Retrieval by classification of images containing large manmade objects using perceptual grouping

This paper applies perceptual grouping rules to the retrieval by classification of images containing large manmade objects such as buildings, towers, bridges, and other architectural objects. The semantic interrelationships between primitive image features are exploited by perceptual grouping to extract structure to detect the presence of manmade objects. Segmentation and detailed object representation are not required. The system analyzes each image to extract features that are strong evidence of the presence of these objects. These features are generated by the strong boundaries typical of manmade structures: straight line segments, longer linear lines, coterminations, “L” junctions, “U” junctions, parallel lines, parallel groups, “significant” parallel groups, cotermination graph, and polygons. A K-nearest neighbor framework is employed to classify these features and retrieve the images that contain manmade objects. Results are demonstrated for two databases of monocular outdoor images.     

基于语义内容的字体设计

20世纪50年代美国设计师哈伯.卢巴林(HERB LUBALIN)第一次提出来"字体应当表现情感"的口号,有些时候设计师利用字体的视觉想象给受众的心理感受为依据,能设计出和字体语意内容不同甚至相反的设计,通过这样的方式来表达她所要阐述的内容,这样的设计更显示出设计师对字体的视觉形象的深刻理解。     

Why Teachers Must Learn: Student Innovation as a Driving Factor in the Future of the Web

User innovation is the key to the development and vitality of technology. As Huatong Sun wrote, “expanding the scope of localization practices and linking user localization efforts” to design cycles—including pedagogical design—will help bridge the gap between what teachers/designers create and what skills users/students need and want. This article theorizes the role of modern composition students and teachers as co-constructors of productive spaces for learning critical inquiry based on students’ statuses as digital natives. It focuses on a class of first-year composition students who reshaped an assignment to fit their own needs within the physical classroom and also enacted a shift to a virtual classroom. While doing so, they provided ways for each class member to individualize space within that digital environment, and they focused their project on examining the ways in which social networking forums colonize their daily lives. This article argues that by letting student innovation drive pedagogical practice—just as social media creators let user innovation drive the digital structures they produce—composition teachers can be assured of having a text for critique that blurs the lines between “private” student underlife and “public” classroom practice and legitimizes the creation of student-produced learning spaces. Using critical and cyberfeminist theories as lenses, this article draws conclusions about the future of computer usage in composition pedagogy based on students’ abilities to re-appropriate physical and digital classroom space.     

Enhanced perceptual distance functions and indexing for image replica recognition

The proliferation of digital images and the widespread distribution of digital data that has been made possible by the Internet has increased problems associated with copyright infringement on digital images. Watermarking schemes have been proposed to safeguard copyrighted images, but watermarks are vulnerable to image processing and geometric distortions and may not be very effective. Thus, the content-based detection of pirated images has become an important application. In this paper, we discuss two important aspects of such a replica detection system: distance functions for similarity measurement and scalability. We extend our previous work on perceptual distance functions, which proposed the Dynamic Partial Function (DPF), and present enhanced techniques that overcome the limitations of DPF. These techniques include the Thresholding, Sampling, and Weighting schemes. Experimental evaluations show superior performance compared to DPF and other distance functions. We then address the issue of using these perceptual distance functions to efficiently detect replicas in large image data sets. The problem of indexing is made challenging by the high-dimensionality and the nonmetric nature of the distance functions. We propose using Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) to index images while using the above perceptual distance functions and demonstrate good performance through empirical studies on a very large database of diverse images.     

Interactive processes and learning attitudes in a web-based problem-based learning (PBL) platform

This paper discusses the steps taken to set up a digital logic course problem through a problem-based learning (PBL) constructivist approach. PBL is the learning which results from the process of working toward the understanding and resolution of a problem. The purpose of this study was to develop and implement problem-based learning in a digital logic course in a senior vocational industrial high school. Data collection included content analysis and a questionnaire survey. Content analysis was used to evaluate the students’ discussion messages, quality of dialogue, and the level of problem-solving activities. A survey was then administered to examine the students’ learning attitudes and perceptions toward this platform as a possible tool for PBL learning. Researchers found “Peer-responses” category is the most messages; the contents of messages focus on “General explanation” and “Reaction”; the level results of all groups’ problem-solving are similar; the index of the “Interaction” satisfaction level is the highest in PBL activity. Finally, some research suggestions were also proposed.     

