Image metamorphosis using snakes and free-form deformations
This paper presents new solutions to the following three problems in image morphing: feature specification, warp generation, and transition control. To reduce the burden of feature specification, we first adopt a computer vision technique called snakes. We next propose the use of multilevel free-form deformations (MFFD) to achieve -continuous and one-to-one warps among feature point pairs. The resulting technique, based on B-spline approximation, is simpler and faster than previous warp generation methods. Finally, we simplify the MFFD method to construct -continuous surfaces for deriving transition functions to control geometry and color blending.

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: 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: 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: Intelligent Multimedia Service System Based on Context Awareness in Smart Home
abstract: According to the rapid change of a computing environment, it is coming an age of ubiquitous computing that we can make use of information service at any time and anywhere as the paradigm of digital convergence such as broadcasting, communication, and appliances. Consequently, Smart Home environment is constructed in the house. Various services such as security/automation, health monitoring, medical examination and treatment, entertainment, education, and e-business are realized at home. Both affective, systematic managements and services that correspond with the above environment are required inmultimedia services as well. In this paper, we propose a Intelligent Multimedia Service System(IMSS) based on context awareness in Smart Home which provides multimedia interoperability among incompatible multimedia play devices, intelligently processes context awareness information, transparent, and provides safe services.

title: A filter bank approach to independent component analysis for convolved mixtures
abstract: We present a filter bank approach to perform independent component analysis (ICA) for convolved mixtures. Input signals are split into subband signals and subsampled. A simplified network performs ICA on the subsampled signals, and finally independent components are synthesized. The proposed approach achieves superior performance than the frequency domain approach and faster convergence with less computational complexity than the time domain approach. Furthermore, it requires shorter unmixing filter length and less computational complexity than other filter bank approaches by designing efficient filter banks. Also, a method is proposed to resolve the permutation and scaling problems of the filter bank approach.

title: Adaptive prefetching technique for shared virtual memory
abstract: Though shared virtual memory (SVM) systems promise low cost solutions for high performance computing, they suffer from long memory latencies. These latencies are usually caused by repetitive invalidation on shared data. Since shared data are accessed through synchronizations and the patterns by which threads synchronize are repetitive, a prefetching scheme based on such repetitiveness would reduce memory latencies. Based on this observation, we propose a prefetching technique which predicts future access behavior by analyzing access history per synchronization variable. Our technique was evaluated on an 8-node SVM system using the SPLASH-2 benchmark. The results show that our technique could achieve 34%-45% reduction in memory access latencies.

title: American sign language recognition in game development for deaf children
abstract: ASL) game, which uses gesture recognition technology to help young deaf children practice ASL skills. We describe a brief history of the game, an overview of recent user studies, and the results of recent work on the problem of continuous, user-independent sign language recognition in classroom settings. Our database of signing samples was collected from user studies of deaf children playing aWizard of Oz version of the game at the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf (AASD). Our data set is characterized by disfluencies inherent in continuous signing, varied user characteristics including clothing and skin tones, and illumination changes in the classroom. The dataset consisted of 541 phrase samples and 1,959 individual sign samples of five children signing game phrases from a 22 word vocabulary. Our recognition approach uses color histogram adaptation for robust hand segmentation and tracking. The children wear small colored gloves with wireless accelerometers mounted on the back of their wrists. The hand shape information is combined with accelerometer data and used to train hidden Markov models for recognition. We evaluated our approach by using leave-one-out validation; this technique iterates through each child, training on data from four children and testing on the remaining child's data. We achieved average word accuracies per child ranging from 91.75% to 73.73% for the user-independent models.

title: 3D Medical Volume Reconstruction Using Web Services
abstract: We address the problem of 3D medical volume reconstruction using Web services. The use of proposed Web services is motivated by the fact that the problem of 3D medical volume reconstruction requires significant computer resources and human expertise in medical and computer science areas. Web services were implemented as an additional layer to a dataflow framework called data to knowledge. In the collaboration between UIC and NCSA, pre-processed input images at NCSA were made accessible to medical collaborators for registration. Every time medical collaborators inspected images and selected corresponding features for registration, the Web server at NCSA was contacted and the registration processing query was executed using the image to knowledge library of registration methods. Co-registered frames were returned for verification by medical collaborators in a new window. This paper presents 3D volume reconstruction problem requirements, architecture of the developed prototype system and the tradeoffs of our system design.