Nihal Kodikara

A Tool for Ranking and Enhancing Aesthetic Quality of Paintings

Measuring aesthetic value of an artwork is a significant task in the field of visual & performing arts. Artists follow several techniques manually using traditional methods to balance the visual aesthetic value of different aesthetic products such as a film, a drama, a painting etc. Today, artists are enthusiastic on emerging information technology techniques for judgment and enhancement of designed product aesthetically and efficiently while applying traditional concepts to design initial form of the artwork. Computational aesthetics is the research of computational methods that do make applicable aesthetic decisions in a similar fashion as human can. This paper introduces a new tool that can be used to rank a given digital image of paintings based on a common parameter set with their weighting factors which are supposed to be adjusted for changing the aesthetic level of a particular painting in the area of computational aesthetics.

Moving from detection to pre-detection of Alzheimer's Disease from MRI data

Alzheimers Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia, affecting approximately 10% of individuals under 65 years of age, with the prevalence doubling every 5 years up to age 80, above which the prevalence exceeds 40%. Currently diagnosis of AD is largely based on the examination of clinical history and tests such as MMSE (Mini-mental state examination) and PAL (Paired Associates Learning). However many present studies have highlighted the inaccuracies and limitations of such tests. Thus medical officers are now moving to the more accurate neuroimaging data (Magnetic Resonance Imaging- MRI) based diagnosis for these types of diseases where brain atrophy transpires. However it is a considerable challenge to analyse large numbers of images manually to get the most accurate diagnosis at present.

Flight Simulator for Serious Gaming

Providing entertainment is the primary concern of the gaming. Once this primary objective alters to provide learning and training materials it calls simulators or the serious gaming. Learning through experiencing or facing the actual scenario is considered as an effective learning technique. The limitations of the experiential learning and how the simulations are going to address those limitations are also reviewed in this paper. Aviation field is one of the most critical and potentially high risk areas where one has to spend lots of money and resources in training scenario. Hence the serious gaming concepts have being playing as an effective cost cutting solution in aviation training. In this paper it is intended to discuss the seriousness of a selected flight simulator and how they adopted the teaching learning concepts. How the simulator can be used in the learning curve is also discussed separately

The Need for Novel Development Methodologies for Software Projects in Universities: A Sri Lankan Case Study

Software engineering requires coordination across a number of disciplines and is concerned with theories, methods and tools for professional software development. Project management is considered as the main function which facilitates better utilization of knowledge, skills, resources, tools and techniques in any such project to achieve its intended objectives. But, there is no such standard method that can be used in every project. Project Management practices mainly depend on the industry it is been used; i.e. construction, manufacturing, marketing, auditing, software engineering, etc. For software engineering there are number of standard Project Management methods used in different circumstances. Nevertheless, it was difficult to find a specific methodology that can be used in a university context, which is more focused on innovations, research and learning. The paper aims to motivate why a novel software product development methodology should be developed for used within universities, such methodology may even be possible to be later implemented within the software industry, where innovation is a major ingredient.

User Perception of the Physical & Behavioral Realism of a Maritime Virtual Reality Environment

Perception enhanced real-time Virtual Reality (VR) applications are used in various fields such as education and entertainment. The physical and behavioral realism of such applications are important in different perspectives. We have developed a perception enhanced real-time VR solution for maritime applications such as naval training, water way designs and simulate military scenes. In this paper, we present brief description of a six degrees of freedom (6-DOF) real-time mathematical ship motion simulation model and validation techniques for physical/ behavioral realism of a perception enhanced maritime VR environment. The user perceived physical and behavioral realism of the VR solution is investigated with user tests and preliminary results are presented.

Classification of stages of diabetic retinopathy in human retina

Diabetic retinopathy is a major health problem which is prevalent in a vast variety of diabetic patients. It will lead to eventual blindness due to changes of blood vessels in the retina. Retinal anomaly identification is a complex, time consuming task for ophthalmologists as they have to investigate a large portion of the area at once with the involvement of expert ophthalmologists or expensive equipment such as Fundus camera.

