67,417 research outputs found
Towards the 3D Web with Open Simulator
Continuing advances and reduced costs in computational power, graphics processors and network bandwidth have led to 3D immersive multi-user virtual worlds becoming increasingly accessible while offering an improved and engaging Quality of Experience. At the same time the functionality of the World Wide Web continues to expand alongside the computing infrastructure it runs on and pages can now routinely accommodate many forms of interactive multimedia components as standard features - streaming video for example. Inevitably there is an emerging expectation that the Web will expand further to incorporate immersive 3D environments. This is exciting because humans are well adapted to operating in 3D environments and it is challenging because existing software and skill sets are focused around competencies in 2D Web applications. Open Simulator (OpenSim) is a freely available open source tool-kit that empowers users to create and deploy their own 3D environments in the same way that anyone can create and deploy a Web site. Its characteristics can be seen as a set of references as to how the 3D Web could be instantiated. This paper describes experiments carried out with OpenSim to better understand network and system issues, and presents experience in using OpenSim to develop and deliver applications for education and cultural heritage. Evaluation is based upon observations of these applications in use and measurements of systems both in the lab and in the wild.Postprin
Convolutional nets for reconstructing neural circuits from brain images acquired by serial section electron microscopy
Neural circuits can be reconstructed from brain images acquired by serial
section electron microscopy. Image analysis has been performed by manual labor
for half a century, and efforts at automation date back almost as far.
Convolutional nets were first applied to neuronal boundary detection a dozen
years ago, and have now achieved impressive accuracy on clean images. Robust
handling of image defects is a major outstanding challenge. Convolutional nets
are also being employed for other tasks in neural circuit reconstruction:
finding synapses and identifying synaptic partners, extending or pruning
neuronal reconstructions, and aligning serial section images to create a 3D
image stack. Computational systems are being engineered to handle petavoxel
images of cubic millimeter brain volumes
Meshed Up: Learnt Error Correction in 3D Reconstructions
Dense reconstructions often contain errors that prior work has so far
minimised using high quality sensors and regularising the output. Nevertheless,
errors still persist. This paper proposes a machine learning technique to
identify errors in three dimensional (3D) meshes. Beyond simply identifying
errors, our method quantifies both the magnitude and the direction of depth
estimate errors when viewing the scene. This enables us to improve the
reconstruction accuracy.
We train a suitably deep network architecture with two 3D meshes: a
high-quality laser reconstruction, and a lower quality stereo image
reconstruction. The network predicts the amount of error in the lower quality
reconstruction with respect to the high-quality one, having only view the
former through its input. We evaluate our approach by correcting
two-dimensional (2D) inverse-depth images extracted from the 3D model, and show
that our method improves the quality of these depth reconstructions by up to a
relative 10% RMSE.Comment: Accepted for the International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA) 201
Growing the use of Virtual Worlds in education : an OpenSim perspective
The growth in the range of disciplines that Virtual Worlds support for educational purposes is evidenced by recent applications in the fields of cultural heritage, humanitarian aid, space exploration, virtual laboratories in the physical sciences, archaeology, computer science and coastal geography. This growth is due in part to the flexibility of OpenSim, the open source virtual world platform which by adopting Second Life protocols and norms has created a de facto standard for open virtual worlds that is supported by a growing number of third party open source viewers. Yet while this diversity of use-cases is impressive and Virtual Worlds for open learning are highly popular with lecturers and learners alike immersive education remains an essentially niche activity. This paper identifies functional challenges in terms of Management, Network Infrastructure, the Immersive 3D Web and Programmability that must be addressed to enable the wider adoption of Open Virtual Worlds as a routine learning technology platform. We refer to specific use-cases based on OpenSim and abstract generic requirements which should be met to enable the growth in use of Open Virtual Worlds as a mainstream educational facility. A case study of a deployment to support a formal education curriculum and associated informal learning is used to illustrate key points.Postprin
PlaceRaider: Virtual Theft in Physical Spaces with Smartphones
As smartphones become more pervasive, they are increasingly targeted by
malware. At the same time, each new generation of smartphone features
increasingly powerful onboard sensor suites. A new strain of sensor malware has
been developing that leverages these sensors to steal information from the
physical environment (e.g., researchers have recently demonstrated how malware
can listen for spoken credit card numbers through the microphone, or feel
keystroke vibrations using the accelerometer). Yet the possibilities of what
malware can see through a camera have been understudied. This paper introduces
a novel visual malware called PlaceRaider, which allows remote attackers to
engage in remote reconnaissance and what we call virtual theft. Through
completely opportunistic use of the camera on the phone and other sensors,
PlaceRaider constructs rich, three dimensional models of indoor environments.
