A Hospital Information Systems (HIS) have turned a hospital into a gigantic computer with huge computational power, huge storage and wired/wireless local area network. On the other hand, a modern medical device, such as echograph, is a computer system with several functional units connected by an internal network named a bus. Therefore, we can embed such a medical device into the HIS by simply replacing the bus with the local area network. This paper designed and developed two embedded systems, a ubiquitous echograph system and a networked digital camera. Evaluations of the developed systems clearly show that the proposed approach, embedding existing clinical systems into HIS, drastically changes productivity in the clinical field. Once a clinical system becomes a pluggable unit for a gigantic computer system, HIS, the combination of multiple embedded systems with application software designed under deep consideration about clinical processes may lead to the emergence of disruptive innovation in the clinical field.

This paper describes a novel game system which provides multiple players with a sense of touching fire with their own hands. Players in this game are divided into two teams in front of a wall-type flat display and try to score points by grounding a fireball on the other team's court like volleyball. The players can recognize their contacts with the fireball from mirrored image of their own appearance and the superimposed fireball in the display. Computer detects those contacts by using a real-time time-of-flight camera and renders flame of the fireball based on fluid simulation. The reason why we choose fire as a ball is that several characteristics of fire are advantages in interactions between users and virtual objects. This game can provide players with enough enjoyment and reality due to these advantages even if the implemented human detection algorithm is quite simple.

This paper proposes a method for rendering an inter-reflection between a marker and a glossy floor in Augmented Reality (AR). At first, a reflectance ratio of the floor is estimated from the reflection on the floor and from the marker box directly. Then the roughness of the floor is estimated based on the sharpness of the reflected marker box image on the floor. Lastly, the marker box reflection is eliminated based on the surrounding colors of the marker box reflection. Rendered images show that natural inter-reflection can be achieved by using the proposed method.

Colors in nature can be classified into two categories: pigment colors and structural colors. Structural colors, which are caused by optical path differences of reflected rays in microstructures, change depending on viewing angle and lighting conditions. In the present paper, we propose a generic approach for rendering structural colors in real-time. The proposed method uses optical path differences as common parameters to allow unified treatment of various types of microstructures, such as thin films, multilayer films, and diffraction gratings. To achieve real-time rendering, we store pre-computed information related to specific microstructure and lighting conditions on several kinds of textures. The textures are used as a look-up table in the rendering process. The proposed method can be applied to objects that have arbitrary shape and enables rendering from any viewing direction and under any lighting conditions.

Accurate measurement of the position of features in an image is subject to a fundamental compromise: The features must be both small, to limit the effect of nonlinear distortions, and large, to limit the effect of noise and discretization. This constrains both the accuracy and the robustness of image measurements, which play an important role in geometric camera calibration as well as in all subsequent measurements based on that calibration. In this paper, we present a new geometric camera calibration technique that exploits the complete camera model during the localization of control markers, thereby abolishing the marker size compromise. Large markers allow a dense pattern to be used instead of a simple disc, resulting in a significant increase in accuracy and robustness. When highly planar markers are used, geometric camera calibration based on synthetic images leads to true errors of 0.002 pixels, even in the presence of artifacts such as noise, illumination gradients, compression, blurring, and limited dynamic range. The camera parameters are also accurately recovered, even for complex camera models.

This paper describes a real-time pre-visualization method using augmented reality techniques for videographers. It enables them to test camera work without real actors in a real environment. As a substitute for real actors, virtual ones are superimposed on a live video in real-time according to a real camera motion and an illumination condition. The key technique of this method is real-time motion estimation of a camera, which can be applied to unknown complex environments including natural objects. In our method, geometric and photometric registration problems for such unknown environments are solved to realize the above visualization. A prototype system demonstrates availability of the pre-visualization method.

For the real-time recognition of unspecified gestures by an arbitrary person, a comprehensive framework is presented that addresses two important problems in gesture recognition systems: selective attention and processing frame rate. To address the first problem, we propose the Quadruple Visual Interest Point Strategy. No assumptions are made with regard to scale or rotation of visual features, which are computed from dynamically changing regions of interest in a given image sequence. In this paper, each of the visual features is referred to as a visual interest point, to which a probability density function is assigned, and the selection is carried out. To address the second problem, we developed a selective control method to equip the recognition system with self-load monitoring and controlling functionality. Through evaluation experiments, we show that our approach provides robust recognition with respect to such factors as type of clothing, type of gesture, extent of motion trajectories, and individual differences in motion characteristics. In order to indicate the real-time performance and utility aspects of our approach, a gesture video system is developed that demonstrates full video-rate interaction with displayed image objects.

We propose a measurement system of spectral distribution and shape of an object with the use of an imaging spectrograph. Color and shape information are very important for us to recognize objects. A RGB color camera is usually used to measure color, but a real image is a projection of a complex optical phenomenon with spectral distribution. However, there are only few systems measuring spectral distribution as an image. Moreover there is no system which can acquire both spectral distribution and shape information. We propose a system which is able to measure spectral distribution and shape simultaneously with the use of the imaging spectrograph, a turntable and gray code patterns projection.

Presents a method to estimate the 3D pose of a human head in an image. To increase the stableness of the pose estimation, we use continuous representations instead of binary images to describe the skin/hair regions in an image. We use them to calculate the geometrical properties such as area, center, and the axis of least inertia of the skin, the hair, and the head regions. Then we use them to estimate the 3D pose of the head.

Proposes a new method for reconstructing complete 3D shapes and colors of outdoor objects, especially of archaeological sites, as a reconstructed 3D image can be useful for archaeological research. The method integrates two kinds of data: (1) partial surfaces (inaccurate object surfaces with color information which are obtained by stereogrammetry, each of which has its local geometry fixed on the roughly calibrated stereo cameras), and (2) surveyed points (sampled points whose 3D coordinate values are represented with the world geometry and accurately measured by a sensor). The authors focused on fitting the partial surfaces to the surveyed points, and adopted adjustment processes which contained two feedback loops. The method is applied to an outdoor 3D measurement of the Kamaato archaeological site.