Graphics and Human Computer Interfaces Commons^™

Towards Textually Describing Complex Video Contents With Audio-Visual Concept Classifiers, Chun Chet Tan, Yu-Gang Jiang, Chong-Wah Ngo

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Automatically generating compact textual descriptions of complex video contents has wide applications. With the recent advancements in automatic audio-visual content recognition, in this paper we explore the technical feasibility of the challenging issue of precisely recounting video contents. Based on cutting-edge automatic recognition techniques, we start from classifying a variety of visual and audio concepts in video contents. According to the classification results, we apply simple rule-based methods to generate textual descriptions of video contents. Results are evaluated by conducting carefully designed user studies. We find that the state-of-the-art visual and audio concept classification, although far from perfect, is able …

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 …

Context-Based Friend Suggestion In Online Photo-Sharing Community, Ting Yao, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

With the popularity of social media, web users tend to spend more time than before for sharing their experience and interest in online photo-sharing sites. The wide variety of sharing behaviors generate different metadata which pose new opportunities for the discovery of communities. We propose a new approach, named context-based friend suggestion, to leverage the diverse form of contextual cues for more effective friend suggestion in the social media community. Different from existing approaches, we consider both visual and geographical cues, and develop two user-based similarity measurements, i.e., visual similarity and geo similarity for characterizing user relationship. The problem of …

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, …

Vireo@Trecvid 2011: Instance Search, Semantic Indexing, Multimedia Event Detection And Known-Item Search, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shi-Ai Zhu, Wei Zhang, Chun-Chet Tan, Ting Yao, Lei Pang, Hung-Khoon Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The vireo group participated in four tasks: instance search, semantic indexing, multimedia event detection and known-item search. In this paper,we will present our approaches and discuss the evaluation results.

Defining, Executing And Visualizing Representative Workflows In A Retail Domain, May Zeineldin

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Our lives are filled with routine activities that we do more or less on auto-pilot such as driving to work and cooking. This thesis explores a workflow representation as a way to represent such activities of daily living. The domain of a retail store environment is used. Workflows are initially expressed in a structured English representation, then translated into a Petri net notation and implemented in mix of Petri nets, Lua, and C so that the resulting workflows can be displayed as the actions of collections of avatarbots (avatars controlled by programs) in a 3D virtual world, Second Life. One …

A Representation Of Selected Nonmanual Signals In American Sign Language, Jerry C. Schnepp

College of Computing and Digital Media Dissertations

Computer-generated three-dimensional animation holds great promise for synthesizing utterances in American Sign Language (ASL) that are not only grammatical, but believable by members of the Deaf community. Animation poses several challenges stemming from the massive amounts of data necessary to specify the movement of three-dimensional geometry, and there is no current system that facilitates the synthesis of nonmanual signals. However, the linguistics of ASL can aid in surmounting the challenge by providing structure and rules for organizing the data.

This work presents a first method for representing ASL linguistic and extralinguistic processes that involve the face. Any such representation must …

Beyond Search: Event-Driven Summarization For Web Videos, Richard Hong, Jinhui Tang, Hung-Khoon Tan, Chong-Wah Ngo, Shuicheng Yan, Tat-Seng Chua

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The explosive growth of Web videos brings out the challenge of how to efficiently browse hundreds or even thousands of videos at a glance. Given an event-driven query, social media Web sites usually return a large number of videos that are diverse and noisy in a ranking list. Exploring such results will be time-consuming and thus degrades user experience. This article presents a novel scheme that is able to summarize the content of video search results by mining and threading "key" shots, such that users can get an overview of main content of these videos at a glance. The proposed …

Learning Human Emotion Patterns For Modeling Virtual Humans, Shu Feng, Ah-Hwee Tan

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Emotion modeling is a crucial part in modeling virtual humans. Although various emotion models have been proposed, most of them focus on designing specific appraisal rules. As there is no unified framework for emotional appraisal, the appraisal variables have to be defined beforehand and evaluated in a subjective way. In this paper, we propose an emotion model based on machine learning methods by taking the following position: an emotion model should mirror actual human emotion in the real world and connect tightly with human inner states, such as drives, motivations and personalities. Specifically, a self-organizing neural model called Emotional Appraisal …

Engineering A 3 Dimensional Model Of The Bridgewater Campus Using 3ds Max, Jean-Leman Rusangiza

Senior Seminars

Computers are a revolutionary part of daily life. Today computers are everywhere and used by everyone. The popularity of computers is mainly due to computer graphics. Graphics make computers easier to use and understand, by just about anybody. Today computer graphics are everywhere, on television, in films, training simulators and video games. In this paper a computer scientist decided to explore the field of computer graphics to learn how they are made and how they can help and educate people. In doing so a 3D computer model was engineered using a 3D modeling software system called 3ds MAX and a …

