2012

• Alaa Abd El Hakeem and Motaz El Saban, Distortion Impact on Low-Dimensional Manifold Recovery of High-Dimensional Data, in Taibah University International Conference on Computing and Information Technology , 2012
• NourElDin Laban, Motaz El Saban, Ayman Nasr, and Hoda Onsi, System Refinement for Content Based Satellite Image Retrieval, in The Egyptian Journal of Remote Sensing and Space Sciences, 2012
• Meena Abd El Meseeh, Islam Badr El Deen, Mohammad Abd El Kader, and Motaz El-Saban, Combining global and local information for within-category object class recognition, in International conference on pattern recognition, 2012
• Ayman Kaheel, Motaz El-Saban, Mostafa Izz, and Mahmoud Refaat, Employing 3D Accelerometer Information for Fast and Reliable Image Features Matching on mobile devices, in ICME 2012 workshop on hot topics in mobile multimedia, IEEE Internation Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), 2012
• Alaa Abd El Hakeem and Motaz El-Saban, FRPCA: Fast Robust Principal Component Analysis, in IEEE conference on pattern recognition, 2012

2011

• Mohammad Nael, Moataz Abd El Wahab, Motaz El Saban, and Mikhail Wasfy, Highly Efficient Human Action Recognition using compact 2DPCA-based descriptors in the Spatial and Transform domains, in Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems (MWSCAS), IEEE, 2011
• Mostafa Saad and Motaz El-Saban, Higher order potentials with superpixel neighbourhood (HSN) for semantic image segmentation, in ICIP, IEEE, 2011
• Mahmoud Bassiouny and Motaz El Saban, Object Matching Using Feature Aggregation Over a Frame Sequence, in WACV, IEEE, 2011
• Mahmoud Refaat, Motaz El-Saban, and Ayman Kaheel, Active Feedback for Enhancing the Construction of Panoramic Live Mobile Video Streams, in ICME, IEEE Internation Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), 2011
• Motaz El-Saban, Xin-Jing Wang, Noran Hasan, Mahmoud Bassiouny, and Mahmoud refaat, Seamless annotation and enrichment of mobile captured video streams in real-time, in ICME, IEEE Internation Conference on Multimedia & Expo (ICME), 2011
• Motaz El-Saban, Mostafa Izz, Ayman Kaheel, and Mahmoud Refaat, Improved optimal seam selection blending for fast video stitching of videos captured from freely moving devices, in ICIP, IEEE, 2011
• Mohammad Nael, Moataz Abd El Wahab, and Motaz El Saban, Multi-view Human Action Recognition System Employing 2DPCA, in WACV, IEEE, 2011

2010

• Mohammad EL Deeb and Motaz El-Saban, Human age estimation using enhanced bio-inspired features (EBIF), in ICIP, 2010
  
  The Aging process is a non-reversible process, causing human face characteristics change with time as hair whitening, muscles drop and wrinkles. Recently, age estimation from facial images has emerged as a hot research area. One of the most successful works is based on biologically inspired features (BIF). In this paper we extend BIF by incorporating fine details facial features, automatic initialization using active shape models and analyzing a more complete facial area by including the forehead details. Besides, we combine regression-based and classification-based models and test them experimentally on standard datasets showing the superiority of our proposed algorithm (extended BIF – EBIF) over the state-of-the-art.
• Motaz El-Saban, Mostafa Izz, and Ayman Kaheel, FAST STITCHING OF VIDEOS CAPTURED FROM FREELY MOVING DEVICES BY EXPLOITING TEMPORAL REDUNDANCY, in ICIP, IEEE, 2010
  
  We investigate the problem of efficient panoramic video construction based on time-synchronized input video streams. No additional constraints are imposed regarding the motion of the capturing video cameras. The presented work is, to the best of our knowledge, the first attempt to construct in real-time a panoramic video stream from input video streams captured by freely moving cameras. The main contribution is in proposing an efficient panoramic video construction algorithm that exploits temporal information to avoid solving the stitching problem fully on a frame by frame basis. We provide detailed experimental evaluation of different methodologies that employ previous frames stitching results such as tracking interest points using optical flow and using areas of overlap to limit the search space for interest points. Our results clearly indicate that making use of temporal information in video stitching can achieve a significant reduction in execution time while providing a comparable effectiveness.

