Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Mapping Reality Into Virtual Worlds, Josh Mcfarlane

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

As virtual worlds become more prevalent, they become increasingly useful as a means of information dissemination. This thesis examines the possible connections between real world objects and their virtual world counterparts. We look at how, by attaching sensors to an object, or by using a smart object with embedded sensors, the information can be relayed to a server. From this information, it will be possible to create a duplicate object in the virtual world and have it mirror the real world object in terms of state and movement. Almost all current solutions for remotely viewing a room or area are …

Ontology-Based Visual Word Matching For Near-Duplicate Retrieval, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper proposes a novel approach to exploit the ontological relationship of visual words by linguistic reasoning. A visual word ontology is constructed to facilitate the rigorous evaluation of linguistic similarity across visual words. The linguistic similarity measurement enables cross-bin matching of visual words, compromising the effectiveness and speed of conventional keypoint matching and bag-of-word approaches. A constraint EMD is proposed and experimented to efficiently match visual words. Empirical findings indicate that the proposed approach offers satisfactory performance to near-duplicate retrieval, while still enjoying the merit of speed efficiency compared with other techniques.

Matlab Report, Nancy Hale

Cornerstone 3 Reports : Interdisciplinary Informatics

The objective of this effort is to create a multidisciplinary approach to problem solving using technology. Through Thinkfinity, the Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems is collaborating with the science and quantitative faculty to create lessons that can be used by high school and first -year college students to work interactively with data to solve problems. MatLab is the tool of choice. It gives the user the ability to create visual models of large data sets and is used in the science and finance areas.

The key features of MatLab:

• Interactive tools for iterative exploration, design, and …

Bag-Of-Visual-Words Expansion Using Visual Relatedness For Video Indexing, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bag-of-visual-words (BoW) has been popular for visual classification in recent years. In this paper, we propose a novel BoW expansion method to alleviate the effect of visual word correlation problem. We achieve this by diffusing the weights of visual words in BoW based on visual word relatedness, which is rigorously defined within a visual ontology. The proposed method is tested in video indexing experiment on TRECVID-2006 video retrieval benchmark, and an improvement of 7% over the traditional BoW is reported.

Pitch Correction On The Human Voice, Suzanne Ownbey

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Singing is an excellent way to achieve fame, granted one can sing on key. Alternatively, a person who does not inherently have this ability or want to spend the time practicing to achieve it could use a programmatic solution to pitch correction. Proprietary products already exist that can correct the pitch of a singer, but the average mediocre singer may not be willing or able to purchase them. The focus of this research is to use the basic frequency altering algorithm of resampling, which alters the length of the wave to correct the pitch of a note. Small parts of …

Multimodal News Story Clustering With Pairwise Visual Near-Duplicate Constraint, Xiao Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Alexander G. Hauptmann

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Story clustering is a critical step for news retrieval, topic mining, and summarization. Nonetheless, the task remains highly challenging owing to the fact that news topics exhibit clusters of varying densities, shapes, and sizes. Traditional algorithms are found to be ineffective in mining these types of clusters. This paper offers a new perspective by exploring the pairwise visual cues deriving from near-duplicate keyframes (NDK) for constraint-based clustering. We propose a constraint-driven co-clustering algorithm (CCC), which utilizes the near-duplicate constraints built on top of text, to mine topic-related stories and the outliers. With CCC, the duality between stories and their underlying …

Columbia University/Vireo-Cityu/Irit Trecvid2008 High-Level Feature Extraction And Interactive Video Search, Shih-Fu Chang, Junfeng He, Yu-Gang Jiang, Elie El Khoury, Chong-Wah Ngo, Akira Yanagawa, Eric Zavesky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this report, we present overview and comparative analysis of our HLF detection system, which achieves the top performance among all type-A submissions in 2008. We also describe preliminary evaluation of our video search system, CuZero, in the interactive search task.

