18712320
Decomposing polygon meshes by means of critical points
Polygon mesh is among the most common data structures used for representing objects in computer graphics. Unfortunately, a polygon mesh does not capture high-level structures, unlike a hierarchical model. In general, high-level abstractions are useful for managing data in applications. In this paper, we present a method for decomposing an object represented in polygon meshes into components by means of critical points. The method consists of steps to define the root vertex of the object, define a function on the polygon meshes, compute the geodesic tree and critical points, decide the decomposition order, and extract components using backwards flooding. We have implemented the method. The preliminary results show that it works effectively and efficiently. The decomposition results can be useful for applications such as 3D model retrieval and morphing.
15320041
Feature extraction of volume data based on multi-scale representation
In this paper, we present a novel algorithm that can detect and extract salient points as features in 3-D volume datasets. This algorithm extracts not only the locations of feature points, but also finds out the scales at which the features are most significant. It applies the scale-space theory by adaptively processing the input volume in a few discrete scales. The features points, as well as their scales, detected can be used for subsequent processing, such as content-based volume data authentication and content-based volume rendering.We have implemented the algorithm and tested its effectiveness on several volume datasets. Some optimization has also been done on time-consuming intermediate steps to speed up the feature detection process.
7343489
Feature difference analysis in video authentication system
In most video authentication systems, the difference between features of the original and received videos is often used to decide the authenticity. In this paper, by employing mutual information to represent the similarity between the original and received video frames, we theoretically analyze the relationship between the feature difference and the video distortion. The relationship we derived is applied to estimate the maximum allowable feature difference in a video authentication system and to show how the feature difference varies with quantization step. Experimental results demonstrate that the derived relationship is reasonable and helpful for designing a robust video authentication system.
26245064
Feature-guided painterly image rendering
Non-photo-realistic rendering (NPR) refers to any technique which can produce a non-photo-realistic image. We present a method for automatically generating a stroke-based painting from a digital image. The rendering process generates rectangular brush strokes with suitable location, orientation and size. Inspired by the real painting process, where a painter always observes the distinctive features and decides the shape and orientation of the stroke, we apply techniques of image moment functions and texture analysis, from which features are extracted and used to guide the stroke generation. Techniques are also developed for dynamic determination of cropped image size and edge enhancement. The main features in the source image are well preserved.
490406
Skyline Queries Against Mobile Lightweight Devices in MANETs
Skyline queries are well suited when retrieving data according to multiple criteria. While most previous work has assumed a centralized setting this paper considers skyline querying in a mobile and distributed setting, where each mobile device is capable of holding only a portion of the whole dataset; where devices communicate through mobile ad hoc networks; and where a query issued by a mobile user is interested only in the user’s local area, although a query generally involves data stored on many mobile devices due to the storage limitations. We present techniques that aim to reduce the costs of communication among mobile devices and reduce the execution time on each single mobile device. For the former, skyline query requests are forwarded among mobile devices in a deliberate way, such that the amount of data to be transferred is reduced. For the latter, specific optimization measures are proposed for resource-constrained mobile devices. We conduct extensive experiments to show that our proposal performs efficiently in real mobile devices and simulated wireless ad hoc networks.
62135913
Kernel-based method for tracking objects with rotation and translation
This paper addresses the issue of tracking translation and rotation simultaneously. Starting with a kernel-based spatial-spectral model for object representation, we define an l/sub 2/-norm similarity measure between the target object and the observation, and derive a new formulation to the tracking of translational and rotational object. Based on the tracking formulation, an iterative procedure is proposed. We also develop an adaptive kernel model to cope with varying appearance. Experimental results are presented for both synthetic data and real-world traffic video.
2926030
Reasoning with Inconsistent Ontologies
In this paper we present a framework of reasoning with inconsistent ontologies, in which pre-defined selection functions are used to deal with concept relevance. We examine how the notion of "concept relevance" can be used for reasoning with inconsistent ontologies. We have implemented a prototype called PION (Processing Inconsistent ONtologies), which is based on a syntactic relevance-based selection function. In this paper, we also report the experiments with PION.
19558398
Gestures for Embodied Agents with Logic Programming
The paper discusses how distributed logic programming can be used to define and control the hand gestures of embodied agents in virtual worlds, by using the STEP language as an interface between the constructs of logic programming and the humanoid model defined in Virtual Reality Modelling Language (VRML). By using this framework, different gesture dictionaries can be defined and variants of a hand gesture, according to dynamically changing factors, can be generated on the fly. The approach is tested on the demanding demonstrator of conducting, providing experience, also on time performance of the animation.
16942431
A graph model for E-commerce recommender systems
Information overload on the Web has created enormous challenges to customers selecting products for online purchases and to online businesses attempting to identify customers' preferences efficiently. Various recommender systems employing different data representations and recommendation methods are currently used to address these challenges. In this research, we developed a graph model that provides a generic data representation and can support different recommendation methods. To demonstrate its usefulness and flexibility, we developed three recommendation methods: direct retrieval, association mining, and high-degree association retrieval. We used a data set from an online bookstore as our research test-bed. Evaluation results showed that combining product content information and historical customer transaction information achieved more accurate predictions and relevant recommendations than using only collaborative information. However, comparisons among different methods showed that high-degree association retrieval did not perform significantly better than the association mining method or the direct retrieval method in our test-bed.
34497095
3D Protein Structure Matching by Patch Signatures
For determining functionality dependencies between two proteins, both represented as 3D structures, it is an essential condition that they have one or more matching structural regions called patches. As 3D structures for proteins are large, complex and constantly evolving, it is computationally expensive and very time-consuming to identify possible locations and sizes of patches for a given protein against a large protein database. In this paper, we address a vector space based representation for protein structures, where a patch is formed by the vectors within the region. Based on our previews work, a compact representation of the patch named patch signature is applied here. A similarity measure of two patches is then derived based on their signatures. To achieve fast patch matching in large protein databases, a match-and-expand strategy is proposed. Given a query patch, a set of small k-sized matching patches, called candidate patches, is generated in match stage. The candidate patches are further filtered by enlarging k in expand stage. Our extensive experimental results demonstrate encouraging performances with respect to this biologically critical but previously computationally prohibitive problem.
7369101
Trust and Commitment in Dynamic Logic
Trust and commitment have been identified as crucial concepts in electronic commerce applications. In this paper we are interested in the relation between these social concepts. We introduce a dynamic logic in which violations of stronger commitments result in a higher loss of trustworthiness than violations of weaker ones. We illustrate how the logic can be used to analyze some aspects of a well known example of trust within reason.