Within the field of game design, game balance can best be described as a black art. It is the process by which game designers make a game simultaneously fair for players while providing them just the right amount of difficulty to be both exciting and challenging without making the game entirely predictable. This involves a combination of mathematics, psychology, and occasionally other fields such as economics and game theory. Game Balance offers readers a dynamic look into game design and player theory. Throughout the book, relevant topics on the use of spreadsheet programs will be included in each chapter. This book therefore doubles as a useful reference on Microsoft Excel, Google Spreadsheets, and other spreadsheet programs and their uses for game designers. FEATURES The first and only book to explore game balance as a topic in depth Topics range from intermediate to advanced, while written in an accessible style that demystifies even the most challenging mathematical concepts to the point where a novice student of game design can understand and apply them Contains powerful spreadsheet techniques which have been tested with all major spreadsheet programs and battle-tested with real-world game design tasks Provides short-form exercises at the end of each chapter to allow for practice of the techniques discussed therein along with three long-term projects divided into parts throughout the book that involve their creation Written by award-winning designers with decades of experience in the field Ian Schreiber has been in the industry since 2000, first as a programmer and then as a game designer. He has worked on eight published game titles, training/simulation games for three Fortune 500 companies, and has advised countless student projects. He is the co-founder of Global Game Jam, the largest in-person game jam event in the world. Ian has taught game design and development courses at a variety of colleges and universities since 2006. Brenda Romero is a BAFTA award-winning game director, entrepreneur, artist, and Fulbright award recipient and is presently game director and creator of the Empire of Sin franchise. As a game director, she has worked on 50 games and contributed to many seminal titles, including the Wizardry and Jagged Alliance series and titles in the Ghost Recon, Dungeons & Dragons, and Def Jam franchises.

Are you thinking about working in the board game industry? Here's what you need to know. There are so many jobs and roles that need to be filled in the board game industry. You might just have the right skills and experience to excel. But first you need to know what opportunities exist and what the hardest gaps are to fill! In this book, you'll discover * What jobs are really in demand * How you can get your foot in the door with a publisher * Jobs in the industry you've never even thought of * What other opportunities exist for people with skills just like yours With insights from over 40 industry pros, as well as the author's many years of experience, you'll be able to put your own skills and experience to great use in an amazing, growing industry.

Multimedia surveillance systems is an emerging field that includes signal and image processing, communications, and computer vision. Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, combines the most recent research results from these areas for use by engineers and end-users involved in the design of surveillance systems in the fields of transportation and services. The book covers emerging surveillance requirements, including new digital sensors for real-time acquisition of surveillance data, low-level image processing algorithms, and event detection methods. It also discusses problems related to knowledge representation in surveillance systems, wireless and wired multimedia networks, and a new generation of surveillance communication tools. Timely information is presented on digital watermarking, broadband multimedia transmission, legal use of surveillance systems, performance evaluation criteria, and other new and emerging topics, along with applications for transports and pedestrian monitoring. The information contained in Multimedia Video-Based Surveillance Systems: Requirements, Issues and Solutions, bridges the distance between present practice and research findings, and the book is an indispensable reference tool for professional engineers.

The unique, dynamic learning system that has helped thousands of artists enhance their figure drawing abilities Dozens of updated illustrations and all-new content, exclusive to the 3rd edition Select pages can be scanned by your smartphone or other device to pull up bonus video content, enhancing the learning process

The advent of X-ray Computed Tomography (CT) as a tool for the soil sciences almost 40 years ago has revolutionised the field. Soil is the fragile, thin layer of material that exists above earth's geological substrates upon which so much of life on earth depends. However a major limitation to our understanding of how soils behave and function is due to its complex, opaque structure that hinders our ability to assess its porous architecture without disturbance. X-ray imagery has facilitated the ability to truly observe soil as it exists in three dimensions and across contrasting spatial and temporal scales in the field in an undisturbed fashion. This book gives a comprehensive overview of the "state of the art" in a variety of application areas where this type of imaging is used, including soil water physics and hydrology, agronomic management of soils, and soil-plant-microbe interactions. It provides the necessary details for entry level readers in the crucial areas of sample preparation, scanner optimisation and image processing and analysis. Drawing on experts across the globe, from both academia and industry, the book covers the necessary "dos and don'ts", but also offers insights into the future of both technology and science. The wider application of the book is provided by dedicated chapters on how the data from such imagery can be incorporated into models and how the technology can be interfaced with other relevant technical applications. The book ends with a future outlook from the four editors, each of whom has over 20 years of experience in the application of X-ray CT to soil science.

