Bayesian methods for multimedia signal processing

• Authors: A. Taylan Cemgil
• Venue: Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Multimedia
• Year: 2007

In the last years, there have been a significant growth of multimedia information processing applications that employ ideas from statistical machine learning and probabilistic modeling. In this paradigm, multimedia data (music, audio, video, images, text, ...) are viewed as realizations from highly structured stochastic processes. Once a model is constructed, several interesting problems such as transcription, coding, classification, restoration, tracking, source separation or resynthesis etc. can be formulated as Bayesian inference problems. In this context, graphical models provide a "language" to construct models for quantification of prior knowledge. Unknown parameters in this specification are estimated by probabilistic inference. Often, however, the problem size poses an important challenge and in order to render the approach feasible, specialized inference methods need to be tailored to improve the computational speed and efficiency. The scope of the proposed tutorial is as follows: First, we will review the fundamentals of probabilistic models, with some focus on music, video and text data. Then, we will discuss the numerical techniques for inference in these models. In particular, we will review exact inference, approximate stochastic inference techniques such as Markov Chain Monte Carlo, Sequential Monte Carlo and deterministic (variational) inference techniques. Our ultimate aim is to provide a basic understanding of probabilistic modeling for multimedia processing, associated computational techniques and a roadmap such that information retrieval researchers new to the Bayesian approach can orient themselves in the relevant literature and understand the current state of the art.