19027501
A Study of Collaborative Dancing in Tele-immersive Environments
We first present the tele-immersive environments developed jointly by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and University of California at Berkeley. The environment features 3D full and real body capturing, wide field of view, multi-display 3D rendering, and attachment free participant. We then describe a study of collaborative dancing between remotely located dancers in the shared virtual space. Two professional dancers are invited to the tele-immersive site of each university. As a preliminary experiment, we let the dancers perform elementary body movements and coordinate their dancing. The coordination requires one dancer to take the lead while the other follows her by appropriate movements. During the experiment, the dancers are dancing at various motion rates to evaluate how well the collaborative dancing is supported with the current technical boundary. Our important findings indicate that 1) tele-immersive environments have strong potential impact on the concept of choreography and communication of live dance performance, 2) the presence of multi-display system, real body 3D rendering, audio channel, and less intrusive-ness greatly enhances the immersive and dancing experience, and 3) the level of synchronization achieved by the dancers is higher than that expected from the video rate
11758
A multi-stream adaptation framework for bandwidth management in 3D tele-immersion
Tele-immersive environments will improve the state of collaboration among distributed participants. However, along with the promise a new set of challenges have emerged including the real-time acquisition, streaming and rendering of 3D scenes to convey a realistic sense of immersive spaces. Unlike 2D video conferencing, a 3D tele-immersive environment employs multiple 3D cameras to cover a much wider field of view, thus generating a very large volume of data that need to be carefully coordinated, organized, and synchronized for Internet transmission, rendering and display. This is a challenging task and a dynamic bandwidth management must be in place. To achieve this goal, we propose a multi-stream adaptation framework for bandwidth management in 3D tele-immersion. The adaptation framework relies on the hierarchy of mechanisms and services that exploits the semantic link of multiple 3D video streams in the tele-immersive environment. We implement a prototype of the framework that integrates semantic stream selection, content adaptation, and 3D data compression services with user preference. The experimental results have demonstrated that the framework shows a good quality of the resulting composite 3D rendered video in case of sufficient bandwidth, while it adapts individual 3D video streams in a coordinated and user-friendly fashion, and yields graceful quality degradation in case of low bandwidth availability.
677559
TEEVE: the next generation architecture for tele-immersive environments
Tele-immersive 3D multi-camera room environments are starting to emerge and with them new challenging research questions. One important question is how to organize the large amount of visual data, being captured, processed, transmitted and displayed, and their corresponding resources, over current COTS computing and networking infrastructures so that "everybody" would be able to install and use tele-immersive environments for conferencing and other activities. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer control and streaming framework over general purpose delivery infrastructure, called TEEVE (tele-immersive environments for everybody). TEEVE aims for effective and adaptive coordination, synchronization, and soft QoS-enabled delivery of tele-immersive visual streams to remote room(s). The TEEVE experiments between two tele-immersive rooms residing in different institutions more than 2000 miles apart show that we can sustain communication of up to 12 3D video streams with 4/spl sim/5 3D frames per second for each stream, yielding 4/spl sim/5 tele-immersive video rate.
11512625
Hourglass multimedia content and service composition framework for smart room environments
Pervasive environments with their ubiquitous multimedia devices such as video-enabled cell-phones, laptops, PC tablets, digital cameras, HDTV plasma displays are becoming integral part of our workplaces and homes. Furthermore, these digital multimedia devices make it easier and easier to create and view volumes of content that can be stored throughout the Internet. The big challenge is to organize the distributed content, get the distributed multimedia content composed, produced and distributed to users in customized fashion according to users' preference, and their resource availabilities in pervasive environments. Basically, the challenge is to create Internet Interactive Television where the user/interest group, residing in a pervasive environment, corresponds to the TV program director who decides and/or influences what content(s) will be viewed, how it will be composed, presented and delivered. In this paper, we present a vision how this challenge can be solved. We propose a novel hourglass-based system that delivers composite multimedia content to users in pervasive environments, which considers both users' interest in the content and the presentation capabilities of various display devices. This hourglass-based system relies on our content and service composition framework that allows for customized production, distribution and presentation of multimedia content for pervasive environments. We present the hourglass design, possible solutions for some content composition scenarios and validate the solutions via selected experiments.
