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Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_4
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper proposes an algorithm to compute
k-prototypes for a set of 3D rigid structures. Two structures are called
rigid, if one can align them via translation, reflection and rotation. The
authors first propose a 1-prototype algorithm to find the best
representative 3D structure (the one minimizing the distance to all other
structure subject to optimal rigid alignement). For k-prototype
clustering, the algorithm then consists of building a correlation graph
and using [11] to perform k-median clustering. For each obtained cluster,
the 1-prototype algorithm is applied. The algorithm is evaluated on a
synthetic example as well as on biological data.
The paper is
clearly written and mathematically rigorous. Alignment and clustering of
rigid structures is an important problem in eg, chromosome, protein
analysis and visualization, computer vision, etc. The authors provide
theoretical guarantees on the quality of the solution (although in
practice, I'm not sure how much that holds since various approximation
steps are taken). In most of practical applications there is typically
also significant noise (where structures contain outliers) which is not
really dealt with in the paper. The experiments are really sparse (with no
comparison to existing techniques), so it's hard to judge the results.
Other comments: - Algorithm 1 looks like generalize procrustes
analysis. What's the relation to it? - Given that [14] can be used to
align 3D structures efficiently, performing procrustes analysis gives you
the best prototype. Why not do that? - Are there any guarantees on the
search algorithm in l.188-198? Since this seems to be proposed in cases
when m is large, a theoretical analysis on the complexity of the algorithm
would be appropriate. At least a discussion on what is the range of m that
this algorithm handles. - At least some more visual results could be
provided. - In computer vision there are several techniques for
aligning shapes. I wonder how the proposed algorithm relates/compares to
those. - Refs dealing with a similar problem (but are practical
algorithms): - Belongie et al., Shape matching and object recognition
using shape contexts, TPAMI 2002 - Jian et al, Learning Shape Prior
Models for Object Matching, CVPR 2009 (see also refs
within) Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
The authors propose k-prototype clustering for 3D
rigid structures. Focus is on the theoretical
guarantees. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_5
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
This paper introduces an algorithm to cluster shapes
into k groups, each containing rigidly transformed versions of one shape,
and computing a prototype for each group. Two new chromatic clustering
algorithms are proposed to compute the prototype within a cluster with
various quality guarantees.
I can see the interest of the proposed
algorithm with its theoretical guarantees. However, from a practical
standpoint, I am not entirely convinced of the benefits of the resulting
method. In particular: - Step 2(a) of the 1 prototype learning
algorithm finds the best alignment of each shape to the current prototype.
Would is really make a significant difference to simply compute the median
of the n points corresponding to point q_j, instead of using the chromatic
clustering algorithm? Since the alignment already guarantees a one-to-one
correspondence, is it really useful to recompute it with the chromatic
clustering algorithm? - It is mentioned that ICP would not be suitable
because it does not guarantee a one-to-one correspondence. This is true,
but I am not sure how often this problem would occur in practice.
Furthermore, since the chromatic clustering algorithm recomputes the
correspondences, it may not be relevant at all. - In practice, how
important is it to run several iterations of Step 2(a) and (b)? I would
expect that, if the clusters found by [11] are good, a single iteration is
sufficient. If the clusters are bad, then it would be hard to find a
meaningful prototype, anyway. - While the experiments show the good
behavior of the algorithm, they do not compare it against other existing
methods (e.g., an ICP-based approach, or simpler versions of the algorithm
as proposed above). It is thus not clear what the true benefits of the
algorithm are.
It also seems to me that several references to
existing shape analysis works are missing. In particular: - The
manifold of 3D shapes has been studied by Kendall, and later by Dryden
& Mardia. - A lot of work on the topic has been recently done by
Srivastava and colleagues, e.g., Kurtek et al. CVPR'10. - Other shape
representations have also been studied, such as level sets (Osher &
Fedkiw), or medial surfaces (Bouix et al.).
Additional comments:
- The multi-level net method seems related to a branch-and-bound
approach. Would it be possible to get better guarantees with a proper
branch-and-bound approach? For instance, Hartley & Kahl, IJCV'09,
studied branch-and-bound to optimize rotations, although in a different
context. - In Definitions 5 and 6, why change the notation from P_i to
G_i? - Line 233, it should be m median, instead of k. - In the
synthetic experiments, were the rigid shapes transformed by random rigid
transformations? With the current description, it seems that they just are
noisy versions of the prototypes, which would make the task easier.
Q2: Please summarize your review in 1-2
sentences
I can see the interest of having some theoretical
guarantees, but I am not quite convinced about the practical benefits of
the proposed method. Submitted by
Assigned_Reviewer_6
Q1: Comments to author(s).
First provide a summary of the paper, and then address the following
criteria: Quality, clarity, originality and significance. (For detailed
reviewing guidelines, see
http://nips.cc/PaperInformation/ReviewerInstructions)
The paper addresses a new prototype learning problem
with applications in in biology for determining the spatial organization
pattern of chromosome territories from a population of cells.
The
paper is very clearly written and I was able to follow the definitions,
algorithms and proofs. Presenting the ideas for the 1-prototype learning
before the k-prototype case also contributes a lot to understanding.
One point that needs clarification is:
"From Definition 4,
we know that the k-prototype learning problem can be viewed as first
clustering the rigid structures into k clusters and then build a prototype
for each cluster so as to minimize the total alignment cost."
