Game Design Deep Dive: Roguelikes examines the history and rise of the often-confusing roguelike genre. Despite being more than 30 years old, the roguelike genre remains a mystery to a lot of consumers and developers. Procedural generation, or having the game generate content, has been a cornerstone and point of complexity since its inception. The 2010s saw an explosion of new designs and examples, along with a debate about what a roguelike is. The genre found its way back to mainstream audiences with the award-winning Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Since then, roguelikes have revolutionized the way we see and design games. Author and game design critic Joshua Bycer explains the differences between the various roguelike designs and give a detailed blueprint showing what makes the best ones work. The first of its kind talking about the roguelike genre Examines the design and methodology of roguelike games and the different variations A high-level discussion and breakdown of procedural and random content generation Joshua Bycer is a game design critic with more than seven years of experience critically analyzing game design and the industry itself. In that time, through Game-Wisdom, he has interviewed hundreds of game developers and members of the industry about what it means to design video games. He is also a public speaker and presenter at schools and libraries on game design and game development.

OpenGL ES is the standard graphics API used for mobile and embedded systems. Despite its widespread use, there is a lack of material that addresses the balance of both theory and practice in OpenGL ES. JungHyun Han's Introduction to Computer Graphics with OpenGL ES achieves this perfect balance. Han's depiction of theory and practice illustrates how 3D graphics fundamentals are implemented. Theoretical or mathematical details around real-time graphics are also presented in a way that allows readers to quickly move on to practical programming. Additionally, this book presents OpenGL ES and shader code on many topics. Industry professionals, as well as, students in Computer Graphics and Game Programming courses will find this book of importance. Key Features: Presents key graphics algorithms that are commonly employed by state-of-the-art game engines and 3D user interfaces Provides a hands-on look at real-time graphics by illustrating OpenGL ES and shader code on various topics Depicts troublesome concepts using elaborate 3D illustrations so that they can be easily absorbed Includes problem sets, solutions manual, and lecture notes for those wishing to use this book as a course text.

This book describes the methods and algorithms for image pre-processing and recognition. These methods are based on a parallel shift technology of the imaging copy, as well as simple mathematical operations to allow the generation of a minimum set of features to describe and recognize the image. This book also describes the theoretical foundations of parallel shift technology and pattern recognition. Based on these methods and theories, this book is intended to help researchers with artificial intelligence systems design, robotics, and developing software and hardware applications.

Statistical Computing in Nuclear Imaging introduces aspects of Bayesian computing in nuclear imaging. The book provides an introduction to Bayesian statistics and concepts and is highly focused on the computational aspects of Bayesian data analysis of photon-limited data acquired in tomographic measurements. Basic statistical concepts, elements of decision theory, and counting statistics, including models of photon-limited data and Poisson approximations, are discussed in the first chapters. Monte Carlo methods and Markov chains in posterior analysis are discussed next along with an introduction to nuclear imaging and applications such as PET and SPECT. The final chapter includes illustrative examples of statistical computing, based on Poisson-multinomial statistics. Examples include calculation of Bayes factors and risks as well as Bayesian decision making and hypothesis testing. Appendices cover probability distributions, elements of set theory, multinomial distribution of single-voxel imaging, and derivations of sampling distribution ratios. C++ code used in the final chapter is also provided. The text can be used as a textbook that provides an introduction to Bayesian statistics and advanced computing in medical imaging for physicists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists. It is also a valuable resource for a wide spectrum of practitioners of nuclear imaging data analysis, including seasoned scientists and researchers who have not been exposed to Bayesian paradigms.

The new edition of 3D Game Textures: Create Professional Game Art Using Photoshop features the most up-to-date techniques that allow you to create your own unique textures, shaders, and materials. Revised to take new technology into account, it is an ideal hands-on resource for creating online worlds, simulations, web-based applications, and architectural visualization projects. Continuing the practical, no-nonsense approach of its predecessors, the fourth edition shows you how to advance your digital art skills with textures and shaders by exploring their interactions in single objects or entire scenes. It contains expanded coverage of shader nodes, and the companion website-www.lukeahearn.com/textures-has been updated to include video tutorials as well as updated sample textures, shaders, materials, actions, brushes, and all of the art from the book.

