CMU  

Ahmed Ashraf
Assistant Professor

Manitoba Learning and
AI Research (MLAIR)

Department of ECE
The University of Manitoba
75 Chancellor Circle, Winnipeg MB
Email: FirstName.LastName@umanitoba.ca

Education
Post doc Toronto Rehab Institute, UHN, Toronto
Post doc UPenn, Philadelphia, PA, USA
Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
M.Sc. Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA, USA
B.Sc. UET,Lahore, Pakistan

 

Research Interests

My research interests include Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Robotics and Computer Vision. My long term research aspiration is to let machines gain faculties and adroitness that put them at par with humans in terms of performing tasks in which humans currently outperfom the machines.

More specifically I am interested in the applications of machine learning to vision, perception, spatio-temporal biomedical image analysis, healthcare monitoring in long term care (LTC), and assistive living for older adults

I am actively looking for highly motivated graduate students in the areas of Machine Learning/Computer Vision/Biomedical Imaging/Cancer Radiogenomics.


Jump to: Research / Selected Projects | Publications | Talks | Teaching | Curriculum Vitae |


Research

Biomarkers for Breast cancer prognosis
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Ashraf et al. Identification of Intrinsic Imaging Phenotypes for Breast Cancer Tumors: Preliminary Associations with Gene Expression Profiles. Radiology, [Publication][Interview]

Ashraf et al. A multichannel Markov random field approach for automated segmentation of breast cancer tumor in DCE-MRI data using kinetic observation model. MICCAI Vol. 3, pp 546-553, [Publication]

Ashraf et al. Breast DCE-MRI Kinetic Heterogeneity Tumor Markers: Preliminary Associations With Neoadjuvant Chemotherapy Response Translational Oncology , [Publication]


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Pain Expression Recognition for Older Adults with Dementia living in Long Term Care
 

A. B. Ashraf, S. Lucey, J. F. Cohn, T. Chen, K. M. Prkachin, and P. E. Solomon. The painful face II-- Pain expression recognition using active appearance models. International Journal of Image and Vision Computing, 27(12):1788-1796, ., [PDF]

A. B. Ashraf, S. Lucey, J. F. Cohn, T. Chen, K. M. Prkachin, and P. E. Solomon. The painful face -- Pain expression recognition using active appearance models. ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, Nagoya, Japan . (Oral)., [PDF]

See Pain Detection Demo.


 

Margin Manipulation in Support Vector Machines
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A. B. Ashraf , S. Lucey and Tsuhan Chen,. Re-interpreting the application of Gabor filters as a manipulation of the margin in linear support vector machines. IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI),

 

[PDF].



 

Fast Image Alignment in the Fourier Domain

In our recent work we have shown that the conventional Lucas-Kanade algorithm can equivalently be cast in the Fourier domain, instead of the conventional spatial domain. With this formulation, we have shown that performing alignment in the high dimensional feature spaces derived from a bank of filters becomes mathematically equivalent to performing alignment in the low dimensional image space, if appropriate weightings are applied in the Fourier domain. This technique renders the Fourier-LK algorithm robust to noisy artifacts like illumination in comparison to the conventional Lucas-Kanade algorihtm.

A. B. Ashraf , S. Lucey and Tsuhan Chen,. Fast Image Alignment in the Fourier Domain . IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition), (CVPR)

[PDF]

See Fourier-Alignment Demo..


 

Learning Patch-Correspondence for Viewpoint Invariance
 

A. B. Ashraf , S. Lucey and Tsuhan Chen,. Learning Patch Correspondences for Improved Viewpoint Invariant Face Recognition . IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition), Anchorage, Alaska, 2008 (CVPR), (Oral)

[PDF]

See Patch Correspondence Demo..


 

Pain Expression Recognition
 

A. B. Ashraf, S. Lucey, J. F. Cohn, T. Chen, K. M. Prkachin, and P. E. Solomon. The painful face II-- Pain expression recognition using active appearance models. International Journal of Image and Vision Computing, 27(12):1788-1796, November 2009., [PDF]

A. B. Ashraf, S. Lucey, J. F. Cohn, T. Chen, K. M. Prkachin, and P. E. Solomon. The painful face -- Pain expression recognition using active appearance models. ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, Nagoya, Japan 2007. (Oral)., [PDF]

See Pain Detection Demo.


 

Spontaneous Facial Action Recognition
 

Simon Lucey, Ahmed Ashraf, and Jeffrey Cohn. Investigating Spontaneous Facial Action Recognition through AAM Representations of the Face. In K. Kurihara, editor, Face Recognition Book. Pro Literatur Verlag, Mammendorf, Germany, April 2007

 

[PDF].


 

Occupant Classification for Air-bag Deployment

 

Air bags are deployed upon frontal impact to provide a cushion between the occupant and the vehicle. But in case the passenger side seat is occupied by an infant especially seated in a Rear Facing Infant seat, the deployed air-bag strikes the infant’s neck with such immense an impact that crosses the child’s impact resistance and the child dies. There was therefore a need to develop an intelligent system that detects the type of the occupant and adaptively changes the deployment parameters. The vision based solution employs a camera installed in the vehicle that captures the image of the passenger side seat and hands it over to the classification system.

