In the area of computer vision, deep learning has produced a variety of state-of-the-art models that rely on massive labeled data. However, collecting and annotating images from the real world has a great demand for labor and money investments and is usually too passive to build datasets with specific characteristics, such as small area of objects and high occlusion level. Under the framework of Parallel Vision, this paper presents a purposeful way to design artificial scenes and automatically generate virtual images with precise annotations. A virtual dataset named ParallelEye is built, which can be used for several computer vision tasks. Then, by training the DPM (Deformable Parts Model) and Faster R-CNN detectors, we prove that the performance of models can be significantly improved by combining ParallelEye with publicly available real-world datasets during the training phase. In addition, we investigate the potential of testing the trained models from a specific aspect using intentionally designed virtual datasets, in order to discover the flaws of trained models. From the experimental results, we conclude that our virtual dataset is viable to train and test the object detectors.
There have been many attempts that use virtual world to carry out scientific researches. Bainbridge @cite_20 investigated the feasibility of utilizing Second life and World of Warcraft as sites for research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, as well as computer science. With a virtual living lab, Prendinger @cite_19 conducted several controlled driving and travel studies.
@cite_19 @cite_20
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Online virtual worlds, electronic environments where people can work and interact in a somewhat realistic manner, have great potential as sites for research in the social, behavioral, and economic sciences, as well as in human-centered computer science. This article uses Second Life and World of Warcraft as two very different examples of current virtual worlds that foreshadow future developments, introducing a number of research methodologies that scientists are now exploring, including formal experimentation, observational ethnography, and quantitative analysis of economic markets or social networks. This issue includes two articles with additional research examples from distinguished experts in social science and computer science. In the first article, "Secondary Avatars and Semiautonomous Agents" presents semiautonomous agent assistants that have been incorporated into recent MMOGs. In the second article, a group of people constructed combat, mentoring, and trust networks based on data from Sony's popular MMOG Everquest II. They also provide an excellent summary of their ongoing research in performance and learning, player churn analysis, and identifying undesirable behavior in MMOGs. The authors argue that the close collaboration between social scientists and computer scientists is creating an emerging area called "computational social science," where computation is used as an integral mechanism in social science research. Digital immersive virtual environment technology (IVET) enables behavioral scientists to conduct ecologically realistic experiments with near-perfect experimental control. The authors employed IVET to study the interpersonal distance maintained between participants and virtual humans. In Study 1, participants traversed a three-dimensional virtual room in which a virtual human stood. In Study 2, a virtual human approached participants. In both studies, participant gender, virtual human gender, virtual human gaze behavior, and whether virtual humans were allegedly controlled by humans (i.e., avatars) or computers (i.e., agents) were varied. Results indicated that participants maintained greater distance from virtual humans when approaching their fronts compared to their backs. In addition, participants gave more personal space to virtual agents who engaged them in mutual gaze. Moreover, when virtual humans invaded their personal space, participants moved farthest from virtual human agents. The advantages an... There are many studies that collect and store life log for personal memory. The paper explains how a system can create someone's life log in an inexpensive way to share daily life events with family or friends through socialnetwork or messaging. In the modern world where people are usually busier than ever, family members are geographically distributed due to globalization of companies and humans are inundated with more information than they can process, ambient communications through mobile media or internet based communication can provide rich social connections to friends and family. People can stay connected to their loving ones ubiquitously that they care about by sharing awareness information in a passive way. For users who wish to have a persistent existence in a virtual world - to let their friends know about their current activity or to inform their caretakers - new technology is needed. Research that aims to bridge real life and the virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life, Face book etc.) to simulate virtual living or logging daily events, while challenging and promising, is currently rare. Only very recently the mapping of real-world activities to virtual worlds has been attempted by processing multiple sensors data along with inference logic for realworld activities. Detecting or inferring human activity using such simple sensor data is often inaccurate, insufficient and expensive. Hence, this paper proposes to infer human activity from environmental sound cues and common sense knowledge, which is an inexpensive alternative to other sensors (e.g., accelerometers) based approaches. Because of their ubiquity, we believe that mobile phones or hand-held devices (HHD) are ideal channels to achieve a seamless integration between the physical and virtual worlds. Therefore, the paper presents a prototype to log daily events by a mobile phone based application by inferring activities from environmental sound cues. To the best of our knowledge, this system pioneers the use of environmental sound based activity recognition in mobile computing to reflect one's real-world activity in virtual worlds.