This book describes how, in the era of megamedia culture, aggression in communication constitutes a threat to the communication community. Based on the theoretical incorporation of transcendental pragmatics, the book explores how conceptualizing the phenomena of megamedia aggression from this perspective and diagnosing their destructive force are essential for: postulating the need for constructing a theory of media communication closely related to the model of discursive rationality, giving this theory a critical and normative character, and embedding it in the perspective of the project of social co-responsibility and in the plan for an ethics of co-responsibility. Combining key elements of media theory, the philosophy of communication, the concept of normative ethics and the fields of social psychology and social anthropology, this book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the areas of communication studies, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and psychoanalysis.

As a textbook for learning the fundamentals of modeling, rigging and animating 3D-modeled characters for use in video games, this step-by-step lesson book builds on the reader's modeling skills acquired from reading Volume I. The reader will model characters for the Castle Environment created in Volume I, which will be rigged using the Character Animation Toolkit (CAT) in 3ds Max and animated with game moves. The Skin Modifier is used for associating the meshes to the rigs and the characters are then exported to the Unity game engine and integrated into the Castle Scene with a Third Person Character camera. As the text introduces new modeling skills, it additionally calls on the reader to perform repetitive tasks, reinforcing skills learned in the process. The content is presented as if the reader is in a working video game studio, being responsible for researching asset design and providing the team with placeholder assets and final model assets that are unwrapped and custom textured using both box mapping and the 3ds Max Quick Peel tool. Although the text uses Autodesk 3ds Max for the modeling program, the principles are transferable to other major modeling programs. Key Features: The goal of this book is to teach the fundamentals of 3D modeling video game characters in a simplified, logical progression optimized for learning at a beginner level. Rigging principles (Linking, Inverse Kinematics [IK], Forward Kinematics [FK], Skin Deformation, Weighting Vertices and more) are introduced in a gradual progression to allow maximum comprehension and retention. This series of modeling exercises is the result of having successfully taught over 1000 video game students the fundamentals of 3D modeling. This complete, clearly written and concise text is written for self-paced learning, helping those instructors who might not be fully trained in 3D modeling and those interested in self-teaching. Includes instructions and project files for exporting the finished project environment into the 3D game engine, Unity. A companion site (www.3dsMaxBasics.com) includes working 3ds Max project files for chapters, notes and corrections, a 3ds Max user interface, 3ds Max shortcut keys and more.

As a textbook for learning the fundamentals of modeling, rigging and animating 3D-modeled characters for use in video games, this step-by-step lesson book builds on the reader's modeling skills acquired from reading Volume I. The reader will model characters for the Castle Environment created in Volume I, which will be rigged using the Character Animation Toolkit (CAT) in 3ds Max and animated with game moves. The Skin Modifier is used for associating the meshes to the rigs and the characters are then exported to the Unity game engine and integrated into the Castle Scene with a Third Person Character camera. As the text introduces new modeling skills, it additionally calls on the reader to perform repetitive tasks, reinforcing skills learned in the process. The content is presented as if the reader is in a working video game studio, being responsible for researching asset design and providing the team with placeholder assets and final model assets that are unwrapped and custom textured using both box mapping and the 3ds Max Quick Peel tool. Although the text uses Autodesk 3ds Max for the modeling program, the principles are transferable to other major modeling programs. Key Features: The goal of this book is to teach the fundamentals of 3D modeling video game characters in a simplified, logical progression optimized for learning at a beginner level. Rigging principles (Linking, Inverse Kinematics [IK], Forward Kinematics [FK], Skin Deformation, Weighting Vertices and more) are introduced in a gradual progression to allow maximum comprehension and retention. This series of modeling exercises is the result of having successfully taught over 1000 video game students the fundamentals of 3D modeling. This complete, clearly written and concise text is written for self-paced learning, helping those instructors who might not be fully trained in 3D modeling and those interested in self-teaching. Includes instructions and project files for exporting the finished project environment into the 3D game engine, Unity. A companion site (www.3dsMaxBasics.com) includes working 3ds Max project files for chapters, notes and corrections, a 3ds Max user interface, 3ds Max shortcut keys and more.

