Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Simulation Visualization Rhetoric And It's Practical Implications, D'An Knowles Ball, Andrew J. Collins

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

Modeling and simulation has moved far beyond simple data representation into the world of visual communication over the past 15 years; ultimately, the acceptance of M&S within mainstream science and society will depend on the results that are produced visually. A simulation’s function is of primary importance to its end result, but it cannot be denied that the discipline of M&S now prizes fancy graphics to communicate. Rhetorical methodological decisions have the greatest impact on the end user, and considerations that bring visual rhetoric to modeling and simulation should be examined as a necessity to application. This paper will expose …

Implementation And Assessment Of A Virtual Reality Experiment In The Undergraduate Themo-Fluids Laboratory, Sushil Chaturvedi, Jaewan Yoon, Rick Mckenzie, Petros J. Katsioloudis, Hector M. Garcia, Shuo Ren

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

Results are presented from an NSF supported project that is geared towards advancing the development and use of virtual reality (VR) laboratories, designed to emulate the learning environment of physical laboratories. As part of this project, an experiment in the undergraduate thermo-fluids laboratory course titled "Jet Impact Force" was transformed into a 3-D virtual reality experiment using the widely used MAYA R and VIRTOOLS R software. In order to facilitate students' interactions with the newly created 3-D interactive, immersive and stereoscopic virtual laboratory environment, the human computer interfaces (HCI) were programmed and incorporated in the simulation software. Two immersion levels …

Procedural Wound Geometry And Blood Flow Generation For Medical Training Simulators, Rifat Aras, Yuzhong Shen, Jiang Li, David R. Holmes Iii (Ed.), Kenneth H. Wong (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Efficient application of wound treatment procedures is vital in both emergency room and battle zone scenes. In order to train first responders for such situations, physical casualty simulation kits, which are composed of tens of individual items, are commonly used. Similar to any other training scenarios, computer simulations can be effective means for wound treatment training purposes. For immersive and high fidelity virtual reality applications, realistic 3D models are key components. However, creation of such models is a labor intensive process. In this paper, we propose a procedural wound geometry generation technique that parameterizes key simulation inputs to establish the …

Flexible Multitouch Electroluminescent Display, Michael E. Miller, John W. Harmer

AFIT Patents

A display device including a touch sensitive EL display having a flexible substrate; one or more power busses and one or more EL elements disposed over the flexible substrate; and a plurality of distributed chiplets arranged so that at least two chiplets are associated with each of a plurality of touch sensitive areas on the EL display and for sensing stress or strain associated with bending of the flexible substrate or the chiplet substrate to provide respective displacement signals corresponding to the touch sensitive areas; each chiplet connected to one or more of the power busses and one or more …

Powersearch: Augmenting Mobile Phone Search Through Personalization, Xiangyu Liu

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Cell phone has become a fundamental element of people's life. People use it to call each other, browse websites, send text messages, etc. Among all the functionalities, the most important and frequently used is the search functionality. Based on ComScore, in July 2008, Google was estimated to host 235 millions searches per day. However, unlike the search on desktop, the search on cell phone has one critical constrain: battery. Cell phone performing a normal Google search, the battery drains very fast. The reason is that when sending a query to and fetching the results from Google, cell phone keeps communicating …

Cross Media Hyperlinking For Search Topic Browsing, Song Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Hung-Khoon Tan, Lei Pang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the rapid growth of social media, there are plenty of information sources freely available online for use. Nevertheless, how to synchronize and leverage these diverse forms of information for multimedia applications remains a problem yet to be seriously studied. This paper investigates the synchronization of multiple media content in the physical form of hyperlinking them. The ultimate goal is to develop browsing systems that author search results with rich media information mined from various knowledge sources. The authoring enables the vivid visualization and exploration of different information landscapes inherent in search results. Several key techniques are studied in this …

On The Pooling Of Positive Examples With Ontology For Visual Concept Learning, Shiai Zhu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

A common obstacle in effective learning of visual concept classifiers is the scarcity of positive training examples due to expensive labeling cost. This paper explores the sampling of weakly tagged web images for concept learning without human assistance. In particular, ontology knowledge is incorporated for semantic pooling of positive examples from ontologically neighboring concepts. This effectively widens the coverage of the positive samples with visually more diversified content, which is important for learning a good concept classifier. We experiment with two learning strategies: aggregate and incremental. The former strategy re-trains a new classifier by combining existing and newly collected examples, …

