The distance at which TV is viewed in the home is analyzed in terms of the conditions of the surroundings. Newly developed survey method makes it possible to collect a lot of reliable data at a considerably cheaper cost and in a shorter period than in a field survey although based on a questionnaire survey. The results show that the relative viewing distance is around 5 screen heights (H), which is 1 H shorter than before. This change is primarily because the screen size of TVs at home have become bigger despite that the room area has not changed. Absolute viewing distance depends on room area, but screen size does not depend on room area so much. The viewing distance is shorter than the average if the viewer is closely focused on the TV or if interactive services are frequently used.

A variety of systems have been developed that use information on pupil diameter variation. These systems typically require a general-purpose PC or a portable terminal. In addition, a near-infrared camera and an illumination system are required to obtain pupil diameter information. However, a near-infrared camera and an appropriate illumination source are usually not installed in conventional PCs or mobile devices. If the pupil diameter can be measured using a visible-light camera equipped with a general-purpose PC or portable terminal, the aforementioned systems could become more widely used. However, it is difficult to discriminate between the iris and pupil regions in an image captured using a visible-light camera because the colors of the iris and the pupil are similar in individuals of Asian ancestry. In this study, we determine effective color components for the detection and diameter measurement of the pupil under visible light conditions based on eye images obtained using a visible-light camera. The experimental results revealed that the effective color components for the detection and diameter measurement of the pupil are the R, Y, and K color components for brown eyes and the R and C color components for hazel eyes. The suitable color components differ depending on the color of the iris.

In this paper, we propose display systems for supporting deaf and hard of hearing people in viewing sports programs by using Japanese Sign Language (JSL) animation synthesis. The synthesis can automatically produce JSL CG animation from live sports data during a game. We improved the synthesis to make sports-specific collocated motions by compounding several word motions. Utilizing the improved synthesis, we developed three prototype systems for displaying JSL CG animation and live sports video simultaneously: a web browser-based system, tablet application-based system and a tablet & TV system. We carried out a series of experiments to evaluate these systems by using real-time data from actual games, and the tablet & TV system was most preferred.

A survey was conducted on the use of ICT devices by blind and visually impaired people. Of the 303 respondents, 180 (59.4%) used feature phones (keitai), 161 (53.1%) used smartphones, 64 (21.1%) used tablets, and 285 (94.1%) used personal computers. The usage rate of smartphones doubled, and that of feature phones decreased by about 20%. The higher the age was, the higher the usage rate of feature phones and the lower that of smartphones became. The text entry methods on touchscreens with a screen reader varied greatly between blind and low vision people and between smartphones and tablets. Vision aid apps such as for GPS navigation and object recognition were used by more than half of the blind smartphone users.

The goal of making a scatter plot is to visually identify the type of relationship between two quantitative variables quickly. To explore whether a scatter plot can achieve this goal when it is made in the form of a tactile graph and presented to blind people, we conducted an experiment in which x-y data sets were presented to blind participants in three data representations: tactile graph, tactile table, and electronic table, and the participants were asked to identify the type of relationship between two variables. Under all presentation conditions, eight participants or more achieved 100% correct rate. Tactile graphs were understood with the shortest time, tactile tables with the second shortest, and electronic tables needed the longest time. This time differences were due to the different strategies for identifying the relationships. Both tactile graph and tactile table conditions gained significantly higher subjective ratings than the electronic table condition. These results show the usefulness of tactile scatter plots for blind people although it is limited to the present experimental condition.

Point cloud registration is an important part of 3-dimensional information processing. Low overlap ratio, noise, outliers, and missing points considerably influence the registration results. In this paper, we propose a fast and robust point cloud registration method to reduce the impact of these factors. First, the point groups are resampled by point clouds as basic elements for point cloud registration. Second, singular value decomposition is used to decompose the point groups. Third, the depth image of the point groups is calculated, and the sparse feature is obtained using the depth image. Finally, the sparse feature is used to obtain registration results through sparse representation. Under the premise of robustness to low overlap ratio, noise, outliers, and missing points, experimental results show that our algorithm is faster and more accurate than extant methods.