Tsukasa Noma, D.Sc.

Profile

Tsukasa Noma is currently a professor of Department of Artificial Intelligence, Faculty of Computer Science and Systems Engineering, and Program of Creation Informatics, Graduate School of Computer Science and Systems Engineering of Kyushu Institute of Technology. He received a B.Sc. degree in mathematics from Waseda University in 1984, and the degrees of M.Sc. and D.Sc. in information science from the University of Tokyo in 1986 and 1989. He is on the editorial board of The Visual Computer, and also a member of the ACM, the IEEE, the IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan).

Research

1. Character Animation

Our major research interest lies in character animation and its application to "communication." Our characters can report weather forecasts from a set of forecast data, and explain a table from a simple structural description.

• T. Noma, L. Zhao, and N. Badler, "Design of a Virtual Human Presenter," IEEE Comput. Graph. Appl., Vol. 20, No, 4, pp. 79-85, 2000.
• T. Noma, Y. Shiratori, H. Baba, "Automated Generation of Animated Weather Reports with a Virtual Weatherman," Multimedia Modeling (Proc. Int'l Conf on Multimedia Modeling 2000), World Scientific, 412-427, 2000.
• T. Noma, K. Oishi, H. Futsuhara, H. Baba, T. Ohashi, and T. Ejima, "A Motion Generator Approach to Translating Human Motion from Video to Animation," J. of Visualization and Computer Animation, Vol. 11, No, 5, pp. 237-248, 2000.
• T. Tsumura, T. Yoshizuka, T. Nojirino, and T. Noma, "T4: A Motion-capture-based Goal-directed Realtime Responsive Locomotion Engine," Proc. Computer Animation 2001, IEEE Computer Society, pp. 52-60, 2001.
• H. Murakami, H. Baba, and T. Noma, "MLSLib: A Lip Sync Library for Multi Agents and Languages," J. of WSCG (Proc. WSCG 2002), Vol. 10, No, 2, pp. 295-302, 2002.
• K. Kondo, K. Yamamoto, and T. Noma, "TablePresenter: A Life-Like Agent Explaining Tables," Proc. VIIP 2005, IASTED, pp. 727-730, 2005.

2. Motion Capture

Motion capture is extensively used for character animation. But motion capture is NOT only for animation. Motion, or a sequence of postures is a record of personal life, and it is appropriate for the record of personal experiences. Our PWS (Posture Web Server) can obtain user's postures in his/her life, and our PHA (Posture History Archiver) archives the postures as personal records.

• Y. Ooe, K. Yamasaki, and T. Noma, "PWS & PHA: Posture Web Server and Posture History Archiver," Proc. CARPE '04 (1st ACM Workshop on Continuous Archival and Retrieval of Personal Experiences, ACM Press, pp. 99-104, 2004.

3. Non-Photorealistic Rendering (NPR)

Our recent interest includes the acquisition and use of reflectance distributions in oil paintings. "Shading effects" on paintings are usually different from photographs of real scenes, and the effects often represent the "tastes" of the painters. We analyzed the effects on masterpiece paintings, and reproduced them on different images/objects.

• S. Kitaoka, T. Noma, and Y. Kitamura, "Acquisition and Use of Reflectance Distributions in Paintings," Transactions of VRSJ, Vol. 11, No, 3, pp. 395-402, 2006 (in Japanese).
• S. Kitaoka, T. Noma, Y. Kitamura, and K. Yamamoto, "Inverse Rendering for Artistic Paintings," GRAPP 2007, 2007 (accepted).

4. Publications

Please see Tsukasa Noma's publication list.

Education

1. Undergraduate Courses

• Computer Programming (Department of Artiricial Intelligence, 1st year)
• Computer Graphics A (Department of Artificial Intelligence, 3rd year)
• Computer Graphics E (Department of Computer Science and Electronics, 3rd year)

2. Graduate School Courses

• Advanced Computer Graphics I (Graduate School of Computer Science and Systems Engineering)
• Advanced Multimedia Representation (Graduate School of Computer Science and Systems Engineering)
• Advanced Multimedia Engineering (Graduate School of Computer Science and Systems Engineering)

3. Authored Textbooks

1. Visual Information Processing Editorial Committee (ed), Visual Information Processing, CG-ARTS Society, 2004 (in Japanese).
2. Computer Graphics Editorial Committee (ed), Computer Graphics, CG-ARTS Society, 2004 (in Japanese).
3. The Institute of Image Electronics Engineers of Japan (ed), Visual Computing, Tokyo Denki University Press, 2006 (in Japanese).

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