This paper describes an approach to detect and track multiple feature points for robust estimation of background motion under camera motion. The main contribution is a robust multiple features tracking algorithm based on KLT tracker and FAST feature point detector. We evaluate the tracking quality for each point and discard some points which are not well-tracked then add new feature points instead of them to keep the number of feature points during tracking. The features are combined with the segmented parts on the image to estimate dominant planes and homographies, and then separated into static and moving ones regardless of the camera motion. The camera motion compensation shows very good accuracy on a number of test sequences.

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Magnetic fluid is composed of nano-meter size particles. Magnetic Targeting Drug delivery System (MT-DDS) which uses magnetic fluid attracts a great deal of attention as one of most advanced medical treatments especially for cancers. Since it needs a real-time monitoring system, we investigated its observation properties in a mouse body with X-ray imaging at Spring-8 in this study. As a result, we found it is possible to extract the density distribution of magnetic fluid in mouse body. Moreover, we demonstrated that optimization of digital values of imaging data can make the contrast better, which suggests possibility of real-time imaging system for MT-DDS.

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This paper proposes a novel technique for recovering entire shape of a solid simultaneously by the employment of virtual see-through cameras. In the technique, a solid is surrounded by a set of cameras. The rear shape of the solid is transformed into the shape which would be observed from frontal cameras and it is superposed to the frontal shape, and vice versa. All this procedure results in that the entire shape of the solid is observed by all the cameras surrounding it. This gives stronger geometrical constraints in the shape recovery. The factorization is applied to this information and the entire shape recovers simultaneously. Experimental results show that this technique gives higher precision in the recovered shape than the technique proposed before by the authors.

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In the present days, information society has so rapidly extended that not only young people but also the elderly have to use the Internet to exchange and acquire information. One of the most popular internet services is WWW that is typical visual media. Human visual characteristics, however, change due to age-related clouding of the eye lens. Therefore, it is very likely that aged people overlook important information of web sites when the change of human visibility is ignored. In this report, the silent reading time, the gaze duration and the saccade were measured using point-of-regard measurement for evaluating legibility of the Web site. As the results, the silent reading time and the gaze duration were extended and the saccade was shortened, when the contrast between characters and a background decreased. Moreover, when the contrast decreased, a decreasing ratio of legibility in a negative coloration compared with a positive coloration was increased. Therefore, it was shown that the legibility is high when the contrast between characters and background is high, and a positive coloration is effective.

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A new cluster analysis using spherical SOM has been proposed to create a more accurate representation of the data by removing the "border effect". The cluster method is able to visualize a multi-dimensional dataset as a graphical object and to extract a tree structure from the object as a dendrogram. In this paper, to better understand the potential effectiveness of the method, the cluster method using spherical SOM has been applied to real medical treatment data and has been compared with the results of the other three approaches for clustering, which are Learning Vector Quantization, Support Vector Machine and Discriminant Analysis. The results of cluster analysis for real medical treatment data confirmed that the cluster analysis using spherical SOM was accuracy more than the equal to the other approaches.

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In recent years, integrating Oriental medicine and modern Western medicine have been required with the increase of disease related to lifestyle related and the change of disease structure. We need prove that the oriental medicine must be usefulness in health screening of Western medicine. The results of Oriental medical examination were compared with the result of Western medical examination, and the usefulness of "Oriental medical examination" was investigated. From the result, of the 15 volunteers diagnosed as the health by the health screening of Western medicine, 12 (80%) were diagnosed at poor health by the health screening of Oriental medicine. Of the 36 volunteers diagnosed as the poor health by the health screening of Western medicine, 32 (89%) were diagnosed at poor health by the health screening of Oriental medicine. It was proven that the results of Oriental medical examination have a relationship with a few results of Western medical examination.

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Guidance robots that safety guide senior and impaired person at hospitals or welfare facilities have been developed. In order to guide visually impaired safety, it is required to provide them non-visual information to realize the guidance. In this study, we developed 5 kinds of guidance leads that conduct bidirectional force information between user and the robot for our guidance robot. The characteristics of each guidance lead about usability and safety were evaluated by psychological experiment. The results showed that the lead whose connection with the robot is elastic is more secure

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We Lifestyle-related disease comes from smoking, overweight and stress. But a daily healthy check is important because clear symptom for these sicknesses. We develop the diagnosis help software which clarifies the state of the blood vessel visually using usual modal SOM, and perform synthetic plethysmogram diagnosis of 4 elements of the map location (the state of the blood vessel), variation (looseness), a pulse/minute and stability of a pulse. The classification of the clinical examples related to the vein stage has been carried out.

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This paper relates an analysis of the heart rate variability (HRV) effects from the repeated listening to the same wind band composition. A man and a woman are invited as the experiment subjects, and one piece of wind band music ("Appalachian overture" (composed by J. Barnes)) is employed as the test piece. Subjects are asked to listen to the test piece for 2 weeks (one time per a day), and their HRV are recorded. The experimental data is analyzed by FFT, components of low frequency (LF; 0.04-0.15Hz) and high frequency (HF; 0.15-0.40Hz) are obtained from the analysis of the HRV power spectrum. The study discovered linear relationship between the frequency of listening to the test piece and the changes of the HF value for both subjects.

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Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), which provides a direct connection between the neural activity of human brain and machine, is being investigated in our study. In this paper, we examined the feasibility of using silent reading as a fundamental BCI trigger by measuring the real-time hemodynamic response during silent reading with Near Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS). The results showed that hemodynamic response could be used as an ON/OFF switch during silent reading. This finding indicated that BCI control signals using Internal Speech Production can be put to practical use.

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