Frederick C. Harris

Real-time natural hand gestures

In human-computer interaction (HCI) applications, traditional devices, such as keyboard and mouse, can become cumbersome and unsuitable. Researchers consider the human hand to be one of the most promising natural HCI media; specifically, using hand gestures to input computer commands. Vision-based HCI hand-gesture analysis and recognition studies require large numbers of a variety of gestures as input and a virtual hand as output to display the results. Creating a virtual hand with natural gestures would improve human hand HCI research by providing data for hand analysis systems and generating visual output for hand simulation systems.

ACAT: A Web-Based Software Tool to Facilitate Course Assessment for ABET Accreditation

There are several institutions that accredit educational programs and require documentation to ensure that an educational program regularly meets certain criteria. This paper focuses on ABET program. They require that programs show student achievement and certain course outcomes. Documentation of this requirement is particularly burdensome. There is no standard method of generating these reports, so each institution handles it differently. This might involve manual collection of the data which is time very consuming. A software tool that facilitates this collection of the data and automatically generates the required reports would save institutions time and money. This paper presents such a tool, named ACAT (ABET Course Assessment Tool), it is a web-based application designed to assist in the collecting of data and generation of standardized assessment reports. This paper focuses on design and usability aspects of the proposed ACAT tool and provides implementation and operation details.

Nearly perfect sets in graphs

Abstract In a graph G =( V , E ), a set of vertices S is nearly perfect if every vertex in V - S is adjacent to at most one vertex in S . Nearly perfect sets are closely related to 2-packings of graphs, strongly stable sets, dominating sets and efficient dominating sets. We say a nearly perfect set S is 1-minimal if for every vertex u in S , the set S - u is not nearly perfect. Similarly, a nearly perfect set S is 1-maximal if for every vertex u in V - S , S ∪ u is not a nearly perfect set. Lastly, we define n p ( G ) to be the minimum cardinality of a 1-maximal nearly perfect set, and N p ( G ) to be the maximum cardinality of a 1-minimal nearly perfect set. In this paper we calculate these parameters for some classes of graphs. We show that the decision problem for n p ( G ) is NP-complete; we give a linear algorithm for determining n p ( T ) for any tree T ; and we show that N p ( G ) can be calculated for any graph G in polynomial time.

Remote-neocortex control of robotic search and threat identification

Robots with remote processing capabilities would be useful in hazardous or complex environments presenting weight and cost constraints. We implemented a novel robotic system that incrementally triangulates and navigates towards a speaking target. This system comprises a distributed, biologically inspired, three-layer control system. High-level decision making is performed via Internet protocol by a pulse-coded neocortical simulator situated remotely in a secure location. The robot navigated towards and contacted an animated human mouth target in 75 of 80 trials (χ 2 = 20.3, P< 0.0001). Current work involves classification and appropriate tactical response to acquired audio and visual speech information.

Watermark Embedder Optimization for 3D Mesh Objects Using Classification Based Approach

This paper presents a novel 3D mesh watermarking scheme that utilizes a support vector machine(SVM) based classifier for watermark insertion. Artificial intelligence(AI)based approaches have been employed by watermarking algorithms for various host mediums such as images, audio, and video. However, AI based techniques are yet to be explored by researchers in the 3D domain for watermark insertion and extraction processes. Contributing towards this end, the proposed approach employs a binary SVM to classify vertices as appropriate or inappropriate candidates for watermark insertion. The SVM is trained with feature vectors derived from the curvature estimates of a 1-ring neighborhood of vertices taken from normalized 3D meshes. A geometry-based non-blind approach is used by the watermarking algorithm. The robustness of proposed technique is evaluated experimentally by simulating attacks such as mesh smoothing, cropping and noise addition.

Robust watermarking of 3D skinning mesh animations

This paper presents a novel robust watermarking algorithm for 3D skinning mesh animations by embedding the watermark in skin weights in addition to key frames. This method can be used for copyright protection, tamper proofing or content annotation purposes. The proposed watermark is immune to noise attacks on key frames and skin weights, key frame dropping and frame modification and is perceptible invisible as well. Experimental results verified that the proposed algorithm has good robustness against attacks and maintains invisibility by preprocessing the animation data sets by key frame decimation.

Open-Source Tools for Immersive Environmental Visualization

Scientists of the Desert Research Institutes atmospheric, hydrological, and earth and ecosystem science divisions sift through vast amounts of data gathered from sophisticated instrumentation and computational models. To help address the data analysis needs that stem from the growing volume of data, DRI established the center for advanced visualization, computation, and modeling (CAVCaM) to foster DRIs move into interactive, large-scale, 3D visualization of these and other environmental research issues. Our mission is two-pronged. First, we seek to partner with our researcher collaborators at DRI and the larger scientific communities through the development and use of better visualization tools. Second, we work with research sponsors to create visualization applications for training and simulation

Steiner Minimal Trees: An Introduction, Parallel Computation, and Future Work

Minimizing a network’s length is one of the oldest optimization problems in mathematics and, consequently, it has been worked on by many of the leading mathematicians in history. In the mid-seventeenth century a simple problem was posed: Find the point P that minimizes the sum of the distances from P to each of three given points in the plane. Solutions to this problem were derived independently by Fermat, Torricelli, and Cavaliers. They all deduced that either P is inside the triangle formed by the given points and that the angles at P formed by the lines joining P to the three points are all 120°, or P is one of the three vertices and the angle at P formed by the lines joining P to the other two points is greater than or equal to 120°.

Towards Benchmarking of Video Motion Tracking Algorithms

The environment in which video motion needs to be tracked, places several constraints on the design of the tracking system. Current datasets which are used to evaluate and compare video motion tracking algorithms use a cumulative performance measure without thoroughly analyzing the effect of these different constraints imposed by the environment. There is need to build a heuristic framework which analyses these constraints as parameters of the framework and their effect on selection or design of tracking algorithm. The emphasis in this paper is to identify these parameters which will lay a foundation for defining subjective measures for the comparison of performance evaluation of tracking algorithms.

TAVERNS: Visualization and Manipulation of GIS Data in 3D Large Screen Immersive Environments

Currently there are many software packages that allow analysis of geographic information systems (GIS) data. However, these software packages limit user interaction and exploration of the GIS data to 2-dimensional (2D) interface. Virtual reality (VR) technology provides a great way for manipulating and visualizing 3-dimensional (3D) data in three dimensions. This paper presents the use of 3D large screen immersive environments for manipulation and interaction of GIS data in creating and editing GIS shapefiles.