适应视觉感知的块效应消除算法

针对编码图像出现块效应的现象,提出一种以人类视觉感知驱动的块效应消除算法。传统块效应消除算法经常会导致图像边缘丢失,为了解决这个问题,本文对块效应影响像素应用自适应滤波器和模糊推理技术。仿真结果表明算法可以获得比传统算法更好的效果。     

Typology of teacher perception toward distance education issues – A study of college information department teachers in Taiwan

The popularity of distance education has grown rapidly over the last decade in Taiwan’s higher education, yet many fundamental teaching–learning issues are still in debate. While teacher–student interaction is a key success factor in distance education, little work has been done on the teachers. The intent of this research was to clarify teacher’s perceptions on key distance education issues and to develop a discernible typology of different groups of teachers based on their perceptions. Because there may be a gulf between teachers and the technology used in distance education, the target of this study was teachers in information related departments in Taiwan’s colleges, who were more familiar with current technology. Factor analysis and cluster analysis were used to derive the typology. Five higher-level issue constructs emerged from the factor analysis: learning effect, customization, administrative challenges, geographic and resource integration, and instructional design challenges. Four groups of teachers, namely the skeptics, the optimists, the mild-promising group, and the outlier, were identified using cluster analysis of teachers’ perceptions on these five higher-level issue constructs. The profiles of the four groups of teachers were summarized and implications were discussed, which should provide useful insights to the policy makers of higher education on distance education decisions.     

Interpersonal perception in bulletin board systems among Chinese Internet users

A study investigating the accuracy of interpersonal perception in Internet Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and the variables that affect the accuracy were conducted in two phases: in the phase one, 58 participants were selected from the BBS which was built on the Internet in advance. During the phase two, participants were requested to complete the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to assess their personalities, and to choose another member in the BBS as their “target”. The assessment packets were then administered to the participants in the following order: the demographic and Internet use survey, the MBTI used by the judge to assess their target’s personality, and the relationship survey between judge and target. The results showed that 76.7% participants made the correct judgment on two to three out of four dimensions of the personality type. The correlation analysis indicated that the variables affected the accuracy were from four aspects: judge, target, relationship and similarity. The binary logistic regression analysis showed that the target’s personality, the judge’s education level, the similarity between them, the stereotypes and projection played important roles on the accuracy. Possibilities for future research on this issue are also briefly discussed.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">HumanPT</Emphasis>: An Open-source,HumanPT Architecture-based,Robotic Application for Low Cost Robotic Tasks

In this paper, first HumanPT architecture for low cost robotic applications is presented. HumanPT architecture differs than other architectures because it is implemented on existing robotic systems (robot  robotic controller) and exploits the minimum communication facilities for real-time control that these systems provide. It is based on well-known communication methods like serial communication (USB, RS232, IEEE-1394) and windows sockets (server–client model) and permits an important number of different type of components like actuators, sensors and particularly vision systems to be connected in a robotic system. The operating system (OS) used is Microsoft Windows, the most widely spread OS. The proposed architecture exploits features of this OS that is not a real-time one, to ensure – in case that the robotic system provide such a facility – control and real time communication with the robotic system controller and to integrate by means of sensors and actuators an important number of robotic tasks and procedures. As implementation of this architecture, HumanPT robotic application and experimental results concerning its performance and its implementation in real tasks are provided. HumanPT robotic application, developed in Visual C++, is an integrated, but simultaneously an open-source software that can be adapted in different types of robotic systems. An important number of robotic tasks or procedures including sensors and particularly vision systems can be generated and executed. Small enterprises by means of the proposed architecture and the open source software can be automated at low cost enhancing in this way their production.     

基于相位编码的音频信息隐藏方法

针对听觉感知无差异时的局部相位失真条件,在宽带音频信号实验的基础上,提出一种利用局部相位分区实现信息隐藏的新算法。相对于经典的相位调制算法,利用局部相位信息,在保证听觉相似性的同时,能提高信息的嵌入量、改善误码率。理论分析和实验结果表明了该算法的有效性。     

A learning classifier system for mazes with aliasing clones

Maze problems represent a simplified virtual model of the real environment and can be used for developing core algorithms of many real-world application related to the problem of navigation. Learning Classifier Systems (LCS) are the most widely used class of algorithms for reinforcement learning in mazes. However, LCSs best achievements in maze problems are still mostly bounded to non-aliasing environments, while LCS complexity seems to obstruct a proper analysis of the reasons for failure. Moreover, there is a lack of knowledge of what makes a maze problem hard to solve by a learning agent. To overcome this restriction we try to improve our understanding of the nature and structure of maze environments. In this paper we describe a new LCS agent that has a simpler and more transparent performance mechanism. We use the structure of a predictive LCS model, strip out the evolutionary mechanism, simplify the reinforcement learning procedure and equip the agent with the ability to Associative Perception, adopted from psychology. We then assess the new LCS with Associative Perception on an extensive set of mazes and analyse the results to discover which features of the environments play the most significant role in the learning process. We identify a particularly hard feature for learning in mazes, aliasing clones, which arise when groups of aliasing cells occur in similar patterns in different parts of the maze. We discuss the impact of aliasing clones and other types of aliasing on learning algorithms.     

