I'm implementing an character recognition system with Hidden Markov Model(HMM). I have used skeleton to extract features of image. And I thought to use HMM for training images.
My question is how I can give those features to HMM? I got to know that I have to save those features into a file and then that file should feed to the HMM.
Can someone please help me? I am stuck here for two months. Still, I couldn't find the solution for this.
Appreciate your help a lot.
I was passing by and just saw this question.
Maybe you looked somewhere because your question is almost a month ago.
You give the features to HMM by clustering your data, you can use k-means, or you can use windows with lengths. If you use k-means, you will obtain the centers, you can use the centers to obtain the features, after this you need to crossfold validation to see if it really learns the features you labeled. Also K-means gives you the states and the initial transition probabilities.
Hope this helps you
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I recently started learning neural networks, and I thought that creating a sudoku solver would be a nice application for NN. I started learning them with backward propagation neural network, but later I figured that there are tens of neural networks. At this point, I find it hard to learn all of them and then pick an appropriate one for my purpose. Hence, I am asking what would be a good choice for creating this solver. Can back propagation NN work here? If not, can you explain why and tell me which one can work.
Thanks!
Neural networks don't really seem to be the best way to solve sudoku, as others have already pointed out. I think a better (but also not really good/efficient) way would be to use an genetic algorithm. Genetic algorithms don't directly relate to NNs but its very useful to know how they work.
Better (with better i mean more likely to be sussessful and probably better for you to learn something new) ideas would include:
If you use a library:
Play around with the networks, try to train them to different datasets, maybe random numbers and see what you get and how you have to tune the parameters to get better results.
Try to write an image generator. I wrote a few of them and they are stil my favourite projects, with one of them i used backprop to teach a NN what x/y coordinate of the image has which color, and the other aproach combines random generated images with ine another (GAN/NEAT).
Try to use create a movie (series of images) of the network learning to create a picture. It will show you very well how backprop works and what parameter tuning does to the results and how it changes how the network gets to the result.
If you are not using a library:
Try to solve easy problems, one after the other. Use backprop or a genetic algorithm for training (whatever you have implemented).
Try to improove your implementation and change some things that nobody else cares about and see how it changes the results.
List of 'tasks' for your Network:
XOR (basically the hello world of NN)
Pole balancing problem
Simple games like pong
More complex games like flappy bird, agar.io etc.
Choose more problems that you find interesting, maybe you are into image recognition, maybe text, audio, who knows. Think of something you can/would like to be able to do and find a way to make you computer do it for you.
It's not advisable to only use your own NN implemetation, since it will probably not work properly the first few times and you'll get frustratet. Experiment with librarys and your own implementation.
Good way to find almost endless resources:
Use google search and add 'filetype:pdf' in the end in order to only show pdf files. Search for neural network, genetic algorithm, evolutional neural network.
Neither neural nets not GAs are close to ideal solutions for Sudoku. I would advise to look into Constraint Programming (eg. the Choco or Gecode solver). See https://gist.github.com/marioosh/9188179 for example. Should solve any 9x9 sudoku in a matter of milliseconds (the daily Sudokus of "Le monde" journal are created using this type of technology BTW).
There is also a famous "Dancing links" algorithm for this problem by Knuth that works very well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancing_Links
Just like was mentioned in the comments, you probably want to take a look at convolutional networks. You basically input the sudoku bord as an two dimensional 'image'. I think using a receptive field of 3x3 would be quite interesting, and I don't really think you need more than one filter.
The harder thing is normalization: the numbers 1-9 don't have an underlying relation in sudoku, you could easily replace them by A-I for example. So they are categories, not numbers. However, one-hot encoding every output would mean a lot of inputs, so i'd stick to numerical normalization (1=0.1, 2 = 0.2, etc.)
The output of your network should be a softmax with of some kind: if you don't use softmax, and instead outupt just an x and y coordinate, then you can't assure that the outputedd square has not been filled in yet.
A numerical value should be passed along with the output, to show what number the network wants to fill in.
