IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B (Cybernetics)

The Web newspaper pagination problem consists of optimizing the layout of a set of articles extracted from several Web newspapers and sending it to the user as the result of a previous query. This layout should be organized in columns, as in real newspapers, and should be adapted to the client Web browser configuration in real time. This paper presents an approach to the problem based on simulated annealing (SA) that solves the problem on-line, adapts itself to the client's computer configuration, and supports articles with different widths.

The problem of automated defect detection in textured materials is investigated. A new approach for defect detection using linear FIR filters with optimized energy separation is proposed. The performance of different feature separation criteria with reference to fabric defects has been evaluated. The issues relating to the design of optimal filters for supervised and unsupervised web inspection are addressed. A general web inspection system based on the optimal filters is proposed. The experiments on this new approach have yielded excellent results. The low computational requirement confirms the usefulness of the approach for industrial inspection.

We present a method for sampling feature vectors in large (e.g., 2000 /spl times/ 5000 /spl times/ 16 bit) images that finds subsets of pixel locations which represent c "regions" in the image. Samples are accepted by the chi-square (/spl chi//sup 2/) or divergence hypothesis test. A framework that captures the idea of efficient extension of image processing algorithms from the samples to the rest of the population is given. Computationally expensive (in time and/or space) image operators (e.g., neural networks (NNs) or clustering models) are trained on the sample, and then extended noniteratively to the rest of the population. We illustrate the general method using fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering to segment Indian satellite images. On average, the new method can achieve about 99% accuracy (relative to running the literal algorithm) using roughly 24% of the image for training. This amounts to an average savings of 76% in CPU time. We also compare our method to its closest relative in the group of schemes used to accelerate FCM: our method averages a speedup of about 4.2, whereas the multistage random sampling approach achieves an average acceleration of 1.63.