Concept Detection: Convergence To Local Features And Opportunities Beyond, Shih-Fu Chang, Junfeng He, Yu-Gang Jiang, Elie El Khoury, Chong-Wah Ngo, Akira Yanagawa, Eric Zavesky

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

No abstract provided.

Neighborhood Defined Adaboost Based Mixture Of Color Components For Efficient Skin Segmentation, Ramya Reddy Maaram

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

A skin segmentation algorithm robust to illumination changes and skin-like backgrounds is developed in this thesis. So far skin pixel classification has been limited to only individual color spaces and there has not been a comprehensive evaluation of which color components or combination of color components would provide the best classification accuracy, Color components in a given color space form the feature set for the classification of skin pixels. The combination of the color components or the features present within a single color space may not be the best when it comes to skin pixel classification as the discriminatory power …

Ontology-Enriched Semantic Space For Video Search, Xiao-Yong Wei, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimedia-based ontology construction and reasoning have recently been recognized as two important issues in video search, particularly for bridging semantic gap. The lack of coincidence between low-level features and user expectation makes concept-based ontology reasoning an attractive midlevel framework for interpreting high-level semantics. In this paper, we propose a novel model, namely ontology-enriched semantic space (OSS), to provide a computable platform for modeling and reasoning concepts in a linear space. OSS enlightens the possibility of answering conceptual questions such as a high coverage of semantic space with minimal set of concepts, and the set of concepts to be developed for …

Evaluating Bag-Of-Visual-Words Representations In Scene Classification, Jun Yang, Yu-Gang Jiang, Alexander G. Hauptmann, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Based on keypoints extracted as salient image patches, an image can be described as a “bag of visual words” and this representation has been used in scene classification. The choice of dimension, selection, and weighting of visual words in this representation is crucial to the classification performance but has not been thoroughly studied in previous work. Given the analogy between this representation and the bag-of-words representation of text documents, we apply techniques used in text categorization, including term weighting, stop word removal, feature selection, to generate image representations that differ in the dimension, selection, and weighting of visual words. The …

Practical Elimination Of Near-Duplicates From Web Video Search, Xiao Wu, Alexander G. Hauptmann, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current web video search results rely exclusively on text keywords or user-supplied tags. A search on typical popular video often returns many duplicate and near-duplicate videos in the top results. This paper outlines ways to cluster and filter out the nearduplicate video using a hierarchical approach. Initial triage is performed using fast signatures derived from color histograms. Only when a video cannot be clearly classified as novel or nearduplicate using global signatures, we apply a more expensive local feature based near-duplicate detection which provides very accurate duplicate analysis through more costly computation. The results of 24 queries in a data …

Towards Optimal Bag-Of-Features For Object Categorization And Semantic Video Retrieval, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Jun Yang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Bag-of-features (BoF) deriving from local keypoints has recently appeared promising for object and scene classification. Whether BoF can naturally survive the challenges such as reliability and scalability of visual classification, nevertheless, remains uncertain due to various implementation choices. In this paper, we evaluate various factors which govern the performance of BoF. The factors include the choices of detector, kernel, vocabulary size and weighting scheme. We offer some practical insights in how to optimize the performance by choosing good keypoint detector and kernel. For the weighting scheme, we propose a novel soft-weighting method to assess the significance of a visual word …

A Wavelet Based Complementary Approach For Image Enhancement, Ismail Kosum

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Detail in an image means more meaningful information that is very important in many computer vision and pattern recognition applications. The object region visibility in an image plays an important role in obtaining accurate and desired information from the original image. In particular, image processing techniques developed for region segmentation and object classification have better results depending on the visibility in images. There are several enhancement techniques available which are capable of obtaining clear images with balanced lighting and contrast. In this thesis, a completely image dependent approach to enhance the luminance of images under extreme lighting conditions and a …

Introduction: Special Issue For The Selected Papers In The Fourth International Conference On Intelligent Multimedia Computing And Networking (Immcn) 2005, Chong-Wah Ngo, Hong-Va Leong

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This special issue introduces seven papers selected from the IMMCN’ 2005, covering a wide range of emerging topics in multimedia field. These papers receive high scores and good comments from the reviewers in their respective areas of intelligent and nextgeneration networking, technology and application, multimedia coding, content analysis and retrieval. The seven papers are extended to 20 pages and then gone through another review process before the final publication. In this issue, we have two papers for video streaming, two papers for multimedia applications, one paper for video coding, and two papers for image and video retrieval.