The current popular and scientific interest in virtual environments has provided a new impetus for investigating binaural and spatial hearing. However, the many intriguing phenomena of spatial hearing have long made it an exciting area of scientific inquiry. Psychophysical and physiological investigations of spatial hearing seem to be converging on common explanations of underlying mechanisms. These understandings have in turn been incorporated into sophisticated yet mathematically tractable models of binaural interaction. Thus, binaural and spatial hearing is one of the few areas in which professionals are soon likely to find adequate physiological explanations of complex psychological phenomena that can be reasonably and usefully approximated by mathematical and physical models. This volume grew out of the Conference on Binaural and Spatial Hearing, a four-day event held at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in response to rapid developments in binaural and spatial hearing research and technology. Meant to be more than just a proceedings, it presents chapters that are longer than typical proceedings papers and contain considerably more review material, including extensive bibliographies in many cases. Arranged into topical sections, the chapters represent major thrusts in the recent literature. The authors of the first chapter in each section have been encouraged to take a broad perspective and review the current state of literature. Subsequent chapters in each section tend to be somewhat more narrowly focused, and often emphasize the authors' own work. Thus, each section provides overview, background, and current research on a particular topic. This book is significant in that it reviews the important work during the past 10 to 15 years, and provides greater breadth and depth than most of the previous works.

This book focuses on the latest developments in the fields of visual AI, image processing and computer vision. It shows research in basic techniques like image pre-processing, feature extraction, and enhancement, along with applications in biometrics, healthcare, neuroscience and forensics. The book highlights algorithms, processes, novel architectures and results underlying machine intelligence with detailed execution flow of models.

This book offers a thorough examination of digital work by women comedians in the US, exploring their use of digital media to perform jokes, engage with fans, remake their reputations, and become political activists This book argues that despite its many adverse effects, digital work is changing comedy, empowering women to create new comic forms and negotiate the contentious political climate incited by former President Donald. J. Trump Chapters are focused on video-podcasting, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and the streaming platform Netflix - each containing informative case studies on significant women comedians who use them, including Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Leslie Jones, Mindy Kaling, Colleen Ballinger, Lilly Singh, Ms. Pat, Whitney Cummings, Issa Rae, and others To understand their strategies, this book examines the popularity of their digital content, their career-outcomes in television and film, as well as the ups and downs of their critical reputations in magazines, newspapers, the trade press, and with their participatory audiences online This insightful and timely work will appeal to scholars researching and teaching in the areas of media studies, digital communication, gender studies and performance

This book provides an in-depth overview of artificial intelligence and deep learning approaches with case studies to solve problems associated with biometric security such as authentication, indexing, template protection, spoofing attack detection, ROI detection, gender classification etc. This text highlights a showcase of cutting-edge research on the use of convolution neural networks, autoencoders, recurrent convolutional neural networks in face, hand, iris, gait, fingerprint, vein, and medical biometric traits. It also provides a step-by-step guide to understanding deep learning concepts for biometrics authentication approaches and presents an analysis of biometric images under various environmental conditions. This book is sure to catch the attention of scholars, researchers, practitioners, and technology aspirants who are willing to research in the field of AI and biometric security.

