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"McOwan, Peter W"
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The magic words: Using computers to uncover mental associations for use in magic trick design
The use of computational systems to aid in the design of magic tricks has been previously explored. Here further steps are taken in this direction, introducing the use of computer technology as a natural language data sourcing and processing tool for magic trick design purposes. Crowd sourcing of psychological concepts is investigated; further, the role of human associative memory and its exploitation in magical effects is explored. A new trick is developed and evaluated: a physical card trick partially designed by a computational system configured to search for and explore conceptual spaces readily understood by spectators.
Journal Article
FReD: The Floral Reflectance Database — A Web Portal for Analyses of Flower Colour
Flower colour is of great importance in various fields relating to floral biology and pollinator behaviour. However, subjective human judgements of flower colour may be inaccurate and are irrelevant to the ecology and vision of the flower's pollinators. For precise, detailed information about the colours of flowers, a full reflectance spectrum for the flower of interest should be used rather than relying on such human assessments.
The Floral Reflectance Database (FReD) has been developed to make an extensive collection of such data available to researchers. It is freely available at http://www.reflectance.co.uk. The database allows users to download spectral reflectance data for flower species collected from all over the world. These could, for example, be used in modelling interactions between pollinator vision and plant signals, or analyses of flower colours in various habitats. The database contains functions for calculating flower colour loci according to widely-used models of bee colour space, reflectance graphs of the spectra and an option to search for flowers with similar colours in bee colour space.
The Floral Reflectance Database is a valuable new tool for researchers interested in the colours of flowers and their association with pollinator colour vision, containing raw spectral reflectance data for a large number of flower species.
Journal Article
Affect recognition for interactive companions: challenges and design in real world scenarios
Affect sensitivity is an important requirement for artificial companions to be capable of engaging in social interaction with human users. This paper provides a general overview of some of the issues arising from the design of an affect recognition framework for artificial companions. Limitations and challenges are discussed with respect to other capabilities of companions and a real world scenario where an iCat robot plays chess with children is presented. In this scenario, affective states that a robot companion should be able to recognise are identified and the non-verbal behaviours that are affected by the occurrence of these states in the children are investigated. The experimental results aim to provide the foundation for the design of an affect recognition system for a game companion: in this interaction scenario children tend to look at the iCat and smile more when they experience a positive feeling and they are engaged with the iCat.
Journal Article
Robust velocity computation from a biologically motivated model of motion perception
Current computational models of motion processing in the primate motion pathway do not cope well with image sequences in which a moving pattern is superimposed upon a static texture. The use of non-linear operations and the need for contrast normalization in motion models mean that the separation of the influences of moving and static patterns on the motion computation is not trivial. Therefore, the response to the superposition of static and moving patterns provides an important means of testing various computational strategies. Here we describe a computational model of motion processing in the visual cortex, one of the advantages of which is that it is highly resistant to interference from static patterns.
Journal Article
Induced motion at texture-defined motion boundaries
When a static textured background is covered and uncovered by a moving bar of the same mean luminance we can clearly see the motion of the bar. Texture-defined motion provides an example of a naturally occurring second-order motion. Second-order motion sequences defeat standard spatio-temporal energy models of motion perception. It has been proposed that second-order stimuli are analysed by separate systems, operating in parallel with luminance-defined motion processing, which incorporate identifiable pre-processing stages that make second-order patterns visible to standard techniques. However, the proposal of multiple paths to motion analysis remains controversial. Here we describe the behaviour of a model that recovers both luminance-defined and an important class of texture-defined motion. The model also accounts for the induced motion that is seen in some texture-defined motion sequences. We measured the perceived direction and speed of both the contrast envelope and induced motion in the case of a contrast modulation of static noise textures. Significantly, the model predicts the perceived speed of the induced motion seen at second-order texture boundaries. The induced motion investigated here appears distinct from classical induced effects resulting from motion contrast or the movement of a reference frame.
Journal Article
Illumination robust face representation based on intrinsic geometrical information
The ability to recognize people is a key element for improving naturalistic human-robot and human-computer interaction systems. In this paper, we propose a binary non-subsampled contourlet transform (B-NSCT) based illumination robust face representation. Faces are transformed into multi-scale and multi-directional contour information where the intrinsic geometrical structures are used for characterising facial texture. Experiments on the Yale B and CMU PIE databases illustrate that B-NSCT is highly insensitive to illumination variation. (6 pages)
Conference Proceeding
Model of a predatory stealth behaviour camouflaging motion
A computational model of a stealth strategy inspired by the apparent mating tactics of male hoverflies is presented. The stealth strategy (motion camouflage) paradoxically allows a predator to approach a moving prey in such a way that it appears to be a stationary object. In the model, the predators are controlled by neural sensorimotor systems that base their decisions on realistic levels of input information. They are shown to be able to employ motion camouflage to approach prey that move along both real hoverfly flight paths and artificially generated flight paths. The camouflaged approaches made demonstrate that the control systems have an ability to predict future prey movements. This is illustrated using two- and three-dimensional simulations.
Journal Article
Humans deceived by predatory stealth strategy camouflaging motion
Motion camouflage is a stealth strategy that allows a predator to conceal its apparent motion as it approaches a moving prey. Although male hoverflies have been observed to move in a manner consistent with motion camouflage to track females, the successful application of the technique has not previously been demonstrated. This article describes the implementation and results of a psychophysical experiment suggesting that humans are susceptible to motion camouflage. The experiment masqueraded as a computer-game competition. The basis of the competition was a game designed to test the comparative success of different predatory-approach strategies. The experiment showed that predators were able to approach closer to their prey (the player of the game) before being detected when using motion camouflage than when using other approach strategies tested. For an autonomous predator, the calculation of a motion-camouflage approach is a non-trivial problem. It was, therefore, of particular interest that in the game the players were deceived by motion-camouflage predators controlled by artificial neural systems operating using realistic levels of input information. It is suggested that these results are especially of interest to biologists, visual psychophysicists, military engineers and computer-games designers.
Journal Article