The use of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) represents a new era in remote sensing technology. A complete handbook for anyone who must design an SAR system capable of reliably producing high quality image data products, free from image artifacts and calibrated in terms of the target backscatter coefficient. Combines fundamentals underlying the SAR imaging process and the practical system engineering required to produce quality images from a real SAR system. Beginning with a broad overview of SAR technology, it goes on to examine SAR system capabilities and components and detail the techniques required for design and development of the SAR ground data system with emphasis on the correlation processing. Intended for SAR system engineers and researchers, it is generously illustrated for maximum clarity.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. This book presents the VISCERAL project benchmarks for analysis and retrieval of 3D medical images (CT and MRI) on a large scale, which used an innovative cloud-based evaluation approach where the image data were stored centrally on a cloud infrastructure and participants placed their programs in virtual machines on the cloud. The book presents the points of view of both the organizers of the VISCERAL benchmarks and the participants. The book is divided into five parts. Part I presents the cloud-based benchmarking and Evaluation-as-a-Service paradigm that the VISCERAL benchmarks used. Part II focuses on the datasets of medical images annotated with ground truth created in VISCERAL that continue to be available for research. It also covers the practical aspects of obtaining permission to use medical data and manually annotating 3D medical images efficiently and effectively. The VISCERAL benchmarks are described in Part III, including a presentation and analysis of metrics used in evaluation of medical image analysis and search. Lastly, Parts IV and V present reports by some of the participants in the VISCERAL benchmarks, with Part IV devoted to the anatomy benchmarks and Part V to the retrieval benchmark. This book has two main audiences: the datasets as well as the segmentation and retrieval results are of most interest to medical imaging researchers, while eScience and computational science experts benefit from the insights into using the Evaluation-as-a-Service paradigm for evaluation and benchmarking on huge amounts of data.

This book discusses computer vision, a noncontact as well as a nondestructive technique involving the development of theoretical and algorithmic tools for automatic visual understanding and recognition which finds huge applications in agricultural productions. It also entails how rendering of machine learning techniques to computer vision algorithms is boosting this sector with better productivity by developing more precise systems. Computer vision and machine learning (CV-ML) helps in plant disease assessment along with crop condition monitoring to control the degradation of yield, quality, and severe financial loss for farmers. Significant scientific and technological advances have been made in defect assessment, quality grading, disease recognition, pests, insects, fruits, and vegetable types recognition and evaluation of a wide range of agricultural plants, crops, leaves, and fruits. The book discusses intelligent robots developed with the touch of CV-ML which can help farmers to perform various tasks like planting, weeding, harvesting, plant health monitoring, and so on. The topics covered in the book include plant, leaf, and fruit disease detection, crop health monitoring, applications of robots in agriculture, precision farming, assessment of product quality and defects, pest, insect, fruits, and vegetable types recognition.

This volume presents the latest developments in the highly active and rapidly growing field of diffusion MRI. The reader will find numerous contributions covering a broad range of topics, from the mathematical foundations of the diffusion process and signal generation, to new computational methods and estimation techniques for the in-vivo recovery of microstructural and connectivity features, as well as frontline applications in neuroscience research and clinical practice. These proceedings contain the papers presented at the 2017 MICCAI Workshop on Computational Diffusion MRI (CDMRI'17) held in Quebec, Canada on September 10, 2017, sharing new perspectives on the most recent research challenges for those currently working in the field, but also offering a valuable starting point for anyone interested in learning computational techniques in diffusion MRI. This book includes rigorous mathematical derivations, a large number of rich, full-colour visualisations and clinically relevant results. As such, it will be of interest to researchers and practitioners in the fields of computer science, MRI physics and applied mathematics.

