Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Tacky Golf, Robert Crosby

Computer Science and Software Engineering

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.

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.

Fast Semantic Diffusion For Large-Scale Context-Based Image And Video Annotation, Yu-Gang Jiang, Qi Dai, Jun Wang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Exploring context information for visual recognition has recently received significant research attention. This paper proposes a novel and highly efficient approach, which is named semantic diffusion, to utilize semantic context for large-scale image and video annotation. Starting from the initial annotation of a large number of semantic concepts (categories), obtained by either machine learning or manual tagging, the proposed approach refines the results using a graph diffusion technique, which recovers the consistency and smoothness of the annotations over a semantic graph. Different from the existing graph-based learning methods that model relations among data samples, the semantic graph captures context by …

Semi-Supervised Hierarchical Clustering For Personalized Web Image Organization, Lei Meng, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Existing efforts on web image organization usually transform the task into surrounding text clustering. However, Current text clustering algorithms do not address the problem of insufficient statistical information for image representation and noisy tags which greatly decreases the clustering performance while increases the computational cost. In this paper, we propose a two-step semi-supervised hierarchical clustering algorithm, Personalized Hierarchical Theme-based Clustering (PHTC), for web image organization. In the first step, the Probabilistic Fusion ART (PF-ART) is proposed for grouping semantically similar images and simultaneously learning the probabilistic distribution of tag occurrence for mining the key tags/topics of clusters. In this way, …

Aligning Images In The Wild, Wen-Yan Lin, Linlin Liu, Yasuyuki Matsushita, Kok-Lim Low, Siying Liu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Aligning image pairs with significant appearance change is a long standing computer vision challenge. Much of this problem stems from the local patch descriptors’ instability to appearance variation. In this paper we suggest this instability is due less to descriptor corruption and more the difficulty in utilizing local information to canonically define the orientation (scale and rotation) at which a patch’s descriptor should be computed. We address this issue by jointly estimating correspondence and relative patch orientation, within a hierarchical algorithm that utilizes a smoothly varying parameterization of geometric transformations. By collectively estimating the correspondence and orientation of all the …

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

Master's Theses

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 combined …

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

Master's Theses

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 …

A Modular Framework For Home Healthcare Monitoring, Blake Puryear

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

Many patients with chronic health problems have multiple ailments but different patients may have different such ailments. Home monitoring systems for individual ailments exist but a patient may have multiple of these, all designed independently. There are no standard architectures so this leads to unmanageable diversity which causes problems for patients in having to learn to use a variety of monitors and for physicians in trying to monitor many patients. The purpose of this project was to design and prototype a next generation modular remote healthcare monitoring system capable of monitoring multiple ailments and extensible to new ailments in order …

Simple Touch-Based Gaming: Project Pond, Taylor Yust

Computer Science and Computer Engineering Undergraduate Honors Theses

The mainstream success of smartphone technology has prompted the video game industry to invest resources into new types of mobile games. While seemingly successful on the surface, there are unseen issues and risks that may potentially harm the long-term sustainability of the market. In response, I’ve developed my own smartphone gaming app that addresses what I find to be some of the largest problems in the market. My intent is to test my design theories while also challenging the status quo in mobile game design. The fruit of my labor is Pond, a smartphone gaming app for Windows Phone 7. …

Cogtool-Helper: Leveraging Gui Functional Testing Tools To Generate Predictive Human Performance Models, Amanda Swearngin

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Numerous tools and techniques for human performance modeling have been introduced in the field of human-computer interaction. With such tools comes the ability to model legacy applications. Models can be used to compare design ideas to existing applications, or to evaluate products against those of competitors. One such mod- eling tool, CogTool, allows user interface designers and analysts to mock up design ideas, demonstrate tasks, and obtain human performance predictions for those tasks. This is one step towards a simple and complete analysis process, but it still requires a large amount of manual work. Graphical user interface (GUI) testing tools …

Converting Three-Component To Four-Component Image (2012), Ronald S. Cok, Michael E. Miller

AFIT Patents

A method of converting a three-or-more-color-component image input signal to an image output signal includes acquiring an input signal having a plurality of pixel signals, each pixel signal having three, or more, color components; determining a residual difference for each color component of each pixel signal; determining a limit value of the residual differences; calculating a common scale factor for each of the color components based upon the limit value; and applying the common scale factor to the image input signal to produce the image output signal.

