Bogdan Ionescu

An intelligent gesture interface for controlling TV sets and set-top boxes

The control of computers and electronics through hand gestures has gained significant industry and academic attention lately for the usability benefits and convenience that it offers users. Of particular research interest has been the control of living room environments containing televisions and set-top boxes. However, existing research has failed to provide a flexible solution for controlling such devices by hand gestures. They have used cameras that are sensitive to environmental factors such as lighting or that have unreasonable calibration demands. Additionally, the gesture processing techniques used so far have imposed considerable computational burden and have not provided a consistent and compelling TV control experience for a large variety of users and their homes. In this paper, the data returned from a custom 3D depth camera and a customizable gesture language is used to create an intelligent gesture interface for the control of TVs and set-top boxes. By using an infrared blaster to emit the commands typical of a physical remote, any television set or set-top box can be controlled to perform actions such as turning the TV on, changing the volume, muting the sound or changing the channel. Finally, a test setup is presented where a common television and a satellite receiver are controlled exclusively through hand gestures.

A testbed and research network for next generation services over next generation networks

The complexity of todays data communication networks necessitates complete, realistic and sophisticated testing grounds for verifying and validating their functionality. Network testing grounds are restricted to laboratories and environments isolated from real life scenarios. Testing in production and commercial networks is typically forbidden since they present a high degree of risk factors for service availability. Additionally, the majority of todays communication network testbeds lack the scale and flexibility needed to properly represent a true networking environment. Before deploying live networks there is a need to have a network testing environment scalable and flexible enough where issues such as: network design, vendor interoperability, endurance, multiprotocol layer interconnectivity, a vendors specific implementations of standards and network design viability have been verified to meet the requirements. In this paper a design and implementation of a next generation network is described, where both testing and production traffic coexist. NCIT*net 2 is an optical transmission network supporting end-to-end services over technologies such as Ethernet, SONET, MPLS and DWDM. The paper also discusses key technology aspects related to the functionality of equipment and network from a service point of view. These include the physical layer and network operation, as well as architecture and control. The testbed network is used for the deployment of networking services over the above technologies in order to verify service implementation, provisioning and assurance of quality of service requirements. This network also allows testing and evaluating systems, subsystems and components from different vendors in various interconnections. The paper goes further to describe, as an example, the tests designed and implemented for the analysis of MPLS based services over next generation networks.

A Collaborative Cloud-Based Multimedia Sharing Platform for Social Networking Environments

The amount of multimedia content on the internet has been growing at a remarkable rate, and users are increasingly looking to share online media with colleagues and friends on social networks. Several commercial and academic solutions have attempted to make it easier to share this large variety of online content with others, but they are generally limited to sending links. Existing products have not been able to provide a scalable cloud-based system that synchronizes disparate web content among many users in real-time. Additionally, they have lacked a platform with a modular architecture that can be extended by developers to support new sources of online media. In this paper, a cloud-based software architecture for a multimedia collaboration platform is introduced. The platform is accessible from a typical web browser and allows users to collaborate over webcam chat while viewing videos, photos, maps, documents, and listening to music, all in real-time. As examples, it is shown how a distributed system called Watch Together was deployed to real users within Facebook and an e-learning environment. Usage data is provided from both deployments and observations are made on how users share and consume real-time multimedia content.

A Multimodal Interaction Method that Combines Gestures and Physical Game Controllers

Motion-based control of video games has gained significant attention from both academic and industrial research groups for the unique interactive experiences it offers. Of particular research interest has been the control of games through gesture-based interfaces enabled by 3D cameras that have recently been made affordable. However, existing research has yet to combine the benefits of a 3D camera with those of a physical game controller in a way that uses accurate gesture and controller tracking to provide six degrees of freedom and one-to-one correspondence between the real-world 3D space and the virtual environment. This paper presents a natural man-machine interaction method whereby a user is able to control a virtual space by using one hand to perform gestures and the other hand to wield a physical controller. The data returned from a custom 3D depth camera is used to obtain not only hand gestures (number of fingers and their angles), but also the absolute position of the physical controller. This 3D data is then combined with the orientation data returned by the accelerometers and gyroscopes within the physical controller. The controller data is fused in real-time into a composite transformation matrix that is applied to a 3D object. Two game prototypes are presented that combine hand gestures and a physical controller to create an entirely new level of interactive gaming.

A SIP Based P2P Architecture for Social Networking Multimedia

P2P applications have been seen as one of the most elegant and simple Web applications which stirred a lot of controversy as they were a vehicle for many Web activities which were and are not legal. The P2P technology has been applied to many domains, from applications spanning the space of music downloading to communication system management etc. The grid as a middleware has raised P2P technology to the level of distributed computing. A series of P2P tools have been devised for the design, development and deployment of network based computing. Despite their spread, there are many open issues such as the lack of any centralized control or hierarchical organization. In this paper, a new hybrid architecture in which a P2P solution based on SIP a server to server connectivity on demand. The above serves as the central axis of a platform for media collaboration on the cloud. It is shown that using the new collaborative workspace on the cloud architecture different social networks in can be linked in a peer-to-peer manner. The security issues do not make the subject of this paper. A proof of concept, a use case scenario, and results obtained from its usage in a test environment are given at the end of the paper.

