Research

Research Interests

Machine learning, Computer Vision, and Network Science.

Machine Learning

Tracking of trajectories of mutually interacted collectively moving agents such as fish, birds, insects, and even humans is an active field in computer vision. However, the trajectories produced by multi-object tracking methods might consist of unconstructed segments of trajectories due to natural phenomena such as occlusion, change of illumination, etc., which require robust tracking methods. Some tracking methods employ computationally expensive approximation schemes to connect these segments. We utilize mutual interactions and dependencies between the agents to reconstruct the missing segments of the trajectories. We utilize machine learning techniques to reconstruct incomplete trajectories. We apply this approach to real-life robot swarms and to representative self-propelled particle swarms, simulated by the classic Vicsek model.  



An artificial neural network model with three layers that is associated with the Hadamard deep autoencoder for trajectory reconstruction.

Computer Vision

With the sophisticated modern technology in the camera industry, the demand for accurate and visually pleasing images is increasing. However, the quality of images captured by cameras is inevitably degraded by noise. Thus, some processing of images is required to filter out the noise without losing vital image features such as edges, corners, etc. Even though the current literature offers a variety of denoising methods, the fidelity and efficiency of their denoising are sometimes uncertain. We develop computationally efficient image denoising methods that are capable of producing accurate outputs. Some of these methods input patches partitioned from the image rather than pixels that are well known for preserving image smoothness.  We perform denoising on the manifold underlying the patch-space rather than that in the image domain to better preserve the features across the whole image. 


Comparison of the quality of the denoised images of our method, GGD, with that of four other benchmark denoising methods, sparse 3-D transform-domain collaborative filtering (BM3D), sparse and redundant representations over learned dictionaries (KSVD), Attention-guided Denoising CNN (ADNet), and Fast and Flexible Denoising CNN (FFDNet). 

Network Science

Extracting connectivity information in massive social networks is important for many applications. Algorithms developed for undirected networks cannot be used with social networks characterized by directed edges. We develop methods to extract the network topology from a small sample of distance measures without the need for exhaustive measurements. Real-world directed social networks such as Twitter and US election blogs have hop-distance matrices that are low-rank. Low-rank matrix completion techniques are thus used to recover the complete topology from a relatively small set of measurements. Evaluation of the proposed technique using metrics such as distance distribution, degree distribution, and hop distances show that the proposed technique is effective even when only a small fraction of distance entries are available. For many important network types, physical coordinate systems and physical distances are either difficult to discern or inapplicable. Accordingly, coordinate systems and characterizations based on hop-distance measurements, such as Topology Preserving Maps (TPMs) and Virtual-Coordinate (VC) systems are attractive alternatives to geographic coordinates for many network algorithms. We develop methods to recover the geometric and topological properties of a network with a small set of distance measurements. These methods are sometimes a combination of shortest-path recovery concepts and low-rank matrix completion. 

Hollow T shaped Cylinder: (a) Original layout, and (b) TPM recovered from full set of VCs with 20 random anchors; Recovered TPM with (c) 10%, (d) 20%, (e) 40%, and (f) 60% of sampled coordinates randomly discarded.

Publications

Peer reviewed

In preparation

Invited talks


Contributed talks (conference)

Posters presentations (conference)

Workshops

Teaching effectively: Engaging a variety of learners. In Teaching Effectiveness Conference 2015, State University of New York, Potsdam, NY, USA. (Oct. 24, 2015)