This paper presents an immersive telepresence system for entertainment and meetings (ITEM). The system aims to provide a radically new video communication experience by seamlessly merging participants into the same virtual space to allow a natural interaction among them and shared collaborative contents. With the goal to make a scalable, flexible system for various business solutions as well as easily accessible by massive consumers, we address the challenges in the whole pipeline of media processing, communication, and displaying in our design and realization of such a system. Particularly, in this paper we focus on the system aspects that maximize the end-user experience, optimize the system and network resources, and enable various teleimmersive (TI) application scenarios. In addition, we also present a few key technologies, i.e., fast object-based video coding for real world data and spatialized audio capture and 3-D sound localization for group teleconferencing. Our effort is to investigate and optimize the key system components and provide an efficient end-to-end optimization and integration by considering user needs and preferences. Extensive experiments show the developed system runs reliably and comfortably in real time with a minimal setup requirement (e.g., a webcam or a color plus depth camera, an optional microphone array, a laptop desktop connected to the Internet) for TI communication. With such a really minimal deployment requirement, we present a variety of interesting applications and user experiences created by ITEM.
With the goal to make the system easily assessable by massive consumers, prior research has also been conducted to develop 2D TI systems (e.g. @cite_10 @cite_9 @cite_4 ) based on commodity cameras and computers. These systems share some similarity with our approach where the foreground objects are segmented from undesired background to allow merging two or multiple participants into the same shared background environment. As a result, participants can experience collaboration capability through natural interaction with each other or with the selected background content (e.g. presentation slides, online photo albums), which does not exist in the traditional video conferencing systems such as Skype. However, the key foreground segmentation techniques adopted are often very rudimentary @cite_10 or computationally intensive @cite_9 and provide a quality-compromised segmentation performance.
@cite_9 @cite_10 @cite_4
2004643852 2137818815 2006500058
Fingerprint recognition plays an important role in many commercial applications and is used by millions of people every day, e.g. for unlocking mobile phones. Fingerprint image segmentation is typically the first processing step of most fingerprint algorithms and it divides an image into foreground, the region of interest, and background. Two types of error can occur during this step which both have a negative impact on the recognition performance: true foreground can be labeled as background and features like minutiae can be lost, or conversely true background can be misclassified as foreground and spurious features can be introduced. The contribution of this paper is threefold: firstly, we propose a novel factorized directional bandpass (FDB) segmentation method for texture extraction based on the directional Hilbert transform of a Butterworth bandpass (DHBB) filter interwoven with soft-thresholding. Secondly, we provide a manually marked ground truth segmentation for 10560 images as an evaluation benchmark. Thirdly, we conduct a systematic performance comparison between the FDB method and four of the most often cited fingerprint segmentation algorithms showing that the FDB segmentation method clearly outperforms these four widely used methods. The benchmark and the implementation of the FDB method are made publicly available. A citing sentence is one that appears in a scientific article and cites previous work. Citing sentences have been studied and used in many applications. For example, they have been used in scientific paper summarization, automatic survey generation, paraphrase identification, and citation function classification. Citing sentences that cite multiple papers are common in scientific writing. This observation should be taken into consideration when using citing sentences in applications. For instance, when a citing sentence is used in a summary of a scientific paper, only the fragments of the sentence that are relevant to the summarized paper should be included in the summary. In this paper, we present and compare three different approaches for identifying the fragments of a citing sentence that are related to a given target reference. Our methods are: word classification, sequence labeling, and segment classification. Our experiments show that segment classification achieves the best results. Statistical background modelling and subtraction has proved to be a popular and effective class of algorithms for segmenting independently moving foreground objects out from a static background, without requiring any a priori information of the properties of foreground objects. We present two contributions on this topic, aimed towards robotics where an active head is mounted on a mobile vehicle. In periods when the vehicle's wheels are not driven, camera translation is virtually zero, and background subtraction techniques are applicable. This is also highly relevant to surveillance and video conferencing. The first part presents an efficient probabilistic framework for when the camera pans and tilts. A unified approach is developed for handling various sources of error, including motion blur, subpixel camera motion, mixed pixels at object boundaries, and also uncertainty in background stabilisation caused by noise, unmodelled radial distortion and small translations of the camera. The second contribution regards a Bayesian approach to specifically incorporate uncertainty concerning whether the background has yet been uncovered by moving foreground objects. This is an important requirement during initialisation of a system. We cannot assume that a background model is available in advance since that would involve storing models for each possible position, in every room, of the robot's operating environment.. Instead the background mode must be generated online, very possibly in the presence of moving objects.