {(x,y)\in W}{\sum }}I_{x}^{2}&{\underset {(x,y)\in W}{\sum }}I_{x}I_{y}\\{\underset {(x,y)\in W}{\sum }}I_{x}I_{y}&{\underset {(x,y)\in W}{\sum }}I_{y}^{2}\end{bmatrix}}} == Process of Harris corner detection algorithm == Commonly, Harris corner detector algorithm can be divided into five steps. Color to grayscale Spatial derivative calculation Structure tensor setup Harris response calculation Non-maximum suppression === Color to grayscale === If we use Harris corner detector in a color image, the first step is to convert it into a grayscale image, which will enhance the processing speed. The value of the gray scale pixel can be computed as a weighted sums of the values R, B and G of the color image, ∑ C ∈ { R , G , B } w C ⋅ C {\displaystyle \sum _{C\,\in \,\{R,G,B\}}w_{C}\cdot C} , where, e.g., w R = 0.299 , w G = 0.587 , w B = 1 − ( w R + w G ) = 0.114. {\displaystyle w_{R}=0.299,\ w_{G}=0.587,\ w_{B}=1-(w_{R}+w_{G})=0.114.} === Spatial derivative calculation === Next, we are going to find the derivative with respect to x and the derivative with respect to y, I x ( x , y ) {\displaystyle I_{x}(x,y)} and I y ( x , y ) {\displaystyle I_{y}(x,y)} . This can be approximated by applying Sobel operators. === Structure tensor setup === With I x ( x , y ) {\displaystyle I_{x}(x,y)} , I y ( x , y ) {\displaystyle I_{y}(x,y)} , we can construct the structure tensor M {\displaystyle M} . === Harris response calculation === For x ≪ y {\displaystyle x\ll y} , one has x ⋅ y x + y = x 1 1 + x / y ≈ x . {\displaystyle {\tfrac {x\cdot y}{x+y}}=x{\tfrac {1}{1+x/y}}\approx x.} In this step, we compute the smallest eigenvalue of the structure tensor using that approximation: λ min ≈ λ 1 λ 2 ( λ 1 + λ 2 ) = det ( M ) tr ⁡ ( M ) {\displaystyle \lambda _{\min }\approx {\frac {\lambda _{1}\lambda _{2}}{(\lambda _{1}+\lambda _{2})}}={\frac {\det(M)}{\operatorname {tr} (M)}}} with the trace t r ( M ) = m 11 + m 22 {\displaystyle \mathrm {tr} (M)=m_{11}+m_{22}} . Another commonly used Harris response calculation is shown as below, R = λ 1 λ 2 − k ( λ 1 + λ 2 ) 2 = det ( M ) − k tr ⁡ ( M ) 2 {\displaystyle R=\lambda _{1}\lambda _{2}-k(\lambda _{1}+\lambda _{2})^{2}=\det(M)-k\operatorname {tr} (M)^{2}} where k {\displaystyle k} is an empirically determined constant; k ∈ [ 0.04 , 0.06 ] {\displaystyle k\in [0.04,0.06]} . === Non-maximum suppression === In order to pick up the optimal values to indicate corners, we find the local maxima as corners within the window which is a 3 by 3 filter. == Improvement == Sources: Harris-Laplace Corner Detector Differential Morphological Decomposition Based Corner Detector Multi-scale Bilateral Structure Tensor Based Corner Detector == Applications == Image Alignment, Stitching and Registration 2D Mosaics Creation 3D Scene Modeling and Reconstruction Motion Detection Object Recognition Image Indexing and Content-based Retrieval Video Tracking

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