2441510
Interactive Rendering of Deforming NURBS Surfaces
The non-uniform rational B-splines (NURBS) has been widely accepted a s a standard tool f or geometry representation and design. Its r ich g eometric properties allow it t o represent both analytic shapes and free-form curves and surfaces precisely. Moreover, a set of tools is available for shape modification or more implicitly, object deformation. Existing NURBS rendering methods include de Boor algorithm, Oslo algorithm, Shantz’s adaptive forward differencing algorithm and Silbermann’s high speed implementation o f NURBS. However, these methods consider only speeding u p the rendering p rocess of individual f rames. Recently, Kumar et al. proposed an incremental method for rendering NURBS surfaces, but it is still limited to static surfaces. In realtime applications such a s virtual reality, interactive display is needed. If a virtual environment contains a lot of deforming objects, these methods cannot provide a good solution. In this paper, we propose an efficient method for interactive rendering of deformable objects by maintaining a polygon model of each d eforming NURBS surface and a daptively refining the resolution o f the polygon model. We also look at how this method may be applied to multi-resolution modelling.
17558341
Adaptive partitioning for multi-server distributed virtual environments
A distributed virtual environment (DVE) allows users at different geographical locations to share information and interact within a common virtual environment (VE) via a local network or through the Internet. However, when the number of users exploring the VE increases, the server will quickly become the bottleneck. To enable good performance, we are currently developing a multi-server DVE prototype. In this paper, we describe an adaptive data partitioning technique to dynamically partition the whole VE into regions. All objects within each region will be managed by a single server. As the loading of the servers changes, we show how it can be redistributed while minimizing the communication cost. Our initial results show that the proposed adaptive partitioning technique significantly improves the performance of the overall system.
8615414
Collaborative distributed virtual sculpting
A lot of effort is now being put into developing collaborative distributed virtual environments. However very few projects address collaborative virtual sculpting in which the shapes of the target objects are likely changing continuously. Some major issues including user interaction, data transmission, concurrent object editing by multiple clients and rendering of deforming objects must be addressed in a real-time context. We propose a framework for collaborative virtual sculpting in a distributed virtual environment. The system is based on a hybrid model which merges the client-server and the peer-to-peer architectures to allow fast data replication. To support real-time deformation and rendering of deformable objects, we model each of these objects using NURBS surfaces and render them using the real-time deformable NURBS rendering method that we have developed. We present a data structure for the transmission of these deformable objects. We also introduce the idea of editing region and the corresponding locking mechanism for simultaneous editing of the same object by multiple clients. Toward the end of the paper we show some performance results of the prototype system.
6487445
Incremental rendering of deformable trimmed NURBS surfaces
Trimmed NURBS surfaces are often used to model smooth and complex objects. Unfortunately, most existing hardware graphics accelerators cannot render them directly. Although there are a lot of methods proposed to accelerate the rendering of such surfaces, majority of them are based on tessellation, which is developed primarily for handling non-deforming objects. For an object that may deform in run-time, such as clothing, facial expression, human and animal character, the tessellation process will need to be performed repeatedly while the object is deforming. However, as the tessellation process is very time consuming, interactive display of deforming objects is difficult. This explains why deformable objects are rarely used in virtual reality applications. In this paper, we present a efficient method for incremental rendering of deformable trimmed NURBS surfaces. This method can handle both trimmed surface deformation and trimming curve deformation. Experimental results show that our method performs significantly faster than the method used in OpenGL.
6484880
Spatio-temporal aggregation using sketches
Several spatio-temporal applications require the retrieval of summarized information about moving objects that lie in a query region during a query interval (e.g., the number of mobile users covered by a cell, traffic volume in a district, etc.). Existing solutions have the distinct counting problem: if an object remains in the query region for several timestamps during the query interval, it will be counted multiple times in the result. We solve this problem by integrating spatio-temporal indexes with sketches, traditionally used for approximate query processing. The proposed techniques can also be applied to reduce the space requirements of conventional spatio-temporal data and to mine spatio-temporal association rules.
13941129
Compiler-directed thermal management for VLIW functional units
As processors, memories, and other components of today's embedded systems are pushed to higher performance in more enclosed spaces, processor thermal management is quickly becoming a limiting design factor. While previous proposals mostly approached this thermal management problem from circuit and architecture angles, software can also play an important role in identifying and eliminating thermal hotspots as it is the main factor that shapes the order and frequency of accesses to different hardware components in the chip. This is particularly true for compiler-scheduled Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) datapath.In this paper, we focus on a compiler-based approach to make the thermal profile more balanced in the integer functional units of VLIW architectures. For balanced thermal behavior and peak temperature minimization, we propose techniques based on load balancing across the integer functional units with or without rotation of functional unit usage. As leakage power is exponentially dependent on temperature and temperature is dependent on total power (i.e., switching and leakage), in our techniques, we also consider leakage power optimization by IPC tuning (instructions issued per cycle). By taking a code that is already scheduled for maximum performance as input, our scheduling strategies modify this performance-oriented schedule for balanced thermal behavior with negligible performance degradation. We simulate our scheduling strategies using a framework that consists of the Trimaran infrastructure, a power model, and the HotSpot. Our experimental results using several benchmark programs reveal that the peak temperature can be reduced through compiler scheduling.
35956760
Analysis of recursive feature elimination methods
Recursive feature elimination using SVM (SVM-RFE) has become an effective approach in selecting predictive features. For example, [1] found 8 genes from 7,000 for cancer prediction using SVM-RFE. It is not well understood, however, whether the success of SVM-RFE comes from the recursive process or the choice of the classifier? And, more generally, what property of a classifier would make it successful in RFE? We answer this question by examining multiple classifiers (SVM, ridge regression (RR) and Rocchio) with feature selection in recursive and non-recursive settings, on two DNA microarray datasets and a text categorization benchmark dataset (Reuters-21578).
11230966
Robust Aggregation in Sensor Networks
In the emerging area of sensor-based systems, a significant challenge is to develop scalable, fault-tolerant methods to extract useful information from the data the sensors collect. An approach to this data management problem is the use of sensor “database” systems, which allow users to perform aggregation queries on the readings of a sensor network. Due to power and range constraints, centralized approaches are generally impractical, so most systems use in-network aggregation to reduce network traffic. However, these aggregation strategies become bandwidthintensive when combined with the fault-tolerant, multi-path routing methods often used in these environments. In order to avoid this expense, we investigate the use of approximate in-network aggregation using small sketches and we survey robust and scalable methods for computing duplicate-sensitive aggregates.
15048202
Protection and guarantee for voice and video traffic in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs
In order to support multimedia applications such as voice and video over the wireless medium, a contention-based channel access function, called enhanced distributed coordination function (EDCF), is being developed in the emerging standard IEEE 802.11e. In EDCF, differentiated services are provided for different traffic classes. In this paper, we propose a two-level protection and guarantee mechanism for voice and video traffic in IEEE 802.11e wireless LANs. In the first-level protection, the existing voice and video flows are protected from the new and other existing voice and video flows. In the second-level protection, the voice and video flows are protected from the best-effort data traffic. For each protection level, a couple of protection mechanisms are proposed. Extensive simulation results show that the proposed two-level protection and guarantee mechanism is very effective in terms of protecting and guaranteeing existing voice and video flows as well as fully utilizing the channel capacity