Discrimination of visual and haptic rendering delays in networked environments

Many networked human-machine interface systems have a distributed structure for certain purposes such as more computational power, tele-presence, collaboration, and portability. However, network delays are inevitable in the distributed structure, and often make sensory information delivered behind time to the user. In the literature, the effect of network delays on the quality of information presentation has been considered with respect to task performances in most cases. In this paper, we pay attention to a more stringent criterion, namely whether perceptual artifacts caused by network delays are perceptible by the user. We examined minimum perceptible visual and/or haptic rendering delays by measuring their discrimination thresholds between normal and delayed virtual environments with and without a task, and report the results in this paper. We also provide a simple guideline for determining whether active delay compensation algorithms are required in a networked human-machine interface system by comparing representative network delays to the measured discrimination thresholds. Recommended by Guest Editor Phill Kyu Rhee. This work was supported in parts by a grant R01-2006-000-10808-0 and a NRL grant R0A-2008-000-20087-0 both from KOSEF and by a ITRC support program C1090-0804-0002 from IITA, all funded by the Korea government. In Lee is a Ph.D student in Computer Science and Engineering at POSTECH, of Korea. He received the B.S. degree in Information and Communication Engineering from Sungkyunkwan University in 2006. His research interests include haptics, virtual reality, and human-computer interaction. Seungmoon Choi is an Assistant Professor in Computer Science and engineering at POSTECH, Korea. He received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Control and Instrumentation Engineering from Seoul National University in 1995 and 1997, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Purdue University in 2003. His research areas include haptics, virtual reality, data perceptualization, and applied perception.     

感性消费需求下的设计艺术

科技进步带来丰盛的商品,我们的生活方式、消费需求发生极大转变,社会进入感性消费时代,本文论述了消费心理变化的主观和客观因素,探索感性消费需求心理变化趋势,呼吁企业和设计师关注消费需求的变化,探索感性消费需求下的个性化设计艺术。     

An Artificial Motion and Tactile Receptor Constructed by Hyperelastic Double Physically Cross-Linked Silk Fibroin Ionoelastomer

Ionotronic artificial motion and tactile receptor (i-AMTR) is essential to realize an interactive human-machine interface. However, an i-AMTR that effectively mimics the composition, structure, mechanics, and multi-functionality of human skin, called humanoid i-AMTR, is yet to be developed. To bridge this technological gap, this study proposes a strategy that combines molecular structure design and function integration to construct a humanoid i-AMTR. Herein, a silk fibroin ionoelastomer (SFIE) with double cross-linked molecular structure is designed to mimic the composition and structure of human skin, thereby resolving the conflict of stretchability, softness, and resilience, suffered by many previously reported ionotronics. Functionally, electromechanical sensing and triboelectricity-based tactile perception are integrated into SFIE, to enable simultaneous perception of both motion and tactile inputs. By further leveraging the machine learning and Internet of Things (IoT) techniques, the proposed SFIE-based humanoid i-AMTR precisely senses the movement of human body and accurately sortball objects made of different materials. Notably, the success rate for 610 sorting tests reaches as high as 92.3%. These promising results essentially demonstrate a massive potential of humanoid i-AMTR in the fields of sorting robots, rehabilitation medicine, and augmented reality.     

Dual geometric perception for cross-domain road segmentation

Road segmentation plays an important role in navigation systems and autonomous driving. However, many methods in road segmentation are based on supervised learning and suffer from performance degradation in the real world. There is a certain domain gap (distribution shift problem) between the source domain (training data) and the target domain (testing data). In this paper, we propose a Dual-Geometric Perception (DGP) approach for cross-domain road segmentation, which jointly uses semantic and dual-geometric information to learn the domain-invariant feature for road segmentation. First, we propose an RGB-N dual stream network structure, which effectively fuses normal vector information and RGB information to reduce domain gap. Moreover, a dual geometric adversarial learning strategy is proposed to utilize depth-aware and normal vector features to perform better domain alignment. Furthermore, a self-training learning strategy is used to further improve the model’s generalizability in the target domain. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed DGP achieves superior performance on lane-to-lane and lane-to-sidewalk road domain adaptation tasks.