Finger-based gesture control of a collaborative online workspace

A gesture-based human computer interface can make computers and devices easier to use, such as by allowing people to share photos by moving their hands through the air. Existing solutions have relied on exotic hardware, often involving elaborate setups limited to the research lab. Gesture recognition algorithms used so far are not practical or responsive enough for real-world use, partially due to the inadequate data on which the image processing is applied. Most importantly, existing solutions have lacked a workspace that allows users to perform common collaborative tasks by using their hands and fingers. In this paper, a new paradigm for next-generation computer interfaces is introduced. The method presented is based on a custom 3D camera that is easy to set up and has a flexible detection range. This method accurately detects hand gestures from depth data, allowing them to be used to control any application or device. The paper proposes the control of application windows and their content in collaborative online workspaces on which many teams cooperate to complete useful tasks, as shown with examples.

An ontology based approach to intelligent data mining for environmental virtual warehouses of sensor data

The rapid development of sensor technology led to large deployments of collections of sensing nodes working together to collect information for light, temperature, atmospheric pressure, air pollutions parameters, images, and other relevant data according to specific Environmental applications. The ability of the sensor networks to collect information accurately and reliably enables building both real-time detection and early warning systems. Environment parameter measurement and supervision received a lot of attention from both academic and industrial research communities around the world. Applications supporting decisions for rapid coordinated responses to threats such as bushfires, tsunamis, earthquakes, and other crisis situation have been devised. In this paper a combined ontology and rule-bases intelligent system build over a platform for sensor data warehousing for decision support is introduced. A combined ontology of sensor networks and sensor data for environment parameter measurement is designed and discussed. A set of rule-based systems each tailored to a domain of networked sensors are linked together through a middle-layer of rule-base systems which reason with facts classified and structured as instances of the common sensor ontology. A set of meta-rules direct the intelligent activity of the whole system and requires individual rule-based systems to reason upon specific facts. The paper will also discuss the architecture and algorithms for data mining, fusion and reasoning for specific situation in Environment monitoring and supervision. Results obtained from experiments performed on the system prototype are given at the end of this paper.

Full-body tracking using a sensor array system and laser-based sweeps

The increased availability of consumer-grade virtual reality (VR) head-mounted displays (HMD) has created significant demand for affordable and reliable 3D input devices that can be used to control 3D user interfaces. Accurate positioning of a users body within the virtual environment is essential in order to provide users with convincing and interactive VR experiences. Existing full-body motion tracking systems from academia and industry have suffered from problems of occlusion and accumulated sensor error while often lacking absolute positional tracking. This paper describes a wireless Sensor Array System that uses multiple inertial measurement units (IMUs) for calculating the complete pose of a users body. The system corrects gyroscope errors by using magnetic sensor data. The Sensor Array System is augmented by a positional tracking system that consists of a rotary-laser base station and a photodiode-based tracked object worn on the users torso. The base station emits horizontal and vertical laser lines that sweep across the environment in sequence. With the known configuration of the photodiode constellation, the position and orientation of the tracked object can be determined with high accuracy, low latency, and low computational overhead. As will be shown, the sensor fusion algorithms used result with a full-body tracking system that can be applied to a wide variety of 3D applications and interfaces.

Using a NIR Camera for Car Gesture Control

As digital components are increasingly present in the control of automotive engines, direction systems and other in-car devices, Human-Vehicle Interaction (HVI) becomes more and more complex, requiring new user interfaces. Gesture control is proposed in the literature as a techniques which deserves to be explored as it can tremendously simplify numerous interactions between the car and the driver and/or other passengers. Key characteristics of such HVI devices include reliability, robustness, and stability of the entire system, ranging from the acquisition of the gesture to its recognition and tracking in real-time. In this paper, a smart and real-time depth camera operating in the Near Infrared (NIR) Spectrum is introduced. The camera is based on a new depth generation principle of sampling the space of the Field-of-View (FOV) with IR pulses of variable frequency and duty cycle. The depth images are calculated using reconfigurable hardware architecture and a series of eight IR images obtained via a sensitive image sensor. The final depth map is then processed by the gesture detection, recognition and tracking algorithms. A series of gestures are explored to qualify them for the special case of car control.

Virtual Data Warehouse architecture for real-time WebGIS

Environmental monitoring requires that raw data acquired from sensors and/or data repositories be transformed, by scientific analysis, into assessments of current ecosystem conditions and in evolution trends in time and space. The huge data amount produced by different sources, the complexity of the environmental models adopted and the necessary distributed collaboration between scientists and government agencies, require specific applications to process and understand environmental phenomena and validate results. GIS domain received a great deal of attention from the scientific and industrial applications communities. Many algorithms, protocols, and applications have been built through the ears for the collection, investigation, analysis, and synthesis of data obtained from sensors ranging from temperature, pressure, etc. to satellite imaging. Almost all attempts have been made to deal with data obtained from lumped repositories. Little or almost none works are reported about a general and flexible mechanism used to display geo-dependent data as it is generated. In this paper we present a GIS platform whose goal is to efficiently mine, fuse, and exploit environmental data and to synthetically display the results at the pace the data is produces. A virtual data warehouse to use GIS information is proposed to manage and collect data acquired by and from several sources. The proposed platform allows users to access to environmental data collected by different sources, to register, normalize and visualize data for exploring and analyzing complex structure and relationship, to process data using distributed computing resources and web applications. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed prototype, we present a case study related to data fusion of Modis files and Geo-Located real sensor data for air quality monitoring.