Ricoh (United States)

Bulging is a medical characteristic of the eardrum that is crucial for the diagnosis of acute otitis media. This work proposes a novel classification method for distinguishing bulged eardrums from non-bulged ones. The method uses novel key features extracted from 3D data of the tympanic membrane, captured using a new type of otoscope, the light-field otoscope, capable of non-invasive 3D imaging of the middle ear. We first introduce a variety of geometrical and statistical descriptors (based on isocontours), and then select the most discriminative ones. Results on clinical data show that, when using the proposed feature descriptors, eardrum bulging can be automatically detected with an average accuracy of approximately 82%.

We report the results of a short term experimental study on blind participants to evaluate their performances on two different text typing techniques. BrailleTouch, a gesture based text typing technology, is objectively compared to the TalkBack-enabled Android stock keyboard which requires touch exploration to type. We found that on an average BrailleTouch was almost twice as fast as the Android stock keyboard for typing each character. At the same time, these experiments clearly establish that accuracy of the BrailleTouch technique significantly dwindles as the number of dots in a Braille cell increase due to lesser motor control over the ring finger (or the digitus medicinalis).

David Hockney has argued that the right hand of the disciple, thrust to the rear in Caravaggio's <i>Supper at Emmaus</i> (1606), is anomalously large as a result of the artist refocusing a putative secret lens-based optical projector and tracing the image it projected onto his canvas. We show through rigorous optical analysis that to achieve such an anomalously large hand image, Caravaggio would have needed to make extremely large, conspicuous and implausible alterations to his studio setup, moving both his purported lens and his canvas nearly two meters between "exposing" the disciple's left hand and then his right hand. Such major disruptions to his studio would have impeded -not aided- Caravaggio in his work. Our optical analysis quantifies these problems and our computer graphics reconstruction of Caravaggio's studio illustrates these problems. In this way we conclude that Caravaggio did not use optical projections in the way claimed by Hockney, but instead most likely set the sizes of these hands "by eye" for artistic reasons.

Underdrawings and pentimenti-typically revealed through x-ray imaging and infrared reflectography-comprise important evidence about the intermediate states of an artwork and thus the working methods of its creator.(1) To this end, Shahram, Stork and Donoho introduced the De-pict algorithm, which recovers layers of brush strokes in paintings with open brush work where several layers are partially visible, such as in van Gogh's Self portrait with a grey felt hat.(2) While that preliminary work served as a proof of concept that computer image analytic methods could recover some occluded brush strokes, the work needed further refinement before it could be a tool for art scholars. Our current work makes several steps to improve that algorithm. Specifically, we refine the inpainting step through the inclusion of curvature-based constraints, in which a mathematical curvature penalty biases the reconstruction toward matching the artist's smooth hand motion. We refine and test our methods using "ground truth" image data: passages of four layers of brush strokes in which the intermediate layers were recorded photographically. At each successive top layer (currently identified by the user), we used k-means clustering combined with graph cuts to obtain chromatically and spatially coherent segmentation of brush strokes. We then reconstructed strokes at the deeper layer with our new curvature-based inpainting algorithm based on chromatic level lines. Our methods are clearly superior to previous versions of the De-pict algorithm on van Gogh's works giving smoother, natural strokes that more closely match the shapes of unoccluded strokes. Our improved method might be applied to the classic drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, where the drip work is more open and the physics of splashing paint ensures that the curvature more uniform than in the brush strokes of van Gogh.

We review the recent application of computer graphics to problems in the history and interpretation of master artworks. Carefully constructed computer graphics models of tableaus in paintings allow scholars to explore what if scenarios concerning lighting, geometry, placement of subjects, physical properties (such as color and reflectance characteristics), and more. A special application of computer graphics is to dewarp images depicted in spherical mirrors, such as appear in works from the northern Renaissance, thus revealing new views into artists' studios. We present a number of methodological recommendations to help ensure the results of such studies are valid. We describe some successes of these new techniques and conclude by discussing several outstanding problems and future directions for the use of computer graphics in the analysis of realist art.

The popularity of camera phones enables many exciting multimedia applications. In this paper, we present a novel technology and several applications that allow users to interact with paper documents, books, and magazines. This interaction is in the form of reading and writing electronic information, such as images, web urls, video, and audio, to the paper medium by pointing a camera phone at a patch of text on a document. Our application does not require any special markings, barcodes, or watermarks on the paper document. Instead, we propose a document recognition algorithm that automatically determines the location of a patch of text in a large collection of document images given a small document image. This is very challenging because the majority of phone cameras lack autofocus and macro capabilities and they produce low quality images and video. We developed a novel algorithm, Brick Wall Coding (BWC), that performs image-based document recognition using the mobile phone video frames. Given a document patch image, BWC utilizes the layout, i.e. relative locations, of word boxes in order to determine the original file, page, and the location on the page. BWC runs real-time (4 frames per second) on a Treo 700w smartphone with a 312 MHz processor and 64MB RAM. Using our method we can recognize blurry document patch frames that contain as little as 4-5 lines of text and a video resolution as low as 176x144. We performed experiments by indexing 4397 document pages and querying this database with 533 document patches. Besides describing the basic algorithm, this paper also describes several applications that are enabled by mobile phone-paper interaction, such as inserting electronic annotations to paper, using paper as a tangible interface to collect and communicate multimedia data, and collaborative homework.

In many imaging applications, the objects of interest have broad range of strongly correlated spectral components. For example, the spectral components of grayscale objects such as media printed with black ink or toner are nearly perfectly correlated spatially. We describe how to exploit such correlation during the design of electro-optical imaging systems to achieve greater imaging performance and lower optical component cost. These advantages are achieved by jointly optimizing optical, detector, and digital image processing subsystems using a unified statistical imaging performance measure. The resulting optical systems have lower F# and greater depth-of-field than systems that do not exploit spectral correlations.

A document log is an ordered list of entries providing a history for any sort of media or file, just as a logfile provides a history of a computer program and a logbook provides a history of a journey. The history of a document may consist of copyright information, approvals, annotations, or any sort of metadata. This paper describes a metadata architecture using Content Based Identifiers and Document Logs that facilitates location of metadata from distributed sources, caching, ordering of log entries, and detection of changes in metadata or documents. The techniques used complement existing metadata format standards and are contrasted with storage of metadata in a file or document management system.