593 research outputs found
Emerging Technologies in Architectural Visualization: Implementation Strategies for Practice
Representation has always been a critical component in architectural practice and representational techniques have been evolving over time. The relatively recent advent of the digital media is revolutionizing architectural representation. Digital representation techniques are proving to be a more effective means of communicating the design to the client and the collaborative project team. The techniques are advancing so rapidly that it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep in pace with the digital acceleration and utilize these representation techniques in architectural practice. There is a wide difference between what is possible using digital architectural visualization and what is implemented in practice. The research explores the extent of utilization of these digital representation techniques and the challenges they pose in practical implementation. Employing a logical approach to selectively implement this digital procedural change in representation would help in realizing the strategic benefits of these rapidly progressing techniques
Photorealistic retrieval of occluded facial information using a performance-driven face model
Facial occlusions can cause both human observers and computer algorithms
to fail in a variety of important tasks such as facial action analysis and
expression classification. This is because the missing information is not
reconstructed accurately enough for the purpose of the task in hand. Most
current computer methods that are used to tackle this problem implement
complex three-dimensional polygonal face models that are generally timeconsuming
to produce and unsuitable for photorealistic reconstruction of
missing facial features and behaviour.
In this thesis, an image-based approach is adopted to solve the occlusion
problem. A dynamic computer model of the face is used to retrieve the
occluded facial information from the driver faces. The model consists of a
set of orthogonal basis actions obtained by application of principal
component analysis (PCA) on image changes and motion fields extracted
from a sequence of natural facial motion (Cowe 2003). Examples of
occlusion affected facial behaviour can then be projected onto the model to
compute coefficients of the basis actions and thus produce photorealistic
performance-driven animations.
Visual inspection shows that the PCA face model recovers aspects of
expressions in those areas occluded in the driver sequence, but the expression is generally muted. To further investigate this finding, a database
of test sequences affected by a considerable set of artificial and natural
occlusions is created. A number of suitable metrics is developed to measure
the accuracy of the reconstructions. Regions of the face that are most
important for performance-driven mimicry and that seem to carry the best
information about global facial configurations are revealed using Bubbles,
thus in effect identifying facial areas that are most sensitive to occlusions.
Recovery of occluded facial information is enhanced by applying an
appropriate scaling factor to the respective coefficients of the basis actions
obtained by PCA. This method improves the reconstruction of the facial
actions emanating from the occluded areas of the face. However, due to the
fact that PCA produces bases that encode composite, correlated actions,
such an enhancement also tends to affect actions in non-occluded areas of
the face. To avoid this, more localised controls for facial actions are
produced using independent component analysis (ICA). Simple projection
of the data onto an ICA model is not viable due to the non-orthogonality of
the extracted bases. Thus occlusion-affected mimicry is first generated using
the PCA model and then enhanced by accordingly manipulating the
independent components that are subsequently extracted from the mimicry.
This combination of methods yields significant improvements and results in
photorealistic reconstructions of occluded facial actions
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