In this paper, we study how a multidimensional local binary pattern (LBP) texture feature data can be visually explored and analyzed. The goal is to determine how true paper properties can be characterized with local texture features from visible light images. We utilize isometric feature mapping (Isomap) for the LBP texture feature data and perform non-linear dimensionality reduction for the data. These 2D projections are then visualized with original images to study data properties. Visualization is utilized in the manner of selecting texture models for unlabeled data and analyzing feature performance when building a training set for a classifier. The approach is experimented on with simulated image data illustrating different paper properties and on-line transilluminated paper images taken from a running paper web in the paper mill. The simulated image set is used to acquire quantitative figures on the performance while the analysis of real-world data is an example of semi-supervised learning.

In order to efficiently mitigate emissions radiated from electrical equipment, emission source visualization methods need to be studied. In this paper, we propose a new macroscopic visualization method based on an optimization process which uses only cylindrically-scanned electric field amplitude data from an EMI test facility as specified by CISPR, and so does not need a special measurement system. The presented method divides the visualization space into three-dimensional rectangular cells, and estimated current values through the optimization process are sorted into each corresponding cell. By displaying the summed value of every cell, the emission source can be visualized. For this study, the spatial resolution was evaluated by computer simulation, with a result of around 0.2 m using a cell size of 0.1 m. With subsequent experimental verification using a comb generator in a semi-anechoic chamber, the visualization deviation was found to be less than 0.1 m in a frequency range of 100 MHz to 800 MHz. When two spherical dipole antennas were used, the deviation was less than 0.15 m. Finally, visualization results from a facsimile unit and a PC as real EUTs were shown and basic applicability of this method demonstrated.

There are several optimization techniques available for improving rendering speed of direct volume rendering. An acceleration method using the hierarchical min-max map requires little preprocessing and data storage while preserving image quality. However, this method introduces computational overhead because of unnecessary comparison and level shift between blocks. In this paper, we propose an efficient space-leaping method using optimal-sized blocks. To determine the size of blocks, our method partitions an image plane into several uniform grids and computes the minimum and the maximum depth values for each grid. We acquire optimal block sets suitable for individual rays from these values. Experimental results show that our method reduces rendering time when compared with the previous min-max octree method.

Volume Graphics Clusters (VG Clusters) have proven to be efficient in a wide range of visualization applications and have also shown promise in some other applications where the image composition device could be fully utilized. The main differentiating feature from other graphics clusters is a specialized image composition device, commercially available as the MPC Image Compositor, which enables the building of do-it-yourself VG Clusters. Although this device is highly scalable, the unidirectional composition flow limits the data subdivision to the quantity of physically available rendering nodes. In addition, the limited buffer memory limits the maximum capable image composition size, therefore limiting its use in large-scale data visualization and high-resolution visualization. To overcome these limitations, we propose and evaluate an image composition mechanism in which additional hardware is used for assisting the image composition process. Because of the synergistic use of two distinct image composition hardware devices we named it "Hybrid Image Composition". Some encouraging results were obtained showing the effectiveness of this solution in improving the VG Cluster 's potential. A low-cost parallel port based hardware barrier is also presented as an efficient method for further enhancing this kind of small-scale VG Cluster. Moreover, this solution has proven to be especially useful in clusters built using low-speed networks, such as Fast Ethernet, which are still in common use.

This paper reviews the approximation principle of Physical Optics in view of diffraction theory. Two key error factors are identified for PO, that is, 1) errors in edge diffraction coefficients and 2) fictitious penetrating rays. Improved methods named PO-AF and PTD-AF are proposed as the methods which suppress the fictitious penetrating rays from PO and PTD respectively. In deep shadow regions of the reflector antennas, PO-AF and PDT-AF approach to PO-EEC and UTD respectively, while the continuity is assured. The effectiveness is numerically demonstrated for two dimensional scatterers.

We have developed a visualization system for dialog text exchanged in e-learning virtual classrooms. In this system, text-based online discussions among learners are effectively visualized as discussions held in a virtual classroom in cyberspace. Discussion participants are displayed as avatars. The virtual classroom maintains the interest of learners because it incorporates professional camerawork and switching know-how based on rules derived from an analysis of 42 TV programs. The gestures of the CG avatar depend on the dialog text. A series of virtual classroom experiments confirmed that elementary and junior high school students maintained an interest in using the system.