Digital divides? Student and staff perceptions of information and communication technologies

This paper reports qualitative findings from a study that investigated Australian university staff and students’ perceptions and use of current and emerging technologies both in their daily lives and in teaching and learning contexts. Forty-six first-year students and 31 teaching and support staff from three Australian universities took part in interviews and focus groups. This paper examines how students and staff reported on their use of new technologies in their daily lives, their stated reasons for using those technologies, and their beliefs about the benefits and limitations of using technologies as teaching and learning tools. The findings question assumptions that have been made about a “digital divide” between “digital native” students and their “digital immigrant” teachers in higher education today, suggesting we need to develop a more sophisticated understanding about the role technologies play in the lives of both students and staff. A better understanding of student and staff perspectives will allow for more informed decisions about the implementation of educational technologies in today’s higher education institutions.     

“You’re not in Kansas anymore”: Interactions among semiotic modes in multimodal texts

Research and teaching continue to treat word and image separately and even see image succeeding word in a culture increasingly immersed in digital documents. However, concepts such as Kress’ “semiotics of synaesthesia” stress the relationship between word and image, a critical relationship in teaching students to develop genuinely multimodal texts.     

Social evaluations of embodied agents and avatars

The purpose of this study was to examine social evaluations (i.e., perceptions of empathy and positivity) following peoples’ interactions with digital human representations. Female research participants engaged in a 3-min interaction while immersed in a 3-D immersive virtual environment with a “peer counselor.” Participants were led to believe that the peer counselor was either an embodied agent (i.e., computer algorithm) or an avatar (i.e., another person). During the interaction, the peer counselor either smiled or not. As predicted, a digitally-rendered smile was found to affect participants’ social evaluations. However, these effects were moderated by participants’ beliefs about their interaction partner. Specifically, smiles enhanced social evaluations of embodied agents but degraded them for avatars. Although these results are consistent with other findings concerning the communicative realism of embodied agents and avatars they uniquely demonstrate that people’s beliefs alone, rather than actual differences in virtual representations, can impact social evaluations.     

Musical rhetoric in integrated-media composition

Rhetorical analyses of popular music in film can guide composition teachers to develop an anticipatory pedagogy for transforming ready-made musical materials into coherent and persuasive psychologically interactive, integrated-media compositions. This essay offers an analysis of The Rolling Stones’ “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” as the thesis of Lawrence Kasdan's The Big Chill and an examination of a student-produced digital video homage to David Fincher's Fight Club that employs The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” as a vehicle for its argument. Scholarly attention to visual rhetoric has helped composition teachers and theorists envision new possibilities for composing in new media. Careful consideration of musical rhetoric may enable us to hear new possibilities for integrated-media composition as well.     

Visual design guidelines for improving learning from dynamic and interactive digital text

Despite the dynamic and interactive features of digital text, the visual design guidelines for digital text are similar to those for printed text. The purpose of this study was to develop visual design guidelines for improving learning from dynamic and interactive digital text and to validate them by controlled testing. Two structure design guidelines (for enhancing text structure comprehension) and two selective-attention design guidelines (for maintaining the learners' attention on the essential contents) were developed based on the psychological and instructional, technological foundations that can affect the visual design of digital text. In this study, a 2 × 2 factorial design with 141 university students was used to examine the effectiveness of the visual design guidelines. The university students had 20 min to study a piece of digital text with the structure design guidelines, selective-attention design guidelines, both, or no design guidelines applied. Both the structure and selective-attention design guidelines had a positive influence on text structure understanding, essential contents comprehension and usability of digital text. The suggested visual design guidelines were found to be useful for enhancing text comprehension.     