40810024
Page segmentation using document model
Transforming a paper document to its electronic version in a form suitable for efficient storage, retrieval and interpretation continues to be a challenging problem. An efficient document model is necessary to solve this problem. Document modeling involves techniques of thresholding, skew detection, geometric layout analysis and logical layout analysis. The derived model can then be used in document storage and retrieval. We use the traditional bottom-up approach based on the connected component extraction to efficiently implement page segmentation and region identification. A new document model which preserves top-down generation information is proposed based on which a document is logically represented for interactive editing, storage, retrieval, transfer and logical analysis.
17737533
Semantic Matching of Web Services Based on Choreographies
Web services facilitate the efficient execution of B2B e-commerce by integrating business processes over the Internet, which needs dynamic and flexible binding of services. However, current Web service standards do not support it. A formal approach for semantic matching of service specifications based on choreographies, i.e., the behavior of Web services, is developed in this paper. It can accurately and automatically discover required services for integrating business processes. Firstly an extended deterministic finite state automaton (EDFA) is proposed by labeling state transitions using binary-tuples (input, output) rather than letters. The automata describe Web services in a more accurate way: the nodes represent states maintained by services; the state transitions represent communication activities of services. The automata depict the temporal sequences of communication activities that describe the behaviors of services. Further, the intersection of two EDFAs is defined. Finally, an algorithm for testing the emptiness of the languages accepted by EDFAs is presented and used to evaluate the compatibility of Web services
45224109
Service Matchmaking and Discovery with Rough Sets
The past few years have seen the Grid is evolving as a service-oriented computing infrastructure. It is foreseen that various resources in a Grid environment will be exposed as services for use by a wider user community. Service discovery becomes an issue of vital importance for utilising Grid facilities. This paper presents Rosse, a Rough Sets based Search Engine for service discovery that can deal with uncertainty of service properties when matching service advertisements with service requests. The evaluation results show that Rosse is more effective in service discovery compared with other mechanisms such as UDDI keyword matching and OWL-S matchmaking.
5803741
Incentive Mechanisms for Peer-to-Peer Systems
Most of the existing research in peer-to-peer systems focuses on protocol design and doesn’t consider the rationality of each peer. One phenomenon that should not be ignored is free riding. Some peers simply consume system resources but contribute nothing to the system. In this paper we present an agent-based peer-to-peer system, in which each peer is a software agent and the agents cooperate to search the whole system through referrals. We present a static and a dynamic pricing mechanism to motivate each agent to behave rationally while still achieving good overall system performance. We study the behavior of the agents under two pricing mechanisms and evaluate the impact of free riding using simulations.
41743230
Automatically wrapping legacy software into services: A grid case study
The computational grid is rapidly evolving into a service-oriented computing infrastructure that facilitates resource sharing for solving large-scale data and computationally intensive problems. Peer-to-peer (P2P) systems have emerged as an infrastructure enabling technologies for enhanced scalability and reliability in file sharing and content distribution. It is envisioned that P2P enabled service-oriented grid systems would virtualize various resources as services with high scalability and reliability. Many legacy software resources exist nowadays, but making them grid aware services for effective resource sharing has become an issue of vital importance. This paper presents GSLab, a toolkit for automatically wrapping legacy software into services that can be published, discovered and reused in grid environments. GSLab employs Sun Grid Engine (SGE) to enhance its performance in execution of wrapped services. Using GSLab, we have automatically wrapped a legacy computer animation rendering code written in C as a service that can be discovered and accessed in a SGE environment. The evaluation results show that the performance of GSLab improves with an increase in the number of computing nodes involved.