The Definitive Vulkan (TM) Developer's Guide and Reference: Master the Next-Generation Specification for Cross-Platform Graphics The next generation of the OpenGL specification, Vulkan, has been redesigned from the ground up, giving applications direct control over GPU acceleration for unprecedented performance and predictability. Vulkan (TM) Programming Guide is the essential, authoritative reference to this new standard for experienced graphics programmers in all Vulkan environments. Vulkan API lead Graham Sellers (with contributions from language lead John Kessenich) presents example-rich introductions to the portable Vulkan API and the new SPIR-V shading language. The author introduces Vulkan, its goals, and the key concepts framing its API, and presents a complex rendering system that demonstrates both Vulkan's uniqueness and its exceptional power. You'll find authoritative coverage of topics ranging from drawing to memory, and threading to compute shaders. The author especially shows how to handle tasks such as synchronization, scheduling, and memory management that are now the developer's responsibility. Vulkan (TM) Programming Guide introduces powerful 3D development techniques for fields ranging from video games to medical imaging, and state-of-the-art approaches to solving challenging scientific compute problems. Whether you're upgrading from OpenGL or moving to open-standard graphics APIs for the first time, this guide will help you get the results and performance you're looking for. Coverage includes Extensively tested code examples to demonstrate Vulkan's capabilities and show how it differs from OpenGL Expert guidance on getting started and working with Vulkan's new memory system Thorough discussion of queues, commands, moving data, and presentation Full explanations of the SPIR-V binary shading language and compute/graphics pipelines Detailed discussions of drawing commands, geometry and fragment processing, synchronization primitives, and reading Vulkan data into applications A complete case study application: deferred rendering using complex multi-pass architecture and multiple processing queues Appendixes presenting Vulkan functions and SPIR-V opcodes, as well as a complete Vulkan glossary

Case-based reasoning in design is becoming an important approach to computer-support for design as well as an important component in understanding the design process. Design has become a major focus for problem solving paradigms due to its complexity and open-ended nature. This book presents a clear description of how case-based reasoning can be applied to design problems, including the representation of design cases, indexing and retrieving design cases, and the range of paradigms for adapting design cases. With a focus on design, this book differs from others that provide a generalist view of case-based reasoning.
This volume provides two important contributions to the area:
* a general description of the issues and alternatives in applying case-based reasoning to design, and
* a description of specific implementations of case-based design.
Through this combination, the reader will learn about both the general issues and the practical problems in supporting design through case-based reasoning. This book was prepared to fill a gap in the literature on the unique problems that design introduces to computational paradigms developed in computer science. It also addresses the needs of computational support for design problem solving from both theoretical and practical perspectives.

This book is concerned with the processing of signals that have been sampled and digitized. The authors present algorithms for the optimization, random simulation, and numerical integration of probability densities for applications of Bayesian inference to signal processing. In particular, methods are developed for the computation of marginal densities and evidence, and are applied to previously intractable problems either involving large numbers of parameters or where the signal model is of a complex form. The emphasis is on the applications of these methods notably to the restoration of digital audio recordings and biomedical data. After a chapter which sets out the main principles of Bayesian inference applied to signal processing, subsequent chapters cover numerical approaches to these techniques, the use of Markov chain Monte Carlo methods, the identification of abrupt changes in data using the Bayesian piecewise linear model, and identifying missing samples in digital audio signals.

Description: This tutorial-based book allows readers to create a first-person game from start to finish using industry-standard (and free to student) tools of Maya, Substance Painter, and Unreal Engine. The first half of the book lays out the basics of using Maya and Substance Painter to create game-ready assets. This includes polygonal modeling, UV layout, and custom texture painting. Then, the book covers rigging and animation solutions to create assets to be placed in the game including animated first-person assets and motion-captured NPC animations. Finally, readers can put it all together and build interactivity that allows the player to create a finished game using the assets built and animated earlier in the book. * Written by industry professionals with real-world experience in building assets and games. * Build a complete game from start to finish. * Learn what the pros use: construct all assets using the tools used at industries across the world. * All software used are free to students. * When complete, students will have a playable version of an FPS game. Jing Tian Li is a graduate of China's Central Academy of Fine Arts and New York's School of Visual Arts, where he earned an MFA in Computer Art. He currently is an Assistant Professor of 3D Animation & Game Design at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. Kassandra Arevalo is an instructor of 3D Animation & Game Design at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas. She previously worked as an animator at Immersed Games. Matt Tovar is an industry veteran animator. He has worked at Naughty Dog, Infinity Ward, and Sony Interactive on such games as The Last of Us, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, and most recently Marvel's Avengers with Crystal Dynamics. He is an Assistant Professor of 3D Animation at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas.