Tracking Web Video Topics: Discovery, Visualization, And Monitoring, Juan Cao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yong-Dong Zhang, Jin-Tao Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Despite the massive growth of web-shared videos in Internet, efficient organization and monitoring of videos remains a practical challenge. While nowadays broadcasting channels are keen to monitor online events, identifying topics of interest from huge volume of user uploaded videos and giving recommendation to emerging topics are by no means easy. Specifically, such process involves discovering of new topic, visualization of the topic content, and incremental monitoring of topic evolution. This paper studies the problem from three aspects. First, given a large set of videos collected over months, an efficient algorithm based on salient trajectory extraction on a topic evolution …

Galaxy Browser: Exploratory Search Of Web Videos, Lei Pang, Song Tan, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most search engines return a ranked list of items in response to a query. The list however tells very little about the relationship among items. For videos especially, users often read to spend significant amount of time to navigate the search result. Exploratory search presents a new paradigm for browsing where the browser takes up the role of information exploring and presents a well-organized browsing structure for users to navigate. The proposed interface Galaxy Browser adopts the recent advances in near-duplicate detection and then synchronizes the detected near-duplicate information with comprehensive background knowledge derived from online external resources. The result …

Wii Remote-Based Collaborative Interfaces For Music, Adriano Baratè, Luca A. Ludovico, Davide Andrea Mauro

Computer Sciences and Electrical Engineering Faculty Research

Wii Remote is the main controller for Nintendo's Wii con- sole. Thanks to the use of accelerometer and optical sensor technology, it presents motion sensing capability, which implies gesture recognition and intuitive pointing. Such a controller is user-friendly, inexpensive and easily available, due to growing Wii console's popularity. These features make Wii Remote a good device to create and manipulate both music and audio in a home entertainment environment. In this paper, the most interesting characteristics of the controller will be reviewed. A case study will be presented, namely the creation of a virtual music instrument to be controlled in …

Passive Matrix Electro-Luminescent Display System, Michael E. Miller, John F. Hamilton Jr., Andrew D. Arnold

AFIT Patents

A passive matrix, electro-luminescent display system has a passive matrix, electro-luminescent display having an orthogonally oriented array of column and row electrodes and an electro-luminescent layer located between the electrodes at the intersection of each column and row electrode forming an individual light-emitting element. Drivers provide separate signals at different times to different groups of row electrodes within the array of row electrodes; wherein the row electrodes of each group simultaneously receive at least two different level signals. A display driver receives and processes the input image signal to provide a presharpened image control signal. Column drivers respond to the …

Fusing Heterogeneous Modalities For Video And Image Re-Ranking, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimedia documents in popular image and video sharing websites such as Flickr and Youtube are heterogeneous documents with diverse ways of representations and rich user-supplied information. In this paper, we investigate how the agreement among heterogeneous modalities can be exploited to guide data fusion. The problem of fusion is cast as the simultaneous mining of agreement from different modalities and adaptation of fusion weights to construct a fused graph from these modalities. An iterative framework based on agreement-fusion optimization is thus proposed. We plug in two well-known algorithms: random walk and semi-supervised learning to this framework to illustrate the idea …

A Secure Behavior Modification Sensor System For Physical Activity Improvement, Alan Price

CGU Theses & Dissertations

Today, advances in wireless sensor networks are making it possible to capture large amounts of information about a person and their interaction within their home environment. However, what is missing is how to ensure the security of the collected data and its use to alter human behavior for positive benefit.

In this research, exploration was conducted involving the "infrastructure" and "intelligence" aspects of a wireless sensor network through a Behavior Modification Sensor System. First was to understand how a secure wireless sensor network could be established through the symmetric distribution of keys (the securing of the infrastructure), and it involves …

Concept-Driven Multi-Modality Fusion For Video Search, Xiao-Yong Wei, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

As it is true for human perception that we gather information from different sources in natural and multi-modality forms, learning from multi-modalities has become an effective scheme for various information retrieval problems. In this paper, we propose a novel multi-modality fusion approach for video search, where the search modalities are derived from a diverse set of knowledge sources, such as text transcript from speech recognition, low-level visual features from video frames, and high-level semantic visual concepts from supervised learning. Since the effectiveness of each search modality greatly depends on specific user queries, prompt determination of the importance of a modality …

Mining Event Structures From Web Videos, Xiao Wu, Yi-Jie Lu, Qiang Peng, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The article is discussing the issues of mining event structures from Web video search results using text analysis, burst detection, and clustering as with the proliferation of social media, the volume of Web videos have grown exponentially.

