Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Building Capable, Energy-Efficient, Flexible Visualization And Sensing Clusters From Commodity Tablets, Thomas Delgado Dias, Xian Yan, Konstantin Läufer, George K. Thiruvathukal

Computer Science: Faculty Publications & Other Works

We explore the application of clusters of commodity tablet devices to problems spanning a “trilogy” of concerns: visualization, sensing, and computation. We conjecture that such clusters provide a low-cost, energy-efficient, flexible, and ultimately effective platform to tackle a wide range of problems within this trilogy. This is a work in progress, and we now elaborate our position and give a preliminary status report.

A wide range of Android tablet devices are available in terms of price and capabilities. “You get what you pay for” w.r.t. display resolution, sensors, and chipset---corresponding to the trilogy. $200 gets one a 1280x800-pixel ...

Social Desirability Bias And Engagement In Systems Designed For Long-Term Health Tracking, Laura Vardoulakis

Computer Science Dissertations

In the coming years, remote health monitoring is an area that is expected to grow significantly. Systems designed to follow-up with patients at home can be used not only to reduce visits to the doctor but also to augment the face-to-face interactions between patients and physicians. These systems could also provide much-needed care to the millions of people living in rural areas.

While many researchers are investigating remote sensing technologies, the use of self-report in technological systems for long-term health monitoring remains a relatively understudied area. In this thesis, we investigate two main challenges in building systems designed for the ...

3design - Holographic Telecollaboration Interface, Thomas W. De Wit, Mark Gill, Scott Freemon, Preston Garland

University of Tennessee Honors Thesis Projects

No abstract provided.

Amethyst: A 3d Adventure Game For Tablets, Ross Light

Computer Science

Amethyst is a point-and-click science fiction adventure game for tablets, developed over two quarters to demonstrate applied principles of computer graphics and software engineering discipline. Using a novel interaction system, players can engage in environmental puzzles. Development of Amethyst required non-trivial quality assurance measures and workflow enhancements. The end result is a functional technical demo showcasing a single level, with the ability to rapidly produce more content.

Senior Project Report - Doctest, Stephen Weessies

Computer Engineering

DocTest is a program that, simply put, allows a programmer or user to document STANAG 4586 (a standard for unmanned aerial vehicle interoperability) messages and test the vehicle system at Lockheed Martin [5]. The program is extensible to allow for further development aiding our software team to do what they do best and not get bogged down in tedious but necessary documentation. DocTest is also used to aid in testing, keeping track of the issues and bugs found and creating a document that captures each issue so an issue is not missed or forgotten. This program was made for use ...

Ratio-Based Edge Detection Inspired Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion, Asaduzzaman Babu

University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Speckle Reducing Anisotropic Diffusion, SRAD, is a multiplicative speckle noise reduction method. In highly speckled environment, SRAD occasionally produces over-smoothed, dislocated/broadened edge lines and inadequate de-noising on homogeneous image regions where the speckles are well developed. Moreover, the performance of SRAD is highly dependent on the initial selection of a good homogeneous area. To overcome these weaknesses, we propose two different ratio-based edge detection inspired extensions to SRAD. One of the proposed extensions incorporates an edge-sensitive boosting factor to guide the gradient and Laplacian operator based edge detector of SRAD. The edge-sensitive boosting factor is defined by the global ...

Embodied Agents For Long-Term Interaction, Daniel Jason Schulman

Computer Science Dissertations

An Embodied Conversation Agent (ECA) is a computer interface designed to simulate human face-to-face conversation with its users, through the production of synthesized or prerecorded speech combined with an humanoid embodiment: a representation, either physical or visual, of a body capable of producing some portion of the nonverbal behaviors associated with speech, such as mouth movements, eye movements, head movements, hand gestures, facial expressions, and body posture. A key research problem in the design and implementation of realistic ECAs is generating the range of verbal and nonverbal behavior present in human conversation with appropriate frequency, timing, and quality.

ECAs have ...

A Robust Rgb-D Slam System For 3d Environment With Planar Surfaces, Po-Chang Su

Theses and Dissertations--Electrical and Computer Engineering

Simultaneous localization and mapping is the technique to construct a 3D map of unknown environment. With the increasing popularity of RGB-depth (RGB-D) sensors such as the Microsoft Kinect, there have been much research on capturing and reconstructing 3D environments using a movable RGB-D sensor. The key process behind these kinds of simultaneous location and mapping (SLAM) systems is the iterative closest point or ICP algorithm, which is an iterative algorithm that can estimate the rigid movement of the camera based on the captured 3D point clouds. While ICP is a well-studied algorithm, it is problematic when it is used in ...

A Support System For Graphics For Visually Impaired People, Hao Xu

University of Western Ontario - Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As the Internet plays an important role in today’s society, graphics is widely used to present, convey and communicate information in many different areas. Complex information is often easier to understand and analyze by graphics. Even though graphics plays an important role, accessibility support is very limited for web graphics. Web graphics accessibility is not only for people with disabilities, but also for people who want to get and use information in ways different from the ones originally intended.

One of the problems regarding graphics for blind people is that we have few data on how a blind person ...

Implementation Of Edge & Shape Detection Techniques And Their Performance Evaluation, Mohammad Shahnoor Islam Khan

Theses and dissertations

In this thesis, we develop an industrial image processing application for baked goods. Images of baked objects on a conveyor belt are taken by high resolution cameras batch wise throughout the baking period. The network is designed with high performance equipments and the application is fast enough to complete all the steps within the allowed time window. The application uses Canny edge detection method [6] which optimizes the performance compared to other applications used in the industry. We have analyzed the performance of different key properties; such as processing time of an image, dimensions of an object shape, average color ...

