Merl -- A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory

workshop web site. Matthew Brand and Ken Shan MERL---a Mitsubishi Electric Research Lab 201 Broadway, Cambridge, MA, 02139 [email protected] We introduce a method for learning a mapping between signals, and use this to drive facial animation directly from vocal cues. Instead of depending on heuristic intermediate representations such as phonemes or visemes, the system learns its own representation, which includes dynamical and contextual information. In principle, this allows the system to make optimal use of context to handle ambiguity and relatively long-lasting facial co-articulation effects. The output is a series of facial control parameters, suitable for driving many different kinds of animation ranging from photo-realistic image warps to 3D cartoon characters. 1. From lip-syncing to facial animation Psychologists and storytellers alike have observed that there is a good deal of mutual information between vocal and facial gesture [23]. Facial information can add significant

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

this paper are: # We proposed a method to compare the variable length sequences using the HMM parameter space # We showed that the number of largest eigenvalues (in absolute value) to span subspace is proportional to the number of cluster

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

this paper we will present a approach that gives accurate results through a surprisingly simple optimization process. This method is akin to the ICA approaches described in the past by Casey and Westner [1] and Smaragdis [2], it however lacks a statistical foundation and rather attempts to describe auditory scenes using a component-wise reconstruction approach. In this paper we will present two flavors of this technique, one dealing with static spectrum objects, and an extension that can deal with time-varying object

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

ering MERL, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs Special features such as ridges, valleys and silhouettes, of a polygonal scene are usually displayed by explicitly identifying and then rendering `edges' for the corresponding geometry. The candidate edges are identified using the connectivity information, which requires preprocessing of the data. We present a nonobvious but surprisingly simple to implement technique to render such features without connectivity information or preprocessing. At the hardware level, based only on the vertices of a given flat polygon, we introduce new polygons, with appropriate color, shape and orientation, so that they eventually appear as special features. 1 INTRODUCTION Sharp features convey a great deal of information with very few strokes. Technical illustrations, engineering CAD diagrams as well as non-photo-realistic rendering techniques exploit these features to enhance the appearance of the underlying graphics models. The most commonly used featur

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

We propose an unsupervised, low-latency traffic congestion estimation algorithm that operates on the MPEG video data. We extract congestion features directly in the compressed domain, and employ Gaussian Mixture Hidden Markov Models (GM-HMM) to detect traffic condition

Merl -- A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory

We develop a level set based region growing method for automatic partitioning of color images into segments. Previous attempts at image segmentation either suffer fromrequiring a priori information to initialize regions, being computationally complex, or fail to establish the color consistency and spatial connectivity at the same time. Here, we represent the segmentation problem as monotonic wave propagation in an absorbing medium with varying front speeds. We iteratively emit waves from the selected base points. At a base point, the local variance of the data reaches a minimum, which indicates the base point is a suitable representative of its local neighborhood. We determine local variance by applying a hierarchical gradient operator. The speed of the wave is determined by the color similarity of the point on the front to the current coverage of the wave, and by edge information. Thus, the wave advances in an anisotropic spatial-color space. The absorbing function acts as a stopping criterion of the wave front. We take advantage of fast marching methods to solve the Eikonal equation for finding the travel times of the waves. Our method is superior to the linkage-based region growing techniques since it prevents leakage and imposes compactness on the region without over-smoothing its boundary. Furthermore, we can deal with sharp corners and changes in topology. The automatic segmentation method is Eulerian, thus it is computationally efficient. We compare our results with a non-Eulerian approach that evaluates the arrival times of multiple waves as well. Our experiments illustrate the robustness, accuracy, and effectiveness of the proposed method

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

This paper presents the design of a system that interacts with users via a set of "guessers": algorithms for suggesting possible annotations to the user, in the context of learning hierarchical task model

Merl A Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory

The most di#cult aspect of rigid-body simulation is contact modeling. Two major subproblems of contact modeling are detecting contacts and computing contact forces. Although typically studied in isolation, these problems are tightly intertwined in simulation. This paper describes a method for #tting the pieces together

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

this paper, we present observations of user experience n the wild on interactive tables in four different real-world contexts - all non-controlled settings. We reflect upon our collective experience, report our observations, and summarize lessons learned by identifying design considerations relating to several aspects of interactive tables, such as simultaneous touching, ambiguous input, one-fingered touch, finger resolution, alternate touch input, crowding and clutter, text input, orientation, multi-user coordination, occlusion, ergonomic issues, and mental model

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories

We present a novel solution to the warping recovery problem. Our algorithm has several distinct advantages; it is scalable, it enables effective integration of boundary and continuity constraints, and most importantly it is computationally much less demanding than the previous approaches