This paper proposes a method for estimating scene illuminant colors from the two color images acquired by a fixed camera under two different illuminations. Our method, which uses the fact that the same scene is observed as the two images, obtains two sets of surface reflectance of a scene area common to the two images, and estimates the colors of the two illuminations based on the property that the intersection of the sets could correspond to the common area. To obtain the sets of surface reflectance from the colors in the images, relationship between surface reflectance and colors in image, which are calculated using surface reflectance called “typical set” from ISO/TR 16066 object colour spectra database for colour reproduction evaluation and possible illuminants, is used. Experiments using numerical simulation and actual images show that our method derives smaller estimation errors than conventional methods and that it provides stable estimations for several kinds of illuminants and reflectance.

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Morphological image processing is well known as a powerful method in image processing and computer vision. This paper proposes a novel morphology algorithm in consideration of the visual characteristic of a color image. In the traditional morphological processing of the color images, the magnitude correlation of the pixel vector is determined beforehand and has been applied to any color images. Therefore, the effectiveness of the processing will vary depending on the contents of individual images. In this paper, a new concept of Conspicuousness Map of the notability of a pixel, suiting human feeling in the conspicuous grade between the pixels in the structure element of morphology, is proposed, aiming to apply to morphological processing. By the proposal method, the effect to reduce or remove a thin line noise or blob noise regardless of the image contents, which was impossible to acquire by the conventional morphological processing, is attained.

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Many graduate schools of universities offer minor education in addition to education majors. Minor education is offered to all graduate students in the form of education programs which consist of courses for education majors. One of the biggest problems is that graduate students meet difficulty in taking minor education program courses whose timetable overlap with that of majors'. To solve this problem, a design method for the major and minor timetables is proposed using the genetic algorithm, in which courses for minor education programs form genes. Appling the proposed algorithm to the case of 2000 and 200 courses for major and minor respectively, a number of graduate students who are not able to take minor courses is reduced by about 55%.

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Many universities open various kinds of information such as syllabuses of courses, education programs, research projects and so on through their homepages. Information on the education and research is evaluated to be very important as a mean of information share and references for students, faculties and staffs of universities. But use of such information is very poor. To advance the use of the information, a crawling system of homepages of universities has been develop. In this paper, a new syllabuses crawling technology is proposed to solve the problem due to the difference of access method to syllabuses by universities. Also, a new information search technology is proposed to find out meaningful information is proposed. In addition, extracting and visualizing methods of knowledge in a syllabus is proposed. Further more, results of homepages crawling, knowledge extraction and visualization are described.

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In the progress of globalization of societies and industries, activities based on global standards have become more important in various areas. In this situation, aggressive effort for drawing up international standards has become more important. In Japan, however, the importance of global standardization has not sufficiently recognized, and human resources who can draw up international standards have been shorthanded. Also, the education to produce human resources concerning with global standardization has been insufficient. In this paper, the current situation of the education for the global standardization is studied and analyzed. Next, based on books and literatures published so far, the significance of global standardization and the knowledge on the procedure at the organization, R&D including intellectual property right, business strategy, competitiveness in international market, negotiation, and conceptual ability are defined as knowledge congeries that should be studied by those who are in charge of global standardization. Then, a method to design the new interdisciplinary education program for graduate students and business people is explained. Furthermore, the progress of the lecture is reported, and the results of the questionnaires for students who are studying this education program are shown as a kind of evaluation of the program.

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We propose a non-photorealistic rendering method for generating zebra-pattern images from input color images. First, the weight-shifted bilateral filter is applied to an input image for transforming it to a labyrinthine image, to which the anisotropic shock filter is applied for transforming it to a zebra-pattern image. While the labyrinthine images contain noises and angular lines, the anisotropic shock filter removes noises and smoothes lines. We demonstrate that drawing lines in black increases the contrast of zebra-pattern images and each line becomes clearly detectable.

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