Feature-based surface light field morphing
A surface light field is a function that gives the colors of each object point viewed from different directions. Object representation with a surface light field provides a nice structure for 3D photography. This paper presents a feature-based morphing technique for two objects equipped with surface light fields. The technique consists of geometry morphing and in-between light field mapping. Geometry morphing is accomplished by 3D mesh morphing, where we introduce a vertex merging technique to generate a simpler metamesh. In in-between light field mapping, an in-between object is rendered by extracting necessary fragments from input surface light fields. We also propose an acceleration technique for rendering an in-between object. Experimental results with real and synthetic data show natural and plausible morphing between objects with surface light fields. The proposed morphing technique can be used as an editing tool for 3D photography.

title: Optical Flow Rendering
abstract: This paper proposes a new approach to image-based rendering that generates an image viewed from an arbitrary camera position and orientation by rendering optical flows extracted from reference images. To derive valid optical flows, we develop an analysis technique that improves the quality of stereo matching. Without using any special equipments such as range cameras, this technique constructs reliable optical flows from a sequence of matching results between reference images. We also derive validity conditions of optical flows and show that the obtained flows satisfy those conditions. Since environment geometry is inferred from the optical flows, we are able to generate more accurate images with this additional geometric information. Our approach makes it possible to combine an image rendered from optical flows with an image generated by a conventional rendering technique through a simple Z-buffer algorithm.

title: Scattered Data Interpolation with Multilevel B-Splines
abstract: The paper describes a fast algorithm for scattered data interpolation and approximation. Multilevel B-splines are introduced to compute a C/sup 2/ continuous surface through a set of irregularly spaced points. The algorithm makes use of a coarse to fine hierarchy of control lattices to generate a sequence of bicubic B-spline functions whose sum approaches the desired interpolation function. Large performance gains are realized by using B-spline refinement to reduce the sum of these functions into one equivalent B-spline function. Experimental results demonstrate that high fidelity reconstruction is possible from a selected set of sparse and irregular samples.

title: Local injectivity conditions of 2D and 3D uniform cubic B-spline functions
abstract: Uniform cubic B-spline functions have been used for mapping functions in various areas such as image warping and morphing, 3D deformation, and volume morphing. The injectivity (one-to-one property) of a mapping function is important to obtain good results in these areas. We consider the local injectivity conditions of 2D and 3D uniform cubic B-spline functions. We propose a geometric interpretation of the local injectivity of a uniform cubic B-spline function, with which 2D and 3D cases can be handled in a similar way. Based on the geometric interpretation, we present sufficient conditions for the local injectivity that are represented in terms of control point displacements. These sufficient conditions are simple and easy to check and will be useful to guarantee the injectivity of mapping functions in application areas.

title: Transitive Mesh Space of a Progressive Mesh
abstract: The paper investigates the set of all selectively refined meshes that can be obtained from a progressive mesh. We call the set the transitive mesh space of a progressive mesh and present a theoretical analysis of the space. We define selective edge collapse and vertex split transformations, which we use to traverse all selectively refined meshes in the transitive mesh space. We propose a complete selective refinement scheme for a progressive mesh based on the transformations and compare the scheme with previous selective refinement schemes in both theoretical and experimental ways. In our comparison, we show that the complete scheme always generates selectively refined meshes with smaller numbers of vertices and faces than previous schemes for a given refinement criterion. The concept of dual pieces of the vertices in the vertex hierarchy plays a central role in the analysis of the transitive mesh space and the design of selective edge collapse and vertex split transformations.

title: Interactive Multiresolution Editing of Arbitrary Meshes
abstract: This paper presents a novel approach to multiresolution editing of a triangular mesh. The basic idea is to embed an editing area of a mesh onto a 2D rectangle and interpolate the user-specified editing information over the 2D rectangle. The result of the interpolation is mapped back to the editing area and then used to update the mesh. We adopt harmonic maps for the embedding and multilevel B-splines for the interpolation. The proposed mesh editing technique can handle an arbitrary mesh without any preprocessing such as remeshing. It runs fast enough to support interactive editing and produces intuitive editing results.

