Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

A Modular Approach To The Development Of Interactive Augmented Reality Applications., Nelson J. Andre

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Augmented reality (AR) technologies are becoming increasingly popular as a result of the increase in the power of mobile computing devices. Emerging AR applications have the potential to have an enormous impact on industries such as education, healthcare, research, training and entertainment. There are currently a number of augmented reality toolkits and libraries available for the development of these applications; however, there is currently no standard tool for development. In this thesis we propose a modular approach to the organization and development of AR systems in order to enable the creation novel AR experiences. We also investigate the incorporation of …

Detecting Multilingual Lines Of Text With Fusion Moves, Igor Milevskiy

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This thesis proposes an optimization-based algorithm for detecting lines of text in images taken by hand-held cameras. The majority of existing methods for this problem assume alphabet-based texts (e.g. in Latin or Greek) and they use heuristics specific to such texts: proximity between letters within one line, larger distance between separate lines, etc. We are interested in a more challenging problem where images combine alphabet and logographic characters from multiple languages where typographic rules vary a lot (e.g. English, Korean, and Chinese). Significantly higher complexity of fitting multiple lines of text in different languages calls for an energy-based formulation combining …

Redesign Of Johar: A Framework For Developing Accessible Applications, Oladapo Oyebode

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

As the population of disabled people continues to grow, designing accessible applications is still a challenge, since most applications are incompatible with assistive technologies used by disabled people to interact with the computer. This accessibility issue is usually caused by the reluctance of software engineers or developers to include complete accessibility features in their applications, which in turn is often due to the extra cost and development effort required to dynamically adapt applications to a wide range of disabilities. Our aim to resolve accessibility issues led to the design and implementation of the "Johar" framework, which facilitates the development of …

Representation, Recognition And Collaboration With Digital Ink, Rui Hu

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Pen input for computing devices is now widespread, providing a promising interaction mechanism for many purposes. Nevertheless, the diverse nature of digital ink and varied application domains still present many challenges. First, the sampling rate and resolution of pen-based devices keep improving, making input data more costly to process and store. At the same time, existing applications typically record digital ink either in proprietary formats, which are restricted to single platforms and consequently lack portability, or simply as images, which lose important information. Moreover, in certain domains such as mathematics, current systems are now achieving good recognition rates on individual …

Cognitive Activity Support Tools: Design Of The Visual Interface, Paul Parsons

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is broadly concerned with interactive computational tools that support the performance of complex cognitive activities, examples of which are analytical reasoning, decision making, problem solving, sense making, forecasting, and learning. Examples of tools that support such activities are visualization-based tools in the areas of: education, information visualization, personal information management, statistics, and health informatics. Such tools enable access to information and data and, through interaction, enable a human-information discourse. In a more specific sense, this dissertation is concerned with the design of the visual interface of these tools. This dissertation presents a large and comprehensive theoretical framework to …

Vehicular Instrumentation And Data Processing For The Study Of Driver Intent, Taha Kowsari

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The primary goal of this thesis is to provide processed experimental data needed to determine whether driver intentionality and driving-related actions can be predicted from quantitative and qualitative analysis of driver behaviour. Towards this end, an instrumented experimental vehicle capable of recording several synchronized streams of data from the surroundings of the vehicle, the driver gaze with head pose and the vehicle state in a naturalistic driving environment was designed and developed. Several driving data sequences in both urban and rural environments were recorded with the instrumented vehicle. These sequences were automatically annotated for relevant artifacts such as lanes, vehicles …

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

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 edge …

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

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 draws …