Real-time realistic ocean wave rendering model for visualization of different sea states

At the present time virtual simulation has become a very popular subject in computer graphics. The main goal of the simulation in the context of computer graphics is reproducing the natural phenomena surrounding us in a more true-to-life possible way. When representing natural phenomena, more sensible factor is increasing the reality. Among many kinds of simulations realistic ocean simulation has become an important arena. Actually, it is a very interesting natural object to model because two third of the surface of the earth is covered by the ocean and water is an intrinsic part of day to day life. There are different models to represent ocean surface. However, due to highly dynamic behavior of the ocean, representing the visual complexity of these phenomena using basic simulation models is a challenge. Thus ocean water simulation is a computationally expensive process. The main aim of this research is proposing a substantive ocean wave visualization model taking into account different sea states proposed by Beaufort Sea scale. Since yet there is no such single approach with a satisfactory outcome. The state of the sea is changing time to time according to wind speed and other various phenomena. This dynamic feature is very important for serious computer games and simulators use for maritime trainings. The rendering mechanism suggests in this thesis is intended to provide an efficient and accurate method to represent the high quality of visual characteristics and runs in real time to produce highly realistic ocean scenes regardless of the complexity of the wave model. Building a mathematical model for representing the shape of the ocean surface is not an objective of this research. But suitable existing wave models are used for the study. Further this thesis is trying to identify the most suitable wave model among different kind of existing wave models for representing the each selected sea state.

Stiffness parameter evaluation for graphical and haptic gallbladder model

Surgery simulation platform is a combination of three components; deformable model; input output method and; collision detection method. Throughout the literature there are number of techniques, algorithms and mechanisms have been proposed to enhance the performances of those modules. In this paper we presents an extensive literature review on deformable object modeling algorithms, collision detection methods, haptic devices, haptic force feedback and rendering mechanism. Stiffness value is the governing parameter which decides the overall performance as well as the realism of the deformable models. With the stiffness it can increase or decrease the flexibility of the model. With the haptic force feedback it can sense the flexibility of the model. Hence it is important to impose an acceptable stiffness on model to enhance the user realism. Based on the methods which have been used to implement the deformable model, the acceptable stiffness value range may vary. In this paper it has discussed the stiffness parameter extraction process for the designed deformable gallbladder model under certain constraints and also has proposed an acceptable stiffness value range. The process has been evaluated based on the young modulus value of the live gallbladder tissue.

Autogenous diabetic retinopathy censor for ophthalmologists - AKSHI

The Diabetic Retinopathy (DR) is a rapidly growing interrogation around the world which can be annotated by abortive metabolism of glucose that causes long-term infection in human retina. This is one of the preliminary reason of visual impairment and blindness of adults. Information on retinal pathological mutation can be recognized using ocular fundus images. In this research, we are mainly focused on resurrecting an automated diagnosis system to detect DR anomalies such as severity level classification of DR patient (Non-proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy approach) and vessel tortuosity measurement of untwisted vessels to assessment of vessel anomalies (Proliferative Diabetic Retinopathy approach). Severity classification method is obtained better results according to the precision, recall, F-measure and accuracy (exceeds 94%) in all formats of cross validation. In ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curves also visualized the higher AUC (Area Under Curve) percentage (exceeds 95%). User level evaluation of severity capturing is obtained higher accuracy (85%) result and fairly better values for each evaluation measurements. Untwisted vessel detection for tortuosity measurement also carried out the good results with respect to the sensitivity (85%), specificity (89%) and accuracy (87%).

Real-Time Simulation of Aero-optical Distortions Due to Air Density Fluctuations at Supersonic Speed

Implementations of visual simulations of shock phenomenon have been given significantly less-attention in last decades. We present a novel approach to simulate aero-optical distortions due to shock waves generated by a supersonic jet by considering the physics background of the shock phenomenon. The optical distortion is simulated by calculating the index of refraction for oblique shock waves. The refractive index for the shock wave was calculated, by considering the mean characteristics of supersonic flows. Even though the flow characteristics are not uniform across the shock wave the results shows that this approach is a better way to simulate aero-optical distortions in real time.