The squash-and-stretch stylization for character motions

The squash-and-stretch describes the rigidity of the character. This effect is the most important technique in traditional cartoon animation. In this paper, we introduce a method that applies the squash-and-stretch effect to character motion. Our method exaggerates the motion by sequentially applying the spatial exaggeration technique and the temporal exaggeration technique. The spatial exaggeration technique globally deforms the pose in order to make the squashed or stretched pose by modeling it as a covariance matrix of joint positions. Then, the temporal exaggeration technique computes a time-warping function for each joint, and applies it to the position of the joint allowing the character to stretch its links appropriately. The motion stylized by our method is a sequence of squashed and stretched poses with stretching limbs. By performing a user survey, we prove that the motion created using our method is similar to that used in 2D cartoon animation and is funnier than the original motion for human observers who are familiar with 2D cartoon animation.     

Human motion retrieval from hand-drawn sketch

The rapid growth of motion capture data increases the importance of motion retrieval. The majority of the existing motion retrieval approaches are based on a labor-intensive step in which the user browses and selects a desired query motion clip from the large motion clip database. In this work, a novel sketching interface for defining the query is presented. This simple approach allows users to define the required motion by sketching several motion strokes over a drawn character, which requires less effort and extends the users’ expressiveness. To support the real-time interface, a specialized encoding of the motions and the hand-drawn query is required. Here, we introduce a novel hierarchical encoding scheme based on a set of orthonormal spherical harmonic (SH) basis functions, which provides a compact representation, and avoids the CPU/processing intensive stage of temporal alignment used by previous solutions. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can well retrieve the motions, and is capable of retrieve logically and numerically similar motions, which is superior to previous approaches. The user study shows that the proposed system can be a useful tool to input motion query if the users are familiar with it. Finally, an application of generating a 3D animation from a hand-drawn comics strip is demonstrated.     

Adaptive synthesis of distance fields

We address the computational resource requirements of 3D example-based synthesis with an adaptive synthesis technique that uses a tree-based synthesis map. A signed-distance field (SDF) is determined for the 3D exemplars, and then new models can be synthesized as SDFs by neighborhood matching. Unlike voxel synthesis approach, our input is posed in the real domain to preserve maximum detail. In comparison to straightforward extensions to the existing volume texture synthesis approach, we made several improvements in terms of memory requirements, computation times, and synthesis quality. The inherent parallelism in this method makes it suitable for a multicore CPU. Results show that computation times and memory requirements are very much reduced, and large synthesized scenes exhibit fine details which mimic the exemplars.     

Adaptive load balancing algorithm for multiple homing mobile nodes

In places where mobile users can access multiple wireless networks simultaneously, a multipath scheduling algorithm can benefit the performance of wireless networks and improve the experience of mobile users. However, existing literature shows that it may not be the case, especially for TCP flows. According to early investigations, there are mainly two reasons that result in bad performance of TCP flows in wireless networks. One is the occurrence of out-of-order packets due to different delays in multiple paths. The other is the packet loss which is resulted from the limited bandwidth of wireless networks. To better exploit multipath scheduling for TCP flows, this paper presents a new scheduling algorithm named Adaptive Load Balancing Algorithm (ALBAM) to split traffic across multiple wireless links within the ISP infrastructure. Targeting at solving the two adverse impacts on TCP flows, ALBAM develops two techniques. Firstly, ALBAM takes advantage of the bursty nature of TCP flows and performs scheduling at the flowlet granularity where the packet interval is large enough to compensate for the different path delays. Secondly, ALBAM develops a Packet Number Estimation Algorithm (PNEA) to predict the buffer usage in each path. With PNEA, ALBAM can prevent buffer overflow and schedule the TCP flow to a less congested path before it suffers packet loss. Simulations show that ALBAM can provide better performance to TCP connections than its other counterparts.     

Existence and Exponential Stability of Multiple Periodic Solutions for a Multidirectional Associative Memory Neural Network

The paper proposes several mathematical models of the multidirectional associative memory (MAM) neural network by analyzing its structure. A model of MAM with distributed delays is studied. Under some new assumptions on activation functions, 2^n₀[m/2]{2^{n_0[m/2]}} invariant subsets of MAM are constructed. Then the existence and the exponential stability of 2^n₀[m/2]{2^{n_0[m/2]}} periodic solutions located on invariant subsets are obtained by constructing a suitable Liapunov function and a Poincaré mapping. An estimating method of the exponential convergence rate is given. The obtained results are new to MAM neural networks. An example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the results.     