Spalendar: Visualizing A Group's Calendar Events Over A Geographic Space On A Public Display, Chen Xiang, Sebastian Boring, Sheelagh Carpendale, Anthony Tang, Saul Greenberg

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Portable paper calendars (i.e., day planners and organizers) have greatly influenced the design of group electronic calendars. Both use time units (hours/days/weeks/etc.) to organize visuals, with useful information (e.g., event types, locations, attendees) usually presented as - perhaps abbreviated or even hidden - text fields within those time units. The problem is that, for a group, this visual sorting of individual events into time buckets conveys only limited information about the social network of people. For example, people’s whereabouts cannot be read ‘at a glance’ but require examining the text. Our goal is to explore an alternate visualization that can …

#Epicplay: Crowd-Sourcing Sports Video Highlights, Anthony Tang, Sebastian Boring

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

During a live sports event, many sports fans use social media as a part of their viewing experience, reporting on their thoughts on the event as it unfolds. In this work, we use this information stream to semantically annotate live broadcast sports games, using these annotations to select video highlights from the game. We demonstrate that this approach can be used to select highlights specific for fans of each team, and that these clips reflect the emotions of a fan during a game. Further, we describe how these clips differ from those seen on nightly sportscasts.

Analyzing Financial Data Through Interactive Visualization, Fizi Yadav

Purdue Polytechnic Masters Theses

This investigation explored the role data visualization in the scientific community and its effect on the cognitive ability of an individual. The research attempted to answer the question, “ Whether appropriate data visualization helps in better understanding of corporate financial data?” and used quantitative methods to gain an insight. Participants in the study were divided into two groups of 30 each, with one group receiving the treatment devised for the research and the other using the common prevalent method. Both the groups were subjected to a test, based upon the analysis of which a conclusion was derived. The subjects were …

Three-Dimensional Scene Reconstruction Using Multiple Microsoft Kinects, Matt Miller

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The Microsoft Kinect represents a leap forward in the form of cheap, consumer friendly, depth sensing cameras. Through the use of the depth information as well as the accompanying RGB camera image, it becomes possible to represent the scene, what the camera sees, as a three-dimensional geometric model. In this thesis, we explore how to obtain useful data from the Kinect, and how to use it for the creation of a three-dimensional geometric model of the scene. We develop and test multiple ways of improving the depth information received from the Kinect, in order to create smoother three-dimensional models. We …

Extending The Hybridthread Smp Model For Distributed Memory Systems, Eugene Anthony Cartwright Iii

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Memory Hierarchy is of growing importance in system design today. As Moore's Law allows system designers to include more processors within their designs, data locality becomes a priority. Traditional multiprocessor systems on chip (MPSoC) experience difficulty scaling as the quantity of processors increases. This challenge is common behavior of memory accesses in a shared memory environment and causes a decrease in memory bandwidth as processor numbers increase. In order to provide the necessary levels of scalability, the computer architecture community has sought to decentralize memory accesses by distributing memory throughout the system. Distributed memory offers greater bandwidth due to decoupled …

Apple Vs. Microsoft: Which One Is Better? A Historical And Technical Comparison Of Two Companies, Philip Thorpe

Senior Seminars

With this paper, the goal is to help define between Apple and Microsoft which one was better. The focus of research started with a brief introduction into the GUI, and how that evolved into what Windows and Apple created. This was broken down into the changes they made in their operating systems, what type of hardware requirements were needed to run the operating systems, how these two companies made changes in comparison or in response to each other, and how much market they share among personal computers and operating systems. With the information provided, an unknown user could make a …

Electronic Device, Display And Touch-Sensitive User Interface, Michael E. Miller, Jerald J. Muszak, Michael J. Telek

AFIT Patents

Display devices and methods for operating the same are provided. In one embodiment, the display device has an electronic display having an active area for presenting visual content; a housing holding the electronic display and having an opening allowing a person to view a first portion of the active area; and a bezel about the opening, the bezel covering a second portion of the active area and providing a window through which at least a part of the second portion can be viewed. A sensor system senses when a person is close to touching the bezel or when a person …

Exploration Of Human-Computer Interaction (Hci) Applications In Hospitality Industry, Jia Wei

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Purpose: The purpose of this professional paper is to explore and identify the best practices in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) applications and use within the hospitality industry.

Statement of Objectives: To accomplish the stated purpose, first, the paper will provide the universal definition of HCI applications and define HCI within the context of hospitality industry. Second, the paper will gather and categorize information, such as the standards of designing HCI applications, from other fields of study such as informatics. Third, the paper will gather existing examples of HCI applications across different areas within the hospitality industry, such as the front desk …

Electro-Luminescent Display Device, Michael E. Miller, Joseph R. Bietry, Ronald S. Cok

AFIT Patents

An electro-luminescent display includes a first array of light-emitting elements. Each of these light-emitting elements has an optical element. A second array of light-emitting elements also includes a second optical element different from the first. One or more row lines are electrically connected to either light-emitting elements in the first array of light-emitting elements or light-emitting elements in the second array of light-emitting elements. One or more column lines provide a data signal to the first and second array of light-emitting elements. A driver circuit delivers common information to the light-emitting elements in both the first and second arrays in …

Zen Cart Shopper, Michael Mcmahon

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Zen Cart is a popular e-commerce tool for building a shopping cart web site. A typical Zen Cart store is not well suited for the small touch screens commonly found on today’s smart phones. Zen Cart Shopper is a solution for Android systems which employs web scraping techniques to display a store’s content in a smart phone friendly interface. This report describes the design and implementation of the Zen Cart Shopper app for Android.