This book is a comprehensive, hands-on guide to the basics of data mining and machine learning with a special emphasis on supervised and unsupervised learning methods. The book lays stress on the new ways of thinking needed to master in machine learning based on the Python, R, and Java programming platforms. This book first provides an understanding of data mining, machine learning and their applications, giving special attention to classification and clustering techniques. The authors offer a discussion on data mining and machine learning techniques with case studies and examples. The book also describes the hands-on coding examples of some well-known supervised and unsupervised learning techniques using three different and popular coding platforms: R, Python, and Java. This book explains some of the most popular classification techniques (K-NN, Naive Bayes, Decision tree, Random forest, Support vector machine etc,) along with the basic description of artificial neural network and deep neural network. The book is useful for professionals, students studying data mining and machine learning, and researchers in supervised and unsupervised learning techniques.

Integrates rational approximation with adaptive filtering, providing viable, numerically reliable procedures for creating adaptive infinite impulse response (IIR) filters. The choice of filter structure to adapt, algorithm design and the approximation properties for each type of algorithm are also addressed. This work recasts the theory of adaptive IIR filters by concentrating on recursive lattice filters, freeing systems from the need for direct-form filters.;A solutions manual is available for instructors only. College or university bookstores may order five or more copies at a special student price which is available upon request.

Bayesian probability theory and maximum entropy methods are at the core of a new view of scientific inference. These new' ideas, along with the revolution in computational methods afforded by modern computers, allow astronomers, electrical engineers, image processors of any type, NMR chemists and physicists, and anyone at all who has to deal with incomplete and noisy data, to take advantage of methods that, in the past, have been applied only in some areas of theoretical physics. This volume records the Proceedings of Eleventh Annual Maximum Entropy' Workshop, held at Seattle University in June, 1991. These workshops have been the focus of a group of researchers from many different fields, and this diversity is evident in this volume. There are tutorial papers, theoretical papers, and applications in a very wide variety of fields. Almost any instance of dealing with incomplete and noisy data can be usefully treated by these methods, and many areas of theoretical research are being enhanced by the thoughtful application of Bayes' theorem. The contributions contained in this volume present a state-of-the-art review that will be influential and useful for many years to come.

All games are potentially transformative experiences because they engage the player in dynamic action. When repurposed in an educational context, even highly popular casual games played online to pass the time can engage players in a way that deepens learning. Games as Transformative Experiences for Critical Thinking, Cultural Awareness, and Deep Learning: Strategies & Resources examines the learning value of a wide variety of games across multiple disciplines. Organized just like a well-made game, the book is divided into four parts highlighting classroom experiences, community and culture, virtual learning, and interdisciplinary instruction. The author crosses between the high school and college classroom and addresses a range of disciplines, both online and classroom practice, the design of curriculum, and the transformation of assessment practices. In addition to a wealth of practical exercises, resources, and lesson ideas, the book explains how to use a wide and diverse range of games from casual to massively multiplayer online games for self-improvement as well as classroom situations.

This book contains thirteen contributions from invited experts of international recognition addressing important issues in shape analysis in medical image analysis, including techniques for image segmentation, registration, modelling and classification and applications in biology, as well as in cardiac, brain, spine, chest, lung and clinical practice.

This volume treats topics such as for example, anatomic and functional shape representation and matching; shape-based medical image segmentation; shape registration; statistical shape analysis; shape deformation; shape-based abnormity detection; shape tracking and longitudinal shape analysis; machine learning for shape modeling and analysis; shape-based computer-aided-diagnosis; shape-based medical navigation; benchmark and validation of shape representation, analysis and modeling algorithms.

This work will be of interest to researchers, students and manufacturers in the fields of artificial intelligence, bioengineering, biomechanics, computational mechanics, computational vision, computer sciences, human motion, mathematics, medical imaging, medicine, pattern recognition and physics.

This book covers recent advances in image processing and imaging sciences from an optimization viewpoint, especially convex optimization with the goal of designing tractable algorithms. Throughout the handbook, the authors introduce topics on the most key aspects of image acquisition and processing that are based on the formulation and solution of novel optimization problems. The first part includes a review of the mathematical methods and foundations required, and covers topics in image quality optimization and assessment. The second part of the book discusses concepts in image formation and capture from color imaging to radar and multispectral imaging. The third part focuses on sparsity constrained optimization in image processing and vision and includes inverse problems such as image restoration and de-noising, image classification and recognition and learning-based problems pertinent to image understanding. Throughout, convex optimization techniques are shown to be a critically important mathematical tool for imaging science problems and applied extensively. Convex Optimization Methods in Imaging Science is the first book of its kind and will appeal to undergraduate and graduate students, industrial researchers and engineers and those generally interested in computational aspects of modern, real-world imaging and image processing problems.

