Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Trajectory-Based Visualization Of Web Video Topics, Juan Cao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yong-Dong Zhang, Dong-Ming Zhang, Liang Ma

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

While there have been research efforts in organizing largescale web videos into topics, efficient browsing of web video topics remains a challenging problem not yet addressed. The related issues include how to efficiently browse and track the evolution of topics and eventually locate the videos of interest. In this paper, we introduce a novel interface for visualizing video topics as evolution trajectories. The trajectory visualization is capable of highlighting milestone events and depicting the topical hotness over time. The interface also allows multi-level browsing from topics to events and to videos, resulting in search exploration could be more efficiently conducted …

Statistical Image Recovery From Laser Speckle Patterns With Polarization Diversity, Donald B. Dixon

Theses and Dissertations

This research extends the theory and understanding of the laser speckle imaging technique. This non-traditional imaging technique may be employed to improve space situational awareness and image deep space objects from a ground-based sensor system. The use of this technique is motivated by the ability to overcome aperture size limitations and the distortion effects from Earth’s atmosphere. Laser speckle imaging is a lensless, coherent method for forming two-dimensional images from their autocorrelation functions. Phase retrieval from autocorrelation data is an ill-posed problem where multiple solutions exist. This research introduces polarization diversity as a method for obtaining additional information so the …

Accelerating Malware Detection Via A Graphics Processing Unit, Nicholas S. Kovach

Theses and Dissertations

Real-time malware analysis requires processing large amounts of data storage to look for suspicious files. This is a time consuming process that (requires a large amount of processing power) often affecting other applications running on a personal computer. This research investigates the viability of using Graphic Processing Units (GPUs), present in many personal computers, to distribute the workload normally processed by the standard Central Processing Unit (CPU). Three experiments are conducted using an industry standard GPU, the NVIDIA GeForce 9500 GT card. The goal of the first experiment is to find the optimal number of threads per block for calculating …

3dq: Threat Dome Visibility Querying On Mobile Devices, James Carswell, Keith Gardiner, Junjun Yin

Articles

3DQ (Three Dimensional Query) is our mobile spatial interaction (MSI) prototype for location and orientation aware mobile devices (i.e. today's sensor enabled smartphones). The prototype tailors a military style threat dome query calculation using MSI with hidden query removal functionality for reducing “information overload” on these off-the-shelf devices. The effect gives a more accurate and expected query result for Location-Based Services (LBS) applications by returning information on only those objects visible within a user’s 3D field-of-view. Our standardised XML based request/response design enables any mobile device, regardless of operating system and/or programming language, to access the 3DQ web-service interfaces.

Visual Occam: High Level Visualization And Design Of Process Networks, Mikolaj M. Slomka

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

With networks, multiprocessors, and multi-threaded systems becoming more common in our world it is increasingly evident that concurrent programming is not something to be ignored or marginalized even though many takes on concurrency (mainly by means of monitors or shared resources) have proven to be difficult to deal with on large scales. Thankfully, a good deal of work has already been done to combat this, through CSP, occam, and other such derivatives, to produce a scalable process oriented paradigm. Still, it is cumbersome to attempt to deal with the intricacies of such communicating networks down to every minutia; if, instead, …

Automatic Generation Of Semantic Fields For Annotating Web Images, Gang Wang, Tat Seng Chua, Chong-Wah Ngo, Yong Cheng Wang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The overwhelming amounts of multimedia contents have triggered the need for automatically detecting the semantic concepts within the media contents. With the development of photo sharing websites such as Flickr, we are able to obtain millions of images with usersupplied tags. However, user tags tend to be noisy, ambiguous and incomplete. In order to improve the quality of tags to annotate web images, we propose an approach to build Semantic Fields for annotating the web images. The main idea is that the images are more likely to be relevant to a given concept, if several tags to the image belong …

Learning Personal Agents With Adaptive Player Modeling In Virtual Worlds, Yilin Kang, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

There has been growing interest in creating intelligent agents in virtual worlds that do not follow fixed scripts predefined by the developers, but react accordingly based on actions performed by human players during their interaction. In order to achieve this objective, previous approaches have attempted to model the environment and the user’s context directly. However, a critical component for enabling personalized virtual world experience is missing, namely the capability to adapt over time to the habits and eccentricity of a particular player. To address the above issue, this paper presents a cognitive agent with learning player model capability for personalized …