Remote burglars can thus download the physical space, study the environment
carefully, and steal virtual objects from the environment (such as financial
documents, information on computer monitors, and personally identifiable
information). Through two human subject studies we demonstrate the
effectiveness of using mobile devices as powerful surveillance and virtual
theft platforms, and we suggest several possible defenses against visual
malware
Depth Prediction Without the Sensors: Leveraging Structure for Unsupervised Learning from Monocular Videos
Learning to predict scene depth from RGB inputs is a challenging task both
for indoor and outdoor robot navigation. In this work we address unsupervised
learning of scene depth and robot ego-motion where supervision is provided by
monocular videos, as cameras are the cheapest, least restrictive and most
ubiquitous sensor for robotics.
Previous work in unsupervised image-to-depth learning has established strong
baselines in the domain. We propose a novel approach which produces higher
quality results, is able to model moving objects and is shown to transfer
across data domains, e.g. from outdoors to indoor scenes. The main idea is to
introduce geometric structure in the learning process, by modeling the scene
and the individual objects; camera ego-motion and object motions are learned
from monocular videos as input. Furthermore an online refinement method is
introduced to adapt learning on the fly to unknown domains.
The proposed approach outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches, including
those that handle motion e.g. through learned flow. Our results are comparable
in quality to the ones which used stereo as supervision and significantly
improve depth prediction on scenes and datasets which contain a lot of object
motion. The approach is of practical relevance, as it allows transfer across
environments, by transferring models trained on data collected for robot
navigation in urban scenes to indoor navigation settings. The code associated
with this paper can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/struct2depth.Comment: Thirty-Third AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI'19
Lose The Views: Limited Angle CT Reconstruction via Implicit Sinogram Completion
Computed Tomography (CT) reconstruction is a fundamental component to a wide
variety of applications ranging from security, to healthcare. The classical
techniques require measuring projections, called sinograms, from a full
180 view of the object. This is impractical in a limited angle
scenario, when the viewing angle is less than 180, which can occur due
to different factors including restrictions on scanning time, limited
flexibility of scanner rotation, etc. The sinograms obtained as a result, cause
existing techniques to produce highly artifact-laden reconstructions. In this
paper, we propose to address this problem through implicit sinogram completion,
on a challenging real world dataset containing scans of common checked-in
luggage. We propose a system, consisting of 1D and 2D convolutional neural
networks, that operates on a limited angle sinogram to directly produce the
best estimate of a reconstruction. Next, we use the x-ray transform on this
reconstruction to obtain a "completed" sinogram, as if it came from a full
180 measurement. We feed this to standard analytical and iterative
reconstruction techniques to obtain the final reconstruction. We show with
extensive experimentation that this combined strategy outperforms many
competitive baselines. We also propose a measure of confidence for the
reconstruction that enables a practitioner to gauge the reliability of a
prediction made by our network. We show that this measure is a strong indicator
of quality as measured by the PSNR, while not requiring ground truth at test
time. Finally, using a segmentation experiment, we show that our reconstruction
preserves the 3D structure of objects effectively.Comment: Spotlight presentation at CVPR 201
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