3D finger tracking and recognition image processing for real-time music playing with depth sensors

In this research, we propose a state-of-the-art 3D finger gesture tracking and recognition method. We use the depth sensors for both hands in real time music playing. In line with the development of 3D depth cameras, we implemented a set of 3D gesture-based instruments, such as Virtual Cello and Virtual Piano, which need precise finger tracking in 3D space. For hands tracking, model-based tracking for left hand and appearance-based tracking for right hand techniques are proposed. To detect finger gestures, our approaches consist number of systematic steps as reducing noise in depth map and geometrical processing for Virtual Cello. For Virtual Piano, we introduce the Neural Network (NN) method to detect special hand gestures. It has Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) structure with back propagation training. Literature has few examples using touch screen as medium, with fixed-coordinates, and 2D–gestures to control MIDI input. The end users should no longer carry anything on their hands. We use Senz3D and Leap Motion due to a few technical benefits. Senz3D and Leap Motion use a closer distance to hands, thus detailed finger gestures can be precisely identified. In the past years, we announced a set of virtual musical instruments and the MINE Virtual Band. Our research work is tested on lab environment and professional theatrical stage. More information and demonstrations of the proposed method can be accessed at: http://video.minelab.tw/DETS/VMIB/.     

Using gestures to convey internal mental models and index multimedia content

Gestures can serve as external representations of abstract concepts which may be otherwise difficult to illustrate. Gestures often accompany verbal statement as an embodiment of mental models that augment the communication of ideas, concepts or envisioned shapes of products. A gesture is also an indicator of the subject and context of the issue under discussion. We argue that if gestures can be identified and formalized they can be used as a knowledge indexing and retrieval tool and can prove to be useful access point into unstructured digital video data. We present a methodology and a prototype, called I-Gesture that allows users to (1) define a vocabulary of gestures for a specific domain, (2) build a digital library of the gesture vocabulary, and (3) mark up entire video streams based on the predefined vocabulary for future search and retrieval of digital content from the archive. I-Gesture methodology and prototype are illustrated through scenarios where it can be utilized. The paper concludes with results of evaluation experiments with I-Gesture using a test bed of design-construction projects.

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On quasi-interpretations of grammar forms

The notions of a grammar form and its interpretations were introduced to describe families of structurally related grammars. Basically, a grammar formG is a (context-free) grammar serving as a master grammar and the interpretation operator defines a family of grammars, each structurally related toG. In this paper, a new operator yielding a family of grammars, is introduced as a variant of . There are two major results. The first is that and commute. The second is that for each grammar formG, the collection of all families of grammars ,G′ in , is finite. Expressed otherwise, the second result is that for each grammar formG there is only a bounded number of grammar forms in (G) no two of which are strongly equivalent.     

A Unified User Management System

ABSTRACT

As open source software has gained in popularity throughout the last decades, free operating systems (OSs) such as Linux (Torvalds) and BSD derivatives (i.e., FreeBSD, 2012; NetBSD, 2012 NetBSD Foundation. (2012). The NetBSD project. Available from http://netbsd.org (http://netbsd.org)  [Google Scholar]; OpenBSD, 2012 OpenBSD. (2012). OpenBSD. OpenBSD. Available from http://netbsd.org (http://netbsd.org)  [Google Scholar]) have become more common, not only on datacenters but also on desktop and laptop computers. It is not rare to find computer labs or company offices composed of personal computers that boot more than one operating system. By being able to choose among available OSs, a company's or organization's information technology manager has the freedom to select the right OS for the company's needs, and the decision can be based on technical or financial criteria. This freedom of choice, however, comes with a cost. The administrative complexity of heterogeneous networks is much higher compared to single OS networks, and if the network is large enough so that protocols such as LDAP (Zeilenga, 2006 Zeilenga, K. 2006. Lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP): Technical specification road map et. alTech. rep., RFC 4510, June [Google Scholar]) or Kerberos (Kohl & Neuman, 1993 Kohl, J. and Neuman, C. 1993. The Kerberos network authentication service (v5) Tech. rep., RFC 1510, September[Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) need to be adopted, then the administration burden may become unbearable. Even though some tools exist that make user management of heterogeneous networks more feasible (Tournier, 2006 Tournier, J. (2006). smbldap-tools – summary [Gna!]. In Welcome to Gna! http://gna.org/projects/smbldap-tools (http://gna.org/projects/smbldap-tools)  [Google Scholar]; Chu & Symas Corp., 2005 Chu, H. and Symas Corp. (2005) http://www.openldap.org/devel/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/contrib/slapd-modules/smbk5pwd/README (http://www.openldap.org/devel/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/contrib/slapd-modules/smbk5pwd/README)  [Google Scholar]), it is not uncommon to use more than one back end for storing user credentials due to OS incompatibilities. In such configurations, the hardest problem to address is credential and account expiration synchronization among the different back ends. This paper demonstrates a platform that tries to mitigate the problem of synchronization by adding an additional, modular, easy to expand layer which is responsible for synchronizing any number of underlying back ends in a secure fashion.     

