Motion blur is a well-established technique which prevents strobing by making fast moving objects appear blurred. In cel animation however, different methods are used and this paper presents a new technique to emphasise the motion of cartoon objects through the application of geometry. We term the involved non-photorealistic motion blur as ‘cartoon blur’. In order to express cartoon blur, we ha...

BACKGROUND Correct use of intranasal corticosteroid (INCS) and compliance with treatment is very important for the treatment of allergic rhinitis (AR). An animated cartoon-aided teaching method for INCS administration was created to decrease the workload of health care professionals. The aim of this study was to compare the performance of children with AR in using INCS between a group who were ...

There have been many approaches to tackle the problem of image classification. Some sacrifice speed for a very complex model whereas other approaches try to limit the features for speed. In our approach, we try to maintain spatial information similar to the spatial pyramid approach and use the pyramid match kernel for efficiency. We split the images into overlapping patches at multiple scales a...

This paper describes OntoExtractor a tool for extracting metadata from heterogeneous sources of information, producing a “quick-and-dirty” hierarchy of knowledge. This tool is specifically tailored for a quick classification of semi-structured data. By this feature, OntoExtractor is convenient for dealing with a web-based data source.

We explored preschool’s children’s understanding of the correspondence of 3-D objects and 2-D faces in a novel task. In the “footprints” task children were shown a geometric solid, such as a pyramid or a prism, and asked to select which shape the solid would make if it were dipped in ink and stamped on a piece of paper. Through a latent class analysis of children’s errors we found children diff...

This paper proposes a novel method to retrieve cartoon character images in a database or network. In this method, partial features of an image, defined as Regions and Aspects, are used as keys to identify cartoon character images. The similarities between a query cartoon character image and the images in the database are computed by using these features. Based on the similarities, the cartoon i...

This research seeks to examine the determinants of affiliation to pyramid structure of Malaysian public listed firms. A motivation of the research comes from the phenomenon of pyramid structure causing divergence of ultimate owners' actual ownership and control leading to severe expropriation of minority shareholders' interest. The method adapts Attig Model and employs Panel Generalised Least S...