Omid Jafari

Omid Jafari, Parth Nagarkar

Finding similar data in high-dimensional spaces is one of the important tasks in multimedia applications. Approaches introduced to find exact searching techniques often use tree-based index structures which are known to suffer from the curse of the dimensionality problem that limits their performance. Approximate searching techniques prefer performance over accuracy and they return good enough results while achieving a better performance. Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) is one of the most popular approximate nearest neighbor search techniques for high-dimensional spaces. One of the most time-consuming processes in LSH is to find the neighboring points in the projected spaces. An improved LSH-based index structure, called radius-optimized Locality Sensitive Hashing (roLSH) has been proposed to utilize Machine Learning and efficiently find these neighboring points; thus, further improve the overall performance of LSH. In this paper, we extend roLSH by experimentally studying the effect of different types of famous Machine Learning techniques on overall performance. We compare ten regression techniques on four real-world datasets and show that Neural Network-based techniques are the best fit to be used in roLSH as their accuracy and performance trade-off are the best compared to the other techniques.

Shikun Zhang, Omid Jafari, Parth Nagarkar

Machine learning has been utilized to perform tasks in many different domains such as classification, object detection, image segmentation and natural language analysis. Data labeling has always been one of the most important tasks in machine learning. However, labeling large amounts of data increases the monetary cost in machine learning. As a result, researchers started to focus on reducing data annotation and labeling costs. Transfer learning was designed and widely used as an efficient approach that can reasonably reduce the negative impact of limited data, which in turn, reduces the data preparation cost. Even transferring previous knowledge from a source domain reduces the amount of data needed in a target domain. However, large amounts of annotated data are still demanded to build robust models and improve the prediction accuracy of the model. Therefore, researchers started to pay more attention on auto annotation and labeling. In this survey paper, we provide a review of previous techniques that focuses on optimized data annotation and labeling for video, audio, and text data.

Nada Ibrahim, Preeti Maurya, Omid Jafari et al.

Video analytics systems perform automatic events, movements, and actions recognition in a video and make it possible to execute queries on the video. As a result of a large number of video data that need to be processed, optimizing the performance of video analytics systems has become an important research topic. Neural networks are the state-of-the-art for performing video analytics tasks such as video annotation and object detection. Prior survey papers consider application-specific video analytics techniques that improve accuracy of the results; however, in this survey paper, we provide a review of the techniques that focus on optimizing the performance of Neural Network-Based Video Analytics Systems.

Omid Jafari, Parth Nagarkar

Finding nearest neighbors in high-dimensional spaces is a fundamental operation in many multimedia retrieval applications. Exact tree-based indexing approaches are known to suffer from the notorious curse of dimensionality for high-dimensional data. Approximate searching techniques sacrifice some accuracy while returning good enough results for faster performance. Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) is a very popular technique for finding approximate nearest neighbors in high-dimensional spaces. Apart from providing theoretical guarantees on the query results, one of the main benefits of LSH techniques is their good scalability to large datasets because they are external memory based. The most dominant costs for existing LSH techniques are the algorithm time and the index I/Os required to find candidate points. Existing works do not compare both of these dominant costs in their evaluation. In this experimental survey paper, we show the impact of both these costs on the overall performance of the LSH technique. We compare three state-of-the-art techniques on four real-world datasets, and show that, in contrast to recent works, C2LSH is still the state-of-the-art algorithm in terms of performance while achieving similar accuracy as its recent competitors.

Omid Jafari, Parth Nagarkar, Jonathan Montaño

Similarity search in high-dimensional spaces is an important task for many multimedia applications. Due to the notorious curse of dimensionality, approximate nearest neighbor techniques are preferred over exact searching techniques since they can return good enough results at a much better speed. Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) is a very popular random hashing technique for finding approximate nearest neighbors. Existing state-of-the-art Locality Sensitive Hashing techniques that focus on improving performance of the overall process, mainly focus on minimizing the total number of IOs while sacrificing the overall processing time. The main time-consuming process in LSH techniques is the process of finding neighboring points in projected spaces. We present a novel index structure called radius-optimized Locality Sensitive Hashing (roLSH). With the help of sampling techniques and Neural Networks, we present two techniques to find neighboring points in projected spaces efficiently, without sacrificing the accuracy of the results. Our extensive experimental analysis on real datasets shows the performance benefit of roLSH over existing state-of-the-art LSH techniques.

Omid Jafari, Parth Nagarkar, Jonathan Montaño

Finding similar images is a necessary operation in many multimedia applications. Images are often represented and stored as a set of high-dimensional features, which are extracted using localized feature extraction algorithms. Locality Sensitive Hashing is one of the most popular approximate processing techniques for finding similar points in high-dimensional spaces. Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) and its variants are designed to find similar points, but they are not designed to find objects (such as images, which are made up of a collection of points) efficiently. In this paper, we propose an index structure, Bitmap-Image LSH (bImageLSH), for efficient processing of high-dimensional images. Using a real dataset, we experimentally show the performance benefit of our novel design while keeping the accuracy of the image results high.