libMesh : a C++ library for parallel adaptive mesh refinement/coarsening simulations

In this paper we describe the libMesh (http://libmesh.sourceforge.net) framework for parallel adaptive finite element applications. libMesh is an open-source software library that has been developed to facilitate serial and parallel simulation of multiscale, multiphysics applications using adaptive mesh refinement and coarsening strategies. The main software development is being carried out in the CFDLab (http://cfdlab.ae.utexas.edu) at the University of Texas, but as with other open-source software projects; contributions are being made elsewhere in the US and abroad. The main goals of this article are: (1) to provide a basic reference source that describes libMesh and the underlying philosophy and software design approach; (2) to give sufficient detail and references on the adaptive mesh refinement and coarsening (AMR/C) scheme for applications analysts and developers; and (3) to describe the parallel implementation and data structures with supporting discussion of domain decomposition, message passing, and details related to dynamic repartitioning for parallel AMR/C. Other aspects related to C++ programming paradigms, reusability for diverse applications, adaptive modeling, physics-independent error indicators, and similar concepts are briefly discussed. Finally, results from some applications using the library are presented and areas of future research are discussed.     

Measuring and ranking attacks based on vulnerability analysis

As the number of software vulnerabilities increases, the research on software vulnerabilities becomes a focusing point in information security. A vulnerability could be exploited to attack the information asset with the weakness related to the vulnerability. However, multiple attacks may target one software product at the same time, and it is necessary to rank and prioritize those attacks in order to establish a better defense. This paper proposes a similarity measurement to compare and categorize vulnerabilities, and a set of security metrics to rank attacks based on vulnerability analysis. The vulnerability information is retrieved from a vulnerability management ontology integrating commonly used standards like CVE (http://www.cve.mitre.org/), CWE (http://www.cwe.mitre.org/), CVSS (http://www.first.org/cvss/), and CAPEC (http://www.capec.mitre.org/). This approach can be used in many areas of vulnerability management to secure information systems and e-business, such as vulnerability classification, mitigation and patching, threat detection and attack prevention.     

Benchmarking SQL on MapReduce systems using large astronomy databases

In the era of bigdata, with a massive set of digital information of unprecedented volumes being collected and/or produced in several application domains, it becomes more and more difficult to manage and query large data repositories. In the framework of the PetaSky project (http://com.isima.fr/Petasky), we focus on the problem of managing scientific data in the field of cosmology. The data we consider are those of the LSST project (http://www.lsst.org/). The overall size of the database that will be produced is expected to exceed 60 PB (Lsst data challenge handbook, 2012). In order to evaluate the performances of existing SQL On MapReduce data management systems, we conducted extensive experiments by using data and queries from the area of cosmology. The goal of this work is to report on the ability of such systems to support large scale declarative queries. We mainly investigated the impact of data partitioning, indexing and compression on query execution performances.     