Enhancement Technique For Aerial Images, Sertan Erkanli, Ahmet Gungor Pakfiliz, Jiang Li

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

Recently, we proposed an enhancement technique for uniformly and non-uniformly illuminated dark images that provides high color accuracy and better balance between the luminance and the contrast in images to improve the visual representations of digital images. In this paper we define an improved version of the proposed algorithm to enhance aerial images in order to reduce the gap between direct observation of a scene and its recorded image.

3d Face Reconstruction From Limited Images Based On Differential Evolution, Qun Wang, Jiang Li, Vijayan K. Asari, Mohammad A. Karim, Andrew G. Tescher (Ed.)

Electrical & Computer Engineering Faculty Publications

3D face modeling has been one of the greatest challenges for researchers in computer graphics for many years. Various methods have been used to model the shape and texture of faces under varying illumination and pose conditions from a single given image. In this paper, we propose a novel method for the 3D face synthesis and reconstruction by using a simple and efficient global optimizer. A 3D-2D matching algorithm which employs the integration of the 3D morphable model (3DMM) and the differential evolution (DE) algorithm is addressed. In 3DMM, the estimation process of fitting shape and texture information into 2D …

Enhancing Brand Equity Through Flow: Comparison Of 2d Versus 3d Virtual World, Fiona Fui-Hoon Nah, Brenda Eschenbrenner, David Dewester

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This research uses the theory of flow to examine the effect of 2D versus 3D virtual world environments on brand equity and use intention. The results suggest that a 3D virtual world environment has both positive (indirect) and negative (direct) effects on brand equity. The positive, indirect effect of the 3D virtual world environment occurs through feelings of telepresence and enjoyment, both of which contribute positively to brand equity and, in turn, induces a higher behavioral intention. The negative, direct effect can be explained using distraction-conflict theory, where attentional conflict is faced by users of a highly interactive and rich …

On The Annotation Of Web Videos By Efficient Near-Duplicate Search, Wan-Lei Zhao, Xiao Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the proliferation of Web 2.0 applications, usersupplied social tags are commonly available in social media as a means to bridge the semantic gap. On the other hand, the explosive expansion of social web makes an overwhelming number of web videos available, among which there exists a large number of near-duplicate videos. In this paper, we investigate techniques which allow effective annotation of web videos from a data-driven perspective. A novel classifier-free video annotation framework is proposed by first retrieving visual duplicates and then suggesting representative tags. The significance of this paper lies in the addressing of two timely issues …

Co-Reranking By Mutual Reinforcement For Image Search, Ting Yao, Tao Mei, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most existing reranking approaches to image search focus solely on mining “visual” cues within the initial search results. However, the visual information cannot always provide enough guidance to the reranking process. For example, different images with similar appearance may not always present the same relevant information to the query. Observing that multi-modality cues carry complementary relevant information, we propose the idea of co-reranking for image search, by jointly exploring the visual and textual information. Co-reranking couples two random walks, while reinforcing the mutual exchange and propagation of information relevancy across different modalities. The mutual reinforcement is iteratively updated to constrain …

On The Sampling Of Web Images For Learning Visual Concept Classifiers, Shiai Zhu, Gang Wang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yu-Gang Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Visual concept learning often requires a large set of training images. In practice, nevertheless, acquiring noise-free training labels with sufficient positive examples is always expensive. A plausible solution for training data collection is by sampling the largely available user-tagged images from social media websites. With the general belief that the probability of correct tagging is higher than that of incorrect tagging, such a solution often sounds feasible, though is not without challenges. First, user-tags can be subjective and, to certain extent, are ambiguous. For instance, an image tagged with “whales” may be simply a picture about ocean museum. Learning concept …

Coherent Bag-Of Audio Words Model For Efficient Large-Scale Video Copy Detection, Yang Liu, Wan-Lei Zhao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Chang-Sheng Xu, Han-Qing Lu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Current content-based video copy detection approaches mostly concentrate on the visual cues and neglect the audio information. In this paper, we attempt to tackle the video copy detection task resorting to audio information, which is equivalently important as well as visual information in multimedia processing. Firstly, inspired by bag-of visual words model, a bag-of audio words (BoA) representation is proposed to characterize each audio frame. Different from naive singlebased modeling audio retrieval approaches, BoA is a highlevel model due to its perceptual and semantical property. Within the BoA model, a coherency vocabulary indexing structure is adopted to achieve more efficient …