2009

• A. Kaheel, M. El-Saban, M. Refaat, and M. Izz, Mobicast - A system for collaborative event casting using mobile phones, in ACM Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia - MUM '09, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., UK, November 2009
  
  Lately, the usage of mobile live video streaming for video sharing has been growing steadily. However, because of the limitations presented by the capabilities of mobile phone video capturing devices, these video streams end up having either a low resolution or a small field of view. On the other hand, the ubiquity of video capture-capable mobile phones make the probability that more than one user will be recording the same scene from different views relatively high. In this paper we introduce a system for mobile live video streaming, named Mobicast, that enables the collaboration between multiple users streaming the same event from their mobile phones to provide a better collective viewing experience of the event to end viewers. We describe architectural components of the system that can be used in enhancing the viewing experience in different ways. Thereafter, we describe the details of an implementation of the system aiming at enhancing the viewing experience by stitching the incoming mobile video streams to construct a panoramic view in real-time. We performed a number of experiments, using both real-usage data and synthetically generated data, aiming at verifying that the system fulfills its promise of enhancing the viewing experience.
• M. El-Saban, A. Kaheel, and M. Refaat, Stitching videos streamed by mobile phones in real-time, in ACM Multimedia - MM '09, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., China, October 2009
  
  User generated videos with mobile phone cameras are becoming more and more ubiquitous allowing people to share live content with remote parties, possibly in real-time. However with limited mobile phone capabilities, these videos are usually of small resolution, resulting in a small field of view for acceptable quality. Fortunately with the proliferation of video capture-enabled mobile phones, there is high chance that one or more persons will be shooting the same scene from different views. In this demonstration, we are showing an end-to-end system which receives video streams coming from different mobile phones, time synchronizes the streams and produces a single composite mosaic video, and all of this is done in real-time. The proposed system operates without coordination between users. The system has been tested under various capturing conditions such as indoor, outdoor, day and night conditions.
• Ayman Kaheel, Motazel, Mahmood Refaat, and Mostafa Izz, Mobicast: A System for Collaborative Event Casting Using Mobile Phones, in Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia , Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2009
• M EL Deeb, B Abou Zaid, H. Zawbaa, M Zahaar, and Motaz El-Saban, Soccer video summarization using enhanced logo detection, in ICIP, 2009
  
  We propose an automatic soccer video summarization engine which relies on an improved algorithm for the detection of replay shots which delineate interesting events. Video shots are first detected using dominant color and histogram intersection methods. Replay shots are detected using an improved technique, then processed through a set of mid-level descriptors (goal-mouth and score board with other cinematic features) and finally fed into a rule-based classifier. The proposed summarization has been experimentally tested on 6 hours from 10 videos in total. The proposed logo-based replay detection technique achieves 100% recall with 96.3% precision. Interesting events such as goals are detected with 100% recall and 100% precision, attacks with 91.7% recall and 86.7% precision) and other events such as (fouls, free kicks etc) with 90.8% recall and 95% precision.
• Motaz El-Saban, Mahmoud Refaat, Ayman Kaheel, and Ahmad Abdul Hamid, Stitching videos streamed by mobile phones in real-time, in ACM MM, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2009
  
  User generated videos with mobile phone cameras are becoming more and more ubiquitous allowing people to share live content with remote parties, possibly in real-time. However with limited mobile phone capabilities, these videos are usually of small resolution, resulting in a small field of view for acceptable quality. Fortunately with the proliferation of video capture-enabled mobile phones, there is high chance that one or more persons will be shooting the same scene from different views. In this demonstration, we are showing an end-to-end system which receives video streams coming from different mobile phones, time synchronizes the streams and produces a single composite mosaic video, and all of this is done in real-time. The proposed system operates without coordination between users. The system has been tested under various capturing conditions such as indoor, outdoor, day and night conditions.
• Waleed Magdy, Kareem Darwish, and Motaz El-Saban, Efficient Language-Independent Retrieval of Printed Documents without OCR, in SPIRE, 2009
  