It
is not clear to me why this holds. Q2: Please summarize
your review in 1-2 sentences
A very interesting paper that presents a new problem
and its solution in clear way.
Q1:Author
rebuttal: Please respond to any concerns raised in the reviews. There are
no constraints on how you want to argue your case, except for the fact
that your text should be limited to a maximum of 6000 characters. Note
however that reviewers and area chairs are very busy and may not read long
vague rebuttals. It is in your own interest to be concise and to the
point.
We thank the reviewers for their thoughtful comments.
Below, we address their concerns.
Reviewer 4:
1. The
relationship between Algorithm 1 and generalized procrustes analysis
(GPA).
The main difference is that points from each P_i are not
required to be pre-labeled in algorithm 1, while for GPA every input point
should have an individual index. This is also the main difficulty for both
of the alignment and the chromatic clustering steps in algorithm 1, since
we do not know which point is matched to which point in advance.
2. Why not use the method in [14] (which is [13] in our camera
ready version)?
As we mentioned, the algorithm in [13] is not
practical, since its running time is O(m^7), and the hiding constant is
also very large.
3. The time complexity of the algorithm in
l.188-198.
Let c be the number of rounds that the algorithm runs,
and t be the number of sub-regions it divides in each round. Then the time
complexity of the algorithm is O(ctm^3), which is significantly lower than
that of the algorithm in [13] (see the above question 2).
4.
Comparison with other existing shape aligning algorithms.
We agree
that several methods for aligning shapes exist, but most of them are not
suitable for our problem. For example, the idea of the matching algorithm
via shape contexts by Belongie et al. is to build a histogram for each
point, but it requires that the distribution of the points be dense
enough, otherwise the histogram would be meaningless; however, in our
problem the distribution of the points from each rigid structure could be
quite sparse. The algorithm by Jiang et al. is for non-rigid
transformation or affine transformation, rather than rigid transformation
on which our paper mainly focuses. Their method uses QR decomposition to
find the optimal affine transformation matrix, which is challenging to
tailor it to suit the rigid transformation in our problem.
Reviewer 5:
1. Is chromatic clustering necessary?
Yes, it is. As pointed out by the reviewer, simply computing the
median of the n points corresponding to each q_j indeed yields a feasible
solution. But it is not optimal with respect to the cost function. On the
contrary, chromatic clustering seeks to obtain the minimum cost for the
new configuration in each round.
2. How often the one-to-one
correspondence occurs in practice. Furthermore, since the chromatic
clustering algorithm recomputes the correspondences, it may not be
relevant at all.
-The one-to-one correspondence is necessary for
some applications. For example, the biology problem studied in this paper
requires that every chromosome territory be uniquely matched to another
chromosome territory in the other cell. Many other pattern matching
problems also have such a requirement, especially for those in which no
two feature points can be matched to the same one (i.e., mutual
exclusiveness exists among feature points).
-For the latter
question, the final result is relevant to the one-to-one correspondence
requirement in the alignment step, even though the following chromatic
clustering step can also ensure one-to-one correspondence. This is because
our purpose is not only obtaining the one-to-one point matching between
the prototype and each rigid structure, but also minimizing the objective
value. The performance of chromatic clustering depends on the
configuration of the rigid structures in the previous alignment step, and
incorrect alignments for some rigid structures could cause poor
performance (i.e., high objective value) for the chromatic clustering.
3. How important is it to run several iterations of step 2(a) and
2(b)?
The clustering from the algorithm in [11] (which is [9] in
our camera ready version) can only guarantee a constant approximation (by
theorem 3), but may not be good enough. To further reduce the objective
value, we need to run 2(a) and 2(b) iteratively.
4. Why not use
branch-and-bound (BB) approach.
BB approach needs to grow a
searching tree in the parameter space, and for each node it requires
estimating the upper and lower bounds of the objective value in the
corresponding sub-region. But for our alignment problem, it is challenging
to obtain such accurate estimations. Moreover, BB approach grows the
searching tree in all the sub-regions not satisfying the pruning
conditions, which could make the running time grow exponentially.
5. Why change P_i to G_i in Definition 5 and 6?
Actually,
when rigid structure P_i is fixed in the space, it is equivalent to G_i.
We use different notations to distinguish rigid structure from static
point-set.
6. Were the rigid structures transformed by random
rigid transformation in the synthetic experiments?
Yes, they were.
We should mention it more clearly in the paper, and thank the reviewer for
pointing it out.
Reviewer 6:
1. Clarify ``From Definition
4, ……………minimize the total alignment cost."
From formula (1) in
Definition 4, we know that if each P_i is assigned to the one in {Q_1, …,
Q_k} with the minimum alignment cost with P_i, then all rigid structures
are automatically divided into k clusters, and each Q_j is the prototype
of its corresponding cluster. But in reality, since {Q_1, …, Q_k} are
unknown in advance, we need to first cluster {P_1, …, P_n} into k clusters
based on their pairwise similarities, and then independently build the
prototype for each cluster. We are able to show that although clustering
the rigid structures (without knowing {Q_1, …, Q_k}) may not yield the
optimal solution, it produces an approximation solution with quality
guarantee (see Theorem 3).
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