Jieming Ma

Fengze Li, Jishuai He, Jieming Ma et al.

Dynamic scene reconstruction is essential in robotic minimally invasive surgery, providing crucial spatial information that enhances surgical precision and outcomes. However, existing methods struggle to address the complex, temporally dynamic nature of endoscopic scenes. This paper presents ST-Endo4DGS, a novel framework that models the spatio-temporal volume of dynamic endoscopic scenes using unbiased 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS) primitives, parameterized by anisotropic ellipses with flexible 4D rotations. This approach enables precise representation of deformable tissue dynamics, capturing intricate spatial and temporal correlations in real time. Additionally, we extend spherindrical harmonics to represent time-evolving appearance, achieving realistic adaptations to lighting and view changes. A new endoscopic normal alignment constraint (ENAC) further enhances geometric fidelity by aligning rendered normals with depth-derived geometry. Extensive evaluations show that ST-Endo4DGS outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and real-time performance, establishing a new state-of-the-art in dynamic scene reconstruction for endoscopic surgery.

Fengze Li, Jieming Ma, Zhongbei Tian et al.

Mirrors can degrade the performance of computer vision models, but research into detecting them is in the preliminary phase. YOLOv4 achieves phenomenal results in terms of object detection accuracy and speed, but it still fails in detecting mirrors. Thus, we propose Mirror-YOLO, which targets mirror detection, containing a novel attention focus mechanism for features acquisition, a hypercolumn-stairstep approach to better fusion the feature maps, and the mirror bounding polygons for instance segmentation. Compared to the existing mirror detection networks and YOLO series, our proposed network achieves superior performance in average accuracy on our proposed mirror dataset and another state-of-art mirror dataset, which demonstrates the validity and effectiveness of Mirror-YOLO.

Yiwen Zhang, Diego Monteiro, Hai-Ning Liang et al.

Randomness is an important factor in games, so much so that some games rely almost purely on it for its outcomes and increase players' engagement with them. However, randomness can affect the game experience depending on when it occurs in a game, altering the chances of planning for a player. In this paper, we refer to it as "input-output randomness". Input-output randomness is a cornerstone of collectable card games like Hearthstone, in which cards are drawn randomly (input randomness) and have random effects when played (output randomness). While the topic might have been commonly discussed by game designers and be present in many games, few empirical studies have been performed to evaluate the effects of these different kinds of randomness on the players' satisfaction. This research investigates the effects of input-output randomness on collectable card games across four input-output randomness conditions. We have developed our own collectable card game and experimented with the different kinds of randomness with the game. Our results suggest that input randomness can significantly impact game satisfaction negatively. Overall, our results present helpful considerations on how and when to apply randomness in game design when aiming for players' satisfaction.