Special issue on convergence of real-time 3D imaging and optical communications

Abstract

With the fast developments in electronics industry and the amazing growing of the community of potential customers, multimedia are increasingly ubiquitous: an increasing number of people are faced with a life in a world accompanied by Internet pop-ups and streaming television, mobile phone texting and video clips and pod-casting. Rapid advancements in computer graphics, imaging, multimedia service and game technologies determine the influence and impact of digital images on modern society tremendously, and image processing and computer graphics are now a key component in science and technology. Image processing has become such an essential component in contemporary science and technology that many tasks would not be conceivable without it. The rapid progress in handling digital images by computer or human, and the associated developments in related analysis methods, has propelled computer vision into one of the most important sub-fields in scientific imaging. It is a truly interdisciplinary subject that draws from synergistic developments involving many disciplines and is used in computer graphics, computer vision, computer art and many other fields. This special issue is intended to foster the dissemination of state-of-the-art research in the area of ‘‘Convergence of Real-Time 3D Imaging and Optical Communications’’ that can fulfill the anytime and anywhere access expectations of the consumers. Original research articles are solicited in all aspects of Real-Time 3D Imaging and Optical Communication technologies including emerging trends and applications, theoretical studies, and experimental prototypes. This special issue consists of seven papers addressed in this guest editorial by brief summaries. The first paper entitled ‘‘Analyzing Repetitive Action in Game based on Sequence Pattern Matching’’ by S. Kim et al. presents a log-based usability evaluation system to analyze user behavior in a gaming environment. They explore the potential of input log data for automated usability evaluation and visualization of player behavior in a game. They traced the keyboard input value and mouse movement of users involving a sequence data-mining technique in a gaming environment. Additionally, they constructed 3D body meshes for behavior analysis using Kinect interface and visualized the data obtained by tracing and automatic searching of repetitive patterns in the game for further analysis. Especially, this can be applied to bot detection and player identification in online gaming because the approach proposes measuring the distribution of frequent patterns by the mutual information between the distributions being observed for certain players. The second paper entitled in this issue ‘‘Development of a Virtual Aquarium System Interacting with a Smart Device’’ by Y. Seo et al. proposes an interactive virtual aquarium system that interacts with a smart device as a control interface. They developed a virtual aquarium graphic system having a remote interaction application of a smart device and performed an experiment that demonstrates the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed S. Seo (&) Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Daejeon, Korea e-mail: shseo75@gmail.com