Building large-format displays for digital libraries
COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM May 2001/Vol. 44, No. 5 57 Digital libraries house media of ever-increasing complexity, from models of statues to virtual archeological landscapes. Future digital archives will only increase in resolution and complexity as acquisition hardware improves and data becomes more intricate. Although digital content is constantly improving, the typical display device (the desktop monitor) remains relatively unchanged. The problem is the spatial resolution and color quality of digital media surpasses the display real estate of typical monitors. It is common for objects such as artwork and manuscripts to be digitized at a much higher resolution than can be displayed on even the best monitors. This forces the data to be down-sampled, or restricts viewing to selected regions of interest at a time. Even with improved resolution, small display areas are often less than compelling. For example, the high-resolution facsimile of Michelangelo’s 17-foot statue of David [4] is somewhat less spectacular when displayed on a high-resolution 20-inch monitor. The simple fact is monitors have become under-powered technologies for the visualization capabilities now needed to fully appreciate digital archives. The immediate reaction is to enlist the help of large-format displays for visualization available as video walls, domes, and immersive environments such as the CAVE. These environments provide a compelling sense of presence and help break the “window on worlds” paradigm. Unfortunately, these technologies also present serious challenges that limit their accessibility and usefulness to a small number of institutions. Of primary concern is the cost. Initial costs of projectors, rendering hardware, and subsequent recurring operational expenses are fiscally prohibitive. A second concern is the renovation necessary for installing a large-format display system. Because most systems rely on mechanically aligned projectors and rigidly constructed display surfaces, room modification and projection surface infrastructure are necessary. An additional difficulty is the complexity of continuous operation. These systems are not for novice users and can quickly become unusable without expert maintenance and tuning. Our goal is to bring large-format displays to the digital library community by breaking down the barriers that make them expensive and difficult to set up and run. We are attacking the price/performance barrier by engineering displays built entirely from commodity components and assembled in a scalable configuration. Specifically, commodity light projectors, unlike monitors, can be positioned collectively to form a single logical desktop . Inexpensive video cards can perform at the level required to drive a projector. Groups of PCs, each driving a projector and communicating via a local area network, are inexpensive and powerful [2, 6]. While the physical alignment of projectors creates a very compelling display, it is tedious and requires major effort. Within the digital library community, where libraries must operate and maintain equipment, it is important to enable novice technicians to build up and maintain a display by a more casual placement of projectors. Michael S. Brown, W. Brent Seales, Stephen B. Webb, and Christopher O. Jaynes { {

title: A practical and flexible tiled display system
abstract: Computer graphics and high-resolution digital imagery are becoming increasingly pervasive in communities not traditionally associated with graphics. Commodity graphics cards and digital cameras, along with powerful modeling software, allow organizations such as libraries, museums, and small businesses to produce expressive and realistic computer generated imagery, far surpassing the capabilities of current desktop monitors. What remains elusive to these groups is access to affordable and easy to use large format display technology. We present a practical system for deploying flexible projector based tiled displays. Our framework integrates two key components: (1) self-calibrating display geometry with real-time geometric correction and (2) PC-based distributed rendering that supports an established graphics API. Our system's display geometry is easy to configure and reconfigure, accommodates casually tiled projectors and arbitrary display surfaces, and can be operational in a matter of minutes. In addition, the underlying distributed rendering architecture (WireGL) is transparent to existing OpenGL applications, requiring no custom APIs or re-compilation of existing OpenGL executables. In short, we present a practical and flexible low-cost tiled display system that is simple to deploy and easy to operate.

title: Correcting common distortions in camera-imaged library materials
abstract: We present a technique to correct image distortion that can occur when library materials are imaged by cameras. Our approach provides a general framework to undo a variety of common distortions, including binder curl, fold distortion, and combinations of the two. Our algorithm is described and demonstrated on several examples.

title: Beyond 2D images: effective 3D imaging for library materials
abstract: Significant efforts are being made to digitize rare and valuable library materials, with the goal of providing patrons and historians digital facsimiles that capture the "look and feel" of the original materials. This is often done by digitally photographing the materials and making high resolution 2D images available. The underlying assumption is that the objects are flat. However, older materials may not be flat in practice, being warped and crinkled due to decay, neglect, accident and the passing of time. In such cases, 2D imaging is insufficient to capture the "look and feel" of the original. For these materials, 3D acquisition is necessary to create a realistic facsimile. This paper outlines a technique for capturing an accurate 3D representation of library materials which can be integrated directly into current digitization setups. This will allow digitization efforts to provide patrons with more realistic digital facsimile of library materials.

