This study proposes an entire hardware and software architecture from operator input to motor command for the autonomous area coverage mission using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles. Despite the rapid growth of commercial drone services, there are many limitations on operations, such as a low decision-making autonomy and the need for experienced operators to intervene in the whole process. For performing the area coverage mission more efficiently and autonomously, this study newly designs an optimization problem that allocates waypoints created to cover that area to unmanned aerial vehicles. With an optimized list of waypoints, unmanned aerial vehicles can fill the given areas with their footprints in a minimal amount of time and do not overlap each other during the mission. In addition, this study performs both various simulations for quantitative analysis and an outdoor experiment through real hardware implementation in order to verify the performance sufficiently. The methodologies developed in this study could be applied to endless applications using unmanned aerial vehicles equipped with mission-specific sensors.

In this paper, a gaze estimation method is proposed for use with a large-sized display at a distance. Our research has the following four novelties: this is the first study on gaze-tracking for large-sized displays and large Z (viewing) distances; our gaze-tracking accuracy is not affected by head movements since the proposed method tracks the head by using a near infrared camera and an infrared light-emitting diode; the threshold for local binarization of the pupil area is adaptively determined by using a p-tile method based on circular edge detection irrespective of the eyelid or eyelash shadows; and accurate gaze position is calculated by using two support vector regressions without complicated calibrations for the camera, display, and user's eyes, in which the gaze positions and head movements are used as feature values. The root mean square error of gaze detection is calculated as 0.79° for a 30-inch screen.

We propose a new remote gaze tracking system as an intelligent TV interface. Our research is novel in the following three ways: first, because a user can sit at various positions in front of a large display, the capture volume of the gaze tracking system should be greater, so the proposed system includes two cameras which can be moved simultaneously by panning and tilting mechanisms, a wide view camera (WVC) for detecting eye position and an auto-focusing narrow view camera (NVC) for capturing enlarged eye images. Second, in order to remove the complicated calibration between the WVC and NVC and to enhance the capture speed of the NVC, these two cameras are combined in a parallel structure. Third, the auto-focusing of the NVC is achieved on the basis of both the user’s facial width in the WVC image and a focus score calculated on the eye image of the NVC. Experimental results showed that the proposed system can be operated with a gaze tracking accuracy of ±0.737°~±0.775° and a speed of 5~10 frames/s.

This paper presents a scheme for geometric correction of projected content for planar and quadratic projection surfaces. The scheme does not require the projection surface to be perfectly quadratic or planar and is therefore suitable for uneven low‐cost commercial and home projection surfaces. An approach based on the recursive subdivision of second‐order Bézier patches is proposed for the estimation of projection distortion owing to surface imperfections. Unlike existing schemes, the proposed scheme is completely automatic, requires no prior knowledge of the projection surface, and uses a single uncalibrated camera without requiring any physical markers on the projection surface. Furthermore, the scheme is scalable for geometric calibration of multiprojector setups. The efficacy of the proposed scheme is demonstrated using simulations and via practical experiments on various surfaces. A relative distortion error metric is also introduced that provides a quantitative measure of the suppression of geometric distortions, which occurs as the result of an imperfect projection surface.

This paper presents an interactive terrestrial digital multimedia broadcasting (T-DMB) player. Interactive T-DMB contents consist of the main AV streams and additional data streams such as BIFS (binary format for scene) streams, OD streams, and image streams. In order to properly play interactive T-DMB contents, presented player includes BIFS decoder, BIFS manager and JPEG decoder modules. The implementation of the interactive player and its capabilities are presented along with usage examples.

This study presents a task reassignment strategy that can flexibly handle changes in dynamic environments. Most existing studies have only considered static environments where the mission is predetermined and unexpected events do not occur. However, in practice, the environment in which unmanned aerial vehicles perform their mission is complex and includes various pop-up events. Therefore, task reassignment is essential through re-optimization to adjust the previous plan, which is no longer optimal whenever dynamic events occur. The importance of this study is that the modified receding horizon task assignment algorithm is applied for accurate and efficient task reassignment. In addition, this study aims to provide a complete system architecture from operator input to motor commands for autonomous area coverage missions. Reliable performance validation is also performed through various simulations and a challenging outdoor flight experiment with real hardware implementation.