Nikolaos Ersotelos

Building highly realistic facial modeling and animation: a survey

This paper provides a comprehensive survey on the techniques for human facial modeling and animation. The survey is carried out from two different perspectives: facial modeling, which concerns how to produce 3D face models, and facial animation, which regards how to synthesize dynamic facial expressions. To generate an individual face model, we can either perform individualization of a generic model or combine face models from an existing face collection. With respect to facial animation, we have further categorized the techniques into simulation-based, performance-driven and shape blend-based approaches. The strength and weakness of these techniques within each category are discussed, alongside with the applications of these techniques to various exploitations. In addition, a brief historical review of the technique evolution is provided. Limitations and future trend are discussed. Conclusions are drawn at the end of the paper.

WebGL-based interactive rendering of whole body anatomy for web-oriented visualisation of avatar-centered digital health data

The visualisation of whole-body anatomy has a variety of applications in health-related analysis and simulation. However, the rendering of complex 3D human anatomy models is generally performed by standalone applications rather than via a web interface, as rendering large 3D models has always been a weak spot of traditional web browsers. Consequently, online access to, and exploration of, the human anatomy in 3D has not been feasible in the past. With the advent of WebGL and HTML5, high performance OpenGL rendering seamlessly integrated with the web interface is now within reach, and this opens the possibility of visualising avatar-centered health data via a web interface. In this paper, a WebGL-based prototype for rendering whole-body anatomy is introduced, and the technical details are presented.

Data Mining, Management and Visualization in Large Scientific Corpuses

Organizing scientific papers helps efficiently derive meaningful insights of the published scientific resources, enables researchers grasp rapid technological change and hence assists new scientific discovery. In this paper, we experiment text mining and data management of scientific publications for collecting and presenting useful information to support research. For efficient data management and fast information retrieval, four data storages are employed: a semantic repository, an index and search repository, a document repository and a graph repository, taking full advantage of their features and strength. The results show that the combination of these four repositories can effectively store and index the publication data with reliability and efficiency and hence supply meaningful information to support scientific research.

Dr. Inventor, Promoting Scientific Creativity by Utilising Web-based Research Objects, FP7

Scientific creativity and innovation represent the beating heart of European growth at a time of rapid technological change. Dr Inventor is built on the vision that technologies have great potential to supplement human ingenuity in science by overcoming the limitations that people suffer in pursuing scientific discovery. It presents an original system that will provide inspiration for scientific creativity by utilising the rich presence of web-based research resources. Dr Inventor will act as a personal research assistant, utilising machine-empowered search and computation to bring researchers extended perspectives for scientific innovation by informing them of a broad spectrum of relevant research concepts and approaches, by assessing the novelty of research ideas, and by offering suggestions of new concepts and workflows with unexpected features for new scientific discovery. Dr Inventor is an attempt to understand the potential of technology in the scientific creative process within current technology limitations. It represents a sound balance between scientific insight into individual scientific creative processes and technical implementation using innovative technologies in information extraction, document summarization, semantics and visual analytics. The outcomes will be integrated into a web-based system that will allow evaluation in a selected research area under real-world settings with carefully designed metrics, benchmarks and baseline for creative performance, leading to tangible measurements on the performance of the technologies in enhancing human creativity and a blueprint for future technologies in computational creativity. Dr Inventor has huge implications for scientific innovation in Europe, as it has the potential to change the way in which scientific research is undertaken. The acceptance of the system by general research communities will open opportunities for many industrial sectors, leading to reinforced leadership of European industry.

Topic-Aware Visual Citation Tracing via Enhanced Term Weighting for Efficient Literature Retrieval

Efficient retrieval of scientific literature related to a certain topic plays a key role in research work. While little has been done on topic-enabled citation filtering in traditional citation tracing, this paper presents visual citation tracing of scientific papers with document topics taken into consideration. Improved term selection and weighting are employed for mining the most relevant citations. A variation of the TF-IDF scheme, which uses external domain resources as references is proposed to calculate the term weighting in a particular domain. Moreover document weight is also incorporated in the calculation of term weight from a group of citations. A simple hierarchical word weighting method is also presented to handle keyword phrases. A visual interface is designed and implemented to interactively present the citation tracks in chord diagram and Sankey diagram.

MyHealthAvatar: A Case Study of Web-Based Interactive Visual Analytics of Lifestyle Data

MyHealthAvatar is a project designed to collect and track lifestyle and health data to promote citizen wellbeing. As a lifetime companion of citizens, the amount of data collected will be huge. It is almost impossible for citizen, patients and doctors to view, utilise and understand these data without proper visual presentation and user interaction. Interactive visual analytics of lifestyle data is one of the key features of MyHealthAvatar. This paper presents the interactive visual analytics components in MyHealthAvatar to facilitate health and lifestyle data presentation and analysis, including 3d avatar, dashboard, diary, timeline, clock view and map. These components can be integrated to achieve flexible visual analysis of spatio-temporal lifestyle data.

A highly automated method for facial expression synthesis

This paper proposes a highly automatic approach for a realistic facial expression synthesis that allows for enhanced performance in speed and quality, while minimizing user interferences. It will present a highly technical and automated method for facial feature detection, by allowing users to perform their desired facial expression synthesis with very limited labour input. Moreover, it will present a novel approach for normalizing the illumination settings values between the source and the target images, thereby allowing the algorithm to work accurately, even in different lighting conditions. We will present the results obtained from the proposed techniques, together with our conclusions, at the end of the paper.

Image-Based Rendering for Computer Synthesized Human Figures

Human figures synthesis has been one of the most complicated problems in computer graphics. In particular, facial animation is the most significant issue. Two decades have passed since Parkes pioneering work in animating faces (Parke, 1972). In the span of time, significant effort has been devoted to the development of computational models of human face for applications in diverse areas such as entertainment, low bandwidth teleconferencing, surgical facial planning and virtual reality. However, the task of accurately modeling the expressive human face by computer remains a major challenge. The main aspect of this research is to construct a new modeling and rendering technique. There will be brief analysis of IBMR (image based modeling and rendering) techniques for human face synthesis in computer graphics, research results obtained to date and future aims with discussions. The outcome of this research is to provide a faster, low cost and accurate 3D model that enables realistic facial expressions for animation purposes.

Texture synthesis using incremental patches

This paper presents a fast texture synthesis method using texture patches with incremental sizes. In contrast to the existing work in the area, it offers much fast speed through efficient computations. By applying the method to a wide variety of texture samples, we have demonstrated the effectiveness of the method through the results and discussions. In addition, we have also applied this texture synthesis method to cube mapping for the fast viewing of surfaces decorated by textures.