28801152
Remote Collaboration on Physical Whiteboards
A whiteboard provides a large shared space for the participants to focus their attention and express their ideas, and is therefore a great collaboration tool for information workers. However, it has several limitations; notably, the contents on the whiteboard are hard to archive or share with people who are not present in the discussions. This paper presents our work in developing tools to facilitate collaboration on physical whiteboards by using a camera and a microphone. In particular, our system allows a user to take notes of a whiteboard meeting when he/she wants or in an automatic way, to transmit the whiteboard content to remote participants in real time and in an efficient way, and to archive the whole whiteboard session for efficient post-viewing. Our system can be retrofit to any existing whiteboard. With the help of a camera and a microphone, we are effectively bridging the physical and digital worlds.
8951856
Model-based head pose tracking with stereovision
We present a robust model-based stereo head tracking algorithm that operates in real time on a commodity PC. The use of an individualized three-dimensional head model, coupled with the epipolar constraint from the stereo image pair greatly improves the robustness of the tracking. Experimental results have shown that our method is able to track all the six degrees of freedom of the rigid part of head motions, over an extended period of time, in the presence of large angular and translational head motions, partial occlusions, and/or dramatic facial expression changes. Applications include human-computer interaction and eye-gaze correction for videoconferencing.
9407873
Linear combination representation for outlier detection in motion tracking
In this paper we show that Ullman and Basri's linear combination (LC) representation, which was originally proposed for alignment-based object recognition, can be used for outlier detection in motion tracking with an affine camera. For this task LC can be realized either on image frames or feature trajectories, and therefore two methods are developed which we call linear combination of frames and linear combination of trajectories. For robust estimation of the linear combination coefficients, the support vector regression (SVR) algorithm is used and compared with the RANSAC method. SVR based on quadratic programming optimization can efficiently deal with more than 50 percent outliers and delivers more consistent results than RANSAC in our experiments. The linear combination representation can use SVR in a straightforward manner while previous factorization-based or subspace separation methods cannot. Experimental results are presented using real video sequences to demonstrate the effectiveness of our LC+SVR approaches, including a quantitative comparison of SVR and RANSAC.
5132220
Efficient bundle adjustment with virtual key frames: a hierarchical approach to multi-frame structure from motion
In this paper we present an efficient hierarchical approach to structure from motion for long image sequences. There are two key elements to our approach: accurate 3D reconstruction for each segment and efficient bundle adjustment for the whole sequence. The image sequence is first divided into a number of segments so that feature points can be reliably tracked across each segment. Each segment has a long baseline to ensure accurate 3D reconstruction. To efficiently bundle adjust 3D structures from ail segments, we reduce the number of frames in each segment by introducing "virtual keyframes". The virtual frames encode the 3D structure of each segment along with its uncertainty but they form a small subset of the original frames. Our method achieves significant speedup over conventional bundle adjustment methods.
18016173
Corner guided curve matching and its application to scene reconstruction
Corners and curves are important image features in many vision-based applications. Corners are usually more stable and easier to match than curves, while curves contain richer information of scene structure. In previously work, corners are often used to recover the epipolar geometry between two views, which is then used in curve matching to reduce the search space. However, information of the scene structure contained in this set of matched corners is ignored. In this paper we present a curve matching algorithm that is guided by a set of matched corners. Within a probabilistic framework, the role of the corner guidance is explicitly defined by a set of similarity-invariant unary measurements and by a similarity function. The similarity function provides stronger capability of resolving matching ambiguity than the epipolar constraint, and is integrated into a relaxation scheme to reduce computational complexity and improve accuracy of curve matching. Experimental results clearly demonstrate the benefit of integrating corner matches into the curve matching procedure.
2276524
Automatic Business Card Scanning with a Camera
In this paper, we present a system to automatically extract, rectify and enhance business card images. First the business card image patch is automatically segmented by minimizing a novel local-global variational energy. Second a quadrangle is fitted to the segmented image patch. With the four corner points of the quadrangle, we then estimate the physical aspect ratio of the business card and obtain a homography to rectify the quadrangle back to rectangular shape. We finally enhance the contrast of the rectified business card image using a S-shaped curve. Extensive experiments demonstrated the efficacy and robustness of our system.
