Three-dimensional head tracking and facial expression recovery using an anthropometric muscle-based active appearance model

This paper describes a novel 3-D model-based tracking algorithm allowing the real-time recovery of 3-D position, orientation, and facial expressions of a moving head. The method uses a 3-D anthropometric muscle-based active appearance model (3-D AMB AAM), a feature-based matching algorithm, and an extended Kalman filte

Hierarchical animation control of avatars in 3-D virtual environments

This paper reports the development of a three-layer hierarchical control system for the animation of anthropomorphic avatars in three-dimensional virtual environments. The lower layer controls the movement of the avatar's joints, the second layer defines skills or basic behaviors (such as walk, run, and jump), and the highest layer executes a behavior-based script language that can be used to describe stories to be enacted by the avatars. In order to verify how flexible the proposed hierarchical approach is, the two lower control layers were implemented in two different ways, without affecting the script language layer

A web-based 3D virtual robot remote control system

Robot remote control is a major subfield of robotics. It has many potential applications, such as remote production monitoring, remote exploration and manipulation in dangerous environments, tele-surgery and tele-teaching, etc. This paper proposes an approach to develop a robot remote control system by combining the 3D graphical model of the robot and the environment with the web based control software. The 3D graphical model of the environment and the robot is to get a more realistic interface which can help the user to remotely control the robot or part of the robot, such as the arm, for easier manipulation

Avatar animations in a 3D virtual environment

Virtual environments with avatars can be used in a variety of application areas such as engineering, science, education and entertainment. This paper reports an effective way to control an avatar defined in VRML according to the international ISO/IEC Humanoid Standard. The control system has a hierarchical structure and is built in three levels: joint control, basic behaviors and script language

Capturing Behaviour for the Use of Avatars in Virtual Environments

Avatars, representations of people in virtual environments, are subject to human control. However, for most applications, it is impractical for a person to directly control each joint in a complex avatar. Rather, people must be allowed to specify complex behaviours with simple instructions and the avatar permitted to select the correct movements in sequence to execute the instruction. This requires a variety of technologies that are currently available. Human behaviour must be captured and stored it so that it can be retrieved at a later time for use by the avatar. This has been done successfully with a variety of haptic interfaces, with visual observation of human head movements, and with verbal behaviour in natural language applications. The behaviour must be broken into atomic actions that can be sequenced with a regular grammar, and an appropriate grammar developed. Finally, a user interface must be developed so that a person can deliver instructions to the avatar

Model-based filtering and compression of oscillometric blood pressure pulses

This paper presents a new approach toward outlier removal, filtering and compression of oscillometric blood pressure pulses by modeling the pulses as sum of harmonically related sinusoids. By curve fitting the proposed model to the measured oscillometric pulses using a nonlinear optimization technique, we demonstrate that an arbitrary oscillometric pulse can be modeled and consequently noise and artifacts can be reduced. As each sinusoid is precisely expressed by its amplitude, phase and frequency, the proposed method provides a compressed representation of the oscillometric pulses. We show that the proposed method achieves a compression ratio of 60/HR Fs/2N+4, where HR is the heart rate in beats/min, Fs is the sampling frequency in Hz, and N is the number of harmonics considered in the model. New methods for detecting, replacing, and correcting the outliers based on the characteristics of the outlier neighboring pulses are also proposed in this paper