Evaluation of Movement Generation Systems Using the Point-Light Technique

We describe a comparative evaluation of different movement generation systems capable of computing articulatory trajectories from phonetic input. The articulatory trajectories here pilot the facial deformation of a 3D clone of a human female speaker. In this paper we test the adequacy of the predicted trajectories in accompanying the production of natural utterances. The performance of these predictions are compared to the ones of natural articulatory trajectories produced by the speaker and estimated by an original video-based motion capture technique. The test uses the point-light technique [26, 27]

Talking faces for MPEG-4 compliant scalable face-to-face telecommunication

We present here a system that captures, encodes and renders speaker-specific speech gestures in a MPEG-4 compliant framework. The process is eased by two original options: (a) the use of a specific video capture via a head-mounted camera, (b).the a priori construction of speaker-specific shape and appearance models. We will show that speaker-specific articulatory movements can be straightforward encoded into the normalized MPEG-4 Facial Animation Parameters. We will comment the perquisite to possible extensions of this work towards every day life face-to-face communications and multimodal virtual teleconferencing

Weight compensated motion estimation for facial deformation analysis

Investigation of the motion performed by a person's face while speaking is the target of this paper. Methods and results of the studied facial motions are presented and rigid and non-rigid motion are analyzed. In order to extract only facial deformation independent from head pose, we use a new and simple approach for separating rigid and non-rigid motion called Weight Cornpensated Motion Estimation (WCME). This approach weights the data points according to their influence to the desired motion model. A synthetic test as well as real data, are used to demonstrate the performance of this approach. We also present results in the field of facial deformation analysis and used basis shapes as description form. These results can be used for recognition purposes by adding temporal changes to the overall process or adding natural deformations other than at the given database

Improving the Safety of Major Resection for Hepatobiliary Malignancy: Portal Vein Embolization and Recent Innovations in Liver Regeneration Strategies

Purpose of review: For three decades, portal vein embolization (PVE) has been the “gold-standard” strategy to hypertrophy the anticipated future liver remnant (FLR) in advance of major hepatectomy. During this time, CT volumetry was the most common method to preoperatively assess FLR quality and function and used to determine which patients are appropriate surgical candidates. This review provides the most up-to-date methods for preoperatively assessing the anticipated FLR and summarizes data from the currently available strategies used to induce FLR hypertrophy before surgery for hepatobiliary malignancy. Recent findings: Functional and physiological imaging is increasingly replacing standard CT volumetry as the method of choice for preoperative FLR assessment. PVE, associating liver partition and portal vein ligation, radiation lobectomy, and liver venous deprivation are all currently available techniques to hypertrophy the FLR. Each strategy has pros and cons based on tumor type, extent of resection, presence or absence of underlying liver disease, age, performance status, complication rates, and other factors. Summary: Numerous strategies can lead to FLR hypertrophy and improve the safety of major hepatectomy. Which is best has yet to be determined