Geometric Snakes for Triangular Meshes
Feature detection is important in various mesh processing techniques, such as mesh editing, mesh morphing, mesh compression, and mesh signal processing. In spite of much research in computer vision, automatic feature detection even for images still remains a difficult problem. To avoid this difficulty, semi-automatic or interactive techniques for image feature detection have been investigated. In this paper, we propose a geometric snake as an interactive tool for feature detection on a 3D triangular mesh. A geometric snake is an extension of an image snake, which is an active contour model that slithers from its initial position specified by the user to a nearby feature while minimizing an energy functional. To constrain the movement of a geometric snake onto the surface of a mesh, we use the parameterization of the surrounding region of a geometric snake. Although the definition of a feature may vary among applications, we use the normal changes of faces to detect features on a mesh. Experimental results demonstrate that geometric snakes can successfully capture nearby features from user-specified initial positions.

title: Motif analysis of noisy regular textures
abstract: A regular texture contains a periodic arrangement of a determinable pattern. Motifs of a regular texture are the minimal parallelogrammic sub-regions that can reproduce the texture by tiling. A motif extracted from a regular texture can be used for texture reproduction, texture recognition, and texture compression. However, it is not simple to accurately capture a motif of a regular texture, as the motif may be non-rectangular or arranged in an arbitrary direction. Moreover, when the texture contains additive noises, such as are created by the scanning process, motif analysis becomes more difficult. In this paper, we present an algorithm to obtain a motif of a noisy regular texture in O( mn log mn ) time, where m × n is the size of the texture. The analysis examples demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can robustly derive motifs of noisy regular textures.

title: Feature sensitive mesh segmentation with mean shift
abstract: Feature sensitive mesh segmentation is important for many computer graphics and geometric modeling applications. In this paper, we develop a mesh segmentation method, which is capable of producing high-quality shape partitioning. It respects fine shape features and works well on various types of shapes, including natural shapes and mechanical parts. The method combines a procedure for clustering mesh normals with a modification of the mesh clarification technique. For clustering of mesh normals, we adopt Mean Shift, a powerful general purpose technique for clustering scattered data. We demonstrate advantages of our method by comparing it with two state-of-the-art mesh segmentation techniques.

title: Out-of-Core Remeshing of Large Polygonal Meshes
abstract: We propose an out-of-core method for creating semi-regular surface representations from large input surface meshes. Our approach is based on a streaming implementation of the MAPS remesher of Lee et al. Our remeshing procedure consists of two stages. First, a simplification process is used to obtain the base domain. During simplification, we maintain the mapping information between the input and the simplified meshes. The second stage of remeshing uses the mapping information to produce samples of the output semi-regular mesh. The out-of-core operation of our method is enabled by the synchronous streaming of a simplified mesh and the mapping information stored at the original vertices. The synchronicity of two streaming buffers is maintained using a specially designed write strategy for each buffer. Experimental results demonstrate the remeshing performance of the proposed method, as well as other applications that use the created mapping between the simplified and the original surface representations

title: Motion retargeting and evaluation for VR-based training of free motions
abstract: Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as one of the important and effective tools for education and training. Most VR-based training systems are situation based, where the trainees are trained for discrete decision making in special situations presented by the VR environments. In contrast, this paper discusses the application of VR to a different class of training, for learning free motion, often required in sports and the arts. We propose a VR-based motion-training framework that contains an intuitive motion-guiding interface, posture-oriented motion retargeting, and an evaluation and advice scheme for corrective feedback. Applications of the proposed framework to simple fencing training and a dance imitation game are demonstrated .

title: Mesh parameterization with a virtual boundary
abstract: Parameterization of a 3D triangular mesh is a fundamental problem in various applications of meshes. The convex combination approach is widely used for parameterization because of its good properties, such as fast computation and one-to-one embedding. However, the approach has a drawback: most boundary triangles have high distortion in the embedding compared with interior ones. In this paper, we present an extension of the convex combination approach that resolves the drawback by using a virtual boundary. Since the virtual boundary is fixed onto a given convex polygon instead of the real boundary, the real boundary triangles can better reflect the shape of the corresponding 3D triangles. The proposedapproach obtains a parameterization of a 3D mesh with less d istortion than with the original convex combination approach.

