CS295-5 Project Idea List

These ideas, most less-than-completely-formed-and-described, were suggested by various researchers around campus. If you are interested in following them up for your project, please contact the provider of the idea or chat with me (dhl) for more information.

From Michael_Tarr@brown.edu, Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences:

1. Visualization of similarity spaces: Take a set of images. Compute similarity over some metric. Generate visual representation of the space. Have sliders to change parameters, e.g., spatial filtering of image (might get more or less similar). And so on.

2. Visualization of brain imaging data collected longitudinally. We have time-series data across multiple slices in the brain. In addition we have behavioral data associated with the slices. Again, an interactive visualization tool would be very useful.

From Bill_Warren@brown.edu, Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences

Two possibilities come to mind:

(1) Creating a virtual environment. This isn't exactly data visualization, but we're doing experiments on human navigation ("cognitive maps") in VR, using the 40 x 40 ft. VENLab with an HMD, tracker, and SGI graphics. It may be possible for a group to create a virtual environment for such an experiment. For example, we're beginning to build a "Hundred acre wood" environment, and pieces of that may be doable. We use WorldToolKit as a platform, so there would be a learning curve involved.

(2) Prism views. A smaller project is to simulate what the world looks like through a distorting prism. This would involve learning a bit of optics (e.g. the transfer function for a wedge prism) and computing the view through it for a moving observer. My interest is in calculating and displaying the optic flow field (a vector field) for different environmentals structures with different types of distortions.

From David_Mumford@Brown.edu, Applied Math

Are you teaching anything about tools for seeking structure in high dimensional data sets, i.e. given a billion points in 10-dimensional space, figuring out if they lie, more or less, on some curved surface in R^10? I know there has been some work on this, but I'm not too familiar with it. If so, I might have a project.

The motivating problem for me is to "look" at 4x4 patches of images and classify them. A 4x4 patch is given by 16 pixels so defines a point in R^16. We can easily generate gigabytes of such patches, hence pts in R^16. But a gigabyte is still small compared to the elbow room in R^16. We have, of course, some ideas about what the cloud of these samples looks like but nothing really good yet.

From Eileen Vote (Eileen_Vote@brown.edu) Archaeology

Viewing Artifact Data in a Dynamic Way: I've got about 150,000 artifacts plotted in the GIS application, ArcView, over in the geology lab in MacMillan Hall. You might remember that I sent you an early image [and a second image] of what the data looked like plotted with one artifact type, Pottery. Unfortunately, the application does not allow me to show more than one artifact type plotted at once so the analysis possibilities are limited. Students could work on the problem of how to represent multiple types of artifacts at the same time in a 3D format. I have all the data (100 layers X 15 artifact types) in table format so it would be pretty easy for them to work with it.

From John_Hermance@brown.edu, Geology

Visualize earth's magnetic field as it varies over time.

Visualize ground water dynamics.

From David Laidlaw (dhl@cs) Computer Science

Evaluate, via a user study, how many variables can be encoded using iconic textures.

Something motivated by one of the research proposals we have read: archaeology, oil painting concepts for visualization, diffusion tensor visualization, bio-electric field visualization.

Build physical prototypes for true 3D visualization.

Represent uncertainty visually.

From Tom Banchoff (tfb@cs) Mathematics

We have this new CAVE, and I haven't even been in it yet. My colleague George Francis at the University of Illinois has been experimenting with a CAVE there at the National Supercomputer Center for the visualization of surfaces in four-space. He has a lot of experience and he has written some things about it. He works closely with Donna Cox, whom you might well know from the computer art world. Anyway, I'd love to see some of our stuff on the CAVE, to learn what new questions we can ask.

From Anne Spalter, Computer Science (ams@cs, x3-7615)

The Brown Graphics Group is looking for u-grad and grads interested in color. The main goal of the project is to make it easier and more enjoyable to choose effective colors in computer graphics programs. Specific research underway includes:

1. Better interfaces for choosing and modifying colors in graphics applications

2. Designing expert palettes and their interfaces

3. Color palette organization

4. Visualization of color spaces

From David Cooper, Engineering/LEMS (cooper@lems)

One of my graduate RA's has been working on modifying algebraic surfaces in an interactive way. This involves ways to change parameters or add synthetic data, specifying regions of use, visualizing the modifying information and the resulting representation, etc. I am sure we can find an interesting challenging project for your students, and Andrew, my grad student, and they could interact on the project. Let me know if that seems interesting to you.

From Frederic Leymarie (leymarie@lems) Engineering/LEMS

Visualization of topographical features in graphs z=h(x,y)

Height functions are a very common form of data to deal with in various application domains: geography, hydrography, surface material properties, single view range imagery, etc.

Different approaches exist to map such graphs to feature maps, based on some geometric features of the height functions. These range from local (differential) to global (regional) approaches to capture features like: ridge/valley lines, to regional segmentation and watersheds.

Each method has its pros and cons and its favored applications.

The first project I have in mind is to implement a number of these approaches, from local to regional and find good ways to visualize the results and compare these.

The second project - might be included in the first - is to do the same kind of work for a method I developed a few years ago. It is derived from an old concept in geometry: the Indicatrix (of Dupin). Basically you take slice of the graph of varying size (notion of scale space introduced) and look at the local shape of the cut. For continuous (Morse) functions you have a small set of possibilities of interest. The interest of this method is that it alloes to merge local and regional methods in one framework. It also relates to topography in a more "comprehensive" way by defining valleys and ridges as elongated regions rather than lines on a surface. Flow fields can be derived to illustrate how the different labels (cut types) interact on any given height function. One difficulty is how to express the additional dimension of scale.

The above two methods are particularly relevant to vision (and geography, etc.).

The third project is to use the same approaches as above in the context of 3D surface this time. A height function can be introduced either regionally (view points) of locally (normal field).

I can describe a 4th project, if you need more ideas ... It would be about the volumetic and surfacic flowfields involved in the computation of 3D skeletons. But since I am still developping the algorithms to retrieve these, this might prove too early.

The algorithms for projects 1 and 2 exist though. For 1 there are many recent papers on the topic. For 2 I have my own set of algorithms (implemented under the Khoros environement, in C) and results.

I'll be happy to discuss any of the above in more details.


David Laidlaw
Last modified: Thu Aug 24 13:37:50 EDT 1999