Automatic Foreground Initialization For Binary Image Segmentation, Wei Li

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Foreground segmentation is a fundamental problem in computer vision. A popular approach for foreground extraction is through graph cuts in energy minimization framework. Most existing graph cuts based image segmentation algorithms rely on user’s initialization. In this work, we aim to find an automatic initialization for graph cuts. Unlike many previous methods, no additional training dataset is needed. Collecting a training set is not only expensive and time consuming, but it also may bias the algorithm to the particular data distribution of the collected dataset. We assume that the foreground differs significantly from the background in some unknown feature ...

Sketchmate: A Computer-Aided Sketching And Simulation Tool For Teaching Graph Algorithms, Kristy Sue Van Hornweder

Doctoral Dissertations

In this dissertation, we developed and tested a sketching, visualization, and simulation tool called Sketchmate for demonstrating graph algorithms commonly taught in undergraduate computer science courses. For this research, we chose to focus on shortest path and network flow algorithms. Two versions of this tool have been implemented: 1) an instructor tool that supports computer-aided manual simulations of algorithms that augment traditional whiteboard presentations, allowing lectures to be more dynamic and interactive, and 2) a student tool that supports computer-aided manual practice of algorithms that enables students to work through homework problems more quickly while providing detailed incremental feedback about ...

Interactive Augmented Reality As A Support Tool For Parkinson’S Disease Rehabilitation Programs, Andrés Ayala García

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In this thesis, an augmented reality system is proposed as an alternative to create multiple interactive virtual environments that might later be used in Parkinson’s Disease rehabilitation programs. The main objective of this thesis is to develop a Wearable Tangible Augmented Reality Environment focused on providing the sense of presence required to effectively immerse patients so that they are able to perform different tasks in context–specific scenarios. By using our system, patients are able to freely navigate different virtual environments. Moreover, by segmenting and then overlaying users’ hands and objects of interest above the 3D environment, patients have ...

User Assisted Tree Reconstruction From Point Clouds, William P. Leavenworth Ii

Department of Computer Graphics Technology Degree Theses

LIDAR is a useful tool for quickly digitalizing real world objects, but it usually takes some effort to produce a recognizable object from the raw input. When the object is a tree, the challenge is to create a three‐dimensional model that represents its general shape, while avoiding the influence of undersampling and noise. In the method developed for this research, the user creates a sketch overlaying a display of the raw input data. Each node in the sketch creates an estimated slice of the tree skeleton at that point, and the slices are connected according to the connectivity of ...

The Utilization Of Context To Adapt The Interface Of A Computer, Ludovic Delaveau

College of Technology Masters Theses

This research examines the possibility for a computer to adapt its interface and its settings to the current environment, through the notion of situations and corresponding profiles. These situations are group of context elements and tasks or activities performed in that operating conditions, such as the activities conducted at the workplace or the relaxation time at home. The profiles are set of configuration values for the computer, such as the network services. Adapting the computer serves the user as it takes care of putting his computer in the right mode to be efficient in the activity performed. In order to ...

Flexrender: A Distributed Rendering Architecture For Ray Tracing Huge Scenes On Commodity Hardware., Robert Edward Somers

Master's Theses and Project Reports

As the quest for more realistic computer graphics marches steadily on, the demand for rich and detailed imagery is greater than ever. However, the current "sweet spot" in terms of price, power consumption, and performance is in commodity hardware. If we desire to render scenes with tens or hundreds of millions of polygons as cheaply as possible, we need a way of doing so that maximizes the use of the commodity hardware we already have at our disposal.

Techniques such as normal mapping and level of detail have attempted to address the problem by reducing the amount of geometry in ...

Beaglebone Webcam Server, Alexander Corcoran

Computer Engineering

The Beaglebone Webcam Server is a Linux based IP webcam, based on an inexpensive ARM development board, which hosts its own web server to display the webcam feed. The server has the ability to either connect to a wired router, or to act as a wireless access point in order for users to connect and control its functions via any Wi-Fi enabled device.

Tacky Golf, Robert Crosby

Computer Science

This project implements a simple miniature golf game in 3d for the iPhone. Using a modular approach the game engine was written in several modules to handle its various functions and for cross platform potability. Four major modules are described in detail about their design choices and how they work. Ultimately the game and its engine are intended to be sold on the Apple App store and to be used for future games and applications on the iPhone.

Gpu-Accelerated Point-Based Color Bleeding, Ryan Daniel Schmitt

Master's Theses and Project Reports

Traditional global illumination lighting techniques like Radiosity and Monte Carlo sampling are computationally expensive. This has prompted the development of the Point-Based Color Bleeding (PBCB) algorithm by Pixar in order to approximate complex indirect illumination while meeting the demands of movie production; namely, reduced memory usage, surface shading independent run time, and faster renders than the aforementioned lighting techniques.

The PBCB algorithm works by discretizing a scene’s directly illuminated geometry into a point cloud (surfel) representation. When computing the indirect illumination at a point, the surfels are rasterized onto cube faces surrounding that point, and the constituent pixels are ...

The Effects Of Diagrams And Relational Complexity On User Performance In Conditional Probability Problems In A Non-Learning Context, Vincent J. Kellen

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Many disciplines in everyday life depend on improved performance in conditional probability problems. Most adults struggle with conditional probability problems and several prior studies have shown participant accuracy is less than 50%. This study examined user performance when aided with computer-generated Venn and Euler type diagrams in a non-learning context. Despite the prevalence of research into diagrams and extensive research into conditional probability problem solving, this study is one of the only studies to apply theories of working memory to predict user performance in conditional probability problems with diagrams. Following relational complexity theory, this study manipulated problem complexity in computer ...