title: Handheld routers: intelligent bandwidth aggregation for mobile collaborative communities
abstract: Multi-homed, mobile wireless computing and communication devices can spontaneously form communities to logically combine and share the bandwidth of each other's wide-area communication links using inverse multiplexing. But membership in such a community can be highly dynamic, as devices and their associated WAN links randomly join and leave the community. We identify the issues and tradeoffs faced in designing a decentralized inverse multiplexing system in this challenging setting, and determine precisely how heterogeneous WAN links should be characterized, and when they should be added to, or deleted from, the shared pool. We then propose methods of choosing the appropriate channels on which to assign newly-arriving application flows. Using video traffic as a motivating example, we demonstrate how significant performance gains can be realized by adapting allocation of the shared WAN channels to specific application requirements. Our simulation and experimentation results show that collaborative bandwidth aggregation systems are, indeed, a practical and compelling means of achieving high-speed Internet access for groups of wireless computing devices beyond the reach of public or private access points.

title: Responsive Multimedia System for Virtual Storytelling
abstract: In this paper, we propose Responsive Multimedia System (RMS) for a virtual storytelling. It consists of three key components; Multi-modal Tangible User Interface (MTUI), a Unified Context-aware Application Model for Virtual Environments (vr-UCAM), and Virtual Environment Manager (VEManager). MTUI allows users to interact with virtual environments (VE) through human’s senses by exploiting tangible, haptic and vision-based interfaces. vr-UCAM decides reactions of VE according to multi-modal input. VEManager generates dynamic VE by applying the reactions and display it through 3D graphics and 3D sounds, etc. To demonstrate an effectiveness of the proposed system, we implemented a virtual storytelling system which unfolds a legend of Unju Temple. We believe the proposed system plays an important role in implementing various entertainment applications.

title: SILENT: serialized low energy transmission coding for on-chip interconnection networks
abstract: On-chip source-synchronous serial communication has many advantages over multi-bit parallel communication in the aspects of skew, crosstalk area cost, wiring difficulty, and clock synchronization. However, the serial wire tends to dissipate more energy than parallel bus due to the bit multiplexing. We propose a coding method to reduce the transmission energy of the serial communication by minimizing the number of transitions on the serial wire. We demonstrate the significant energy saving in a multimedia application, 3D graphics. We also apply the coding technique to a CMOS SoC implementation which integrates various processing units with packet switched on-chip networks.

title: An efficient lock protocol for home-based lazy release consistency
abstract: Home-based lazy release consistency (HLRC) shows poor performance on lock based applications because of two reasons: a whole page is fetched on a page fault while actual modification is much smaller; and a home is at the fixed location while the access pattern is migratory. We present an efficient lock protocol for HLRC. In this protocol, the pages that are expected to be used by the acquirer are selectively updated using diffs. The diff accumulation problem is minimized by limiting the size of diffs to be sent for each page. Our protocol reduces the number of page faults inside critical sections because pages can be updated by applying locally stored diffs. This reduction yields the reduction of average lock waiting time and the reduction of message amount. The experiment with five applications shows that our protocol archives 2%-40% speedup against base HLRC for four applications.

title: Video Data Indexing by 2D C-Trees
abstract: Video data contains a large amount of spatial and temporal information. The changes of video frames are quite useful for motion analysis and cannot be provided by other media easily. Chang et al. had proposed an effective 2D string approach for spatial indexing of image data. In this paper, we extend this iconic approach and apply it to video data indexing. We propose 2D C-trees to represent the spatial content within individual frames. A video sequence can then be represented and indexed by a temporal set or an ordering set of 2D C-trees. The similarity retrieval of video matching problem becomes the problem of video sequence matching by computing the similarity, or the minimum cost of matched frames. We present three schemes, full-sequence matching, segment matching and subsequence matching, for video information retrieval. The matching schemes can be modified and extended to approximate sequence matching by computing the partial distance for providing a comprehensive retrieval of video data. A prototype video information system is also developed to validate the effectiveness of video data indexing by 2D C-trees.