Modeling Local Interest Points For Semantic Detection And Video Search At Trecvid 2006, Yu-Gang Jiang, Xiaoyong Wei, Chong-Wah Ngo, Hung-Khoon Tan, Wanlei Zhao, Xiao Wu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Local interest points (LIPs) and their features have been shown to obtain surprisingly good results in object detection and recognition. Its effectiveness and scalability, however, have not been seriously addressed in large-scale multimedia database, for instance TRECVID benchmark. The goal of our works is to investigate the role and performance of LIPs, when coupling with multi-modality features, for high-level feature extraction and automatic video search.

Threading And Autodocumenting News Videos: A Promising Solution To Rapidly Browse News Topics, Xiao Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Qing Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper describes the techniques in threading and autodocumenting news stories according to topic themes. Initially, we perform story clustering by exploiting the duality between stories and textual-visual concepts through a co-clustering algorithm. The dependency among stories of a topic is tracked by exploring the textual-visual novelty and redundancy of stories. A novel topic structure that chains the dependencies of stories is then presented to facilitate the fast navigation of the news topic. By pruning the peripheral and redundant news stories in the topic structure, a main thread is extracted for autodocumentary

Accelerating Missile Threat Engagement Simulations Using Personal Computer Graphics Cards, Sean E. Jeffers

Theses and Dissertations

The 453rd Electronic Warfare Squadron supports on-going military operations by providing battlefield commanders with aircraft ingress and egress routes that minimize the risk of shoulder or ground-fired missile attacks on our aircraft. To determine these routes, the 453rd simulates engagements between ground-to-air missiles and allied aircraft to determine the probability of a successful attack. The simulations are computationally expensive, often requiring two-hours for a single 10-second missile engagement. Hundreds of simulations are needed to perform a complete risk assessment which includes evaluating the effectiveness of countermeasures such as flares, chaff, jammers, and missile warning systems. Thus, the need for faster …

Creating Enterprise Simulations Using High Level Architecture, Anton R. Lidums

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Despite an established need, there are two remaining roadblocks to building distributed simulations and enterprise simulation systems. First, commercial simulation packages and engineering modeling tools are not readily distributable across multiple computers and have traditionally had very little impetus for utilizing a distributable format. Second, although HLA simulations have been built and there are tools to facilitate those efforts, very little has been done or written that specifically describes a "non-standard" integration implementation in sufficient detail to make the process reusable or repeatable. This thesis introduces a proof of concept prototype that was developed to integrate simulations. The paper presents …

On Clustering And Retrieval Of Video Shots Through Temporal Slices Analysis, Chong-Wah Ngo, Ting-Chuen Pong, Hong-Jiang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Based on the analysis of temporal slices, we propose novel approaches for clustering and retrieval of video shots. Temporal slices are a set of two-dimensional (2-D) images extracted along the time dimension of an image volume. They encode rich set of visual patterns for similarity measure. In this paper, we first demonstrate that tensor histogram features extracted from temporal slices are suitable for motion retrieval. Subsequently, we integrate both tensor and color histograms for constructing a two-level hierarchical clustering structure. Each cluster in the top level contains shots with similar color while each cluster in bottom level consists of shots …

Motion Retrieval By Temporal Slices Analysis, Chong-Wah Ngo, Chong-Wah Ngo, Hong-Jiang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this papel; we investigate video shots retrieval based on the analysis of temporal slice images. Temporal slices are a set of2D images extracted along the time dimension of image sequences. They encode rich set of motion clues for shot similarity measure. Because motion is depicted as texture orientation in temporal slices, we utilize various texture features such as tensor histogram, Gabor feature, and the statistical feature of co-occurrence matrix extracted directly from slices for motion description and retrieval. In this way, motion retrieval can be treated in a similar way as texture retrieval problem. Experimental results indicate that the …

