Random Assisted Browsing of Rushes Archives

How to efficiently browse a large video database if its content is unknown to the user? In this paper we propose new approaches for browsing initialisation, exploration and content access of a rushes archive, where the span of information stored can be huge and difficult to understand at a glance. Exploring and navigating through raw footage is assisted by organising the video material in a meaningful structure and by adopting appropriate visualisation solutions. Un-annotated content is organised in hierarchical previews, while browsing is enabled by novel methods of random exploration and random content access to preview nodes. User tests conducted on professional users in a real-work scenario aim at demonstrating how the hierarchical visualisation and the proposed random browsing solutions assist the process of accessing and retrieving desired content

Inferring Implicit 3D Representations from Human Figures on Pictorial Maps

In this work, we present an automated workflow to bring human figures, one of the most frequently appearing entities on pictorial maps, to the third dimension. Our workflow is based on training data and neural networks for single-view 3D reconstruction of real humans from photos. We first let a network consisting of fully connected layers estimate the depth coordinate of 2D pose points. The gained 3D pose points are inputted together with 2D masks of body parts into a deep implicit surface network to infer 3D signed distance fields (SDFs). By assembling all body parts, we derive 2D depth images and body part masks of the whole figure for different views, which are fed into a fully convolutional network to predict UV images. These UV images and the texture for the given perspective are inserted into a generative network to inpaint the textures for the other views. The textures are enhanced by a cartoonization network and facial details are resynthesized by an autoencoder. Finally, the generated textures are assigned to the inferred body parts in a ray marcher. We test our workflow with 12 pictorial human figures after having validated several network configurations. The created 3D models look generally promising, especially when considering the challenges of silhouette-based 3D recovery and real-time rendering of the implicit SDFs. Further improvement is needed to reduce gaps between the body parts and to add pictorial details to the textures. Overall, the constructed figures may be used for animation and storytelling in digital 3D maps.Comment: to be published in 'Cartography and Geographic Information Science

Reducing Ambiguities in Line-based Density Plots by Image-space Colorization

Line-based density plots are used to reduce visual clutter in line charts with a multitude of individual lines. However, these traditional density plots are often perceived ambiguously, which obstructs the user's identification of underlying trends in complex datasets. Thus, we propose a novel image space coloring method for line-based density plots that enhances their interpretability. Our method employs color not only to visually communicate data density but also to highlight similar regions in the plot, allowing users to identify and distinguish trends easily. We achieve this by performing hierarchical clustering based on the lines passing through each region and mapping the identified clusters to the hue circle using circular MDS. Additionally, we propose a heuristic approach to assign each line to the most probable cluster, enabling users to analyze density and individual lines. We motivate our method by conducting a small-scale user study, demonstrating the effectiveness of our method using synthetic and real-world datasets, and providing an interactive online tool for generating colored line-based density plots

Understanding and modeling of aesthetic response to shape and color in car body design

This study explored the phenomenon that a consumer's preference on color of car body may vary depending on shape of the car body. First, the study attempted to establish a theoretical framework that can account for this phenomenon. This framework is based on the (modern-) Darwinism approach to the so-called evolutionary psychology and aesthetics. It assumes that human's aesthetic sense works like an agent that seeks for environmental patterns that potentially afford to benefit the underlying needs of the agent, and this seeking process is evolutionary fitting. Second, by adopting the framework, a pattern called “fundamental aesthetic dimensions” was developed for identifying and modeling consumer’s aesthetic response to car body shape and color. Next, this study developed an effective tool that is capable in capturing and accommodating consumer’s color preference on a given car body shape. This tool was implemented by incorporating classic color theories and advanced digital technologies; it was named “Color-Shape Synthesizer”. Finally, an experiment was conducted to verify some of the theoretical developments. This study concluded (1) the fundamental aesthetics dimensions can be used for describing aesthetics in terms of shape and color; (2) the Color-Shape Synthesizer tool can be well applied in practicing car body designs; and (3) mapping between semantic representations of aesthetic response to the fundamental aesthetics dimensions can likely be a multiple-network structure