High frequency (HF) diffraction is known as local phenomena, and only parts of the scatterer contribute to the field such as the edge, corner and specular reflection point etc. Many HF diffraction techniques such as Geometrical Theory of Diffraction (GTD), Uniform Theory of Diffraction (UTD) and Physical Theory of Diffraction (PTD) utilize these assumptions explicitly. Physical Optics (PO), on the other hand, expresses the diffraction in terms of radiation integral or the sum total of contributions from all the illuminated parts of scatterers, while the PO currents are locally defined at the point of integration. This paper presents PO-based visualization of the scattering and diffraction phenomena and tries to provide the intuitive understanding of local property of HF diffraction as well as the relations between PO and the ray techniques such as GTD, UTD etc. A weighting named "eye function" is introduced in PO radiation integrals to take into account of local cancellation between rapidly oscillating contributions from adjacent currents; this extracts important areas of current distribution, whose location moves not only with the source but also with the observation point. PO visualization illustrates both local property of HF scattering and defects associated with ray techniques. Furthermore, careful examination of visualized image reminds us of the error factor in PO as applied for curved surfaces, named fictitious penetrating rays. They have been scarcely recognized if not for visualization, though they disturb the geometrical shadow behind the opaque scatterer and can be the leading error factors of PO in shadow regions. Finally, visualization is extended to slot antennas with finite ground planes by hybrid use of modified edge representation (MER) to assess the significance of edge diffraction.

This paper describes the architecture of ReVolver/C40 a scalable parallel machine for volume rendering and its prototype implementation. The most important feature of ReVolver/C40 is view-independent real time rendering of translucent 3D object by using perspective projection. In order to realize this feature, the authors propose a parallel volume memory architecture based on the principal axis oriented sampling method and parallel treble volume memory. This paper also discusses the implementation issues of ReVolver/C40 where various kinds of parallelism extracted to achieve high-perfromance rendering are explained. The prototype systems had been developed and their performance evaluation results are explained. As the results of the evaluation of the prototype systems, ReVolver/C40 with 32 parallel volume memory is estimated to achieve more than 10 frame per second for 2563 volume data on 2562 screen by using perspective projection. The authors also review the development of ReVolver/C40 from several view points.

Self-organizing map is a widely used tool in high-dimensional data visualization. However, despite its benefits of plotting very high-dimensional data on a low-dimensional grid, browsing and understanding the meaning of a trained map turn to be a difficult task -- specially when number of nodes or the size of data increases. Though there are some well-known techniques to visualize SOMs, they mainly deals with cluster boundaries and they fail to consider raw information available in original data in browsing SOMs. In this paper, we propose our Factor controlled Hierarchical SOM that enables us select number of data to train and label a particular map based on a pre-defined factor and provides consistent hierarchical SOM browsing.

This letter proposes a 3-D stereo endoscopic image processing system. Whereas a conventional 3-D stereo endoscopic system has simple monitoring functions, the proposed system gives doctors exact depth feelings by providing them depth value information, visualization, and stereo PACS viewer to aid an education, accurate diagnosis, a surgical operation, and to further apply in a robotic surgery.

Patterns exist in many contexts and can be considered the useful information for decision making. However, many patterns are not directly visible without careful presentation. Here, we describe an interactive visualization approach for browsing patterns in a history of interacting with a computer system. While a user is carrying out his/her business using computers, activities with respect to time and location are captured to determine the situational interactions. We first integrate the timeline and geographical map to create a structure to visualize spatiotemporal events in the interaction history. The spiral-based interactive visualization technique, presented in this paper, is then used to derive patterns according to the user-specified different spatial viewpoints on the map. In this study, we demonstrate how patterns can be used as visual statements for the analysis of a spatiotemporal data set in the information visualization.

We describe an index for estimating the level of interest in Web pages. This "time-based interest" (TBI) index combinates an equation reflecting page accesses and an equation reflecting the decrease in interest over time. These equations work simultaneously by using a parameter that is based on the time since the last access. We experimentally estimated the decrease ratio of the TBI index and evaluated the characteristics of the TBI equation. We found that the index follows Zipf's distribution, indicating that reflects the change in popularity. We also introduce an access-log analysis system called CyberRanking that includes TBI analysis. CyberRanking analyzes the access logs of Web servers and presents the results in 2-D or 3-D graph on a Web browser.

This paper proposes an automatic method for reconstructing a realistic 3D facial image from CT (computer tomography) and three color photographs: front, left and right views, which can be linked easily with the underlying bone and soft tissue models. This work is the first part of our final goal, "the prediction of patient's facial appearance after cancer surgery" such as removal of a part of bone or soft tissues. The 3D facial surface derived from CT by the marching cubes algorithm is obviously colorless. Our task is to add the color texture of the same patient actually taken with a digital camera to the colorless 3D surface. To do this it needs an accurate registration between the 3D facial image and the color photograph. Our approach is to set up a virtual camera around the 3D facial surface to register the virtual camera images with the corresponding color photographs by automatically adjusting seven parameters of the virtual camera. The camera parameters consists of three rotations, three translations and one scale factor. The registration algorithm has been developed based upon Besl and McKay's iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm.