This book explores technologies related to bodily interaction and creativity from a multi-disciplinary perspective. By taking such an approach, the collection offers a comprehensive view of digital technology research that both extends our notions of the body and creativity through a digital lens, and informs of the role of technology in practices central to the arts and humanities. Crucially, Digital Bodies foregrounds creativity, the interrogation of technologies and the notion of embodiment within the various disciplines of art, design, performance and social science. In doing so, it explores a potential or virtual new sense of the embodied self. This book will appeal to academics, practitioners and those with an interest in not only how digital technologies affect the body, but also how they can enhance human creativity.

The book provides copyright protection approaches for videos using watermarking. The various watermarking techniques using various transforms such as discrete cosine transform (DCT), discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and singular value decomposition (SVD) for videos are presented. The book also provides video watermarking approach using compressive sensing (CS) theory. The presented watermarking techniques are designed and implemented using color digital videos. The performance of the presented techniques is evaluated using Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Normalized Correlation (NC).

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 tutorial-based book allows readers to create a first-person game from start to finish using industry-standard (and free to student) tools of Unity, Substance Painter, and Maya. 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. The book then 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 game studios across the world * All software used are free to students * When complete, students will have a playable version of an FPS game Jingtian 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. Adam Watkins is a 20-year veteran of 3D education. He holds an MFA in 3D Animation and a BFA in Theatre Arts from Utah State University. He currently is the Coordinator and Professor of the 3D Animation & Game Department 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.

Questioning essentialist forms of feminist discourse, this work develops an innovative approach to gender and feminist theory by drawing together the work of key feminist and gender theorists, such as Judith Butler and Donna Haraway, and the biopolitical philosophy of Giorgio Agamben and Gilles Deleuze. By analysing representations of the female cyborg figure, the gynoid, in science fiction literature, television, film and videogames, the work acknowledges its normative and subversive properties while also calling for a new feminist politics of selfhood and autonomy implied by the posthuman qualities of the female machine.

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 Unity, Substance Painter, and Maya. 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. The book then 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 game studios across the world * All software used are free to students * When complete, students will have a playable version of an FPS game Jingtian 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. Adam Watkins is a 20-year veteran of 3D education. He holds an MFA in 3D Animation and a BFA in Theatre Arts from Utah State University. He currently is the Coordinator and Professor of the 3D Animation & Game Department 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.

The vision of a world in which privacy persists and security is ensured but the full potential of the technology is nevertheless tapped guides this work. It is argued that security and privacy can be ensured using technical safeguards if the whole RFID system is designed properly. The challenge is immense since many constraints exist for providing security and privacy in RFID systems: technically and economically but also ethically and socially. Not only security and privacy needs to be provided but the solutions also need to be inexpensive, practical, reliable, scalable, flexible, inter-organizational, and lasting.

After analyzing the problem area in detail, this work introduces a number of new concepts and protocols that provide security and ensure privacy in RFID systems by technical means. The classic RFID model is extended and considerations in new directions are taken. This leads to innovative solutions with advantageous characteristics. Finally, a comprehensive framework including required protocols for operation is proposed. It can be used within a global scope, supports inter-organizational cooperation and data sharing, and adheres to all the architectural guidelines derived in this work. Security and privacy is provided by technical means in an economic manner. Altogether, the goal of building scalable and efficient RFID systems on a global, inter-organizational scale without neglecting security and privacy has been achieved well.