On Rewriting Rules in Mizar

This paper presents some tentative experiments in using a special case of rewriting rules in Mizar (Mizar homepage: http://www.mizar.org/): rewriting a term as its subterm. A similar technique, but based on another Mizar mechanism called functor identification (Korni?owicz 2009) was used by Caminati, in his paper on basic first-order model theory in Mizar (Caminati, J Form Reason 3(1):49–77, 2010, Form Math 19(3):157–169, 2011). However for this purpose he was obligated to introduce some artificial functors. The mechanism presented in the present paper looks promising and fits the Mizar paradigm.     

Enclosing the solution set of linear systems with inaccurate data by iterative methods based on incomplete LU-decompositions

We present a class of iterative methods to enclose the solution set by an interval vector;A is varying in ann×n intervalH-Matrix andb is varying in an interval vector . The algorithm taken into consideration generalizes an iterative method of Meijerink/van der Vorst based on an incompleteLU-decomposition of anM-MatrixA. Theorems concerning the feasibility of the algorithm, its rate of convergence and its quality of enclosure are given. Since the original method of Meijerink/van der Vorst is a special case of our algorithm we have thus shown its applicability to the larger class ofH-matrices. Furthermore we relate theR ₁-factor (as defined in Ortega/Rheinboldt [9]) of the original method to the underlying setP of indices.     

Joint Optimization for Object Class Segmentation and Dense Stereo Reconstruction

The problems of dense stereo reconstruction and object class segmentation can both be formulated as Random Field labeling problems, in which every pixel in the image is assigned a label corresponding to either its disparity, or an object class such as road or building. While these two problems are mutually informative, no attempt has been made to jointly optimize their labelings. In this work we provide a flexible framework configured via cross-validation that unifies the two problems and demonstrate that, by resolving ambiguities, which would be present in real world data if the two problems were considered separately, joint optimization of the two problems substantially improves performance. To evaluate our method, we augment the Leuven data set (http://cms.brookes.ac.uk/research/visiongroup/files/Leuven.zip), which is a stereo video shot from a car driving around the streets of Leuven, with 70 hand labeled object class and disparity maps. We hope that the release of these annotations will stimulate further work in the challenging domain of street-view analysis. Complete source code is publicly available (http://cms.brookes.ac.uk/staff/Philip-Torr/ale.htm).     

On the approximate solution of first-kind integral equations of Volterra type

The present paper deals with the approximate solution of integral equations of the first kind, ( y)x∈I:=[a, b], where denotes a (linear) integral operator of Volterra (or Abel) type, and whereg∈C(I), withg(a)=0. The given functiong is approximated uniformly onI (or on a finite subsetZ?I by using certain weak Chebyshev systems onI which are obtained in a natural way. By the linearity of this yields an approximation to the exact solutiony onI. Questions of uniqueness and characterization of such approximating functions, as well as numerical aspects of the approximation problem are discussed.     

The XTS-AES Disk Encryption Algorithm and the Security of Ciphertext Stealing

Abstract

This paper describes the importance of the XTS-AES encryption mode of operation and concludes with a new proof for the security of ciphertext stealing as used by XTS-AES. The XTS-AES mode is designed for encrypting data stored on hard disks where there is not additional space for an integrity field. Given this lack of space for an integrity field, XTS-AES builds on the security of AES by protecting the storage device from many dictionary and copy/paste attacks. The operation of the XTS mode of AES is defined in the IEEE 1619-2007 standard [3 IEEE Std 1619–2007 . April 18, 2008 . The XTS-AES Tweakable Block Cipher. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc.  [Google Scholar]], and has been adopted by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as an approved mode of operation under FIPS 140-2 [2 Dworkin , M. December 2009 . NIST SP 800-38E, “Recommendation for Block Cipher Modes of Operation: The XTS-AES Mode for Confidentiality on Storage Devices”.  [Google Scholar]]. XTS-AES builds on the XEX (Xor-Encrypt-Xor) mode originally proposed by Rogaway [8 Rogaway , P. 2004 . Efficient Instantiations of Tweakable Block ciphers and Refinements to Modes OCB and PMAC. Advances in Cryptology–Asiacrypt 2004, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 3329, Springer-Verlag, pp. 16–31. Available at http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/rogaway/papers/offsets.pdf (Accessed 6 January 2012) . [Google Scholar]].     