In this article we present a survey of medical image processing with the stress on applications of image generation and pattern recognition / understanding to computer aided diagnosis (CAD) and surgery (CAS). First, topics and fields of research in medical image processing are summarized. Second the importance of the 3D image processing and the use of virtualized human body (VHB) is pointed out. Thirdly the visualization and the observation methods of the VHB are introduced. In the forth section the virtualized endoscope system is presented from the viewpoint of the observation of the VHB with the moving viewpoints. The fifth topic is the use of VHB with deformation such as the simulation of surgical operation, intra-operative aids and image overlay. In the seventh section several topics on image processing methodologies are introduced including model generation, registration, segmentation, rendering and the use of knowledge processing.

A method for reconstructing realistic 3D human faces from computer tomography images and color photographs is proposed in this paper. This can be linked easily with the underlying bone and soft tissue models. An iteration algorithm has been developed for automatically estimating the virtual camera parameters to match the projected 3D CT image with 2D color photographs using known point correspondence. An approach has been proposed to select landmarks using a mouse with minimum error. Six landmarks from each image have been selected for front face matching and five for each side face matching.

This paper discusses visualization of temporal and spatial information in natural language descriptions (NLDs), focusing on the translation process of intermediate representations of NLDs to proper scenarios" and environments" for animations. First, the intermediate representations are shown according to the idea of actors. Actors and non-actors are represented as primitives of objects, whereas actions as those of events. Temporal and spatial constraints by a given NLD text are imposed upon the primitives. Then, the representations containing unknown temporal or spatial parameters --time and coordinates-- are translated into evaluation functions, where the unlikelihood of the deviations from the predicted temporal or spatial relations are estimated. Particularly, the functions concerning actor's movements contain both temporal and spatial parameters. Next, the sum of all the evaluation functions is minimized by a nonlinear optimization method. Thus, the most proper actors' time-table, or scenario, and non-actors' location-table, or environment, for visualization are obtained. Implementation and experiments show that both temporal and spatial information in NLDs are well connected through actors' movements for visualization.

Most current management systems employ graphic-user-interface displays to visualize the networks being managed. Some networks are so large that it is difficult to display all network elements in a single window alone, and therefore, the hierarchical multi-window style presentation is commonly used. This form of presentation has disadvantages, however, including the fact that window manipulations are complex. Our approach (bifocal network visualization) is able to display both the context and any detail of a network within a single window, and overcomes the disadvantages of hierarchical multi-window presentation. We implemented this bifocal network visualization on a workstation using a frame buffer memory called DUALQUEST that is able to generate images in real-time and is simple to operate. This paper describes bifocal network visualization and its implementation. Furthermore, we present an experiment to compare our interface with conventional hierarchical multi-window presentation.

Serious failures of the latest electronic equipments occur easily due to electrostatic discharge (ESD) , which can be caused frequently by the electrification phenomena of human-body walking on the floor. The number of the above damaging incidents has significantly been increasing with an increased use of integrated semiconductor elements with lower operation power. The most effective measures against the ESD consist in preventive ones, which are to obtain dynamic behaviors of the electric charge before the ESD happens, thereby preventing the charge accumulation. From this point of view, this paper describes new approaches for measurement of the static electricity directed toward preventing the ESD. First, a two-dimensional measurement method for visualizing charge distributions is described. This principle is based on visualizing the potential distribution induced in the array electrodes from the electrostatic fields. For showing usefulness of the visualization measurement, a prototype was built and attempts were made on the visualizations for the static electricity distributions of charged bodies. Second, a potential calculation of the human body charged by walking on the floor is described. A model was shown for analyzing the human-body potential on the floor, and the theoretical equation for describing the potential attenuation process was derived in the closed form in the Laplacian transformation domain. In order to obtain the typical half-life of the human-body potential, numerical computations were performed using a reverse Laplacian transformation. The experiments were also conducted for confirming the validity of the computed results. Finally, a new method is described for estimating dynamic behaviors of the occurrence charges of the human body electrified by walking-motions. Statistical measurements of the charges and potentials were made for the fundamental walking-motions specified here. The pace transitions of the potentials due to continuous walking and stepping were also measured and their results were explained from the electrification properties for the fundamental walking-motions.