10 research outputs found

    Improving Surgical Training Phantoms by Hyperrealism: Deep Unpaired Image-to-Image Translation from Real Surgeries

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    Current `dry lab' surgical phantom simulators are a valuable tool for surgeons which allows them to improve their dexterity and skill with surgical instruments. These phantoms mimic the haptic and shape of organs of interest, but lack a realistic visual appearance. In this work, we present an innovative application in which representations learned from real intraoperative endoscopic sequences are transferred to a surgical phantom scenario. The term hyperrealism is introduced in this field, which we regard as a novel subform of surgical augmented reality for approaches that involve real-time object transfigurations. For related tasks in the computer vision community, unpaired cycle-consistent Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have shown excellent results on still RGB images. Though, application of this approach to continuous video frames can result in flickering, which turned out to be especially prominent for this application. Therefore, we propose an extension of cycle-consistent GANs, named tempCycleGAN, to improve temporal consistency.The novel method is evaluated on captures of a silicone phantom for training endoscopic reconstructive mitral valve procedures. Synthesized videos show highly realistic results with regard to 1) replacement of the silicone appearance of the phantom valve by intraoperative tissue texture, while 2) explicitly keeping crucial features in the scene, such as instruments, sutures and prostheses. Compared to the original CycleGAN approach, tempCycleGAN efficiently removes flickering between frames. The overall approach is expected to change the future design of surgical training simulators since the generated sequences clearly demonstrate the feasibility to enable a considerably more realistic training experience for minimally-invasive procedures.Comment: 8 pages, accepted at MICCAI 2018, supplemental material at https://youtu.be/qugAYpK-Z4

    Reducing driver distraction by utilizing augmented reality head-up display system for rear passengers

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    Prototype gesture recognition interface for vehicular head-up display system

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    Ocularcentrism and Deepfakes: Should Seeing Be Believing?

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    The pernicious effects of misinformation were starkly exposed on January 6, 2021, when a violent mob of protestors stormed the nation’s capital, fueled by false claims of election fraud. As policymakers wrestle with various proposals to curb misinformation online, this Article highlights one of the root causes of our vulnerability to misinformation, specifically, the epistemological prioritization of sight above all other senses (“ocularcentrism”). The increasing ubiquity of so-called “deepfakes”—hyperrealistic, digitally altered videos of events that never occurred—has further exposed the vulnerabilities of an ocularcentric society, in which technology-mediated sight is synonymous with knowledge. This Article traces the evolution of visual manipulation technologies that have exploited ocularcentrism and evaluates different means of addressing the issues raised by deepfakes, including the use of copyright law

    Augmented Reality

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    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

    Image Bodies, Avatar Ontologies: Rendering the Virtual in Digital Culture

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    In 2009 five avatar-themed films were released, one of which became the highest grossing film to date, signaling that in addition to their popularity in videogames and virtual worlds, avatars are culturally salient figures which demand scholarly attention. Avatars, virtual environments, and user behavior have evolved significantly since virtual reality captured public and academic attention at the close of the twentieth century, and this dissertation is an attempt to theorize the avatar in contemporary digital culture. By interlacing new media philosophy and analyses of cinematic texts I situate the avatar at the nexus between digital images and interactive bodies, with implications for both cinema and virtual environments. Avatarial interfaces position users in an embodiment of connections which in some ways evokes the cyborg body, but the avatar as a theoretical figure places greater stress on the relation between human embodiment and (digital) images, as well as suggesting a move from cyborg fragmentation toward an avatarial gestalt. Avatars are also fruitful bodies for thinking through agency and gender in contemporary society, and engaging the lost `body\u27 of the picture as film has been supplanted by digital imagery. In this regard, virtuality, as a conceptual state pertaining to images, embodiment, technology, and philosophy, serves as the connective theoretical tissue linking bodies and images. Ultimately, in this dissertation I employ the avatar in an exploration of the ways in which we are already virtual, and how we have become avatarial in our own skin

    Dictionaries in the European Enlightenment: a testimony to the civilization of its time and the foundations of modern Europe

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    The text presents a plan for an international and multidisciplinary research project that is under preparation now and which is looking for collaborators from other universities or research centers. It aims to investigate the role that played monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual dictionaries published in the 18th century in the constitution of modern Europe as we know it now. It is well known that in the 18th century there appeared many dictionaries in various European countries. These dictionaries were mainly monolingual but there appeared many bilingual or plurilingual ones as well. They had a wide range of functions: linguistic (to write and understand texts), but also symbolic, representing the development and the level of civilization and prestige that a given language of culture had in times previous to 19th-century European linguistic nationalisms. Another aspect is text-oriented and text-based: the 18th-century dictionaries used to be built on relatively large sources of contemporary texts and they reflected the level of knowledge in various subjects. Therefore, they can be considered testimonies of contemporary linguistic thinking and the applied linguistics, but at the same time, they resume the development of science, legal thought, political science, etc., illustrating how knowledge spread in the Enlightenment at the international level. The project seeks to unite researchers dedicated to the linguistic historiography of philologies of European languages, historians of natural sciences, law, and social and political history, among other disciplines. It aims to offer a map of the intellectual and political globalization that began to take place in the 18th century as it is reflected in its dictionaries. The project currently counts with a small group of researchers from linguistic historiography of Romance languages. Researchers of the historiography of other European philologies are welcome and needed, and so are historians of natural and social sciences specialized in the 18th century. The main aim of the project is to stop working in parallel, horizontal and vertical, tunnels and to form a network, necessary for this type of transdisciplinary research
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