A knowledge-based approach to the iris segmentation problem

This paper describes a knowledge-based approach to the problem of locating and segmenting the iris in images showing close-up human eyes. This approach is inspired in the expert system’s paradigm but, due the specific processing problems associated with image analysis, uses direct encoding of the “decision rules”, instead of a classic, formalized, knowledge base. The algorithm involves a succession of phases that deal with image pre-processing, pupil location, iris location, combination of pupil and iris, eyelids detection, and filtering of reflections. The development was iterative, based on successive improvements tested over a set of training images. The results that were achieved indicate that this global approach can be useful to solve image analysis problems over which human “experts” have better performance than the present computer-based solutions.     

Can avatar and self-referencing really increase the effects of online 2-D and 3-D advertising?

Previous studies have sought insights into how websites can effectively draw sustained attention from internet users. Do different types of information presentations on webpages have different influences on users’ perceptions of the information? More precisely, can combinations of an ever greater number of advertising elements on individual websites increase consumers’ purchase intentions? The aim of this study is to explore changes in web advertising’s verbal and visual stimulation of surfers’ cognitive process, and to provide valuable information for the successful matching of advertising elements to one another. We examine optimal website design according to the personality-trait theory and resource-matching theory. Study 1 addresses the effects that combinations of various types of online advertising can have on web design factor, and to this end, we use a 2 (visual complexity: 3D advertising with an avatar, 2D advertising) × 2 (verbal complexity: with or without self-referencing that is an advertising practice to express product claims in words) factorial design. Study 2 treats personality traits (i.e., need-for-cognition and sensation seeking) as moderating variables to build the optimal portfolio regarding the “online-advertising effects” hypothesis. Our results suggest that subjects prefer medium-complex advertising comprising “3D advertising elements with an avatar” or “2D advertising elements with self-referencing”: high-sensation seekers and low-need-for-cognition viewers prefer the former, whereas low-sensation seekers and high-need-for-cognition viewers prefer the latter.     

Retain viewer’s attention on banner ad by manipulating information type of the content

The influence of phenomenon like Banner blindness and Habituation has weakened researchers’ efforts to highlight the effect of adding salient visual features to ads. On the other hand, many studies discussed advertising attention on the basis of individual pages, neglecting the fact that most ads reside on one of a sequence of webpages that a viewer continuously reads. Therefore, our study discussed advertising attention from a different perspective, switching focus to the information type and their influence on attention in a sequence of webpages. This study, extended from our previous study, in which we found user attention to advertisement to drop sharply beyond the initial page, planned to investigate if it is possible to dishabituate users and enhance viewer‘s attention on banner ads by manipulating the information type of a sequence of content. We found that viewer’s attention on ads can be prolonged on subsequent pages with a rudimentary stimulus variation to content order and without changing any visual design feature of the ad itself, which is prone to the crippling effects of banner blindness and habituation, and that the image-based content inserted between pages of text-based content plays an important role in raising overall attention to advertisement.     

基于半监督多示例学习的对象图像检索

针对基于对象的图像检索问题,提出一种新的半监督多示例学习(MIL)算法.该算法将图像当作包,分割区域的视觉特征当作包中的示例,按"点密度"最大原则,提取"视觉语义"构造投影空间;然后利用定义的非线性函数将包映射成投影空间中的一个点,以获得图像的"投影特征",并采用粗糙集(RS)方法对其进行属性约简;最后利用直推式支持向量机(TSVM)进行半监督的学习,得到分类器.实验结果表明,该方法有效且性能优于其他方法.     

Scalable edge enhancement with automatic optimization for digital radiographic images

The ability to resolve fine picture detail is of paramount importance in medical imaging systems for viewing small tissue, bone structure and anatomy in X-ray images. In this paper, we present a new digital radiographic image processing system with the property of scalability and adaptability. (i) A new automatic optimization algorithm is proposed for display. (ii) An adaptive detection of a region-of-interest is developed. (iii) A “scalable edge enhancement algorithm” is proposed to improve the image quality for showing subtle structures in digital radiographic images. The advantage of the proposed method is demonstrated through experiments on 200 digital X-ray images and 50 CT images, in which different parts of human body structures are captured.     

