Animating pictures is an interesting and useful visual effect in entertainment industry. In this paper, we present a system that allow user to animate a character in pictures in 3D space by applying 3D motion data. We use a 3D character mesh with skeleton rigged as template model. The user need to cut out silhouette of the character in pictures, and assign correspondence points between 2D chara...

We thank Marc Suchard, Jeff Thorne, Rod Page, and an anonymous reviewer for many helpful suggestions for improving the manuscript, and we thank Fredrik Ronquist for valuable discussions on this topic. We thank the National Science foundation for financial support (MTH was supported by award DBI-0306047 and DLS, POL, and MTH were funded by EF 03-31495, part of the CIPRES project). BL acknowledge...

A simple method of scaling ordered categorical responses having a joint distribution with an underlying normal variable is presented. Scores are developed that maximize heritability of the observed variate and that in the class of scores based on polychotomies: (1) maximize the correlation between score and the underlying genetic value to be predicted, and (2) minimize mean-square prediction er...

In this report, a character recognition system is proposed that handles degraded manuscript documents which were discovered at the St. Catherine’s Monastery. In contrast to state-of-the-art Ocr systems, no early decision, namely the image binarization, needs to be performed. Thus, an object recognition methodology is adapted for the recognition of ancient manuscripts. Therefore, interest points...

So far we’ve studied only the evolution of a single trait, e.g., height or weight. But organisms have many traits, and they evolve at the same time. How can we understand their simultaneous evolution? The basic framework of the quantitative genetic approach was first outlined by Russ Lande and Steve Arnold [2]. Let z1, z2, . . . , zn be the phenotype of each character that we are studying. We’l...

Suppose that G(F) is a real or p-adic group. That is, G is a connected reductive algebraic group over a local field F, which we take to be of characteristic 0. Harmonic analysis on G(F) is built upon the set Htemp(G(F)) of irreducible tempered representations of G(F). These representations include the discrete series for G(F), and consist in general of irreducible constituents of representation...

We consider several interacting strings of characters. Otherwise speaking, we consider one-dimensional random walks interacting with each other and with their environments (mostly in a one-sided manner). This embraces many applications: queueing networks with diierent customer types, random walks on some discrete non-commutative groups, random Turing machines and others. We present a scheme for...

A novel pen-based text entry technique, which yields two characters with one stroke, is introduced, and the results of its investigation are presented. The 2CPS technique is implemented as a gesture-based user interface on a QWERTY soft keyboard. Eight participants completed eight text entry trials on a fully functional version of this stroke-based system on a Pocket PC. The difference between ...

Assuming a centralized narrative control mechanism, we must build synthetic characters that can accept and enact direction in real-time from the narrative manager. These characters must adhere to both the character design as intended by the author, as well as the performance requirements of their autonomous behavior, such as military doctrine or social roles. To explore how we can build such ar...