Wii-Mote Head Tracking: A Three Dimensional Virtual Reality Display, David Fairman

Computer Engineering

The goal of this project is to create a customizable three dimensional virtual reality display on a system available to any non-technical user. This System will use the infrared camera component of a standard Nintendo Wii-mote to track a user's head motions in all six major directions. The virtual reality will be a customizable image projected onto a screen or simply shown on a computer or TV monitor. In order to appear 3-dimensional, the image will continually change according to the position of the user's head. As the user moves their head to the left and right, portions of the …

Pretty Lights, Nicholas (Nick) Delmas, Matthew (Matt) Maniaci

Computer Engineering

Digital media players often include a visualization component that allows a user to watch a visualization synchronized to their music or videos. This project uses the visualization plugin API of an existing media playback program (WinAmp) but it displays its visuals using physical LED lights. Instead of outputting visuals to the computer screen, data is sent over USB to a micro controller that runs the LED lights. This project aims to give users a more visceral visual experience than traditional visualizations on the computer screen.

Research Poster: Software Frameworks For Improved Productivity In Climate Change Research, Sohei Okamoto

2010 Annual Nevada NSF EPSCoR Climate Change Conference

Research poster

Exercise Power Grid Display And Web Interface, Alexander (Alex) Chernetz

Computer Engineering

The 2008-2009 expansion of the Recreation Center at Cal Poly includes three new rooms with cardiovascular fitness equipment. As part of its ongoing commitment to sustainable development, the new machines connect to the main power grid and generate power during a workout. This document explains the process of quantifying and expressing the power generated using two interfaces: an autonomous display designed for a television with a text size and amount of detail adaptable to multiple television sizes and viewing distances, and an interactive, more detailed Web interface accessible with any Java-capable computer system or browser.

Towards Google Challenge: Combining Contextual And Social Information For Web Video Categorization, Xiao Wu, Wan-Lei Zhao, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web video categorization is a fundamental task for web video search. In this paper, we explore the Google challenge from a new perspective by combing contextual and social information under the scenario of social web. The semantic meaning of text (title and tags), video relevance from related videos, and user interest induced from user videos, are integrated to robustly determine the video category. Experiments on YouTube videos demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed solution. The performance reaches 60% improvement compared to the traditional text based classifiers.

Distribution-Based Concept Selection For Concept-Based Video Retrieval, Juan Cao, Hongfang Jing, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yongdong Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Query-to-concept mapping plays one of the keys to concept-based video retrieval. Conventional approaches try to find concepts that are likely to co-occur in the relevant shots from the lexical or statistical aspects. However, the high probability of co-occurrence alone cannot ensure its effectiveness to distinguish the relevant shots from the irrelevant ones. In this paper, we propose distribution-based concept selection (DBCS) for query-to-concept mapping by analyzing concept score distributions of within and between relevant and irrelevant sets. In view of the imbalance between relevant and irrelevant examples, two variants of DBCS are proposed respectively by considering the two-sided and onesided …

Semantic Context Transfer Across Heterogeneous Sources For Domain Adaptive Video Search, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shih-Fu Chang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatic video search based on semantic concept detectors has recently received significant attention. Since the number of available detectors is much smaller than the size of human vocabulary, one major challenge is to select appropriate detectors to response user queries. In this paper, we propose a novel approach that leverages heterogeneous knowledge sources for domain adaptive video search. First, instead of utilizing WordNet as most existing works, we exploit the context information associated with Flickr images to estimate query-detector similarity. The resulting measurement, named Flickr context similarity (FCS), reflects the co-occurrence statistics of words in image context rather than textual …

Scalable Detection Of Partial Near-Duplicate Videos By Visual-Temporal Consistency, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Richang Hong, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Following the exponential growth of social media, there now exist huge repositories of videos online. Among the huge volumes of videos, there exist large numbers of near-duplicate videos. Most existing techniques either focus on the fast retrieval of full copies or near-duplicates, or consider localization in a heuristic manner. This paper considers the scalable detection and localization of partial near-duplicate videos by jointly considering visual similarity and temporal consistency. Temporal constraints are embedded into a network structure as directed edges. Through the structure, partial alignment is novelly converted into a network flow problem where highly efficient solutions exist. To precisely …