As PLEXATIC mentionned, neural-nets aren't really well suited for these kind of task. Genetic algorithm sounds good indeed.
However, if you still want to stick with neural-nets you could have a look at https://github.com/Kyubyong/sudoku. As answered Thomas W, 3x3 looks nice.
If you don't want to deal with CNN, you could find some answers here as well. https://www.kaggle.com/dithyrambe/neural-nets-as-sudoku-solvers
GOOD MORNING COLLEAGUES!
I am very into train a new model from my own data set of faces!
I have found no information about this topic, then I hope my information could help people and I can get some answers as well.
I will try to explain the steps I have needed to do to train my own model and later on some questions...
I have download the Latent code from: http://cs.brown.edu/~pff/latent-release4/
I have download the PASCAL VOC 2008 code (devkit) from: http://host.robots.ox.ac.uk/pascal/VOC/voc2008/index.html
I have emulate the structure of files/folders of the VOC PASCAL but in my own data set:
Annotations. I have created a .xml where I have defined a object, face, (in each image I only have one face). I didn't define difficulties or poses...
JPEGImages where I have stored all the images
ImageSets where I have defined three files:
test.txt, where I wrote the file name of my positive samples
train.txt, where I wrote the file name of my negative samples
trainval.txt, where I wrote the file name of my positive samples (exactly the same file than test.txt).
I have change some things in globals.m and VOCinit.m (to tell the algorithm the path and the location of some files...)
Then I run the training with the command: pascal('face', 1);
Following these steps I have achieved that the training run completely and doesn't fail and I get my own model BUT I have some doubts...
Can you see anything weird in my explanation? Could it work?
Must the files test.txt/trainval.txt be equal? Why... What does it mean?
Do I have to choose the number of parts I want in the model INSIDE the function?
Please, you imagine I have two kind of samples (frontal faces and side faces) and I want to detect both... How can I address this issue? I thought I have to train a model with two components... but How can I tell to the training code which are frontal or side samples?? In the annotations with the label pose?? (I don't think so...) Are there other way to handle this purpose?
Thank you for your time!!
I hope you can solve my doubts :)
I think test.txt should contain samples (images) that will be used to estimate how good the system is after learning the faces. However, trainval.txt is used during the learning stage (training) to fine-tune the parameters of the model; it is an essential part of supervised learning.
Also, it is very hard to have one single SVM to classify faces that are both frontal and sideways. Here is my suggestion:
Train one SVM to detect if the input image is a frontal face or a sideways face. Call this something like SVM-0.
Train another SVM for frontal faces. This SVM will classify all your individuals. Note, however, that SVM is usually a binary classifier, so make sure you choose the right SVM, one that as a multiclass architecture. Call this SVM-F.
Tran a final SVM for sideways faces. Again, use a multiclass SVM. Call it SVM-S.
Present the input image to SVM-0 and if it detects it is a frontal face, present the input again to SVM-F; otherwise, give the input to SVM-S.
In my experience, you should expect very low performance in SVM-S. It is a hard problem to solve. But frontal faces is not a big deal, unless you are working with faces that vary in pose, illumination, and expression (PIE). Face recognition is affected greatly with PIE variations in the images.
I recommend you this website, it contains very good information and tutorials for starters, with or without experience.
I have been trying to develop an OCR engine by myself. After researching the topic a bit I have come to the conclusion that there are 4 major steps involved :
Pre-processing the image [de-skewing, image contrast, binarize, etc.]
Segment the image into the characters [to make it easier to process each character individually]
Identify the chracter through feature extraction / comparison and classification.
Post-processing the image [to increase the chances of getting an optimal solution.]
I am hopelessly lost after the 1st step! Can somebody please help me out by telling how to perform character segregation & feature extraction ? I'll be extremely grateful even if you can provide me a link which points me in the right direction.
Thanks in advance! :)
There is a paper called self-tuning spectral clustering by Zelnik-Manor and Perona. Here is the link to their page for paper and code written in Matlab:
Self-Tuning Spectral Clustering
This method can perform image segmentation. Another thing you may want to look into is topic-modeling on images for feature extraction. Anything by Blei will also be useful.
