7719537
Measuring Fingertip Forces by Imaging the Fingernail
This paper presents an external camera method for measuring fingertip forces by imaging the fingernail and surrounding skin. This method is an alternative to the photoplethysmograph sensor originally developed by one of the authors. A 3D model of the fingernail surface and skin is obtained with a stereo camera and laser striping system. Subsequent images from a single camera are registered to the 3D model by adding fiducial markings to the fingernail. Calibration results with a force sensor show that the measurement range depends on the region of the fingernail and skin. A Bayesian method is developed to predict fingertip force given coloration changes. Preliminary accuracy results for normal and shear force measurement are presented. In comparison to the results using the photoplethysmograph fingernail sensor, our results are more accurate and double the range of forces that can be transduced, all the way up to the saturation level.
2008945
Finger Force Direction Recognition by Principal Component Analysis of Fingernail Coloration Pattern
A method based on principal component analysis of the fingernail coloration pattern is presented to infer fingertip force direction during planar contact. Images from 7 subjects were registered and normalized to each other. Results show that the fingernail coloration patterns are similar for the 7 subjects, but the feature centroids vary. It is concluded that there are common features for all people. But accurate detection of fingertip force direction requires individually calibrated centroids
2615609
EigenNail for Finger Force Direction Recognition
This paper presents a technique termed eigennails to classify fingertip force during contact based on the coloration patterns in the fingernail and surrounding skin. Fingertip force is classified into six directions: no force, normal force only, two directions (left/right) of lateral shear force, and two directions (forward/backward) of longitudinal shear forces. Based on the face recognition technique eigenfaces, a small number of eigennails are sufficient to express the color pattern features for shear force direction classification. Results show that 98% of 960 fingernail images of 8 different subjects are correctly classified. The lowest imaging resolution without sacrificing classification accuracy is found to be 10-by-10.
16703712
Design of an e-book user interface and visualizations to support reading for comprehension
Current e-Book browsers provide minimal support for comprehending the organization, narrative structure, and themes, of large complex books. In order to build an understanding of such books, readers should be provided with user interfaces that present, and relate, the organizational, narrative and thematic structures. We propose adapting information retrieval techniques for the purpose of discovering these structures, and sketch three distinctive visualizations for presenting these structures to the e-Book reader. These visualizations are presented within an initial design for an e-Book browser.
16523105
Region-based rate control and bit allocation for wireless video transmission
In this paper, we propose a joint source-channel region-based rate control algorithm for real-time video transmissions over wireless systems. During the video transmission, the channel throughput available to the video encoder in the wireless systems is inherently variable, due to the retransmission of the error packets using the automatic repeat request (ARQ) error control. The variable data rate of the wireless system is characterized by the packet-level Gilbert two-state Markov Model, the parameters of which are extracted from the statistical properties of the channel information obtained from the wireless channel simulator. The proposed algorithm adopts a fast but effective block-based segmentation method to extract the regions of interest. Unlike traditional bit allocation methods used in the region/content-based rate control, the algorithm exploits the most effective criteria "coding qualities" as quantitative factors to directly control bit allocation among different regions so as to achieve better visual quality in the regions of interest. The computational complexity of the algorithm is low making it suitable for real-time applications. Compared with the MPEG-4 rate control algorithm, our algorithm can effectively enhance the perceptual quality for the regions of interest and significantly reduce the number of frame skipping; thereby, improve the smoothness of the video.
14951106
A grid-based system for microbial genome comparison and analysis
Genome comparison and analysis can reveal the structures and junctions of genome sequences of different species. As more genomes are sequenced, genomic data sources are rapidly increasing such that their analysis is beyond the processing capabilities of most research institutes. The grid is a powerful solution to support large-scale genomic data processing and genome analysis. This paper presents the Microbase project that is developing a grid-based system for genome comparison and analysis, and discusses the first implementation of the system (called MicrobaseLite). MicrobaseLite uses a scalable computing environment to support computationally intensive microbial genome comparison and analysis, employing state-of-the-art technologies of Web services, notification, comparative genomics and parallel computing. Microbase will support not only system-defined genome comparison and analysis but also user-defined, remotely conceived genome analysis.
14112050
Distributed particle simulation method on adaptive collaborative system
Abstract This paper presents a distributed N-body method based on an adaptive collaborative system model. The collaborative system is formed by the distributed objects on a distributed system. The system can be reconfigured during the computation to fully utilize the computing power of the networked hosts. The method is implemented in Java and RMI to support distributed computing in heterogeneous environment. A distributed tree structure is designed for communication-efficient computation of N-body method. The performance test shows satisfactory speedup and portability of the method on both homogeneous and heterogeneous clusters. The collaborative system model can be used in various applications and it is expandable to wide-area environment.
17387040
Automated judgment of document qualities
The authors report on a series of experiments to automate the assessment of document qualities such as depth and objectivity. The primary purpose is to develop a quality-sensitive functionality, orthogonal to relevance, to select documents for an interactive question-answering system. The study consisted of two stages. In the classifier construction stage, nine document qualities deemed important by information professionals were identified and classifiers were developed to predict their values. In the confirmative evaluation stage, the performance of the developed methods was checked using a different document collection. The quality prediction methods worked well in the second stage. The results strongly suggest that the best way to predict document qualities automatically is to construct classifiers on a person-by-person basis.