Final Report to NSF of the Standards for Facial Animation Workshop

The human face is an important and complex communication channel. It is a very familiar and sensitive object of human perception. The facial animation field has increased greatly in the past few years as fast computer graphics workstations have made the modeling and real-time animation of hundreds of thousands of polygons affordable and almost commonplace. Many applications have been developed such as teleconferencing, surgery, information assistance systems, games, and entertainment. To solve these different problems, different approaches for both animation control and modeling have been developed

Ultra-high-speed imaging of bubbles interacting with cells and tissue

Ultrasound contrast microbubbles are exploited in molecular imaging, where bubbles are directed to target cells and where their high-scattering cross section to ultrasound allows for the detection of pathologies at a molecular level. In therapeutic applications vibrating bubbles close to cells may alter the permeability of cell membranes, and these systems are therefore highly interesting for drug and gene delivery applications using ultrasound. In a more extreme regime bubbles are driven through shock waves to sonoporate or kill cells through intense stresses or jets following inertial bubble collapse. Here, we elucidate some of the underlying mechanisms using the 25-Mfps camera Brandaris128, resolving the bubble dynamics and its interactions with cells. We quantify acoustic microstreaming around oscillating bubbles close to rigid walls and evaluate the shear stresses on nonadherent cells. In a study on the fluid dynamical interaction of cavitation bubbles with adherent cells, we find that the nonspherical collapse of bubbles is responsible for cell detachment. We also visualized the dynamics of vibrating microbubbles in contact with endothelial cells followed by fluorescent imaging of the transport of propidium iodide, used as a membrane integrity probe, into these cells showing a direct correlation between cell deformation and cell membrane permeability

Example Based Caricature Synthesis

The likeness of a caricature to the original face image is an essential and often overlooked part of caricature production. In this paper we present an example based caricature synthesis technique, consisting of shape exaggeration, relationship exaggeration, and optimization for likeness. Rather than relying on a large training set of caricature face pairs, our shape exaggeration step is based on only one or a small number of examples of facial features. The relationship exaggeration step introduces two definitions which facilitate global facial feature synthesis. The first is the T-Shape rule, which describes the relative relationship between the facial elements in an intuitive manner. The second is the so called proportions, which characterizes the facial features in a proportion form. Finally we introduce a similarity metric as the likeness metric based on the Modified Hausdorff Distance (MHD) which allows us to optimize the configuration of facial elements, maximizing likeness while satisfying a number of constraints. The effectiveness of our algorithm is demonstrated with experimental results

Augmented Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) is a natural development from virtual reality (VR), which was developed several decades earlier. AR complements VR in many ways. Due to the advantages of the user being able to see both the real and virtual objects simultaneously, AR is far more intuitive, but it's not completely detached from human factors and other restrictions. AR doesn't consume as much time and effort in the applications because it's not required to construct the entire virtual scene and the environment. In this book, several new and emerging application areas of AR are presented and divided into three sections. The first section contains applications in outdoor and mobile AR, such as construction, restoration, security and surveillance. The second section deals with AR in medical, biological, and human bodies. The third and final section contains a number of new and useful applications in daily living and learning

Articulatory-Based English Consonant Synthesis in 2-D Digital Waveguide Mesh

In articulatory speech synthesis, the 3-D shape of a vocal tract for a particular speech sound has typically been established, for example, by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and this is used to model the acoustic output from the tract using numerical methods that operate in either one, two or three dimensions. The dimensionality strongly affects the overall computation complexity, which has a direct bearing on the quality of the synthesized speech output. The digital waveguide mesh (DWM) is a numerical method commonly used in room acoustic modelling. A smaller space such as a vocal tract, which is about 5 cm wide and 16.5-18 cm long in adults, can also be modelled using DWM in one, two and three dimensions. The latter requires a very dense mesh requiring massive computational resources; these requirements are lessened by using a lower dimensionality (two rather than three) and/or a less dense mesh. The computational cost of 2-D digital waveguide modelling makes it a practical technique for real-time synthesis in an average PC at full (20 kHz) audio bandwidth. This research makes use of a 2-D mesh with the advantage of the availability and flexibility of existing boundary modelling and the raised-cosine impedance control to study the possibilities of using it for English consonant synthesis. The research was organized under the phonetic ‘manner’ classification of English consonants as: semi-vowel, nasal, fricative, plosive and affricate. Their production has been studied in terms of acoustic pressure wave propagation. Meshing topology was fixed to being a 4-port scattering 2-D rectilinear waveguide mesh for ease of understanding and mapping to the tract shape. As the characteristic of consonant production requires vocal tract articulation variations that are quite unlike vowels, this research adopts the articulatory trajectories using electromagnetic (mid-sagittal) articulograph (EMA) data from mngu0 to guide the change of cross-sectional vocal tract area. Generally, articulatory trajectories have been used to improve the accuracy of speech recognition and synthesis in recent decades. This research adopts the 3 trajectories to control coarticulation in consonant synthesis to demonstrate that a 2-D digital waveguide mesh (DWM) is able to simulate the formant transition accurately. The formant transitions in the results are close acoustically to natural speech and are based on controlling articulation for four places of articulation. Positions of lip, tongue tip, tongue body and tongue dorsum are inversely mapped to their corresponding cross-sectional areas. Linear interpolation between them enabled all tract movements to be modelled. The results show that tract movements are best modelled as non-linear coarticulation