One of the most active research areas in computer vision is image classification. Although there have been many research efforts in this area, it remains a difficult problem, especially when the number of categories is large. Most of the previous work in image classification uses low-level image features. We believe low-level features ignore a lot of the semantic structures of the image classes. In this thesis, we go beyond simple low-level features and propose new approaches for constructing mid-level visual features for image classification. We represent an image using the outputs of a collection of binary classifiers. These binary classifiers are trained to differentiate pairs of object classes in an object hierarchy. Our feature representations implicitly capture the hierarchical structure in object classes. We show that our proposed approach outperforms other baseline methods in image classification.

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Disk performance for random access fares significantly worse compared to sequential access. Time required to transfer random blocks to or from disk is dominated by seeking and rotational delay. To improve the throughput and reduce the latency, one can apply techniques to increase the sequentiality of disk accesses, such as block rearrangement and replication. We introduce an approach to improve read performance by replicating blocks into file system free space at the block level. This makes the replication module independent of the file system and therefore easier to implement and verify. A solution that requires no changes to the file system is also easier to adopt. Supporting a new file system is a matter of writing a user-space component that understands its free block data structures. We implemented a prototype as a stacked device driver for Linux and evaluated its performance on a number of workloads.

Thesis (M.Sc.). / Written for the School of Computer Science. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/01/15). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.) in Earth Sciences--University of Maine, 2008. / Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 93-98).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1966. / Vita. Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Geology, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-40).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1969. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Université de Rennes 1, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the World Wide Web.