Discrete surface modelling using partial differential equations
We use various nonlinear partial differential equations to efficiently solve several surface modelling problems, including surface blending, N-sided hole filling and free-form surface fitting. The nonlinear equations used include two second order flows, two fourth order flows and two sixth order flows. These nonlinear equations are discretized based on discrete differential geometry operators. The proposed approach is simple, efficient and gives very desirable results, for a range of surface models, possibly having sharp creases and corners.

title: Directional smoothing of triangular meshes
abstract: In this paper, we propose a so-called directional smoothing method based mean curvature flow. The selection of the diffusion direction is based on the descent of some energy functional. We show that the directional diffusion flow is volume-preserving. Based on the local directional diffusion flow, we present a feature-preserving smoothing method. Finally, we provide a series of examples to graphically demonstrate the quality of our results.

title: Smooth Shell Construction with Mixed Prism Fat Surfaces
abstract: Several naturally occurring as well as manufactured objects have shell like structures, that is their boundaries consist of surfaces with thickness. In an earlier paper, we have provided a reconstruction algorithm for such shell structures using smooth fat surfaces within three-sided prisms. In this paper, we extend the approach to a scaffolding consisting of three and four-sided prisms. Within each prism the constructed function is converted to a spline representation. In addition to the adaptive feature of our earlier scheme, the new scheme has the following extensions: (a) four sided fat patches are employed; (b) the size of individual fat patches are bigger; (c) fairing techniques are combined to obtain nicely shaped fat surfaces.

title: Spline Approximations of Real Algebraic Surfaces
abstract: We use a combination of both symbolic and numerical techniques to construct several degree boundedG0andG1continuous, piecewise spline approximations of real implicit algebraic surfaces for both computer graphics and geometric modeling. These approximations are based upon an adaptive triangulation (aG0planar approximation) of the real components of the algebraic surface, and include both singular points and singular curves on the surface. A curvilinear wireframe is also constructed using minimum bending energy, parametric curves with additionally normals varying along them. The spline approximations over the triangulation or curvilinear wireframe could be one of several forms: either low degree, implicit algebraic splines (triangular A-patches) or multivariate functional B-splines (B-patches) or standardized rational Bernstein?Bezier patches (RBB), or triangular rational B-Splines. The adaptive triangulation is additionally useful for a rapid display and animation of the implicit surface.

title: Fast evaluation of the improved Loop's subdivision surfaces
abstract: For obtaining better curvature distributions of subdivision surfaces, various improvements for Loop's subdivision scheme (C. Loop, 1987) on triangular surface meshes have been made. A careful analysis shows that the fast evaluation technique of the subdivision surface proposed by Stam is no longer usable to these improved schemes. This paper describes a fast evaluating algorithm for improved Loop's subdivision surfaces. The algorithm is applicable to a vast class of subdivision schemes for triangular surface meshes. Using the proposed algorithm, one can evaluate the subdivision surface at any domain point for any set of input subdivision masks and a control mesh.

title: Automatic reconstruction of surfaces and scalar fields from 3D scans
abstract: We present an efficient and uniform approach for the automatic reconstruction of surfaces of CAD (computer aided design) models and scalar fields defined on them, from an unorganized collection of scanned point data. A possible application is the rapid computer model reconstruction of an existing part or prototype from a three dimensional (3D) points scan of its surface. Color, texture or some scalar material property of the physical part, define natural scalar fields over the surface of the CAD model. Our reconstruction algorithm does not impose any convexity or differentiability restrictions on the surface of the original physical part or the scalar field function, except that it assumes that there is a sufficient sampling of the input point data to unambiguously reconstruct the CAD model. Compared to earlier methods our algorithm has the advantages of simplicity, efficiency and uniformity (both CAD model and scalar field reconstruction). The simplicity and efficiency of our approach is based on several novel uses of appropriate sub-structures (alpha shapes) of a three-dimensional Delaunay Triangulation, its dual the three-dimensional Voronoi diagram, and dual uses of trivariate Bernstein-Bezier forms. The boundary of the CAD model is modeled using implicit cubic Bernstein-Bezier patches, while the scalar field is reconstructed with functional cubic Bernstein-Bezier patches.

title: Error analysis of pure rotation-based self-calibration
abstract: Self-calibration using pure rotation is a well-known technique and has been shown to be a reliable means for recovering intrinsic camera parameters. However, in practice, it is virtually impossible to ensure that the camera motion for this type of self-calibration is a pure rotation. In this paper, we present an error analysis of recovered intrinsic camera parameters due to the presence of translation. We derived closed-form error expressions for a single pair of images with nondegenerate motion; for multiple rotations for which there are no closed-form solutions, analysis was done through repeated experiments. Among others, we show that translation-independent solutions do exist under certain practical conditions. Our analysis can be used to help choose the least error-prone approach (if multiple approaches exist) for a given set of conditions.

title: Subject-independent natural action recognition
abstract: A primitive-based dynamic Bayesian networks are proposed for subject-independent natural action recognition. Inferred by high-level knowledge, primitives are distinctive features that describe the context information and the motion information representing human action as well as pose. Dynamic Bayesian networks could fuse multi-information so that many kinds of weak information could function as strong information for inference. The experimental results show that primitive-based dynamic Bayesian networks not only increase the recognition rate but also improve the robustness.

title: Multi-cue-based face and facial feature detection on video segments
abstract: An approach is presented to detect faces and facial features on a video segment based on multi-cues, including gray-level distribution, color, motion, templates, algebraic features and so on. Faces are first detected across the frames by using color segmentation, template matching and artificial neural network. A PCA-based (Principal Component Analysis) feature detector for still images is then used to detect facial features on each single frame until the resulting features of three adjacent frames, named as base frames, are consistent with each other. The features of frames neighboring the base frames are first detected by the still-image feature detector, then verified and corrected according to the smoothness constraint and the planar surface motion constraint. Experiments have been performed on video segments captured under different environments, and the presented method is proved to be robust and accurate over variable poses, ages and illumination conditions.

title: VISATRAM: a real-time vision system for automatic traffic monitoring
abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to automatic traffic monitoring using 2D spatio-temporal images. A TV camera is mounted above a highway to monitor the traffic through two slice windows, and a panoramic view image and an epipolar plane image are formed for each lane. Our real-time vision system for automatic traffic monitoring, VISATRAM, is an inexpensive system with a PC486 and a frame grabber. The system cannot only count vehicles and estimate their speeds but also classify them using 3D measurements. The system has been tested with real road images under various light conditions, including shadows in daytime and lights at night.

title: A probabilistic dynamic contour model for accurate and robust lip tracking
abstract: In this paper a new condensation style contour tracking method called probabilistic dynamic contour (PDC) is proposed for lip tracking: a novel mixture dynamic model is designed to represent shape more compactly and to tolerate larger motions between frames, a measurement model is designed to include multiple visual cues. The proposed PDC tracker has the advantage that it is conceptually general but effectively suitable for lip tracking with the designed dynamic and measurement model. The new tracker improves the traditional condensation style tracker in three aspects: Firstly, the dynamic model is partially derived from the image sequence, so the tracker does not need to learn the dynamics in advance. Secondly, the measurement model is easy to be updated during tracking, which avoids modeling the foreground object in prior. Thirdly, to improve the tracker's speed, a compact representation of shape and a noise model are proposed to reduce the samples required to represent the posterior distribution. An experiment on lip contour tracking shows that the proposed method tracks contours robustly as well as accurately compared to the existing tracking method.