We present a novel modification to the well-known infomax algorithm of blind source separation. Under natural gradient descent, the infomax algorithm converges to a stationary point of a limiting ordinary differential equation. However, due to the presence of saddle points or local minima of the corresponding likelihood function, the algorithm may be trapped around these bad stationary points for a long time, especially if the initial data are near them. To speed up convergence, we propose to add a sequence of random perturbations to the infomax algorithm to shake the iterating sequence so that it is captured by a path descending to a more stable stationary point. We analyze the convergence of the randomly perturbed algorithm, and illustrate its fast convergence through numerical examples on blind demixing of stochastic signals. The examples have analytical structures so that saddle points or local minima of

We develop a multiscale tailored finite point method (MsTFPM) for second order elliptic equations with rough or highly oscillatory coefficients. The finite point method has been tailored to some particular properties of the problem, so that it can capture the multiscale solutions using coarse meshes without resolving the fine scale structure of the solution. Several numerical examples in one-and two-dimensions are provided to show the accuracy and convergence of the proposed method. In addition, some analysis results based on the maximum principle for the one-dimensional problem are proved.

We present a framework for solving the large-scale \ell_1-regularized convex minimization problem:<div class="gsh_dspfr">\ell_1

Surface registration plays a fundamental role in many applications in computer vision and aims at finding a oneto-one correspondence between surfaces. Conformal mapping based surface registration methods conformally map 2D/3D surfaces onto 2D canonical domains and perform the matching on the 2D plane. This registration framework reduces dimensionality, and the result is intrinsic to Riemannian metric and invariant under isometric deformation. However, conformal mapping will be affected by inconsistent boundaries and non-isometric deformations of surfaces. In this work, we quantify the effects of boundary variation and non-isometric deformation to conformal mappings, and give the theoretical upper bounds for the distortions of conformal mappings under these two factors. Besides giving the thorough theoretical proofs of the theorems, we verified them by concrete experiments using 3D human facial scans with dynamic expressions and varying boundaries. Furthermore, we used the distortion estimates for reducing search range in feature matching of surface registration applications. The experimental results are consistent with the theoretical predictions and also demonstrate the performance improvements in feature tracking.