3065647
A core stateless bandwidth broker architecture for scalable support of guaranteed services
We present a novel bandwidth broker architecture for scalable support of guaranteed services that decouples the QoS control plane from the packet forwarding plane. More specifically, under this architecture, core routers do not maintain any QoS reservation states, whether per-flow or aggregate. Instead, the QoS reservation states are stored at and managed by a bandwidth broker. There are several advantages of such a bandwidth broker architecture. Among others, it avoids the problem of inconsistent QoS states faced by the conventional hop-by-hop, distributed admission control approach. Furthermore, it allows us to design efficient admission control algorithms without incurring any overhead at core routers. The proposed bandwidth broker architecture is designed based on a core stateless virtual time reference system developed recently. This virtual time reference system provides a unifying framework to characterize, in terms of their abilities to support delay guarantees, both the per-hop behaviors of core routers and the end-to-end properties of their concatenation. We focus on the design of efficient admission control algorithms under the proposed bandwidth broker architecture. We consider both per-flow end-to-end guaranteed delay services and class-based guaranteed delay services with flow aggregation. Using our bandwidth broker architecture, we demonstrate how admission control can be done on a per domain basis instead of on a "hop-by-hop" basis. Such an approach may significantly reduce the complexity of the admission control algorithms. In designing class-based admission control algorithms, we investigate the problem of dynamic flow aggregation in providing guaranteed delay services and devise a new apparatus to effectively circumvent this problem. We conduct detailed analyses to provide theoretical underpinning for our schemes as well as to establish their correctness. Simulations are also performed to demonstrate the efficacy of our schemes.
14083998
Towards CST-enhanced summarization
In this paper, we propose to enhance the process of automatic extractive multi-document text summarization by taking into account cross-document structural relationships as posited in Cross-document Structure Theory (CST). An arbitrary multidocument extract can be CST-enhanced by replacing low-salience sentences with other sentences that increase the total number of CST relationships included in the summary. We show that CST-enhanced summaries outperform their unmodified counterparts using the relative utility evaluation metric. We also show that the effect of a CST relationship on an extract depends on its type.
206618709
Building an Ontology for Financial Investment
Intelligent agent technologies hold great promise for the financial services and investment industries such as portfolio management. In financial investment, a multi-agent system approach is natural because of the multiplicity of information sources and the different expertise that must be brought to bear to produce a good recommendation (such as a stock buy or sell decision). The agents in a multi-agent system need to coordinate, cooperate or communicate with each other to solve a complex problem. However, ontologies are a key component in how different agents in a multi-agent system can communicate effectively, and how the knowledge of agents can develop. This paper presents a case study in building an ontology in financial investment. The lessons we learned from the construction process are discussed. Based on our ontology development experience and the current development of ontologies, a framework of next generation ontology construction tools, which is aimed to facilitate the ontology construction, is proposed.
12552052
Fixed-slope universal lossy data compression
Corresponding to any lossless codeword length function l, three universal lossy data compression schemes are presented: one is with a fixed rate, another is with a fixed distortion, and a third is with a fixed slope. The former two universal lossy data compression schemes are the generalization of Yang-Kieffer's (see ibid., vol.42, no.1, p.239-45, 1995) results to the general case of any lossless codeword length function l, whereas the third is new. In the case of fixed-slope /spl lambda/>0, our universal lossy data compression scheme works as follows: for any source sequence x/sup n/ of length n, the encoder first searches for a reproduction sequence y/sup n/ of length n which minimizes a cost function n/sup -1/l(y/sup n/)+/spl lambda//spl rho//sub n/(x/sup n/, y/sup n/) over all reproduction sequences of length n, and then encodes x/sup n/ into the binary codeword of length l(y/sup n/) associated with y/sup n/ via the lossless codeword length function l, where /spl rho//sub n/(x/sup n/, y/sup n/) is the distortion per sample between x/sup n/ and y/sup n/. Under some mild assumptions on the lossless codeword length function l, it is shown that when this fixed-slope data compression scheme is applied to encode a stationary, ergodic source, the resulting encoding rate per sample and the distortion per sample converge with probability one to R/sub /spl lambda// and D/sub /spl lambda//, respectively, where (D/sub /spl lambda//, R/sub /spl lambda//) is the point on the rate distortion curve at which the slope of the rate distortion function is -/spl lambda/. This result holds particularly for the arithmetic codeword length function and Lempel-Ziv codeword length function. The main advantage of this fixed-slope universal lossy data compression scheme over the fixed-rate (fixed-distortion) universal lossy data compression scheme lies in the fact that it converts the encoding problem to a search problem through a trellis and then permits one to use some sequential search algorithms to implement it. Simulation results show that this fixed-slope universal lossy data compression scheme, combined with a suitable search algorithm, is promising.
36195188
On the Three Threshold Policy in the Multi-Server Queueing System with Vacations
In this paper, we study an M/M/c queue with a three threshold vacation policy denoted by (e, d, N). With such a policy, the servers keep serving the customers until the number of idle servers reaches d and then e of d servers start taking a vacation together. These e servers keep taking vacations until the number of customers in the system is at least N at a vacation completion instant, then the e servers return to serve the queue again. Using the matrix analytic method, we obtain the stationary performance measures and prove the conditional stochastic decomposition properties for the waiting time and queue length. This model is a generalization of previous multi-server vacation models and offers a useful performance evaluation and system design tool in multi-task server queueing systems.