The Computer Vision System Toolbox now has the ocr function that can save you the trouble.
I want to implement some kind of improvement of DBSCAN algorithm, where user do not need to enter input parameters (minPts and Eps). My idea is to use the K-distances plot, but what is the best method to compute the 'knee' of this plot? How to count when there are 2 or more knees on the plot?
Where I can find the source code for some DBSCAN improvement, like AUTODBSCAN, VDBSCAN, PDBSCAN or DBSCAN-DLP? Im looking for some basics, but nowhere I can find a good help. Maybe you've seen somewhere sample source codes?
DBSCAN has already been improved to death.
In Google Scholar, it has 5361 citations, and probably 1000+ of these "improve" DBSCAN. And probably a dozen of these use the k-distance plot. But none of these are used in practise.
If you want to continue this line of research, best get updated on what has been done since.
In particular, have a look at OPTICS which does away with the Epsilon parameter completely (except for performance reasons when using indexes).
Also have a look at HDBSCAN* by one of the original DBSCAN authors, Joerg Sander. That will likely be the most important DBSCAN extension besides his work on OPTICS and GDBSCAN.
I'm quite new with this topic so any help would be great. What I need is to optimize a neural network in MATLAB by using GA. My network has [2x98] input and [1x98] target, I've tried consulting MATLAB help but I'm still kind of clueless about what to do :( so, any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Edit: I guess I didn't say what is there to be optimized as Dan said in the 1st answer. I guess most important thing is number of hidden neurons. And maybe number of hidden layers and training parameters like number of epochs or so. Sorry for not providing enough info, I'm still learning about this.
If this is a homework assignment, do whatever you were taught in class.
Otherwise, ditch the MLP entirely. Support vector regression ( http://www.csie.ntu.edu.tw/~cjlin/libsvm/ ) is much more reliably trainable across a broad swath of problems, and pretty much never runs into the stuck-in-a-local-minima problem often hit with back-propagation trained MLP which forces you to solve a network topography optimization problem just to find a network which will actually train.
well, you need to be more specific about what you are trying to optimize. Is it the size of the hidden layer? Do you have a hidden layer? Is it parameter optimization (learning rate, kernel parameters)?
I assume you have a set of parameters (# of hidden layers, # of neurons per layer...) that needs to be tuned, instead of brute-force searching all combinations to pick a good one, GA can help you "jump" from this combination to another one. So, you can "explore" the search space for potential candidates.
GA can help in selecting "helpful" features. Some features might appear redundant and you want to prune them. However, say, data has too many features to search for the best set of features by some approaches such as forward selection. Again, GA can "jump" from this set candidate to another one.
You will need to find away to encode the data (input parameters, features...) fed to GA. For finding a set of input paras or a good set of features, I think binary encoding should work. In addition, choosing operators for GA to reproduce offsprings is also important. Yet GA needs to be tuned, too (early stopping which can also be applied to ANN).
Here are just some ideas. You might want to search for more info about GA, feature selection, ANN pruning...
Since you're using MATLAB already I suggest you look into the Genetic Algorithms solver (known as GATool, part of the Global Optimization Toolbox) and the Neural Network Toolbox. Between those two you should be able to save quite a bit of figuring out.
You'll basically have to do 2 main tasks:
Come up with a representation (or encoding) for your candidate solutions
Code your fitness function (which basically tests candidate solutions) and pass it as a parameter to the GA solver.
If you need help in terms of coming up with a fitness function, or encoding of candidate solutions then you'll have to be more specific.
Hope it helps.
Matlab has a simple but great explanation for this problem here. It explains both the ANN and GA part.
For more info on using ANN in command line see this.
There is also plenty of litterature on the subject if you google it. It is however not related to MATLAB, but simply the results and the method.
Look up Matthew Settles on Google Scholar. He did some work in this area at the University of Idaho in the last 5-6 years. He should have citations relevant to your work.