This volume describes the status of fractal imaging research and looks to future directions. It will be useful to researchers in the areas of fractal image compression, analysis, and synthesis, iterated function systems, and fractals in education. In particular it includes a vision for the future of these areas. It aims to provide an efficient means by which researchers can look back over the last decade at what has been achieved, and look forward towards second-generation fractal imaging. The articles in themselves are not meant to be detailed reviews or expositions, but to serve as signposts to the state of the art in their areas. What is important is what they mention and what tools and ideas are seen now to be relevant to the future. The contributors, a number of whom have been involved since the start, are active in fractal imaging, and provide a well-informed viewpoint on both the status and the future. Most were invited participants at a meeting on Fractals in Multimedia held at the IMA in January 2001. Some goals of the mini-symposium, shared with this volume, were to demonstrate that the fractal viewpoint leads to a broad collection of useful mathematical tools, common themes, new ways of looking at and thinking about existing algorithms and applications in multimedia, and to consider future developments. This book should be useful to commercial and university researchers in the rapidly evolving field of digital imaging, specifically, chief information officers, professors, software engineers, and graduate students in the mathematical sciences. While much of the content is quite technical, it contains pointers to the state-of-the-art and the future in fractal imaging.

Provides a technical introduction to deepfakes, its benefits, and the potential harms Presents practical approaches of creation and detection of deepfakes using Deep Learning (DL) Techniques Draws attention towards various challenging issues and societal impact of deepfakes with their existing solutions Includes research analysis in the domain of DL fakes for assisting the creation and detection of deepfakes applications Discusses future research directions with emergence of deepfakes technology

In this introduction to vision models and their use in image and video processing applications, prominent authors take on an engineering and signal processing approach. It is intended for an engineering audience that wants to use and become familiar with vision models.

Create code art, visualizations, and interactive applications with this powerful yet simple computer language and programming environment Learn how to code 2D and 3D animation, pixel-level imaging, motion effects, and physics simulations Take a creative and fun approach to learning creative computer programming If you're interested in creating cutting-edge code-based art and animations, you've come to the right place! Processing (available at www.processing.org) is a revolutionary open source programming language and environment designed to bridge the gap between programming and art, allowing non-programmers to learn programming fundamentals as easily as possible, and empowering anyone to produce beautiful creations using math patterns. With the software freely available, Processing provides an accessible alternative to using Flash for creative coding and computational artboth on and off the Web. This book is written especially for artists, designers, and other creative professionals and students exploring code art, graphics programming, and computational aesthetics. The book provides a solid and comprehensive foundation in programming, including object-oriented principles, and introduces you to the easy-to-grasp Processing language, so no previous coding experience is necessary. The book then goes through using Processing to code lines, curves, shapes, and motion, continuing to the point where you'll have mastered Processing and can really start to unleash your creativity with realistic physics, interactivity, and 3D! In the final chapter, you'll even learn how to extend your Processing skills by working directly with the powerful Java programming languagethe language Processing itselfis built with. You'll learn: The fundamentals of creative computer programming--from procedural programming, to object-oriented programming, to pure Java programming How to virtually draw, paint, and sculpt using computer code and clearly explained mathematical concepts 2D and 3D programming techniques, motion design, and cool graphics effects How to code your own pixel-level imaging effects, such as image contrast, color saturation, custom gradients and more Advanced animation techniques, including realistic physics and artificial life simulation Summary of Contents PART ONE: THEORY OF PROCESSING AND COMPUTATIONAL ART Chapter 1: Code Art Chapter 2: Creative Coding Chapter 3: Code Grammar 101 Chapter 4: Computer Graphics, the Fun, Easy Way Chapter 5: The Processing Environment PART TWO: PUTTING THEORY INTO PRACTICE Chapter 6: Lines Chapter 7: Curves Chapter 8: Object-Oriented Programming Chapter 9: Shapes Chapter 10: Color and Imaging Chapter 11: Motion Chapter 12: Interactivity Chapter 13: 3D Chapter 14: 3D Rendering in Java Mode PART THREE: REFERENCE Appendix A: Processing Language API Appendix B: Math Reference Appendix C: Integrating Processing within Java