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Sound Selection for Gesture Sonification and Manipulation of Virtual Objects

Year: 2017 Volume: 11 Issue: 1 147 - 152 Pages

Abstract: New sensors and technologies – such as microphones, touchscreens or infrared sensors – are currently making their appearance in the automotive sector, introducing new kinds of Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs). The interactions with such tools might be cognitively expensive, thus unsuitable for driving tasks. It could for instance be dangerous to use touchscreens with a visual feedback while driving, as it distracts the driver’s visual attention away from the road. Furthermore, new technologies in car cockpits modify the interactions of the users with the central system. In particular, touchscreens are preferred to arrays of buttons for space improvement and design purposes. However, the buttons’ tactile feedback is no more available to the driver, which makes such interfaces more difficult to manipulate while driving. Gestures combined with an auditory feedback might therefore constitute an interesting alternative to interact with the HMI. Indeed, gestures can be performed without vision, which means that the driver’s visual attention can be totally dedicated to the driving task. In fact, the auditory feedback can both inform the driver with respect to the task performed on the interface and on the performed gesture, which might constitute a possible solution to the lack of tactile information. As audition is a relatively unused sense in automotive contexts, gesture sonification can contribute to reducing the cognitive load thanks to the proposed multisensory exploitation. Our approach consists in using a virtual object (VO) to sonify the consequences of the gesture rather than the gesture itself. This approach is motivated by an ecological point of view: Gestures do not make sound, but their consequences do. In this experiment, the aim was to identify efficient sound strategies, to transmit dynamic information of VOs to users through sound. The swipe gesture was chosen for this purpose, as it is commonly used in current and new interfaces. We chose two VO parameters to sonify, the hand-VO distance and the VO velocity. Two kinds of sound parameters can be chosen to sonify the VO behavior: Spectral or temporal parameters. Pitch and brightness were tested as spectral parameters, and amplitude modulation as a temporal parameter. Performances showed a positive effect of sound compared to a no-sound situation, revealing the usefulness of sounds to accomplish the task.

A Stereo Image Processing System for Visually Impaired

Year: 2008 Volume: 2 Issue: 8 2748 - 2757 Pages

Abstract: This paper presents a review on vision aided systems and proposes an approach for visual rehabilitation using stereo vision technology. The proposed system utilizes stereo vision, image processing methodology and a sonification procedure to support blind navigation. The developed system includes a wearable computer, stereo cameras as vision sensor and stereo earphones, all moulded in a helmet. The image of the scene infront of visually handicapped is captured by the vision sensors. The captured images are processed to enhance the important features in the scene in front, for navigation assistance. The image processing is designed as model of human vision by identifying the obstacles and their depth information. The processed image is mapped on to musical stereo sound for the blind-s understanding of the scene infront. The developed method has been tested in the indoor and outdoor environments and the proposed image processing methodology is found to be effective for object identification.

Retrospective Synthetic Focusing with Correlation Weighting for Very High Frame Rate Ultrasound

Year: 2012 Volume: 6 Issue: 5 122 - 124 Pages

Abstract: The need of high frame-rate imaging has been triggered by the new applications of ultrasound imaging to transient elastography and real-time 3D ultrasound. Using plane wave excitation (PWE) is one of the methods to achieve very high frame-rate imaging since an image can be formed with a single insonification. However, due to the lack of transmit focusing, the image quality with PWE is lower compared with those using conventional focused transmission. To solve this problem, we propose a filter-retrieved transmit focusing (FRF) technique combined with cross-correlation weighting (FRF+CC weighting) for high frame-rate imaging with PWE. A restrospective focusing filter is designed to simultaneously minimize the predefined sidelobe energy associated with single PWE and the filter energy related to the signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR). This filter attempts to maintain the mainlobe signals and to reduce the sidelobe ones, which gives similar mainlobe signals and different sidelobes between the original PWE and the FRF baseband data. Normalized cross-correlation coefficient at zero lag is calculated to quantify the degree of similarity at each imaging point and used as a weighting matrix to the FRF baseband data to further suppress sidelobes, thus improving the filter-retrieved focusing quality.