Trends. War On Personality And Personality And War: Comments On Nass And Lee (2002), Ibpp Editor

International Bulletin of Political Psychology

This Trends article discusses another article – Identity and deconstruction, by Clifford Nass and Kwan Min Yee – published in volume 3 (2002) of Archives of Psychiatry & Psychotherapy in which the authors demonstrate that people reliably attribute personality characteristics to computer-synthesized speech, exploring the ramifications in a political psychological context.

Multimedia Tools For The Creation Of Online Learning Materials : A Critique, Victor Augustine Udosen

World Maritime University Dissertations

No abstract provided.

On Clustering And Retrieval Of Video Shots, Chong-Wah Ngo, Ting-Chuen Pong, Hong-Jiang Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Clustering of video data is an important issue in video abstraction, browsing and retrieval. In this paper, we propose a two-level hierarchical clustering approach by aggregating shots with similar motion and color features. Motion features are computed directly from 20 tensor histograms, while color features are represented by 30 color histograms. Cluster validity analysis is further applied to automatically determine the number of clusters at each level. Video retrieval can then be done directly based on the result of clustering. The proposed approach is found to be useful particularly for sports games, where motion and color are important visual cues …

Video Partitioning By Temporal Slice Coherency, Chong-Wah Ngo, Ting-Chuen Pong, Roland T. Chin

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We present a novel approach for video partitioning by detecting three essential types of camera breaks, namely cuts, wipes, and dissolves. The approach is based on the analysis of temporal slices which are extracted from the video by slicing through the sequence of video frames and collecting temporal signatures. Each of these slices contains both spatial and temporal information from which coherent regions are indicative of uninterrupted video partitions separated by camera breaks. Properties could further be extracted from the slice for both the detection and classification of camera breaks. For example, cut and wipes are detected by color-texture properties, …

Studies Related To The Design And Implementation Of A Magnetic Suspension And Balance System, Syed Adeel Akhtar Jafri

Electrical & Computer Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This thesis presents studies related to the magnetic suspension and balance system (MSBS) of the Princeton/ONR High Reynolds Number Testing Facility (HRTF). The main motivation for developing the MSBS is to provide interference free aero/hydrodynamic testing of submersible models, which will lead to more accurate measurements. From the controls point of view, the main specification of the MSBS is to robustly control the position of a submersible model in five degrees of freedom (DOF), including three translational as well as pitching and yawing positions. The MSBS should not only regulate the submersible model's position but should also allow for small …

A Low-Cost Part-Task Flight Training System: An Application Of A Head Mounted Display, David A. Dahn

Theses and Dissertations

To investigate the feasibility of using head-mounted display(HMD) and Computer Image Generators(CIG) in a low cost part-task trainer, we created a prototype system. Our approach was to build a virtual world interface using a HMD to an existing flight simulator application. This allowed a CIG with only one graphics channel to drive the display. To investigate which class of computing platform was suitable for use as the CIG, a cooperative thesis effort was launched to host the simulator on a mini-computer and micro-computer platform. The appropriate CIG could then be determined through demonstration and comparison between the systems. A software …

Digital Video Display System Using Cathode-Ray Tube, George M. Low, Arthur I. Zygielbaum, Warren L. Martin, Alexander Engel

School of Natural Resources: Faculty Publications

A digital video display system (DWDS) is disclosed for display of image, alphanumeric and other data on a cathode-ray tube (CRT) with sequential raster scan and two, four or eight gray shades. The DVDS includes a central processing unit for ac tivating the system, selecting the X (horizontal axis) and Z (in tensity modulation) modes, and designating the starting loca tion of two successive rasters of data from a memory accessed by a data multiplexer subsystem (DMS). At the end of each raster, the DMS interrupts the computer for a new starting lo cation of a raster of data to …