Experimental Investigations of Stiffeners for Foundations of Offshore Gravity Platforms

Results are presented for laboratory tests of a large-scale model of a gravity platform with additional deep elements in the form of flat ribs-skirts, and also experiments on the impression of segments of a plane and wedge-shape stiffener in the ground.     

3D teleimmersion for collaboration and interaction of geographically distributed users

Teleimmersion is an emerging technology that enables users to collaborate remotely by generating realistic 3D avatars in real time and rendering them inside a shared virtual space. The teleimmersive environment thus provides a venue for collaborative work on 3D data such as medical imaging, scientific data and models, archaeological datasets, architectural or mechanical designs, remote training (e.g., oil rigs, military applications), and remote teaching of physical activities (e.g., rehabilitation, dance). In this paper, we present our research work performed over the course of several years in developing the teleimmersive technology using image-based stereo and more recently Kinect. We outline the issues pertaining to the capture, transmission, rendering, and interaction. We describe several applications where we have explored the use of the 3D teleimmersion for remote interaction and collaboration among professional and scientific users. We believe the presented findings are relevant for future developers in teleimmersion and apply across various 3D video capturing technologies.     

Method of a variable level of shear-strength mobilization for calculation of the strength of soil masses

An approximate method based on evaluation of the degree of shear-strength mobilization along the vertical faces of partitioned slices of a shearing mass is described for strength calculations. Comparison is made with other solutions, including exact solutions, for problems involving determination of the bearing capacity of earth beds and the soil pressure on an enclosure. Translated from Osnovaniya, Fundamenty i Mekhanika Gruntov, Nos. 4–5, pp. 18–22, July–October, 1998.     

Multi-camera tele-immersion system with real-time model driven data compression

Vision-based full-body 3D reconstruction for tele-immersive applications generates large amount of data points, which have to be sent through the network in real time. In this paper, we introduce a skeleton-based compression method using motion estimation where kinematic parameters of the human body are extracted from the point cloud data in each frame. First we address the issues regarding the data capturing and transfer to a remote site for the tele-immersive collaboration. We compare the results of the existing compression methods and the proposed skeleton-based compression technique. We examine the robustness and efficiency of the algorithm through experimental results with our multi-camera tele-immersion system. The proposed skeleton-based method provides high and flexible compression ratios from 50:1 to 5000:1 with reasonable reconstruction quality (peak signal-to-noise ratio from 28 to 31 dB) while preserving real-time (10+ fps) processing.     

Towards coordinated bandwidth adaptations for hundred-scale 3D tele-immersive systems

3D tele-immersion improves the state of collaboration among geographically distributed participants. Unlike the traditional 2D videos, a 3D tele-immersive system employs multiple 3D cameras based in each physical site to cover a much larger field of view, generating a very large amount of stream data. One of the major challenges is how to efficiently transmit these bulky 3D streaming data to bandwidth-constrained sites. In this paper, we study an adaptive human visual system (HVS)-compliant bandwidth management framework for efficient delivery of hundred-scale streams produced from distributed 3D tele-immersive sites to a receiver site with limited bandwidth budget. Our adaptation framework exploits the semantics link of HVS with multiple 3D streams in the 3D tele-immersive environment. We developed TELEVIS, a visual simulation tool to showcase an HVS-aware tele-immersive system for realistic cases. Our evaluation results show that the proposed adaptation can improve the total quality per unit of bandwidth used to deliver streams in 3D tele-immersive systems.