OpenGL ES 1.1 implementation based on OpenGL

In this paper, we present an efficient way of implementing OpenGL ES 1.1 3D graphics API library for the environments with hardware-supported OpenGL facility, typically as desktop PCs. Although OpenGL ES was started from the existing OpenGL features, it rapidly became the standard 3D graphics library customized for embedded systems through introducing fixed-point arithmetic operations, buffer management with fixed-point data type supports, completely new texture mapping functions and others. Currently, it is the official 3D graphics API for Google Android, Apple iPhone, Sony PlayStation3, etc. In this paper, we achieved improvements on the arithmetic operations for the fixed-point number representation, which is the most characteristic data type for OpenGL ES 1.1. For the conversion of fixed-point data types to the floating-point number representations for the underlying OpenGL, we show the way of efficient conversion processes even with satisfying OpenGL ES standard requirements. We also introduced a specialized memory management scheme to manage the converted data from the buffer containing fixed-point numbers. In the case of texture processing, the requirements in both standards are quite different, and thus we used completely new software-implementations. Our final implementation of OpenGL ES library provides all of more than 200 functions in the standard specification and passed its conformance test, to show its compliance with the standard. From the efficiency point of view, we measured its execution times for several OpenGL ES-specific application programs and achieved remarkable improvements.     

k-Nearest neighbor query processing algorithm for cloaking regions towards user privacy protection in location-based services

Due to the advancement of wireless internet and mobile positioning technology, the application of location-based services (LBSs) has become popular for mobile users. Since users have to send their exact locations to obtain the service, it may lead to several privacy threats. To solve this problem, a cloaking method has been proposed to blur users’ exact locations into a cloaked spatial region with a required privacy threshold (k). With the cloaked region, an LBS server can carry out a k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) search algorithm. Some recent studies have proposed methods to search k-nearest POIs while protecting a user’s privacy. However, they have at least one major problem, such as inefficiency on query processing or low precision of retrieved result. To resolve these problems, in this paper, we propose a novel k-NN query processing algorithm for a cloaking region to satisfy both requirements of fast query processing time and high precision of the retrieved result. To achieve fast query processing time, we propose a new pruning technique based on a 2D-coodinate scheme. In addition, we make use of a Voronoi diagram for retrieving the nearest POIs efficiently. To satisfy the requirement of high precision of the retrieved result, we guarantee that our k-NN query processing algorithm always contains the exact set of k nearest neighbors. Our performance analysis shows that our algorithm achieves better performance in terms of query processing time and the number of candidate POIs compared with other algorithms.     

Tertiary hash tree-based index structure for high dimensional multimedia data

Dominant features for the content-based image retrieval usually have high-dimensionality. So far, many researches have been done to index such values to support fast retrieval. Still, many existing indexing schemes are suffering from performance degradation due to the curse of dimensionality problem. As an alternative, heuristic algorithms have been proposed to calculate the answer with ??high probability?? at the cost of accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new hash tree-based indexing structure called tertiary hash tree for indexing high-dimensional feature data. Tertiary hash tree provides several advantages compared to the traditional extendible hash structure in terms of resource usage and search performance. Through extensive experiments, we show that our proposed index structure achieves outstanding performance.     

Performance of TZCD-MBOK watermarking scheme in T-DMB systems

Recently, watermarking based data transmission techniques using terrestrial digital TV signal have been proposed since they are also cost-free and can overcome the limitations of GPS. However, in the previous watermarking based methods, the detection accuracy is low and additional data rate is too low. Thus, we propose the throughput enhancement method by employing the TZCD-MBOK watermarking technique in T-DMB system. By applying the proposed scheme to T-DMB, it allows additional data transmission for disaster broadcasting and improves efficiency of data transmission in shadow region and indoor to mobile environment through watermarking spread code. From the simulation results, we confirm the proposed watermarking scheme affected on the existing T-DMB signal. Moreover, it was also confirmed that the system capacity increases as the power of additional watermarking signal rose. The results of the paper can be applied to wireless multimedia digital broadcasting systems.