Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Interactions Between Humans, Virtual Agent Characters And Virtual Avatars, Tamara Griffith

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Simulations allow people to experience events as if they were happening in the real world in a way that is safer and less expensive than live training. Despite improvements in realism in simulated environments, one area that still presents a challenge is interpersonal interactions. The subtleties of what makes an interaction rich are difficult to define. We may never fully understand the complexity of human interchanges, however there is value in building on existing research into how individuals react to virtual characters to inform future investments. Virtual characters can either be automated through computational processes, referred to as agents, or …

Navigating Immersive And Interactive Vr Environments With Connected 360° Panoramas, Samuel Cosgrove

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

Emerging research is expanding the idea of using 360-degree spherical panoramas of real-world environments for use in "360 VR" experiences beyond video and image viewing. However, most of these experiences are strictly guided, with few opportunities for interaction or exploration. There is a desire to develop experiences with cohesive virtual environments created with 360 VR that allow for choice in navigation, versus scripted experiences with limited interaction. Unlike standard VR with the freedom of synthetic graphics, there are challenges in designing appropriate user interfaces (UIs) for 360 VR navigation within the limitations of fixed assets. To tackle this gap, we …

Virtual Reality Environment Recreation, Ryan Douglas

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

This project will consist of a virtual reality based program that is capable of showing the user both the modern day state of a site of historic or archaeological significance, along with a recreation of what said site or area may have looked like in the past, primarily during the time that gave the site its historical significance. The virtual reality program itself is to be run on modern day Windows hardware and used with the VIVE virtual reality head-mounted display and controllers. Alongside the completed program, the creation of the environments themselves will be documented, resulting in an organized …

Stylized 2d Fabrication Of Non-Photorealistic Images, Athina Panotopoulou

Dartmouth College Ph.D Dissertations

A current trend in computer graphics is the use of programmable tools that allow non-experts to engage in the design of physical prototypes. Within fabrication, one area of research focuses on non-photorealistic images which are stylized to depict a particular aesthetic quality or convey key information. In cases where authenticity is demanded or the images need to be manipulated, fabrication is necessary. Non-photorealistic image fabrication involves two challenges: identifying and abstracting key information during design and considering material restrictions during fabrication. This thesis showcases two examples for fabricating new types of non-photorealistic images, the first involving watercolors, and the second …

V-Slam And Sensor Fusion For Ground Robots, Ejup Hoxha

Dissertations and Theses

In underground, underwater and indoor environments, a robot has to rely solely on its on-board sensors to sense and understand its surroundings. This is the main reason why SLAM gained the popularity it has today. In recent years, we have seen excellent improvement on accuracy of localization using cameras and combinations of different sensors, especially camera-IMU (VIO) fusion. Incorporating more sensors leads to improvement of accuracy,but also robustness of SLAM. However, while testing SLAM in our ground robots, we have seen a decrease in performance quality when using the same algorithms on flying vehicles.We have an additional sensor for ground …

Towards Making Videos Accessible For Low Vision Screen Magnifier Users, Ali Selman Aydin, Shirin Feiz, Vikas Ashok, Iv Ramakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

People with low vision who use screen magnifiers to interact with computing devices find it very challenging to interact with dynamically changing digital content such as videos, since they do not have the luxury of time to manually move, i.e., pan the magnifier lens to different regions of interest (ROIs) or zoom into these ROIs before the content changes across frames.

In this paper, we present SViM, a first of its kind screen-magnifier interface for such users that leverages advances in computer vision, particularly video saliency models, to identify salient ROIs in videos. SViM's interface allows users to zoom in/out …

Automatic Gaze Classification For Aviators: Using Multi-Task Convolutional Networks As A Proxy For Flight Instructor Observation, Justin Wilson, Sandro Scielzo, Sukumaran Nair, Eric C. Larson

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

In this work, we investigate how flight instructors observe aviator scan patterns and assign quality to an aviator's gaze. We first establish the reliability of instructors to assign similar quality to an aviator's scan patterns, and then investigate methods to automate this quality using machine learning. In particular, we focus on the classification of gaze for aviators in a mixed-reality flight simulation. We create and evaluate two machine learning models for classifying gaze quality of aviators: a task-agnostic model and a multi-task model. Both models use deep convolutional neural networks to classify the quality of pilot gaze patterns for 40 …

An Intra-Severity Classification And Adaptation Technique To Improve Dysarthric Speech Recognition Accuracy, Al-Qatab Bassam Ali Qasem

Student Works (2020-2029)

Dysarthria is a motor speech impairment at the neurological and/or muscular levels that caused difficulty in pronouncing words clearly. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) system is increasingly applied as assistive technology to aid an individual with physical disability particularly the speech impaired community such as dysarthria speakers. However, the development of an effective ASR system is hindered by the data sparsity, either in the coverage of the language or the size of the existing speech databases. The speaker adaptation (SA) technique is one of the solutions to overcome the data sparsity issue of ASR for dysarthric speakers. Our proposed method introduces …

A Saliency-Driven Video Magnifier For People With Low Vision, Ali Selman Aydin, Shirin Feiz, Iv Ramakrishnan, Vikas Ashok

