Recently, a ground based laser scanning sensor is receiving more attention as an useful tool for real-time acquisition of 3D data, and its applications are proposed in various fields. For example, a topographic survey for archaeological sites is performed efficiently using a laser scanning sensor. A traverse survey is one of the typical methods for topographic map in archaeological sites. Usual...

The Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM) algorithm of Bishop, Svensén, and Williams (1998) has been introduced as a principled alternative to the SelfOrganizing Map (SOM). As well as avoiding a number of deficiencies in the SOM, the GTM algorithm has the key property that the smoothness properties of the model are decoupled from the reference vectors, and are described by a continuous mapping f...

We review a new form of self-organizing map which is based on a nonlinear projection of latent points into data space, identical to that performed in the Generative Topographic Mapping (GTM) [1]. But whereas the GTM is an extension of a mixture of experts, this model is an extension of a product of experts [6]. We show visualisation and clustering results on a data set composed of video data of...

This paper demonstrates how a recently reported shape-from-shading scheme can be used to extract topographic information from 2D intensity imagery (Worthington and Hancock, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 21 (1999) 1250}1267). The shape-from-shading scheme has two important features which enhance the recovered surface description. Firstly, it uses a geometric update procedure which allo...

Many settings of unsupervised learning can be viewed as quantization problems, namely of minimizing the expected quantization error subject to some restrictions. This has the advantage that tools known from the theory of (supervised) risk minimization like regularization can be readily applied to unsupervised settings. Moreover, one may show that this setting is very closely related to both, pr...