  Recent book digitization initiatives have facilitated the access and search through millions of books. Although OCR remains one of the cornerstones for retrieving printed documents, OCR engines remain limited in the languages they handle and are generally expensive to build. This paper proposes a language independent approach that enables search through printed documents in a way that combines image-based matching with conventional IR techniques without OCR. While image-based matching can be effective in finding similar words, complementing it with efficient retrieval techniques allows for sub-word matching, term weighting, and document ranking. The basic idea is that similar connected elements in printed documents are clustered and represented with ID’s, which are then used to generate equivalent textual representations. The resultant representations are indexed using an IR engine and searched using the equivalent ID’s of the connected elements in queries. Though, the main benefit of the proposed approach lies in languages for which no OCR exists, the technique was tested on English and Arabic to ascertain the relative effectiveness of the approach. The approach achieves more than 61% relative effectiveness compared to using OCR for both languages. While the reported numbers are lower than that of OCR-based approaches, the proposed method is fully automated, does not require any supervised training, and allows documents to be searchable within a few hours.

2008

• Nayer Wanas, Motaz El-Saban, Heba Ashour, and Waleed Ammar, Automatic Scoring of Online Discussion Posts, in 2nd Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web (WICOW 2008), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 30 October 2008
  
  Online discussions forums, known as forums for short, are conversational social cyberspaces constituting rich repositories of content and an important source of collaborative knowledge. However, most of this knowledge is buried inside the forum infrastructure and its extraction is both complex and difficult. The ability to automatically rate postings in online discussion forums, based on the value of their contribution, enhances the ability of users to find knowledge within this content. Several key online discussion forums have utilized collaborative intelligence to rate the value of postings made by users. However, a large percentage of posts go unattended and hence lack appropriate rating. In this paper, we focus on automatic rating of postings in online discussion forums. A set of features derived from the posting content and the threaded discussion structure are generated for each posting. These features are grouped into five categories, namely (i) relevance, (ii) originality, (iii) forum-specific features, (iv) surface features, and (v) posting-component features. Using a non-linear SVM classifier, the value of each posting is categorized into one of three levels High, Medium, or Low. This rating represents a seed value for each posting that is leveraged in filtering forum content. Experimental results have shown promising performance on forum data.
• Nayer Wanas, Motaz El-saban, Heba Ashour, and Waleed Ammar, Automatic Scoring of Online Discussion Posts, in 2nd Workshop on Information Credibility on the Web (WICOW 2008), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 30 October 2008
  
  Online discussions forums, known as forums for short, are conversational social cyberspaces constituting rich repositories of content and an important source of collaborative knowledge. However, most of this knowledge is buried inside the forum infrastructure and its extraction is both complex and difficult. The ability to automatically rate postings in online discussion forums, based on the value of their contribution, enhances the ability of users to find knowledge within this content. Several key online discussion forums have utilized collaborative intelligence to rate the value of postings made by users. However, a large percentage of posts go unattended and hence lack appropriate rating. In this paper, we focus on automatic rating of postings in online discussion forums. A set of features derived from the posting content and the threaded discussion structure are generated for each posting. These features are grouped into five categories, namely (i) relevance, (ii) originality, (iii) forum-specific features, (iv) surface features, and (v) posting-component features. Using a non-linear SVM classifier, the value of each posting is categorized into one of three levels High, Medium, or Low. This rating represents a seed value for each posting that is leveraged in filtering forum content. Experimental results have shown promising performance on forum data.
• Nayer Wanas, Motaz El-Saban, Heba Ashour, and Waleed Ammar, Automatic Scoring of Online Discussion Posts, in CIKM, WICOW workshop, 2008
  
  Online discussions forums, known as forums for short, are conversational social cyberspaces constituting rich repositories of content and an important source of collaborative knowledge. However, most of this knowledge is buried inside the forum infrastructure and its extraction is both complex and difficult. The ability to automatically rate postings in online discussion forums, based on the value of their contribution, enhances the ability of users to find knowledge within this content. Several key online discussion forums have utilized collaborative intelligence to rate the value of postings made by users. However, a large percentage of posts go unattended and hence lack appropriate rating. In this paper, we focus on automatic rating of postings in online discussion forums. A set of features derived from the posting content and the threaded discussion structure are generated for each posting. These features are grouped into five categories, namely (i) relevance, (ii) originality, (iii) forum-specific features, (iv) surface features, and (v) posting-component features. Using a non-linear SVM classifier, the value of each posting is categorized into one of three levels High, Medium, or Low. This rating represents a seed value for each posting that is leveraged in filtering forum content. Experimental results have shown promising performance on forum data.

