Exploration of Visual Data

Sample

Nadia Magnenat-Thalmann, Daniel Thalmann

With the increasing success of Networked Virtual Environments, Games and Web 3D, there is a need for new techniques to permit the creation and animation of Virtual Humans. Users may be represented by realistic avatars that they can control, but also autonomous Virtual Humans agents can now inhabit these Virtual Worlds. Virtual Humans with their soft tissues, skin, muscles, organs and clothes are completely deformable. There are many methods to enable the representation and deformation of these structures. These methods may be geometric or physics-based. Presenting a selection of the latest research work addressing various aspects related to deformable avatars, this book covers complementary topics such as body modelling and animation, face modelling and animation, physics-based and free-form deformations, motion capture, avatars technologies and agents. This volume is comprised of the combined proceedings of the DEFORM'2000 and AVATARS'2000 workshops, which were sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and organized by IFIP Working Group 5.10. The workshops were held in Geneva and Lausanne, Switzerland in November/December 2000.

Sample

Timothy J. Brown, Paul W. Mielke

Statistical Mining and Data Visualization in Atmospheric Sciences brings together in one place important contributions and up-to-date research results in this fast moving area. Statistical Mining and Data Visualization in Atmospheric Sciences serves as an excellent reference, providing insight into some of the most challenging research issues in the field.

Sample

Martial H. Hebert, Charles Thorpe, Anthony Stentz

Intelligent Unmanned Ground Vehicles describes the technology developed and the results obtained by the Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute in the course of the DARPA Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) project. The goal of this work was to equip off-road vehicles with computer-controlled, unmanned driving capabilities. The book describes contributions in the area of mobility for UGVs including: tools for assembling complex autonomous mobility systems; on-road and off-road navigation; sensing techniques; and route planning algorithms. In addition to basic mobility technology, the book covers a number of integrated systems demonstrated in the field in realistic scenarios. The approaches presented in this book can be applied to a wide range of mobile robotics applications, from automated passenger cars to planetary exploration, and construction and agricultural machines. Intelligent Unmanned Ground Vehicles shows the progress that was achieved during this program, from brittle specially-built robots operating under highly constrained conditions, to groups of modified commercial vehicles operating in tough environments. One measure of progress is how much of this technology is being used in other applications. For example, much of the work in road-following, architectures and obstacle detection has been the basis for the Automated Highway Systems (AHS) prototypes currently under development. AHS will lead to commercial prototypes within a few years. The cross-country technology is also being used in the development of planetary rovers with a projected launch date within a few years. The architectural tools built under this program have been used in numerous applications, from an automated harvester to an autonomous excavator. The results reported in this work provide tools for further research development leading to practical, reliable and economical mobile robots.

Sample

Norman Foo (ed

The 12th Australian Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AI'QQ) held in Sydney, Australia, 6-10 December 1999, is the latest in a series of annual re­ gional meetings at which advances in artificial intelligence are reported. This series now attracts many international papers, and indeed the constitution of the program committee reflects this geographical diversity. Besides the usual tutorials and workshops, this year the conference included a companion sympo­ sium at which papers on industrial appUcations were presented. The symposium papers have been published in a separate volume edited by Eric Tsui. Ar99 is organized by the University of New South Wales, and sponsored by the Aus­ tralian Computer Society, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Computer Sciences Corporation, the KRRU group at Griffith University, the Australian Artificial Intelligence Institute, and Neuron- Works Ltd. Ar99 received over 120 conference paper submissions, of which about o- third were from outside Australia. Prom these, 39 were accepted for regular presentation, and a further 15 for poster display. These proceedings contain the full regular papers and extended summaries of the poster papers. All papers were refereed, mostly by two or three reviewers selected by members of the program committee, and a list of these reviewers appears later. The technical program comprised two days of workshops and tutorials, fol­ lowed by three days of conference and symposium plenary and paper sessions.