/ Noriaki Asada / Professor
/ William L. Martens / Associate Professor
/ Yasushi Kikuchi / Assistant Professor
/ Jung-pil Shin / Assistant Professor
Recognition, analysis and expression of images and sound are studied in the multimedia systems laboratory. The 3-D motion and the 3-D shapes of the object are analyzed, understood and expressed by computer from the images taken by multi TV camera or video camera in the study of computer vision and/or the 3-D stereovision. Detailed movies can be seen from any angle through the 3-D video system, which is expected to be applied to many fields such as the sports coaching and the recognition of the human facial expression. In the remote sensing, the category classification technique can analyze the land usages from color information of land images. A laboratory member is engaged in the SELENE project, the Japanese lunar explorer mission, to analyze the lunar mineral composition and to investigate the future moon surface land usage. Moreover, by applying this technique to the computer vision, even the living body information of the human being can be known, too.
In the on-line handwriting character recognition system, the fundamental study to use the handwriting letter as the input system of the computer is investigated. The character recognition is one of the most important fields on the image processing. The visualization technique is one way to improve the understandings of the mathematics problems. For example, when examining a three-dimensional graph with complicated function, a four-dimensional graph can be easily recognized, where time, color, sound and so on is introduced as the fourth dimensions. Also, it is very useful to understand the mathematical structure of the function to display zero points and limitation values visibly. Just as 3D graphic rendering can produce realistic views of virtual spaces, so can 3D audio rendering produce realistic sounds for objects and events in those virtual spaces, called "Virtual Acoustic Space". State-of-the-art 3D audio rendering is based upon acoustical measurements.
Laboratory members have participated actively in scientific meetings, both in Japan and abroad. They have presented and participated in seminars, and in presentation of scientific results in fully refereed publications. The laboratory is the coordinator for coursework in astronomical observation by cooled CCD cameras. Students learn how to use equipment to get some data into computer system, how to process image data, how to analyze these data and how to study the nature through this courseware project.