Ashweeni's Homepage

Projects


SafeTRIP [2009-Current]


I am the lead investigator at UCL and product owner on the large scale EC co-funded FP7 R&D project SafeTRIP (overall budget €11 million).

In addition, I am responsible for the following:
• User Requirements
• Managing development of 2 services (Info Explorer and Driver Alertness)
• Managing the assessment of trials (User, Commercial, Safety, Security & Environment aspects)
• Managing the development of a driving simulator for driver attention/distration studies
• Dissemination activities (publications, tutorial development and cross-fertilisation)

The SafeTRIP project has a consortium of 20 EU companies and organisations, bringing together Service operators, Road operators, Telecommunication providers and other academic and technical partners. For more details see the website here.

The SafeTRIP (Safellite Applications For Emergency handling, Traffic alerts, Road safety and Incident Prevention) project's general objective is to improve the use of road and transport infrastructures and to improve the alert chain in case of incidents. SAFETRIP benefits from a new satellite technology: the S-Band that is optimised for 2-way communications for on-board vehicle units interoperable with Galileo and UMTS systems.

The SafeTRIP platform architecture User Requirement capture

SafeTRIP architecture
     
road operators

Defining SafeTRIP services Info Explorer - Design, Implementation and Testing


   
asd
asd

Driving Simulator Scientific Studies
Driving Simulator scientific studies


ARVA [2008-2009]

The project centered around the development of an Augmented Reality (AR) system to visualise and interact with 3D CAD models in-situ - using a tablet PC on construction sites.
Essential components of the system included
• Visualisation module for building plans in 3d on a mobile device 
• Tracking module to augment the real world with planning information in real time
• Annotation module to record multimedia information (video, audio and images) and associate these with the plans
It was funded by the EPSRC RAIS scheme to perform the ground work in collaboration with Laing O'Rourke at the Cannon Street Station construction site.


SESAME [2007]

This WINES project involved several institutions - I collaborated with UWIC and the RVC in my work. My research centered around the capture and production of customizable computer animation for athletics. 
I used data captured from olympic sprinters by various data capture techniques. Challenges lie in the data capture and animation of fast moving objects using minimally invasive techniques.

Below are some snapshot of the systems I have been obtaining capture data from. My sesame page is here
Motion Capture Analysis using Coda System Motion Capture Analysis using Qualisys QTM
Coda qualisys-qtm-sm.jpg
Motion Capture Analysis and Editing using Vicon IQ Character Animation using 3D Studio Max

vicon-iq-sm.jpg

3dsanim.jpg

Equator IRC [2004-2007]

My research interests in this project were mobile services, user interfaces, 3d visualisation and collaboration. 

I led UCL's contribution to the equator project by exploring a new field of augmented pedestrian navigation systems.

Project contributions:

•    Photo based pedestrian navigation system using non-landmark photographs
•    Pioneering development of Augmented photo-based pedestrian navigation
•    Design of Geo-Tagging system architecture used to develop application on PDA (used in Chawton House)
•    Design and development of mapping and navigation system on .NET platform
•    Implementation of PDA based system to interface with ECG monitoring device
•    Adaptation of the george square system to UCL porting to Linux and PDA
•    Extended the George Square system to apply visibility processing to prioritize recommendations that are probably visible to the user based on real geometry from maps.
•    Design of content creator for the GS system (emphasis on photo and visibility of buildings)
•    C# .NET CF port (rather reimplementation) of GSQ-pocket PC version
•    Mapservices for on the fly map generation from spatial databases (Oracle and postgis)


Long-Term Habitat Ergonomics for Mars Mission [2004]


I worked on the 3d model used for the simulation of long-term habitat during the Mars mission. The work was done in collaboration with mission specialists, astronauts and simulation experts from ESA and SAS (Belgium).

images/lthe.jpg


















PhD

The work focusses on the development of a novel and principled solution for optimising the network usage of any arbitrary highly animated and populated distributed virtual environment. This is performed with the ultimate goal of reducing the effect of inherent networking problems such as bandwidth limitation, congestion and lag, on the user's perceptual experience of the virtual environment. The aim is to prioritise updates being dispatched by the server to the user's viewer, in a client-server architecture, such that the most perceptually significant updates are sent as soon as possible, whilst the remaining updates are sent subject to the level of network traffic.

 

The work investigates the theories and findings in the field of visual attention from experimental psychology and, more recently, from computer graphics and a few other related fields, with the main aim of developing a computationally viable visual attention model applicable to dynamic and interactive computer generated environments. For this purpose, the features and intrinsic characteristics of what makes a virtual environment different from other computer generated worlds and animations are analysed with strong emphasis on the user's perspective. Building on these findings, a visual attention model comprising of a top-down and bottom-up component is devised, to represent the principal mechanisms which leads to selection of regions of a scene for further scrutiny and also which contributes to the user's overall sense of perceptually plausible environment.

 A set of experiments are carried out to investigate some of the most significant observations about visual attention within the VR context, with the aim to tune and improve the attention model. These include a number of low-level psychophysical studies (to evaluate change detection and inattention blindness) and task-performance study. Most important observations are that colour and orientation changes are visually more salient and only a limited number of changes can be noticed simultaneously, if at all.An efficient implementation of this model, which essentially generates an attention map by combining feature-based maps and mental maps, is evaluated through a set of experiments. Next, distributed VR system architectures which use an implementation of the attention model are conceived, weighting the impact on system resources, network and user perception. The network usage and user's perception is evaluated using experimental test-beds of animated and populated distrib uted virtual environments.


MSc

In this project, we developed an approach to interactive control of avatars in virtual environments, using an artificial neural network. The network captures the essential characteristics of real human motion, and is subsequently employed to create credible body postures from a minimal set of sensor inputs.

 

The technique offers an alternative to inverse kinematics for human figure control. A
generalised network, trained by a population of users, can be used successfully for individuals by
scaling the avatar’s body to match each real human’s body dimensions. It is demonstrated that the
network can predict arm positions to an accuracy better than the errors which human subjects can
detect.