In this study we address the problem of answering queries over information sources storing objects which are indexed by terms arranged in a taxonomy. We examine query languages of different expressivity and sources with different kinds of taxonomies. In the simplest kind, the taxonomy includes just term-to-term subsumption links. This case is used as a basis for further developments, in which w...

In this paper new results are presented for tracking complex multi-body objects. The theoretical framework is based on robotics techniques and uses an a-priori model of the object including a general mechanical link description. A new kinematic-set formulation takes into account that articulated degrees of freedom are directly observable from the camera and therefore their estimation does not n...

Acknowledgements My sincerest thanks go out to the following people—some were involved in starting me off on this road, others in keeping me going and others still in pushing me to the destination. gave me enough rope and always had faith—even when mine was waning. To Konrad Scheffler, who acted as advisor and sounding board and whose ability is surpassed only by his willingness. Professor Ben ...

Next generation robots will need to understand intricate and articulated objects as they cooperate in human environments. To do so, these robots will need to move beyond their current abilities—working with relatively simple objects in a task-indifferent manner—toward more sophisticated abilities that dynamically estimate the properties of complex, articulated objects. To that end, we make two ...

Rendering and animating numerous articulated characters interactively is challenging in computer graphics. Specific hardware systems may be needed. However, by using the temporal coherence characteristics of the articulated characters in an animation, changes from frame to frame remain small, and display rate can be improved using a software approach using impostors. The use of impostors to rep...

Articulated motions are partially dependent. Most of the existing segmentation methods, e.g. Costeira and Kanade[2], can not be applied to articulated motions. We propose a novel algorithm for articulated motion segmentation called RANSAC with priors. It does not require prior knowledge of the number of articulated parts. It is both robust and efficient. Its robustness comes from its RANSAC nat...

This paper describes two methods of fitting deformable templates when tracking articulated objects using particle filters. One method fits a template to each of the links of an articulated object in a hierarchical way. The method first fits a template for the base of the articulated object and then fits a template for each of the links deeper in the hierarchy. The second method fits the whole a...

In order for a robot to manipulate an articulated object, it needs to know its state (i.e. its pose); that is to say: where and in which configuration it is. The result of the object’s state estimation is to be provided as a feedback to the control to compute appropriate robot motion and achieve the desired manipulation outcome. This is the main topic of this thesis, where articulated object st...

Many of the world’s languages lack direct translations of definite articles in English, allowing bare nouns or other nominal expressions in definite contexts. Because articles are taken to head a DP projection in languages that have them (Abney 1987; Szabolcsi 1994), an attractive analysis of languages without definite articles is that they lack a DP projection, a perspective recently advocated...