Kernel methods have been used for turning linear learning algorithms into nonlinear ones. These nonlinear algorithms measure distances between data points by the distance in the kernel-induced feature space. In lossy data compression, the optimal tradeoff between the number of quantized points and the incurred distortion is characterized by the rate-distortion function. However, the rate-distor...

We define the new idea of blind image repair as a process of correcting one or more different and unknown types of distortions afflicting an image. These distortions could introduce linear or non-linear degradations, compression artifacts, noise, etc., or combinations of these. Thus the concept encompasses denoising, deblurring, deblocking, deringing, and other post-acquisition image improvemen...

This report presents a novel, cascaded approach to non-linear acoustic echo cancellation (AEC). The loudspeaker enclosure microphone (LEM) system is divided into two blocks: non-linear clipping and power filtering, and a conventional, linear AEC. They represent the non-linear amplifier and loudspeaker and linear acoustic channel and up-link path in a typical mobile communication scenario. We pr...

Many radial distortion functions have been presented to describe the mappings caused by radial lens distortions in common commercially available cameras. For a given real camera, no matter what function is selected, its innate mapping of radial distortion is smooth, and the signs of its first and second order derivatives are fixed. However, such differential constraints have been never consider...

This paper introduces a new method for simultaneous estimation of lens distortion and multi-view geometry using only point correspondences. The new technique has significant advantages over the current state-of-the art in that it makes more effective use of correspondences arising from any number of views. Multi-view geometry in the presence of lens distortion can be expressed as a set of point...

For applications involving video streaming, full decoding is usually not acceptable for quality assessment. To address the inherent challenges, an efficient method for coding distortion assessment is proposed in this paper. Building on empirical analysis, the proposed method employs a linear model to assess the coding distortion using the quantization scale. Furthermore, the characteristics of ...

We analyze the impact of trade liberalization and removal of the federal tax credit in the United States on ethanol markets using a multimarket international ethanol model. We find that U.S. trade barriers have been effective in protecting the ethanol industry. Under current policy, there is separability of the U.S. ethanol market from world markets. With trade liberalization, the ethanol marke...

-We have investigated the influence of charge on the ground state structures for small Sin (n=5-10) clusters by using the full-potential linear muffin-tin orbital molecular-dynamics (FP-LMTO-MD) method. Addition or removal of one or two electrons does not change the geometrical configurations of the small Sin (n=5-10) clusters even though they undergo some structural distortion. But the structu...