Understanding how individuals focus and perform visual searches during collaborative tasks can help improve user engagement. Eye tracking measures provide informative cues for such understanding. This article presents A-DisETrac, an advanced analytic dashboard for distributed eye tracking. It uses off-the-shelf eye trackers to monitor multiple users in parallel, compute both traditional and advanced gaze measures in real-time, and display them on an interactive dashboard. Using two pilot studies, the system was evaluated in terms of user experience and utility, and compared with existing work. Moreover, the system was used to study how advanced gaze measures such as ambient-focal coefficient K and real-time index of pupillary activity relate to collaborative behavior. It was observed that the time a group takes to complete a puzzle is related to the ambient visual scanning behavior quantified and groups that spent more time had more scanning behavior. User experience questionnaire results suggest that their dashboard provides a comparatively good user experience.

Most existing wearable displays for augmented reality (AR) have only one fixed focal plane and hence can easily suffer from vergence-accommodation conflict (VAC). In contrast, light field displays allow users to focus at any depth free of VAC. This paper presents a series of text-based visual search tasks to systematically and quantitatively compare a near-eye light field AR display with a conventional AR display, specifically in regards to how participants wearing such displays would perform on a virtual-real integration task. Task performance is evaluated by task completion rate and accuracy. The results show that the light field AR glasses lead to significantly higher user performance than the conventional AR glasses. In addition, 80% of the participants prefer the light field AR glasses over the conventional AR glasses for visual comfort.

Denizens of the Internet are under a barrage of phishing attacks of increasing frequency and sophistication. Emails accompanied by authentic looking websites are ensnaring users who, unwittingly, hand over their credentials compromising both their privacy and security. Methods such as the blacklisting of these phishing websites become untenable and cannot keep pace with the explosion of fake sites. Detection of nefarious websites must become automated and be able to adapt to this ever-evolving form of social engineering. There is an improved framework that was previously implemented called “Fresh-Phish”, for creating current machine-learning data for phishing websites. The improved framework uses a total of 28 different website features that query using python, then a large labeled dataset is built and analyze over several machine learning classifiers against this dataset to determine which is the most accurate. This modified framework improves the accuracy of modeling those features by using integer rather than binary values where possible. This article analyzes not just the accuracy of the technique, but also how long it takes to train the model.

This paper introduces an improved HMM (hidden Markov model) for low altitude acoustic target recognition. To overcome the limitation of the classical CDHMM (continuous density hidden Markov model) training algorithm and the generalization ability deficiency of existing discriminative learning methods, a new discriminative training method for estimating the CDHMM in acoustic target recognition is proposed based on the principle of maximizing the minimum relative separation margin. According to the definition of the relative margin, the new training criterion can be equation as a standard constrained minimax optimization problem. Then, the optimization problem can be solved by a GPD (generalized probabilistic descent) algorithm. The experimental results show that the performance of the algorithm is significantly improved compared with the former training method, which can effectively improve the recognition ability of the acoustic target recognition system.

The iASSIST is an iPhone-based assistive sensor solution for independent and safe travel for people who are blind or visually impaired, or those who simply face challenges in navigating an unfamiliar indoor environment. The solution integrates information of Bluetooth beacons, data connectivity, visual models, and user preferences. Hybrid models of interiors are created in a modeling stage with these multimodal data, collected, and mapped to the floor plan as the modeler walks through the building. Client-server architecture allows scaling to large areas by lazy-loading models according to beacon signals and/or adjacent region proximity. During the navigation stage, a user with the navigation app is localized within the floor plan, using visual, connectivity, and user preference data, along an optimal route to their destination. User interfaces for both modeling and navigation use multimedia channels, including visual, audio, and haptic feedback for targeted users. The design of human subject test experiments is also described, in addition to some preliminary experimental results.

In this research article, a novel algorithm is introduced to identify the noisy pixels in video frames and correct them to enhance video quality. The technique consists of three stages: fragmentation of the video sequences to respective 2D frames, noisy pixel identification in the 2D frames, and denoising the pixels to obtain original pixels. Due to the complexity in the background and the change in appearance of the body in motion, noise variation occurs. Various researchers discuss that in order to denoise the video sequences, spatio-temporal filtering is required which identifies noise and preserves the edges. In the first stage, the video sequences are analyzed for the removal of redundant frames. This is done by using the video fragmentation process in the MATLAB toolbox. In the next stage, color smoothing is applied to the target frames for processing the flat regions and identifying all the noisy pixels. In the final stage, an improvised multiresolution wavelet transform based anisotropic diffusion filtering is applied which enhances the denoising process in horizontal, vertical, and diagonal sub bands of the video frame signal. The proposed technique can remove the speckle noise and estimate the motion by preserving the minute details of the processed video frames.

Human emotion recognition is critical to people managing their stress and emotions. Although many innovative techniques have been proposed to recognize human emotions, it is still challenging to understand the emotions due to individual differences in the diversity of emotions. This article focuses on analyzing the emotions computationally. In detail, a wavelet transform technique is utilized to extract significant features and find patterns in an emotion dataset. With the extracted features, both classification and visual analysis are performed. For the classification, Logistic Regression, C4.5, and Support Vector Machine are used. Visualization approaches are also utilized to represent similarities and differences among the emotion patterns. From the analysis, the authors found that the proposed method shows an improvement in identifying the differences among the emotions.