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 …

A Case Study Of The Effects Of A Web Interface Redesign Based On Usability Guidelines., Paromita Bhattacharya

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Usability guidelines for user interface (UI) design formulated by Nielsen and other authorities were used to redesign the web interface for a web based distance education course. The website's original UI, as judged by a group of web design professionals, violated standard guidelines for usability, readability, learnability, consistency, efficiency of use and flexibility. The original and redesigned UIs were tested using thinking aloud testing, a user satisfaction survey, and usability inspection. The results of user testing and heuristic evaluation suggest that the use of these guidelines in website redesign had a positive impact on user performance. A more conclusive result …

Improving Brain-Computer Interface Performance: Giving The P300 Speller Some Color., David B. Ryan

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Individuals who suffer from severe motor disabilities face the possibility of the loss of speech. A Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) can provide a means for communication through non-muscular control. Current BCI systems use characters that flash from gray to white (GW), making adjacent character difficult to distinguish from the target. The current study implements two types of color stimulus (grey to color [GC] and color intensification [CI]) and I hypotheses that color stimuli will; (1) reduce distraction of nontargets (2) enhance target response (3) reduce eye strain. Online results (n=21) show that GC has increased information transfer rate over CI. Mean …

Rock Porosity Analysis Using High Resolution X-Ray Tomography, Leo Groner, Dula Parkinson, Katya Bazilevskaya

STAR Program Research Presentations

Understanding rock porosity, the fraction of rock volume that is in pores, is a key to modeling weathering and flow of water, petroleum and CO2 through geological structures. Weathering of rocks affects the CO2 cycle, nutrient cycle and soil formation. Rock porosity affects water flow rates and, in turn, affects weathering. Avizo software was used to explore, visualize and measure the reconstructed high-resolution X-ray micro-tomography data collected from scanned rocks. Many Avizo approaches were tried before arriving at an acceptable process to determine their porosity characteristics. Porosity dynamics are affected by weathering and lithification. At micron resolution, the image is …

Trends In Web Typography, Heather Mcintosh

Graphic Communication

No abstract provided.

Image Processing – I: Research Design For Evaluation Of Finger Input Properties On Multi-Touch Screen, Ahsan Ullah, Ahmad Kamil B. Mahmood, Suziah Sulaiman, Muzafar Khan

International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies

Interactive tabletop display provides a collaborative workspace to users around a table. Users sit in front of each other and they perform direct and collaborative multi-touch interaction simultaneously. Users access the interactive elements using their bare fingers. The finger works as a pointer device, and it has direct relation with the size, shape, and configuration of the interactive elements on sensitive displays. It is found that there is lack of precise selection of small size interactive elements owing to users' fat fingers. In this regard, it is aimed to propose a research design to evaluate the finger input properties in …

Automatic Content Generation For Video Self Modeling, Ju Shen, Anusha Raghunathan, Sen-Ching S. Cheung, Ravi R. Patel

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Video self modeling (VSM) is a behavioral intervention technique in which a learner models a target behavior by watching a video of him or herself. Its effectiveness in rehabilitation and education has been repeatedly demonstrated but technical challenges remain in creating video contents that depict previously unseen behaviors. In this paper, we propose a novel system that re-renders new talking-head sequences suitable to be used for VSM treatment of patients with voice disorder. After the raw footage is captured, a new speech track is either synthesized using text-to-speech or selected based on voice similarity from a database of clean speeches. …

Developing Digital Field Guides For Plants: A Study From The Perspective Of Users, Emily Roseanne Schwarz

Master's Theses

A field guide is a tool to identify an object of natural history. Field guides
cover a wide range of topics from plants to fungi, birds to mammals, and shells to minerals. Traditionally, field guides are books, usually small enough to be carried outdoors . They enjoy wide popularity in modern life; almost every American home and library owns at least one field guide, and the same is also true for other areas of the world.

At this time, companies, non-profits, and universities are developing computer
technologies to replace printed field guides for identifying plants. This thesis
examines the state …

Point-Based Color Bleeding With Volumes, Christopher J. Gibson

Master's Theses

The interaction of light in our world is immensely complex, but with mod-

ern computers and advanced rendering algorithms, we are beginning to reach

the point where photo-realistic renders are truly difficult to separate from real

photographs. Achieving realistic or believable global illumination in scenes with

participating media is exponentially more expensive compared to our traditional

polygonal methods. Light interacts with the particles of a volume, creating com-

plex radiance patterns.

In this thesis, we introduce an extension to the commonly used point-based

color bleeding (PCB) technique, implementing volume scatter contributions. With

the addition of this PCB algorithm extension, we …