Abstract: System and method for visually tracking a target object silhouette in a plurality of video frames under very general conditions. The tracker does not make any assumption about the object or the scene. The tracker works by approximating, in each frame, a PDF (probability distribution function) of the target's bitmap and then estimating the maximum a posteriori bitmap. The PDF is marginalized over all possible motions per pixel, thus avoiding the stage in which optical flow is determined. This is an advantage over other general-context trackers that do not use the motion cue at all or rely on the error-prone calculation of optical flow. Using a Gibbs distribution with a first order neighborhood system yields a bitmap PDF whose maximization may be transformed into that of a quadratic pseudo-Boolean function, the maximum of which is approximated via a reduction to a maximum-flow problem.

Abstract: System and method for visually tracking a target object silhouette in a plurality of video frames under very general conditions. The tracker does not make any assumption about the object or the scene. The tracker works by approximating, in each frame, a PDF (probability distribution function) of the target's bitmap and then estimating the maximum a posteriori bitmap. The PDF is marginalized over all possible motions per pixel, thus avoiding the stage in which optical flow is determined. This is an advantage over other general-context trackers that do not use the motion cue at all or rely on the error-prone calculation of optical flow. Using a Gibbs distribution with a first order neighborhood system yields a bitmap PDF whose maximization may be transformed into that of a quadratic pseudo-Boolean function, the maximum of which is approximated via a reduction to a maximum-flow problem.

Abstract: A method and system for classification, including the steps of searching a data structure including categories for elements related to an input, calculating statistics describing the relevance of each of the elements to the input, ranking the elements by relevance to the input, determining if the ranked elements exceed a threshold confidence value, and returning a set of elements from the ranked elements when the threshold confidence value is exceeded.

Abstract: A method and system for requesting services from at least one content resource. The method includes the steps of finding relevant remote specifications, optionally retrieving at least one of the remote specifications, displaying a specification menu on a user device, selecting from among choices in the specification menu, executing the specification corresponding to the selected choice, and displaying results of the step of executing on the user device.