Ontologies are the basic block of modern knowledge-based systems; however, the effort and expertise required to develop them often prevents their widespread adoption. In this chapter, the authors present a tool for the automatic discovery of basic ontologies—they call them seed ontologies—starting from a corpus of documents related to a specific domain of knowledge. These seed ontologies are no...

A significant cost in obtaining acoustic training data is the generation of accurate transcriptions. When no transcription is available, unsupervised training techniques must be used. Furthermore, the use of discriminative training has become a standard feature of state-ofthe-art large vocabulary continuous speech recognition (LVCSR) system. In unsupervised training, unlabelled data are recogni...

Automatic reconstruction of 3D models from video sequences requires selection of appropriate video frames for performing the reconstruction. We introduce a complete method for key frame selection that automatically avoids degeneracies and is robust to inaccurate correspondences caused by motion blur. Our method combines selection criteria based on the number of frame-to-frame point corresponden...

in this paper, we try to find a particular combination of wavelet shrinkage and nonlinear diffusion for noise removal in dental images. we selected the wavelet diffusion and modified its automatic threshold selection by proposing new models for speckle related modulus. the laplacian mixture model and circular symmetric laplacian mixture models were evaluated and as it could be expected, the lat...

Segmentation, i.e. the labelling of objects in image data, is a crucial step in many medical imaging processing tasks, e.g. operation planning, radio therapy or diagnostics. Seeded region growing is a basic yet effective method for semi-automatic segmentation. Its major drawback is that poor contrast at the organ edges may result in leaks, letting the area grow far beyond the region of interest...

Repeated patterns among biological communities suggest similar evolutionary and ecological forces are acting on the communities. Conversely, the lack of such patterns suggests that similar forces are absent or additional ones are present. Coevolution between a seed predator, the red crossbill (Loxia curvirostra complex), and lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta var. latifolia) exemplifies the ecologi...

Intense selection for specific seed qualities in winter oilseed rape breeding has had an inadvertent negative influence on seed germination performance. In a panel of 215 diverse winter oilseed rape varieties spanning over 50 years of breeding progress in winter-type rapeseed, we found that low seed erucic acid content and reduced seed glucosinolate content were significantly related with prolo...