6073358
Non-photorealistic virtual environments
We describe a system for non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) of virtual environments. In real time, it synthesizes imagery of architectural interiors using stroke-based textures. We address the four main challenges of such a system — interactivity, visual detail, controlled stroke size, and frame-to-frame coherence — through image based rendering (IBR) methods. In a preprocessing stage, we capture photos of a real or synthetic environment, map the photos to a coarse model of the environment, and run a series of NPR filters to generate textures. At runtime, the system re-renders the NPR textures over the geometry of the coarse model, and it adds dark lines that emphasize creases and silhouettes. We provide a method for constructing non-photorealistic textures from photographs that largely avoids seams in the resulting imagery. We also offer a new construction, art-maps, to control stroke size across the images. Finally, we show a working system that provides an immersive experience rendered in a variety of NPR styles.
16400135
Adaptive grid-based document layout
Grid-based page designs are ubiquitous in commercially printed publications, such as newspapers and magazines. Yet, to date, no one has invented a good way to easily and automatically adapt such designs to arbitrarily-sized electronic displays. The difficulty of generalizing grid-based designs explains the generally inferior nature of on-screen layouts when compared to their printed counterparts, and is arguably one of the greatest remaining impediments to creating on-line reading experiences that rival those of ink on paper. In this work, we present a new approach to adaptive grid-based document layout, which attempts to bridge this gap. In our approach, an adaptive layout style is encoded as a set of grid-based templates that know how to adapt to a range of page sizes and other viewing conditions. These templates include various types of layout elements (such as text, figures, etc.) and define, through constraint-based relationships, just how these elements are to be laid out together as a function of both the properties of the content itself, such as a figure's size and aspect ratio, and the properties of the viewing conditions under which the content is being displayed. We describe an XML-based representation for our templates and content, which maintains a clean separation between the two. We also describe the various parts of our research prototype system: a layout engine for formatting the page; a paginator for determining a globally optimal allocation of content amongst the pages, as well as an optimal pairing of templates with content; and a graphical user interface for interactively creating adaptive templates. We also provide numerous examples demonstrating the capabilities of this prototype, including this paper, itself, which has been laid out with our system.
11363507
An efficient method of volume rendering for medical slices
The volume rendering method uses a special light source, slit-light source, to illuminate the volume and simulates the interactions of light with objects, such as light absorption, scattering and reflection. In comparison with previous methods, our method has several advantages. This includes flexibility for implementation, efficiency for computation, high reality for display and easiness of parallelization. The algorithm can be parallelized easily either using the data space subdivision method or the image space subdivision method. We describe some experimental results of applying our method to several sets of MRI and CT slices of human heads, which show the effectiveness of our method.<<ETX>>
2550376
LDV Remote Voice Acquisition and Enhancement
Laser Doppler vibrometers (LDVs) have been widely used in industry inspection. One of the superior characteristics of an LDV is that it can detect and measure extremely tiny vibration of a target at a large distance, with sensitivity on the order of 1 mum/s. On the other hand, we have found that most objects nearby audio sources can be vibrated by the audio waves. These two aspects motivate our research in a new application of the LDVs, namely remote voice detection from surrounding vibrated objects. However, the detected speech signals may be corrupted by many noise sources, such as laser photon noises, target movements, and background acoustic noises (wind, engine sound, etc.). Therefore, speech enhancement algorithms based on Gaussian bandpass and Wiener filters are designed to effectively improve the intelligibility of the noisy voice signals detected by the LDV system. Experimental results show that remote voice detection via an LDV is very promising, when choosing appropriate targets close to human subjects and using the proposed enhancement techniques
8035776
Semantic Integration in Heterogeneous Databases Using Neural Networks
One important step in integrating heterogeneous databases is matching equivalent attributes: Determining which fields in two databases refer to the same data. The meaning of information may be embodied within a. database model, a conceptual schema, application programs, or data contents. Integration involves extracting semantics, expressing them as metadata, and matching semantically equivalent data elements. We present a procedure using a classifier to categorize attributes according to their field specifications and data values, then train a neural network to recognize similar attributes. In our technique, the knowledge of how to match equivalent data elements is “discovered” from metadata , not “pre-programmed”.
14087384
Rapid development of Hindi named entity recognition using conditional random fields and feature induction
This paper describes our application of conditional random fields with feature induction to a Hindi named entity recognition task. With only five days development time and little knowledge of this language, we automatically discover relevant features by providing a large array of lexical tests and using feature induction to automatically construct the features that most increase conditional likelihood. In an effort to reduce overfitting, we use a combination of a Gaussian prior and early stopping based on the results of 10-fold cross validation.
15110406
Grid Service Agents for Real Time Traffic Synchronization
Grid Service Agents for Real Time Traffic Synchronization is proposed in this research. The paper presents Air Traffic Flow Management (ATFM) problem and its synchronization property. For such a complex problem, using grid computing with multi-agent coordination and negotiation techniques to improve ATFM computational efficiency is the main objective of actual even further research. To demonstrate the developed model - Air Traffic Flow Management in Grid Computing (ATFMGC), the grid architecture, the basic components and relationships among them are described. At the same time, the function of agents, their knowledge representation and inference processes are also discussed. As an example, a tactical planning case study related with some Brazilian airports is illustrated.