The watershed transform has been used as a powerful morphological segmentation tool in a variety of image processing applications. This is because it gives a good segmentation result if a topographical relief and markers are suitably chosen for different type of images. This paper proposes a parallel implementation of the watershed transform on the cellular neural network (CNN) universal machine, called cellular watersheds. Owing to its fine grain architecture, the watershed transform can be parallelized using local information. Our parallel implementation is based on a simulated immersion process. To evaluate our implementation, we have experimented on the CNN universal chip, ACE16k, for synthetic and real images.

In this paper, we demonstrate an immersive and interactive broadcasting production system with a new haptically enhanced multimedia broadcasting chain. The system adapts Augmented Reality (AR) techniques, which merges captured videos and virtual 3D media seamlessly through multimedia streaming technology, and haptic interaction technology in near real-time. In this system, viewers at the haptic multimedia client can interact with AR broadcasting production transmitted via communication network. We demonstrate two test applications, which show that the addition of AR- and haptic-interaction to the conventional audio-visual contents can improve immersiveness and interactivity of viewers with rich contents service.

Most of the traveller guidance services (TGS) are based on GPS technology and generally concerned with the position data mapping on the simplified 2D electronic map in order to provide macro level service facility such as drive direction notifications. Digital GIS based GPS entails in situ intuitive visualization. The visually enhanced TGS can improve the global and local awareness of unknown areas. In this paper, we propose a reliable new TGS system that provides 3D street as well as pin-pointed destination information in two stages of its interactive services; web-based and AR-based. The web server generates a guiding path on 2D digital map and displays 3D car-driving animation along the path. And, the AR-based service is embedded so that users can interactively obtain the detailed micro-level information of a specific section in the area with their fingertips. The implementation is based on autoformation of on-line GIS data structures from the available priori. For the verification, a 54 road network is selected as a test area. In the service demonstration, we show the effective awareness of street environments and the usefulness of this new TGS system.