A real time Named Entity Recognition system for Arabic text mining

Arabic is the most widely spoken language in the Arab World. Most people of the Islamic World understand the Classic Arabic language because it is the language of the Qur’an. Despite the fact that in the last decade the number of Arabic Internet users (Middle East and North and East of Africa) has increased considerably, systems to analyze Arabic digital resources automatically are not as easily available as they are for English. Therefore, in this work, an attempt is made to build a real time Named Entity Recognition system that can be used in web applications to detect the appearance of specific named entities and events in news written in Arabic. Arabic is a highly inflectional language, thus we will try to minimize the impact of Arabic affixes on the quality of the pattern recognition model applied to identify named entities. These patterns are built up by processing and integrating different gazetteers, from DBPedia (http://dbpedia.org/About, 2009) to GATE (A general architecture for text engineering, 2009) and ANERGazet (http://users.dsic.upv.es/grupos/nle/?file=kop4.php).     

GAMer: a synthesis of subspace clustering and dense subgraph mining

In this work, we propose a new method to find homogeneous object groups in a single vertex-labeled graph. The basic premise is that many prevalent datasets consist of multiple types of information: graph data to represent the relations between objects and attribute data to characterize the single objects. Analyzing both information types simultaneously can increase the expressiveness of the resulting patterns. Our patterns of interest are sets of objects that are densely connected within the associated graph and as well show high similarity regarding their attributes. As for attribute data it is known that full-space clustering often is futile, we have to analyze the similarity of objects regarding subsets of their attributes. In order to take full advantage of all present information, we combine the paradigms of dense subgraph mining and subspace clustering. For our approach, we face several challenges to achieve a sound combination of the two paradigms. We maximize our twofold clusters according to their density, size, and number of relevant dimensions. The optimization of these three objectives usually is conflicting; thus, we realize a trade-off between these characteristics to obtain meaningful patterns. We develop a redundancy model to confine the clustering to a manageable size by selecting only the most interesting clusters for the result set. We prove the complexity of our clustering model and we particularly focus on the exploration of various pruning strategies to design the efficient algorithm GAMer (Graph & Attribute Miner). In thorough experiments on synthetic and real world data we show that GAMer achieves low runtimes and high clustering qualities. We provide all datasets, measures, executables, and parameter settings on our website http://dme.rwth-aachen.de/gamer.     

Principal motion components for one-shot gesture recognition

This paper introduces principal motion components (PMC), a new method for one-shot gesture recognition. In the considered scenario a single training video is available for each gesture to be recognized, which limits the application of traditional techniques (e.g., HMMs). In PMC, a 2D map of motion energy is obtained per each pair of consecutive frames in a video. Motion maps associated to a video are processed to obtain a PCA model, which is used for recognition under a reconstruction-error approach. The main benefits of the proposed approach are its simplicity, easiness of implementation, competitive performance and efficiency. We report experimental results in one-shot gesture recognition using the ChaLearn Gesture Dataset; a benchmark comprising more than 50,000 gestures, recorded as both RGB and depth video with a Kinect?camera. Results obtained with PMC are competitive with alternative methods proposed for the same data set.     

Hand posture and gesture recognition technology

Hand gestures that are performed by one or two hands can be categorized according to their applications into different categories including conversational, controlling, manipulative and communicative gestures. Generally, hand gesture recognition aims to identify specific human gestures and use them to convey information. The process of hand gesture recognition composes mainly of four stages: hand gesture images collection, gesture image preprocessing using some techniques including edge detection, filtering and normalization, capture the main characteristics of the gesture images and the evaluation (or classification) stage where the image is classified to its corresponding gesture class. There are many methods that have been used in the classification stage of hand gesture recognition such as Artificial Neural Networks, template matching, Hidden Markov Models and Dynamic Time Warping. This exploratory survey aims to provide a progress report on hand posture and gesture recognition technology.