2006

• Motaz El-Saban and et al., Automated tracking and modelling of microtubule dynamics, International Symposium of biomedical imaging, 2006
• A. Altinok and Motaz El-Saban, Activity Recognition in Microtubule Videos by Mixture of Hidden Markov Models, in CVPR, 2006
  
  We present an automated method for the tracking and dynamics modeling of microtubules -a major component of the cytoskeleton- which provides researchers with a previously unattainable level of data analysis and quantification capabilities. The proposed method improves upon the manual tracking and analysis techniques by i) increasing accuracy and quantified sample size in data collection, ii) eliminating user bias and standardizing analysis, iii) making available new features that are impractical to capture manually, iv) enabling statistical extraction of dynamics patterns from cellular processes, and v) greatly reducing required time for entire studies. An automated procedure is proposed to track each resolvable microtubule, whose aggregate activity is then modeled by mixtures of Hidden Markov Models to uncover dynamics patterns of underlying cellular and experimental conditions. Our results support manually established findings on an actual microtubule dataset and illustrate how automated analysis of spatial and temporal patterns offers previously unattainable insights to cellular processes.
• B. S. Manjunath, B. Sumengen, Z. Bi, J. Biyun, Motaz El-Saban, D. Fedorov, and N. Vu, Towards Automated Bioimage Analysis: from features to semantics, in ISBI, invited paper, 2006
• Motaz El-Saban, Automated microtubule tracking and analysis, 2006
  
  Microtubules are major components of the cytoskeleton and play an important role in a number of cellular functions such as maintaining cell shape, cell division and transport of various molecules. Abnormal dynamic behavior of microtubules has been associated with neuro-degenerative diseases (e.g., Alzheimer) and cancer. Researchers study the dynamics of microtubules under different experimental conditions including different drug treatments, and using time sequence images from fluorescence microscopy. At present the dynamics of microtubules are quantified using simple first and second-order statistical measures of the length variations of manually tracked microtubules. The current analysis being mostly done manually, is quite laborious and time-consuming. Besides, the number of microtubules that one can track with manual methods is limited. In the first part of the thesis, we propose novel tools for automated detection and tracking of microtubules. A multiframe graph-based approach is proposed to tackle tracking issues, and our results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed approach to occlusions and intersections. In the second part of the thesis, we propose the use of statistical modeling tools for a better understanding of the underlying molecular mechanisms of microtubule dynamics. Prototype models are estimated for various experimental conditions by training hidden Markov models (HMMs) on the microtubule tracking data. Furthermore, these models are used to quantify similarities between experimental conditions. Additionally, temporal association rules are derived to characterize frequent patterns in the microtubule dynamics under different experimental conditions. The extraction of frequent patterns leads to a better understanding of how an experimental condition, such as the application of a drug, modulates microtubule dynamics.

2005

• Motaz El-Saban and B. S. Manjunath, Spatiotemporal contour tracking of microtubules, 2005
• Motaz EL-Saban and B. S. Manjunath, Tracking curvilinear structures using active contours and application to microtubule videos, 2005

2004

• Motaz El-Saban and B. S. Manjunath, Interactive Segmentation Using Curve Evolution And Relevance Feedback, in ICIP, 2004
• S. Bhagavaty and Motaz El-Saban, SketchIt: Basketball Video Retrieval Using Ball Motion Similarity, in PCM, 2004

2003

• Motaz El-Saban and B. S. Manjunath, Video Region Segmentation by Spatio-temporal watersheds, in ICIP, 2003

2000

• Motaz El-Saban, S. Abd El-Azeem, and M. Rashwan, A new video coding scheme based on the H.263 standard and entropy constrained vector quantization, in Cairo University, Faculty of Engineering journal, 2000
• Motaz El-Saban, S. Abd El-Azeem, and M. Rashwan, A new video coding scheme based on the H.263 standard and entropy constrained vector quantization, in ICII, 2000
• Motaz El-Saban, New video coding techniques based on the H.263 standard and vector quantization, 2000