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 …

Cognitive Load Of Rating Scales, E. Isaac G. Sparling, Shilad Sen

Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science Honors Projects

Why does Netflix.com use star ratings, Digg.com use up/down votes and Face- book use a “like” but not a “dislike” button? In this paper, we extend existing research on rating scales with findings from an experiment we ran to measure the cognitive load users experience while rating. In this paper, we analyze the cognitive load and time required by different rating scales. Our analysis draws upon 14,000 movie and product ratings we collected from 348 users through an online survey. In the survey, we measured the speed and cognitive load users ex- perience under four scales: unary (‘like it’), binary …

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 …

Real-Time Visualizations Of Ocean Data Collected By The Norus Glider, Daniel M. Medina

Master's Theses

Scientific visualization computer applications generate visual representations of large and complex sets of science data. These types of applications allow scientists to gain greater knowledge and insight into their data. For example, the visualization of environmental data is of particular interest to biologists when trying to understand how complex variables interact. Modern robotics and sensors have expanded the ability to collect environmental data, thus, the size and variety of these data-sets have likewise grown. Oftentimes, the collected data are deposited into files and databases where they sit in their separate and unique formats. Without easy to use visualization tools, it …

Semantic Context Modeling With Maximal Margin Conditional Random Fields For Automatic Image Annotation, Yu Xiang, Xiangdong Zhou, Zuotao Liu, Tat-Seng Chua, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Context modeling for Vision Recognition and Automatic Image Annotation (AIA) has attracted increasing attentions in recent years. For various contextual information and resources, semantic context has been exploited in AIA and brings promising results. However, previous works either casted the problem into structural classification or adopted multi-layer modeling, which suffer from the problems of scalability or model efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel discriminative Conditional Random Field (CRF) model for semantic context modeling in AIA, which is built over semantic concepts and treats an image as a whole observation without segmentation. Our model captures the interactions between semantic …

Personalization By Website Transformation: Theory And Practice, Saverio Perugini

Computer Science Faculty Publications

We present an analysis of a progressive series of out-of-turn transformations on a hierarchical website to personalize a user’s interaction with the site. We formalize the transformation in graph-theoretic terms and describe a toolkit we built that enumerates all of the traversals enabled by every possible complete series of these transformations in any site and computes a variety of metrics while simulating each traversal therein to qualify the relationship between a site’s structure and the cumulative effect of support for the transformation in a site. We employed this toolkit in two websites. The results indicate that the transformation enables users …

A Visualization Approach For Message Passing In Parallel Computing Systems, Arunkumar Sadasivan

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Information Visualization has been used as an effective method in transforming textual information into a visual form that enables users to effectively communicate and understand the information. MPI (Message Passing Interface) usually involves a large amount of data, which necessitates exploring innovative ideas to visualize such data effectively.

In this thesis, we implement a graph visualization tool called MPROV to effectively visualize communication patterns of message passing using log files from MPI applications. The tool provides several interaction techniques to effectively reduce the amount of data displayed on the screen. We have also developed protocol conformance checking, which verifies 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.

Performance Of Scattering Matrix Decomposition And Color Spaces For Synthetic Aperture Radar Imagery, Manuel E. Arriagada

Theses and Dissertations

Polarimetrc Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) has been shown to be a powerful tool in remote sensing because uses up to four simultaneous measurements giving additional degrees of freedom for processing. Typically, polarization decomposition techniques are applied to the polarization-dependent data to form colorful imagery that is easy for operators systems to interpret. Yet, the presumption is that the SAR system operates with maximum bandwidth which requires extensive processing for near- or real-time application. In this research, color space selection is investigated when processing sparse polarimetric SAR data as in the case of the publicly available \Gotcha Volumetric SAR Data Set, …

Bay Audio Repair Website & Data Management Application, Michael Shelley

Computer Science and Software Engineering

The goal of this senior project was to build a website and software application to receive and manage audio equipment repair requests for a small startup company called Bay Audio Repair (BAR). Furthermore, it allowed me to gain experience in web development and software engineering practices, specifically requirements gathering, design and implementation. The website provides an online interface for BAR’s customers to request repairs and the application allows BAR employees to update the progress of a repair. Several technologies were used in the system’s construction: HTML, XML, PHP, and C#.