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Consuming video content poses significant challenges for many screen magnifier users, which is the “go to” assistive technology for people with low vision. While screen magnifier software could be used to achieve a zoom factor that would make the content of the video visible to low-vision users, it is oftentimes a major challenge for these users to navigate through videos. Towards making videos more accessible for low-vision users, we have developed the SViM video magnifier system [6]. Specifically, SViM consists of three different magnifier interfaces with easy-to-use means of interactions. All three interfaces are driven by visual saliency as a …

Repurposing Visual Input Modalities For Blind Users: A Case Study Of Word Processors, Hae-Na Lee, Vikas Ashok, I.V. Ramakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Visual 'point-and-click' interaction artifacts such as mouse and touchpad are tangible input modalities, which are essential for sighted users to conveniently interact with computer applications. In contrast, blind users are unable to leverage these visual input modalities and are thus limited while interacting with computers using a sequentially narrating screen-reader assistive technology that is coupled to keyboards. As a consequence, blind users generally require significantly more time and effort to do even simple application tasks (e.g., applying a style to text in a word processor) using only keyboard, compared to their sighted peers who can effortlessly accomplish the same tasks …

Rotate-And-Press: A Non-Visual Alternative To Point-And-Click, Hae-Na Lee, Vikas Ashok, I. V. Ramakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Most computer applications manifest visually rich and dense graphical user interfaces (GUIs) that are primarily tailored for an easy-and-efficient sighted interaction using a combination of two default input modalities, namely the keyboard and the mouse/touchpad. However, blind screen-reader users predominantly rely only on keyboard, and therefore struggle to interact with these applications, since it is both arduous and tedious to perform the visual 'point-and-click' tasks such as accessing the various application commands/features using just keyboard shortcuts supported by screen readers.

In this paper, we investigate the suitability of a 'rotate-and-press' input modality as an effective non-visual substitute for the visual …

Accessibility Of Deepfakes, Andrew L. Collings

Cybersecurity Undergraduate Research Showcase

The danger posed by falsified media, commonly referred to as deepfakes, has been well researched and documented. The software Faceswap to was used to swap the faces of two politician (Joe Biden and Donald Trump). The testing was performed using an affordable consumer GPU (an AMD Radeon RX 570) over 100,000 iterations. The process and results for the two attempts with the best results (and largest differences) were recorded. The result was ultimately unconvincing, while the software was able to recreate the facial structure the lighting and skin tone did not blend at all.

Sail: Saliency-Driven Injection Of Aria Landmarks, Ali Selman Aydin, Shirin Feiz, Vikas Ashok, Iv Ramakrishnan

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Navigating webpages with screen readers is a challenge even with recent improvements in screen reader technologies and the increased adoption of web standards for accessibility, namely ARIA. ARIA landmarks, an important aspect of ARIA, lets screen reader users access different sections of the webpage quickly, by enabling them to skip over blocks of irrelevant or redundant content. However, these landmarks are sporadically and inconsistently used by web developers, and in many cases, even absent in numerous web pages. Therefore, we propose SaIL, a scalable approach that automatically detects the important sections of a web page, and then injects ARIA landmarks …

Neighbourhood Structure Preserving Cross-Modal Embedding For Video Hyperlinking, Yanbin Hao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Benoit Huet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Video hyperlinking is a task aiming to enhance the accessibility of large archives, by establishing links between fragments of videos. The links model the aboutness between fragments for efficient traversal of video content. This paper addresses the problem of link construction from the perspective of cross-modal embedding. To this end, a generalized multi-modal auto-encoder is proposed.& x00A0;The encoder learns two embeddings from visual and speech modalities, respectively, whereas each of the embeddings performs self-modal and cross-modal translation of modalities. Furthermore, to preserve the neighbourhood structure of fragments, which is important for video hyperlinking, the auto-encoder is devised to model data …

Vireo @ Video Browser Showdown 2020, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Jiaxin Wu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Danny Francis, Benoit Huet

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we present the features implemented in the 4th version of the VIREO Video Search System (VIREO-VSS). In this version, we propose a sketch-based retrieval model, which allows the user to specify a video scene with objects and their basic properties, including color, size, and location. We further utilize the temporal relation between video frames to strengthen this retrieval model. For text-based retrieval module, we supply speech and on-screen text for free-text search and upgrade the concept bank for concept search. The search interface is also re-designed targeting the novice user. With the introduced system, we expect that …

Feature Extraction And Description For Retinal Fundus Image Registration, Ramli Roziana

Student Works (2020-2029)

Retinal fundus image registration (RIR) is performed to align two or more fundus images. A general framework of a feature-based RIR technique comprises of preprocessing, feature extraction, feature descriptor, matching and estimating geometrical transformation. The RIR is mainly performed for super-resolution, image mosaicking and longitudinal study applications to assist diagnosis and monitoring retinal diseases. Registering image pair from these applications involve a combination of challenges such as overlapping area and rotation between images. The challenges of the overlapping area and rotation can be addressed at feature extraction and feature descriptor stages of the feature-based RIR technique, respectively. To address the …