HDR到LDR图像的分段式对数映射算法

为了适应低端显示设备输出,需要一定的方法将高动态范围（HDR)图像转换为相应的低动态范围（LDR)图像。如果既考虑到人眼对亮度反应呈对数变化又利用图像自身的亮度分布,对高动态范围图像进行先全局后局部的映射,便得到一种分段式对数映射算法。该算法的复杂度较低,在视觉效果上结合了对数映射和分段映射算法的特点。     

Integrating aesthetic and emotional preferences in social robot design: An affective design approach with Kansei Engineering and Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network

Recently, many companies have increasingly emphasized product appearance aesthetics and emotional preference-based design to enhance the competitiveness and popularity of their products. Identifying the interaction between product appearance and customer preferences and mining design information from the interacting context play essential roles in affect-related design approaches. However, due to the complexity of the aesthetic and emotional perception process, obtaining such design information from the interacting context is challenging. This paper proposes an affective design approach based on the Kansei engineering (KE) method and a deep convolutional generative adversarial network (DCGAN) following the research trend of merging KE with computer science techniques in recent years. A case study of the social robot design is conducted to verify the effectiveness of this approach. Appearance aesthetic and emotional preference evaluations are adopted by the KE method first to identify the crucial features in two categories: (1) The physical features of the outer shape, head and color for aesthetics; (2) The emotional features of intelligent, interesting and pleasant for preference perceptions. Based on a manually created social robot image dataset, the DCGAN model is trained to automatically generate novel design images. Then several professional designers are involved to fine-tune the generated images in detail. The experimental results show that the newly designed social robots tend to obtain positive aesthetic and preference evaluations. Practically, such an affective design approach can help industrial design companies identify customers’ psychological requirements and support designers in creating new products innovatively and efficiently.     

Podcasting by synchronising PowerPoint and voice: What are the pedagogical benefits?

The purpose of this study was to investigate the efficacy of audio–visual synchrony in podcasting and its possible pedagogical benefits. ‘Synchrony’ in this study refers to the simultaneous playback of audio and video data streams, so that the transitions between presentation slides occur at “lecturer chosen” points in the audio commentary. Manufacturers of lecture recording software (e.g. ProfCast) would have us believe that the synchrony of image and audio should improve the learning experience. We have yet to see in the literature any empirical evidence to support this hypothesis. In our study, 90 participants in two groups undertook two electronic lectures (e-lectures) on two separate topics, the subject matter of neither was familiar to them beforehand. Each group experienced one “synchronous” presentation (e-lecture) of one of the topics, and one “separate” presentation (i.e. PowerPoint and audio files separately presented) of the other topic. Each group therefore experienced both “synchronous” and “separate” delivery and they were then given an MCQ test that assessed five levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Results show no differences in innate ability between the two groups but the evidence supported our primary hypothesis in that statistically significantly higher test scores were seen when participants viewed a synchronous e-lecture; these scores were accounted for by subjects’ performance at three of the five levels of Bloom’s taxonomy. Qualitative ‘attitude’ survey results also displayed participant preference towards the synchronous over the asynchronous mode of delivery, and in spite of general acceptance of the proposed benefits of electronic proceedings, a majority preference towards traditional rather than electronic lectures. Despite this conservatism, this paper explores in more detail the potential benefits of podcasting via synchronous PowerPoint and voice.     

Cooperative passers-by tracking with a mobile robot and external cameras

In this paper, we present a cooperative passers-by tracking system between fixed view wall mounted cameras and a mobile robot. The proposed system fuses visual detections from wall mounted cameras and detections from a mobile robot–in a centralized manner–employing a “tracking-by-detection” approach within a Particle Filtering strategy. This tracking information is then used to endow the robot with passers-by avoidance ability to facilitate its navigation in crowds during the execution of a person following mission. The multi-person tracker’s ability to track passers-by near the robot distinctively is demonstrated through qualitative and quantitative off-line experiments. Finally, the designed perceptual modalities are deployed on our robotic platform, controlling its actuators via visual servoing techniques and free space diagrams in the vicinity of the robot, to illustrate the robot’s ability to follow a given target person in human crowded areas.