Browsing by Author "Ntsoko, Thabo"

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    Enhancing point cloud processing using audio cues
    (2014) Ntsoko, Thabo; Sithole, George
    Today many airborne and terrestrial acquisitions capture point clouds of scenes or objects to be modelled. But before modelling can be done point clouds need to be taken through processing steps such as registration, cleaning, simpli_cation, etc. These point clouds are usually manually processed before being processed automatically. Manual processing of point clouds depends on the visual interaction the user has with the point cloud provided by the visual cues. This research investigated enhancing the level of interaction the user has with the point cloud when processing it. The proposed method augments audio in point clouds to enhance its processing where visual cues are limited. This investigated _nding objects/points of interest in the point cloud while processing it by estimating the position (azimuth and elevation) and depth of audio objects associated with these point cloud objects. The occupancy of space of audio objects was also investigated to determine the unseen events around objects of interest in the point cloud. For example, in a scan registration problem, audio could be augmented to a misaligned scan. As this scan is manually rotated and translated into alignment, various audio cues can be used to inform the user of the state of this alignment. An outlier separated from a surface in a point cloud could be identi_ed and removed by augmenting audio to a volumetric brush that does the point cloud cleaning. Associating audio cues of the audio object with the depth of the outlier to the surface could help the user identify this outlier. Similar implementation could be adopted in point cloud simpli_cation tasks. Various audio cues exist which allow a listener to discern particular information about a sound source. This is done by the human auditory system, using cues such as intensity, pitch, reverberation and HRTFs to discern this information. However, limitations exist in retrieving this information. Literature supports the use of the auditory interface in applications commonly built for the visual interface. The addition of the auditory interface is seen as a way of increasing the interaction users have with applications and therefore improving the experience. An auditory interface was built to help undertake this research. The test subject was immersed in the auditory environment by wearing headphones. This meant that the subject and the virtual listener were merged, allowing the subject to receive emitted audio. The perception of the audio was with respect to the virtual listener.