title: Spatial Intensity Correction of Fluorescent Confocal Laser Scanning Microscope Images
abstract: Fluorescent confocal laser scanning microscope (CLSM) imaging has become popular in medical domain for the purpose of 3D information extraction. 3D information is extracted either by visual inspection or by automated techniques. Nonetheless, 3D information extraction from CLSM suffers from significant lateral intensity heterogeneity. We propose a novel lateral intensity heterogeneity correction technique to improve accurate image analysis, e.g., quantitative analysis, segmentation, or visualization. The proposed technique is novel in terms of its design (spatially adaptive mean-weight filtering) and application (CLSM), as well as its properties and full automation. The key properties of the intensity correction techniques include adjustment of intensity heterogeneity, preservation of fine structural details, and enhancement of image contrast. The full automation is achieved by data-driven parameter optimization and introduction of several evaluation metrics. We evaluated the performance by comparing with three other techniques, four quality metrics, and two realistic synthetic images and one real CLSM image.

title: An Embedding Framework for Myocardial Velocity Processing with MRI
abstract: This paper presents an embedding framework for myocardial velocity processing with MRI based on a hollow, semi-spherical template. The relationship between vector bundle and manifold mapping is analysed and three different mapping methods that include tangent mapping, normal mapping, and normal-tangent mapping are assessed for their practical value of myocardial contractility analysis. The proposed method provides a basis for consistent volume matching and vector correspondence, in addition to the ease of calculating biomechanical indices such as radial, circumferential and longitudinal strain rates without the concern of boundary effects. Detailed analysis results with both synthetic and in vivo MR velocity data sets are provided.

title: An effective hardware architecture for bump mapping using angular operation
abstract: In this paper, we propose an effective bump mapping algorithm that utilizes the reference space with the polar coordinate system and also propose a new hardware architecture associated with the proposed bump mapping algorithm. The proposed architecture reduces the computations to transform the vectors from the object space into the reference space by using a new vector rotation method. It also reduces the computations for the illumination calculation by using the law of cosine. Compared with the previous approaches, the proposed architecture reduces multiplication operations up to 78%.

title: Caching strategies in transcoding-enabled proxy systems for streaming media distribution networks
abstract: With the wide availability of high-speed network access, we are experiencing high quality streaming media delivery over the Internet. The emergence of ubiquitous computing enables mobile users to access the Internet with their laptops, PDAs, or even cell phones. When nomadic users connect to the network via wireless links or phone lines, high quality video transfer can be problematic due to long delay or size mismatch between the application display and the screen. Our proposed solution to this problem is to enable network proxies with the transcoding capability, and hence provide different, appropriate video quality to different network environment. The proxies in our transcoding-enabled caching (TeC) system perform transcoding as well as caching for efficient rich media delivery to heterogeneous network users. This design choice allows us to perform content adaptation at the network edges. We propose three different TeC caching strategies. We describe each algorithm and discuss its merits and shortcomings. We also study how the user access pattern affects the performance of TeC caching algorithms and compare them with other approaches. We evaluate TeC performance by conducting two types of simulation. Our first experiment uses synthesized traces while the other uses real traces derived from an enterprise media server logs. The results indicate that compared with the traditional network caches, with marginal transcoding load, TeC improves the cache effectiveness, decreases the user-perceived latency, and reduces the traffic between the proxy and the content origin server.

title: Assessing local influence for nonlinear structural equation models with ignorable missing data
abstract: A method is proposed in this paper to assess the local influence of minor perturbations for a nonlinear structural equation model with missing data that are missing at random. The main idea is to apply Zhu and Lee's ( (2001) 111) approach to the conditional expectation of the complete-data log-likelihood function in the corresponding EM algorithm for deriving the conformal normal curvature. Building blocks for achieving the diagnostic measures are computed via latent variables that are generated by the Gibbs sampler and Metropolis-Hastings algorithm. It is shown that the proposed methodology is feasible for a wide variety of perturbation schemes. To illustrate the methodology, results that are obtained from analyses of some artificial examples, a simulation study, and a real example are presented.