title: PixelFlex: a reconfigurable multi-projector display system
abstract: This paper presents PixelFlex - a spatially reconfigurable multi-projector display system. The PixelFlex system is composed of ceiling-mounted projectors, each with computer-controlled pan, tilt, zoom and focus; and a camera for closed-loop calibration. Working collectively, these controllable projectors function as a single logical display capable of being easily modified into a variety of spatial formats of differing pixel density, size and shape. New layouts are automatically calibrated within minutes to generate the accurate warping and blending functions needed to produce seamless imagery across planar display surfaces, thus giving the user the flexibility to quickly create, save and restore multiple screen configurations. Overall, PixelFlex provides a new level of automatic reconfigurability and usage, departing from the static, one-size-fits-all design of traditional large-format displays. As a front-projection system, PixelFlex can be installed in most environments with space constraints and requires little or no post-installation mechanical maintenance because of the closed-loop calibration.

title: Incorporating Geometric Registration With Pc-Cluster Rendering For Flexible Tiled Displays
abstract: We describe a display system that automatically registers an array of casually positioned projectors and drives the display with a PC cluster. The display system uses a camera to compute the necessary transformations to geometrically align multiple overlapping projectors. Geometric alignment is realized through real-time corrective warping applied in the rendering pipeline. This combination of camera-aided display alignment with the PC-cluster rendering engine provides a display system that is easy to configure and reconfigure, accommodates casually tiled projectors and arbitrary display surfaces, and can be operational in a very short period of time.

title: Visualization in Scientific Computing
abstract: Publisher Summary Computational science and engineering (CSE it enables them to analyze the data to uncover new information. Computational scientists rely upon a host of high-volume data sources in order to conduct their research. However, they are deluged by the flood of data generated. Using an exclusively numerical format, the human brain cannot interpret gigabytes of data each day, so much information now goes to waste. It is impossible for users to ever quantitatively examine more than a tiny fraction of the solution; that is, it is impossible to investigate the qualitative global nature of numeric solutions. Therefore, the ability to visualize complex computations and simulations is absolutely essential to ensure the integrity of analyses, to provoke insights, and to communicate those insights with others. The chapter focuses on visualization. It is a method of computing that gives visual form to complex data. The growing importance of CS&E, especially with supercomputer capabilities, is creating a commensurate need for more sophisticated visual representations of natural phenomena across time. This requires the development of new tool sets for image generation, visual communication, and analysis. The chapter discusses examples of scientific-visualization for facilitating CS&E research specifically in the fields of planetary sciences, molecular modeling, mathematics, and medical Imaging. The chapter also highlights the current limitations and bottlenecks in visualization technology, focusing on software limitations, data management limitation, hardware limitations, educational limitations, and communication and publication limitation.

title: Visualization of the Interaction of Multiple Sclerosis Lesions with Adjacent White Matter Fibers Using Streamtubes and Streamsurfaces
abstract: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic disease of the central nervous system that predominantly affects young adults during their most productive years. Pathologically, MS is characterized by the presence of areas of demyelination and T-cell predominant perivascular inflammation in the brain white matter. In order to study the effect of MS lesion on the white matter, we acquire diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data on MS patients and employ streamtubes and streamsurfaces to visualize the DTI data. We also register structural data sets with DTI data sets and generate isosurfaces of the MS lesions and the ventricles. The simultaneous visualization of all the models has the potential to elucidate the complex relationship between the MS lesions, the white matter neural fibers and the affected gray matter regions.

title: 3D Model Acquisition by Tracking 2D Wireframes
abstract: This paper presents a semi-automatic wireframe acquisition system. The system uses real-time (25Hz) tracking of a user specified 2D wireframe and intermittent camera pose parameters to accumulate 3D position information. The 2D tracking framework enables the application of model-based constraints in an intuitive way which interacts naturally with the Kalman filter formulation used. In particular, this is used to introduce feedback from the current 3D shape estimate to improve the robustness of the 2D tracking. The scheme allows wireframe models of simple edge based objects to be built in around 5 minutes.

title: Small Subunit Ribosomal RNA Modeling Using Stochastic Context-Free Grammars
abstract: We introduce a model based on stochastic context-free grammars (SCFGs) that can construct small subunit ribosomal RNA (SSU rRNA) multiple alignments. The method takes into account both primary sequence and secondary structure basepairing interactions. We show that this method produces multiple alignments of quality close to hand edited ones and outperforms several other methods. We also introduce a method of SCFG constraints that dramatically reduces the required computer resources needed to effectively use SCFGs on large problems such as SSU rRNA. Without such constraints, the required computer resources are infeasible for most computers. This work has applications to fields such as phylogenetic tree construction.

title: An Interactive Environment for Literate Programming