A fast and robust hand-driven 3D mouse

The development of new interaction paradigms requires a natural interaction. This means that people should be able to interact with technology with the same models used to interact with everyday real life, that is through gestures, expressions, voice. Following this idea, in this paper we propose a non intrusive vision based tracking system able to capture hand motion and simple hand gestures. The proposed device allows to use the hand as a "natural" 3D mouse, where the forefinger tip or the palm centre are used to identify a 3D marker and the hand gesture can be used to simulate the mouse buttons. The approach is based on a monoscopic tracking algorithm which is computationally fast and robust against noise and cluttered backgrounds. Two image streams are processed in parallel exploiting multi-core architectures, and their results are combined to obtain a constrained stereoscopic problem. The system has been implemented and thoroughly tested in an experimental environment where the 3D hand mouse has been used to interact with objects in a virtual reality application. We also provide results about the performances of the tracker, which demonstrate precision and robustness of the proposed syste

Tron: Legacy

Commento del film "Tron: Legacy" per la rubrica "uno scienziato al cinema

A New Computer-aided Technique for Planning the Aesthetic Outcome of Plastic Surgery

Plastic surgery plays a major role in today health care. Planning plastic face surgery requires dealing with the elusive concept of attractiveness for evaluating feasible beautification of a particular face. The existing computer tools essentially allow to manually warp 2D images or 3D face scans, in order to produce images simulating possible surgery outcomes. How to manipulate faces, as well as the evaluation of the results, are left to the surgeon's judgement. We propose a new quantitative approach able to automatically suggest effective patient-specific improvements of facial attractiveness. The general idea is to compare the face of the patient with a large database of attractive faces, excluding the facial feature to be improved. Then, the feature of the faces more similar is applied, with a suitable morphing, to the face of the patient. In this paper we present a first application of the general idea in the field of nose surgery. Aesthetically effective rhinoplasty is suggested on the base of the entire face profile, a very important 2D feature for rating face attractivenes

Using Virtual Environments as a Visual Interface for Accessing Cultural Database Contents

Cultural institutions have to deal with an enormous amount of data, which are stored in cultural databases usually designed for and managed by professionals. Difficulties in accessing such databases usually preclude or limit their use for the general public. Moreover, in the historic, artistic and cultural areas, an important part of the information associated to an object is related to its original historical and spatial context, an evidence that is often not disclosed, or is difficult to explain, to the non experts. For this reason, it is important to try to re-contextualize - where possible - the elements of cultural collections in the places where these objects were in the past. To this end, in this work we propose the integration of databases and Virtual Reality technologies to develop novel visual interfaces to improve the accessibility, for the non experts, to the contents of cultural databases. Virtual Reality is used to re-create the contextual environment of the objects in the database, which can be explored to gain new insights on specific elements and to improve the awareness of relationships between them. The use of two different types of Virtual Environments has been investigated in the development of the proposed visual interfaces. Results of their evaluation by a user panel, in order to assess the accessibility and effectiveness of both interfaces in relation to each other and with a classic text-based interface, are also presente

Computer analysis of face beauty: a survey

The human face conveys to other human beings, and potentially to computer systems, information such as identity, intentions, emotional and health states, attractiveness, age, gender and ethnicity. In most cases analyzing this information involves the computer science as well as the human and medical sciences. The most studied multidisciplinary problems are analyzing emotions, estimating age and modeling aging effects. An emerging area is the analysis of human attractiveness. The purpose of this paper is to survey recent research on the computer analysis of human beauty. First we present results in human sciences and medicine pointing to a largely shared and data-driven perception of attractiveness, which is a rationale of computer beauty analysis. After discussing practical application areas, we survey current studies on the automatic analysis of facial attractiveness aimed at: i) relating attractiveness to particular facial features; ii) assessing attractiveness automatically; iii) improving the attractiveness of 2D or 3D face images. Finally we discuss open problems and possible lines of research

A New 3D Tool for Planning Plastic Surgery

Face plastic surgery (PS) plays a major role in today medicine. Both for reconstructive and cosmetic surgery, achieving harmony of facial features is an important, if not the major goal. Several systems have been proposed for presenting to patient and surgeon possible outcomes of the surgical procedure. In this paper, we present a new 3D system able to automatically suggest, for selected facial features as nose, chin, etc, shapes that aesthetically match the patient's face. The basic idea is suggesting shape changes aimed to approach similar but more harmonious faces. To this goal, our system compares the 3D scan of the patient with a database of scans of harmonious faces, excluding the feature to be corrected. Then, the corresponding features of the k most similar harmonious faces, as well as their average, are suitably pasted onto the patient's face, producing k+1 aesthetically effective surgery simulations. The system has been fully implemented and tested. To demonstrate the system, a 3D database of harmonious faces has been collected and a number of PS treatments have been simulated. The ratings of the outcomes of the simulations, provided by panels of human judges, show that the system and the underlying idea are effectiv