Abstract We introduce a multiple‐pass sketch‐based user interface, designed for novice users, which avoids spatial ambiguities and hence allows considerable freedom in creating 3D animations. The user first draws the path along which a character or object is to move. A vertical motion window is then erected along this path, on which the user specifies the character's gestures or the object's vertical movements. A further cross‐motion window can be used to add detail to the movements of the object. Window‐specific camera modules present the user with appropriate views, extending the fluidity of pencil and paper to 3D. A usability study involving 60 users, who were previously unfamiliar with 3D animation tools, demonstrated that the proposed interface is easy to learn and effective in use. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

SGML/XML are having a profound impact on data modeling and processing. We present an efficient algorithm to compute differences between old and new versions of an SGML/XML document. The difference between the two versions can be considered to be an edit script that transforms one document tree into another. The proposed algorithm is based on a hybridization of bottom-up and top-down methods: The matching relationships between nodes in the two versions are produced in a bottom-up manner and then the top-down breadth-first search computes an edit script. Faster matching is achieved because the algorithm does not need to investigate the possible existence of matchings for all nodes. Furthermore, it can detect structurally meaningful changes such as the movement and copy of a subtree as well as simple changes to the node itself like insertion, deletion, and update.

This paper presents a syntactic method for sophisticated logical structure analysis that transforms document images with multiple pages and hierarchical structure into an electronic document based on SGML/XML. To produce a logical structure more accurately and quickly than previous works of which the basic units are text lines, the proposed parsing method takes text regions with hierarchical structure as input. Furthermore, we define a document model that is able to describe geometric characteristics and logical structure information of documents efficiently and present its automated creation method. Experimental results with 372 images scanned from the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (TPAMI) show that the method has performed logical structure analysis successfully and generated a document model automatically. Particularly, the method generates SGML/XML documents as the result of structural analysis, so that it enhances the reusability of documents and independence of platform.

This paper presents a knowledge-based method for sophisticated geometric structure analysis of technical journal pages. The proposed knowledge base encodes geometric characteristics that are not only common in technical journals but also publication-specific in the form of rules. The method takes the hybrid of top-down and bottom-up techniques and consists of two phases: region segmentation and identification. Generally, the result of the segmentation process does not have a one-to-one matching with composite layout components. Therefore, the proposed method identifies non-text objects, such as images, drawings, and tables, as well as text objects, by splitting or grouping segmented regions into composite layout components. Experimental results with 372 images scanned from the IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence show that the proposed method has performed geometric structure analysis successfully on more than 99 percent of the test images.

Recently, there is a growing interest from various fields of studies in GIS which promotes efficient storage and retrieval of geographic information. The development of automated vectorizing system, an input method for GIS, is of extreme importance due to the fact that this part of constructing a GIS has been time consuming. Most vectorizing systems require users to set parameters as appropriately as possible to the map image at hand, but it is quite difficult for a novice to adjust the parameters accurately. In this paper, we propose an automated vectorizing system based on a knowledge base rendering an appropriate choice of the parameters. Each rule in the knowledge base is characterized by the type of maps, resolution, line width, slope and protrusion. Experimental results with various map images evince the proposed system to be superior in terms of performance and convenience.

There is a growing interest from various fields of studies in geographic information systems (GIS) which promotes efficient storage and retrieval of geographic information. The development of automated vectorizing system, an input method for GIS, is of extreme importance due to the fact that this part of constructing a GIS has been time consuming. Most vectorizing systems require users to set parameters as appropriately as possible to the map image at hand, but it is quite difficult for a novice to adjust the parameters accurately. We propose an automated vectorizing system based on a knowledge base rendering an appropriate choice of the parameters. Each rule in the knowledge base is characterized by the type of maps, resolution, line width, slope and protrusion. Experimental results with various map evince the proposed system to be superior in terms of performance and convenience.