Moments for Perceptive Narration Analysis Through the Emotional Attachment of Audience to Discourse and Story

In this work, our goal is to develop a theoretical framework that can eventually be used for analyzing the effectiveness of visual stories such as feature films to comic books. To develop this theoretical framework, we introduce a new story element called moments. Our conjecture is that any linear story such as the story of a feature film can be decomposed into a set of moments that follow each other. Moments are defined as the perception of the actions, interactions, and expressions of all characters or a single character during a given time period. We categorize the moments into two major types: story moments and discourse moments. Each type of moment can further be classified into three types, which we call universal storytelling moments. We believe these universal moments foster or deteriorate the emotional attachment of the audience to a particular character or the story. We present a methodology to catalog the occurrences of these universal moments as they are found in the story. The cataloged moments can be represented using curves or color strips. Therefore, we can visualize a character's journey through the story as either a 3D curve or a color strip. We also demonstrated that both story and discourse moments can be transformed into one lump-sum attraction parameter. The attraction parameter in time provides a function that can be plotted graphically onto a timeline illustrating changes in the emotional attachment of audience to a character or the story. By inspecting these functions the story analyst can analytically decipher the moments in the story where the attachment is being established, maintained, strengthened, or conversely where it is languishing.Comment: 20 page

Satin Non-Woven Fabrics for Designing of Self-Regulating Breathable Building Skins

In this paper, we introduce the concept of 2-way 2-fold genus-1 non-woven fabrics that can be used to design self-regulating breathable building skins. The advantage of non-woven structures over woven structures for breathable skin design is that they can completely be closed to stop air exchange. We have developed a theoretical framework for such non-woven structures starting from the mathematical theory of biaxial 2-fold Genus-1 woven fabrics. By re-purposing a mathematical notation that is used to describe 2-fold 2-way 2-fold genus-1 woven fabrics, we identify and classify non-woven fabrics. Within this classification, we have identified a special subset that corresponds to satin woven fabrics and allows for maximum air exchange. Any other subset of non-woven structures that correspond to other classical 2-way 2-fold genus-1 fabrics, such as plain or twill, will allow for less air exchange. We also show that there exists another subset of satin non-woven fabrics that can provide the biggest openings.Comment: 10 page

Curved Space-Filling Tiles Using Voronoi Decomposition with Line, and Curve Segments Closed Under Wallpaper Symmetries

In this paper, we present a new approach to obtain symmetric tiles with curved edges. Our approach is based on using higher-order Voronoi sites that are closed under wallpaper symmetries. The resulting Voronoi tessellations provide us with symmetric tiles with curved edges. We have developed a web application that provides real-time tile design. Our application can be found at https://voronoi.viz.tamu.edu. One of our key findings in this paper is that not all symmetry operations are useful for creating curved tiles. In particular, all symmetries that use mirror operation produce straight lines that are useless for creating new tiles. This result is interesting because it suggests that we need to avoid mirror transformations to produce unusual space-filling tiles in 2D and 3D using Voronoi tessellations.Comment: 1

Circular Average Filtering and Circular Linear Interpolation in Complex Color Spaces

In color spaces where the chromatic term is given in polar coordinates, the shortest distance between colors of the same value is circular. By converting such a space into a complex polar form with a real-valued value axis, a color algebra for combining colors is immediately available. In this work, we introduce two complex space operations utilizing this observation: circular average filtering and circular linear interpolation. These operations produce Archimedean Spirals, thus guaranteeing that they operate along the shortest paths. We demonstrate that these operations provide an intuitive way to work in certain color spaces and that they are particularly useful for obtaining better filtering and interpolation results. We present a set of examples based on the perceptually uniform color space CIELAB or L*a*b* with its polar form CIEHLC. We conclude that representing colors in a complex space with circular operations can provide better visual results by exploitation of the strong algebraic properties of complex space C.Comment: 10 page

Fast Approximate Convex Decomposition

Approximate convex decomposition (ACD) is a technique that partitions an input object into "approximately convex" components. Decomposition into approximately convex pieces is both more efficient to compute than exact convex decomposition and can also generate a more manageable number of components. It can be used as a basis of divide-and-conquer algorithms for applications such as collision detection, skeleton extraction and mesh generation. In this paper, we propose a new method called Fast Approximate Convex Decomposition (FACD) that improves the quality of the decomposition and reduces the cost of computing it for both 2D and 3D models. In particular, we propose a new strategy for evaluating potential cuts that aims to reduce the relative concavity, rather than absolute concavity. As shown in our results, this leads to more natural and smaller decompositions that include components for small but important features such as toes or fingers while not decomposing larger components, such as the torso that may have concavities due to surface texture. Second, instead of decomposing a component into two pieces at each step, as in the original ACD, we propose a new strategy that uses a dynamic programming approach to select a set of n_c non-crossing (independent) cuts that can be simultaneously applied to decompose the component into n_c + 1 components. This reduces the depth of recursion and, together with a more efficient method for computing the concavity measure, leads to significant gains in efficiency. We provide comparative results for 2D and 3D models illustrating the improvements obtained by FACD over ACD and we compare with the segmentation methods given in the Princeton Shape Benchmark

Modeling high-genus surfaces

The goal of this research is to develop new, interactive methods for creating very high genus 2-manifold meshes. The various approaches investigated in this research can be categorized into two groups -- interactive methods, where the user primarily controls the creation of the high-genus mesh, and automatic methods, where there is minimal user interaction and the program automatically creates the high-genus mesh. In the interactive category, two different methods have been developed. The first allows the creation of multi-segment, curved handles between two different faces, which can belong to the same mesh or to geometrically distinct meshes. The second method, which is referred to as ``rind modeling'', provides for easy creation of surfaces resembling peeled and punctured rinds. The automatic category also includes two different methods. The first one automates the process of creating generalized Sierpinski polyhedra, while the second one allows the creation of Menger sponge-type meshes. Efficient and robust algorithms for these approaches and user-friendly tools for these algorithms have been developed and implemented