M. R. Hamid,, A. Baloch , A. B. Ashraf , N. A. Zaffar,,. Object Segmentation Using Feature-based Conditional Morphology . IEEE Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, Italy (2003)

 

[PDF].


 

Publications | [Home]
 

A. B. Ashraf ,S. Gavenonis, D. Daye, C. Mies, M. Feldman, M.A. Rosen, and D. Kontos,. "A Multichannel Markov Random Field approach for Automated Segmentation of Breast Cancer Tumor in DCE-MRI Data Using Kinetic Observation Model". MICCAI 2011,, Vol.3 pp 536-543 [PDF]

 
 

A. B. Ashraf , S. Lucey and Tsuhan Chen,. "Re-interpreting the application of Gabor filters as a manipulation of the margin in linear support vector machines". IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI),, [PDF]

 
 
 

S.Lucey and A. B. Ashraf, "Nearest neighbor classifier generalization through spatially constrained filters". Pattern Recognition , 2012 [PDF]

 
 
 

Simon Lucey, Rajitha Navarathna,A. B. Ashraf, and Sridha Sridharan, "Fourier Lucas Kanade Algorithm". IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), , 2012, (Accepted with minor revisions) [PDF]

 
 
 

A. B. Ashraf , S. Lucey and Tsuhan Chen,. Fast Image Alignment in the Fourier Domain . IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition), 2011 (CVPR) , [PDF]

 
 
 

A. B. Ashraf , B. Gaonkar, A. DeMichele, C. Mies, C. Davatzikos, M. Rosen, and D. Kontos,."Pre-treatment prediction of neoadjuvant chemotherapy response in breast cancer patients using DCE-MRI kinetic statistics" . In Proc. Workshop on Breast Image Analysis (BIA), Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention (MICCAI), 2011 , [PDF]

 
 
 

A. B. Ashraf , S. Gavenonis, D. Daye, C. Mies, M. Feldman, M.A. Rosen, and D. Kontos,."Prediction of prognostic tumor gene expression signatures via kinetic analysis of DCE-MRI  for assessing breast cancer recurrence" . In: 97th Scientific Assembly and Annual Meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA), 2011 ,(Oral) [PDF]

 
 
 

Wei Yu, Ahmed Ashraf, Yao-Jen Chang, Congcong Li, Tsuhan Chen,,."3D Augmented Markov Random Field for Object Recognition" . IEEE International Conference on Image Processing (ICIP), 2011 , [PDF]

 
 
 

A. B. Ashraf , S. Lucey and Tsuhan Chen,. Learning Patch Correspondences for Improved Viewpoint Invariant Face Recognition . IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition), Anchorage, Alaska, 2008 (CVPR), (Oral) [PDF]

 
 
 

A. B. Ashraf, S. Lucey, J. F. Cohn, T. Chen, K. M. Prkachin, and P. E. Solomon. The painful face II-- Pain expression recognition using active appearance models. International Journal of Image and Vision Computing, 27(12):1788-1796, November 2009., [PDF]

 
 
 

A. B. Ashraf, S. Lucey, J. F. Cohn, T. Chen, K. M. Prkachin, and P. E. Solomon. The painful face -- Pain expression recognition using active appearance models. ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces, Nagoya, Japan 2007. (Oral)., [PDF]

 
 
 

Simon Lucey, A. B. Ashraf, and Jeffrey Cohn. Investigating Spontaneous Facial Action Recognition through AAM Representations of the Face. In K. Kurihara, editor, Face Recognition Book. Pro Literatur Verlag, Mammendorf, Germany, April 2007 [PDF]

 
 
 

M. R. Hamid,, A. Baloch , A. B. Ashraf , N. A. Zaffar,,. Object Segmentation Using Feature-based Conditional Morphology . IEEE Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, Italy (2003) [PDF].

 

 

Talks | [Home]

-Featureless Computer Vision,. Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, September 4, 2009 [Talk].

-Learning Patch Correspondences for Improved Viewpoint Invariant Face Recognition . CVPR Oral Talk, Anchorage, Alaska, June 26, 2009 [Talk]

-Pose-Invariant Recognition Using Single Gallery Image, Department of ECE, Carnegie Mellon University, November 12, 2008 [Talk]

-Video Content Analysis, Department of ECE, University of Maryland, College Park, October 2008 [Talk]

-The Painful Face, . ACM ICMI Oral Talk, Nagoya, Japan, November 2007 [Talk]


 

Teaching | [Home]

Fall 2017: Computer Vision, University of Toronto

-Fall 2008: Signals and Systems, Carnegie Mellon

-Spring 2009: Signals and Systems, Carnegie Mellon


 

CV | [Home]

[Download CV]


 

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