Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

Intelligent Cinematic Camera Control For Real-Time Graphics Applications, Ian Harris Meeder

Master's Theses

E-sports is currently estimated to be a billion dollar industry which is only growing in size from year to year. However the cinematography of spectated games leaves much to be desired. In most cases, the spectator either gets to control their own freely-moving camera or they get to see the view that a specific player sees. This thesis presents a system for the generation of cinematically-pleasing views for spectating real-time graphics applications. A custom real-time engine has been built to demonstrate the effect of this system on several different game modes with varying visual cinematic constraints, such as the rule …

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 …

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 …

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 …

A Desire Fulfillment Theory Of Digital Game Enjoyment, Owen M. Schaffer

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Empirical research on what makes digital games enjoyable is critical for practitioners who want to design for enjoyment, including for Game Design, Gamification, and Serious Games. But existing theories of what leads to digital game enjoyment have been incomplete or lacking in empirical support showing their impact on enjoyment.

Desire Fulfillment Theory is proposed as a new theory of what leads to digital game enjoyment and tested through research with people who have recently played a digital game. This theory builds on three established theories: Expectancy Disconfirmation Theory, Theory of Basic Human Desires, and Flow Theory. These three theories are …

Image Classification Using Fuzzy Fca, Niruktha Roy Gotoor

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

Formal concept analysis (FCA) is a mathematical theory based on lattice and order theory used for data analysis and knowledge representation. It has been used in various domains such as data mining, machine learning, semantic web, Sciences, for the purpose of data analysis and Ontology over the last few decades. Various extensions of FCA are being researched to expand it's scope over more departments. In this thesis,we review the theory of Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) and its extension Fuzzy FCA. Many studies to use FCA in data mining and text learning have been pursued. We extend these studies to include …

Efficient Meta Learning Via Minibatch Proximal Update, Pan Zhou, Xiao-Tong Yuan, Huan Xu, Shuicheng Yan, Jiashi Feng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

We address the problem of meta-learning which learns a prior over hypothesis from a sample of meta-training tasks for fast adaptation on meta-testing tasks. A particularly simple yet successful paradigm for this research is model-agnostic meta-learning (MAML). Implementation and analysis of MAML, however, can be tricky; first-order approximation is usually adopted to avoid directly computing Hessian matrix but as a result the convergence and generalization guarantees remain largely mysterious for MAML. To remedy this deficiency, in this paper we propose a minibatch proximal update based meta-learning approach for learning to efficient hypothesis transfer. The principle is to learn a prior …

Improved Generalisation Bounds For Deep Learning Through L∞ Covering Numbers, Antoine Ledent, Yunwen Lei, Marius Kloft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Using proof techniques involving L∞ covering numbers, we show generalisation error bounds for deep learning with two main improvements over the state of the art. First, our bounds have no explicit dependence on the number of classes except for logarithmic factors. This holds even when formulating the bounds in terms of the L 2 norm of the weight matrices, while previous bounds exhibit at least a square-root dependence on the number of classes in this case. Second, we adapt the Rademacher analysis of DNNs to incorporate weight sharing—a task of fundamental theoretical importance which was previously attempted only under very …

Improving Medication Information Presentation Through Interactive Visualization In Mobile Apps: Human Factors Design, Don Roosan, Yan Li, Anandi Law, Huy Truong, Mazharul Karim, Jay Chok, Moom Roosan

Pharmacy Faculty Articles and Research

Background: Despite the detailed patient package inserts (PPIs) with prescription drugs that communicate crucial information about safety, there is a critical gap between patient understanding and the knowledge presented. As a result, patients may suffer from adverse events. We propose using human factors design methodologies such as hierarchical task analysis (HTA) and interactive visualization to bridge this gap. We hypothesize that an innovative mobile app employing human factors design with an interactive visualization can deliver PPI information aligned with patients’ information processing heuristics. Such an app may help patients gain an improved overall knowledge of medications.

Objective: The …

Gender And Racial Diversity In Commercial Brands' Advertising Images On Social Media, Jisun An, Haewoon Kwak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Gender and racial diversity in the mediated images from the media shape our perception of different demographic groups. In this work, we investigate gender and racial diversity of 85,957 advertising images shared by the 73 top international brands on Instagram and Facebook. We hope that our analyses give guidelines on how to build a fully automated watchdog for gender and racial diversity in online advertisements.

Vireojd-Mm @ Trecvid 2019: Activities In Extended Video (Actev), Zhijian Hou, Ying-Wei Pan, Ting Yao, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we describe the system developed for Activities in Extended Video(ActEV) task at TRECVid 2019 [1] and the achieved results. Activities in Extended Video(ActEV): The goal of Activities in Extended Video is to spatially and temporally localize the action instances in a surveillance setting. We have participated in previous ActEV prize challenge. Since the only difference between the two challenges is evaluation metric, we maintain previous pipeline [2] for this challenge. The pipeline has three stages: object detection, tubelet generation and temporal action localization. This time we extend the system for two aspects separately: better object detection and …

Eurecom At Trecvid Avs 2019, Danny Francis, Phuong Anh Nguyen, Benoit Huet, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This notebook reports the model and results of the EURECOM runs at TRECVID AVS 2019.

Special Issue On Multimedia Recommendation And Multi-Modal Data Analysis, Xiangnan He, Zhenguang Liu, Hanwang Zhang, Chong-Wah Ngo, Svebor Karaman, Yongfeng Zhang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Rich multimedia contents are dominating the Web. In popular social media platforms such as FaceBook, Twitter, and Instagram, there are over millions of multimedia contents being created by users on a daily basis. In the meantime, multimedia data consist of data in multiple modalities, such as text, images, audio, and so on. Users are heavily overloaded by the massive multi-modal data, and it becomes critical to explore advanced techniques for heterogeneous big data analytics and multimedia recommendation. Traditional multimedia recommendation and data analysis technologies cannot well address the problem of understanding users’ preference in the feature-rich multimedia contents, and have …