Wearable vibrotactile systems for virtual contact and information display

This paper presents a development history of a wearable, scalable vibrotactile stimulus delivery system. This history has followed a path from desktop-based, fully wired systems, through hybrid approaches consisting of a wireless connection from the host computer to a body-worn control box and wires to each tactor, to a completely wireless system employing Bluetooth technology to connect directly from the host to each individual tactor unit. Applications for such a system include delivering vibrotactile contact cues to users of virtual environments, providing directional cues in order to increase situational awareness in both real and virtual environments, and for general information display in wearable contexts. Through empirical study, we show that even a simple configuration, such as eight tactors arrayed around the torso, can be effective in increasing situational awareness in a building-clearing task, compared to users who perform the same task without the added cues.     

Illumination normalization with time-dependent intrinsic images for video surveillance

Variation in illumination conditions caused by weather, time of day, etc., makes the task difficult when building video surveillance systems of real world scenes. Especially, cast shadows produce troublesome effects, typically for object tracking from a fixed viewpoint, since it yields appearance variations of objects depending on whether they are inside or outside the shadow. In this paper, we handle such appearance variations by removing shadows in the image sequence. This can be considered as a preprocessing stage which leads to robust video surveillance. To achieve this, we propose a framework based on the idea of intrinsic images. Unlike previous methods of deriving intrinsic images, we derive time-varying reflectance images and corresponding illumination images from a sequence of images instead of assuming a single reflectance image. Using obtained illumination images, we normalize the input image sequence in terms of incident lighting distribution to eliminate shadowing effects. We also propose an illumination normalization scheme which can potentially run in real time, utilizing the illumination eigenspace, which captures the illumination variation due to weather, time of day, etc., and a shadow interpolation method based on shadow hulls. This paper describes the theory of the framework with simulation results and shows its effectiveness with object tracking results on real scene data sets.     

An approach to the formal analysis of license interoperability

With recent advances in information and telecommunications technologies, a large range of digital content is distributed over the Internet. Whereas diverse licenses are provided to protect the content legally and have the advantage of offering authors many choices, the obstruction of smooth content distribution may occur if the relationships between licenses are not revealed because of differences between the restrictions imposed by each license. To activate digital content distribution, license interoperability must be revealed. In this paper, we propose a framework for formally examining license interoperability by using many-sorted first-order logic. We formalize five actual licenses and examine their interoperability to prove the effectiveness of our proposed framework. The results show that the framework reveals the relationships between licenses.     

Conference assistant system for supporting knowledge sharing in academic communities

This paper describes our ongoing attempts to build a communityware system by presenting a project of providing digital assistants to support participants in an academic conference. We provided participants at the conference with a personal assistant system with mobile and ubiquitous computing technologies and facilitated communication among the participants. We also made online services available via the Web to encourage the participants to continue their relationships even after the conference. In this paper, we show the system we provided for the project and report the results.     

Contact force detection on a minute aperture mounted optical contact slider using an acoustic emission sensor

Advances in the digital network society require both higher density and higher transfer rates in all sorts of storage systems. Especially in optical recording, the trend toward higher density and larger capacity requires novel surface-recording technologies that can drastically diminish head-to-medium spacing, resulting in an improvement in spatial resolution and, finally, a higher recording density. To this end, we have already proposed a novel contact optical head slider that is able to almost cancel the suspension load by generating hydrodynamic pressure, thus realizing a lower net contact force. Evaluating the dynamic contact force is requisite in realizing its stable sliding operation and higher signal readout performance. In this study, a continuous acoustic emission (AE) signal was utilized to detect the dynamic contact force. AE signal modulation was compared with the applied out-of-plane acceleration on a medium generated by a spindle combined piezo-electric actuator. It was clarified that the detected AE modulation amplitude was approximately proportional to the applied acceleration, and that utilizing AE modulation will be a useful method for evaluating dynamic contact force.     

Effects of the SiC/Al interface reaction on fracture behavior of a composite conductor using SiC fiber reinforced aluminum for next generation power equipment

Electrical power demands are increasing every year, meaning that lightweight electric cable is needed which has high transmission capacity, high thermal resistance and low sag. Tokyo Electric Power Co., Chubu Electric Power Co. and Hitachi Cable Ltd. have been breaking new ground in the field of electric cable through the development of a SiC fiber reinforced aluminum conductor. In this work, the SiC/Al interface reaction during the manufacturing process and the electricity transmission temperature were studied by transmission electron microscopy (TEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) and field emission-Auger electron spectroscopy (FE-AES) for long-term reliability assessment. No reaction products were detected at the SiC/Al interface of elemental wire consisting of 7 SiC/Al preformed wires, indicating that the wire manufacturing process was reliable. An Al₄C₃ product was detected locally at the SiC/Al interface of the wire which had been thermally treated in molten Al under unfavorable conditions. The activation energy, Q, of Al₄C₃ growth at the SiC/Al interface was about 190 kJ/mol. In the temperature range of electricity transmission, Al atoms diffused into SiC fiber during heat treatment, and the amount of the diffused Al increased with increasing treatment temperature and holding time. The activation energy of Al diffusion through the SiC/Al interface to SiC fiber was about 78 kJ/mol. Strength deterioration was not induced by Al diffusion into SiC fiber, but strength strongly depended on the formation of Al₂SiO₅ compound at the SiC/Al interface above 400°C transmission temperatures. Kinetics calculations indicated that the rate of strength deterioration of the composite cable, held at 300°C for 36 years, was about 5%, so that practical use of SiC/Al composite cable should not be far in the future.     

Animated interface agent applying atms-based multimodal input interpretation

Two requirements should be met in order to develop a practical multimodal interface system , i . e ., ( 1 ) integration of delayed arrival of data and ( 2 ) elimination of ambiguity in recognition results of each modality . This paper presents an efficient and generic methodology for interpretation of multimodal input to satisfy these requirements . The proposed methodology can integrate delayed - arrival data satisfactorily and efficiently interpret multimodal input that contains ambiguity . In the input interpretation the multimodal interpretation process is regarded as hypothetical reasoning , and the control mechanismof interpretation is formalized by applying the assumption - based truth maintenance system ( ATMS ). The proposed method is applied to an interface agent system that accepts multimodal input consisting of voice and direct indication gesture on a touch display . The systemcommunicates to the user through a human - like interface agent's three - dimensional motion image with facial expressions , gestures , and a synthesized voice .     

Performance evaluation of iterative geometric fitting algorithms

The convergence performance of typical numerical schemes for geometric fitting for computer vision applications is compared. First, the problem and the associated KCR lower bound are stated. Then, three well-known fitting algorithms are described: FNS, HEIV, and renormalization. To these, we add a special variant of Gauss-Newton iterations. For initialization of iterations, random choice, least squares, and Taubin's method are tested. Simulation is conducted for fundamental matrix computation and ellipse fitting, which reveals different characteristics of each method.