Hoare-Style Verification Of Graph Programs, Christopher M. Poskitt, Detlef Plump

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

GP (for Graph Programs) is an experimental nondeterministic programming language for solving problems on graphs and graph-like structures. The language is based on graph transformation rules, allowing visual programming at a high level of abstraction. In particular, GP frees programmers from dealing with low-level data structures. In this paper, we present a Hoare-style proof system for verifying the partial correctness of (a subset of) graph programs. The pre- and postconditions of the calculus are nested graph conditions with expressions, a formalism for specifying both structural graph properties and properties of labels. We show that our proof system is sound with …

Boosting Web Video Categorization With Contextual Information From Social Web, Xiao Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yi-Ming Zhu, Qiang Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Web video categorization is a fundamental task for web video search. In this paper, we explore web video categorization from a new perspective, by integrating the model-based and data-driven approaches to boost the performance. The boosting comes from two aspects: one is the performance improvement for text classifiers through query expansion from related videos and user videos. The model-based classifiers are built based on the text features extracted from title and tags. Related videos and user videos act as external resources for compensating the shortcoming of the limited and noisy text features. Query expansion is adopted to reinforce the classification …

Integrating Information Quality In Visual Analytics, Ahmed Abuhalimeh

Theses and Dissertations

Visualization and visual analytics rely heavily on rapid exploration, and a combination of various information dimensions and sources performed by an analyst. Integrating Information Quality involves combining Information Quality (IQ) residing in different sources and providing users with a unified view of this data quality. This process becomes significant in a variety of situations both commercial and scientific. Integrating information appears with increasing frequency as the volume and the need to share existing information grows. This research focus on a subset of IQ dimensions, which we term subjective IQ (SIQ). Visual analytics techniques rely on fast, continuous, and interactive user …

Summarizing Rushes Videos By Motion, Object, And Event Understanding, Feng Wang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rushes footages are considered as cheap gold mine with the potential for reuse in broadcasting and filmmaking industries. However, mining "gold" from unedited videos such as rushes is challenging as the reusable segments are buried in a large set of redundant information. In this paper, we propose a unified framework for stock footage classification and summarization to support video editors in navigating and organizing rushes videos. Our approach is composed of two steps. First, we employ motion features to filter the undesired camera motion and locate the stock footage. A hierarchical hidden Markov model (HHMM) is proposed to model the …

Stereoscopic Display System With Flexible Rendering Of Disparity Map According To The Stereoscopic Fusing Capability Of The Observer, Elaine W. Jin, Michael E. Miller, Serguei Endrikhovski, Cathleen D. Cerosaletti

AFIT Patents

A method is provided for customizing scene content, according to a user or a cluster of users, for a given stereoscopic display, including obtaining customization information about the user; obtaining a scene disparity map for a pair of given stereo images and/or a three-dimensional (3D) computer graphic model; and determining an aim disparity range for the user. The method of the present invention also generates a customized disparity map and/or rendering conditions for a three-dimensional (3D) computer graphic model correlating with the user's fusing capability of the given stereoscopic display; and renders or re-renders the stereo images for subsequent display.

Online Indian Kitchen Appliances, Sharanpreet Patil

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project was to provide an easy online web application for Indian customers to make use of their regular kitchen appliances. There are places where Indian grocery stores are located in distant places. This means customers have to physically visit and look for their kitchen appliances. They have to travel many miles to check for their appliances availability.

Object Recognition Based On Shape And Function: Inspired By Children's Word Acquisition, Akihiro Eguchi

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

This paper explores a new approach to computational object recognition by borrowing an idea from child language acquisition studies in developmental psychology. Whereas previous image recognition research used shape to recognize and label a target object, the model proposed in this study added the function of the object resulting in a more accurate recognition. This study makes use of new gaming technology, Microsoft’s Kinect, in implementing the proposed new object recognition model. A demonstration of the model developed in this project properly infers different names for similarly shaped objects and the same name for differently shaped objects.

Investigating 3 Axis Cnc Processes For Creating 3d Objects, Michael Jake Newsum

Inquiry: The University of Arkansas Undergraduate Research Journal

Using 3 axis CNC (computer numerical code) routing processes of the Visualization Lab, the CNC was tested for 3D object milling. The CNC process was designed for manufacturing 2D cut out objects with or without a 3D surface. The processes of modeling the object, using CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing) programs, producing the Toolpath, post processing, editing G Code, positioning the stock material, and setting the machine origin were tested for an understanding of what changes had to be made to the process to accurately mill and cut out 3D objects. Solutions were discovered through digital and physical setups that are …

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 …