Locating Imagination in Popular Culture offers a multi-disciplinary account of the ways in which popular culture, tourism and notions of place intertwine in an environment characterized by ongoing processes of globalization, digitization and an increasingly ubiquitous nature of multi-media. Centred around the concept of imagination, the authors demonstrate how popular culture and media are becoming increasingly important in the ways in which places and localities are imagined, and how they also subsequently stimulate a desire to visit the actual places in which people's favourite stories are set. With examples drawn from around the globe, the book offers a unique study of the role of narratives conveyed through media in stimulating and reflecting desire in tourism. This book will have appeal in a wide variety of academic disciplines, ranging from media and cultural studies to fan- and tourism studies, cultural geography, literary studies and cultural sociology.

This book takes a hemispheric approach to contemporary urban intervention, examining urban ecologies, communication technologies, and cultural practices in the twenty-first century. It argues that governmental and social regimes of control and forms of political resistance converge in speculation on disaster and that this convergence has formed a vision of urban environments in the Americas in which forms of play and imaginations of catastrophe intersect in the vertical field. Schifani explores a diverse range of resistant urban interventions, imagining the city as on the verge of or enmeshed in catastrophe. She also presents a model of ecocriticism that addresses aesthetic practices and forms of play in the urban environment. Tracing the historical roots of such tactics as well as mapping their hopes for the future will help the reader to locate the impacts of climate change not only on the physical space of the city, but also on the epistemological and aesthetic strategies that cities can help to engender. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of Urban Studies, Media Studies, American Studies, Global Studies, and the broad and interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities.

An Image Processing Tour of College Mathematics aims to provide meaningful context for reviewing key topics of the college mathematics curriculum, to help students gain confidence in using concepts and techniques of applied mathematics, to increase student awareness of recent developments in mathematical sciences, and to help students prepare for graduate studies. The topics covered include a library of elementary functions, basic concepts of descriptive statistics, probability distributions of functions of random variables, definitions and concepts behind first- and second-order derivatives, most concepts and techniques of traditional linear algebra courses, an introduction to Fourier analysis, and a variety of discrete wavelet transforms - all of that in the context of digital image processing. Features Pre-calculus material and basic concepts of descriptive statistics are reviewed in the context of image processing in the spatial domain. Key concepts of linear algebra are reviewed both in the context of fundamental operations with digital images and in the more advanced context of discrete wavelet transforms. Some of the key concepts of probability theory are reviewed in the context of image equalization and histogram matching. The convolution operation is introduced painlessly and naturally in the context of naive filtering for denoising and is subsequently used for edge detection and image restoration. An accessible elementary introduction to Fourier analysis is provided in the context of image restoration. Discrete wavelet transforms are introduced in the context of image compression, and the readers become more aware of some of the recent developments in applied mathematics. This text helps students of mathematics ease their way into mastering the basics of scientific computer programming.

The aim of this book is to outline the concept of entropy, various types of entropies and their implementation to evaluate a variety of biomedical signals/images. The book emphasizes various entropy-based image pre-processing methods which are essential for the development of suitable computerized examination systems. The recent research works on biomedical signal evaluation confirms that signal analysis provides vital information regarding the physiological condition of the patient, and the efficient evaluation of these signals can help to diagnose the nature and the severity of the disease. This book emphasizes various entropy-based image pre-processing methods which are essential for the development of suitable computerized examination systems for the analysis of biomedical images recorded with a variety of modalities. The work discusses the image pro-processing methods with the Entropies, such as Kapur, Tsallis, Shannon and Fuzzy on a class of RGB-scaled and gray-scaled medical pictures. The performance of the proposed technique is justified with the help of suitable case studies, which involves x-ray image analysis, MRI analysis and CT analysis. This book is intended for medical signal/image analysts, undergraduate and postgraduate students, researchers, and medical scientists interested in biomedical data evaluation.

In view of better results expected from examination of medical datasets (images) with hybrid (integration of thresholding and segmentation) image processing methods, this work focuses on implementation of possible hybrid image examination techniques for medical images. It describes various image thresholding and segmentation methods which are essential for the development of such a hybrid processing tool. Further, this book presents the essential details, such as test image preparation, implementation of a chosen thresholding operation, evaluation of threshold image, and implementation of segmentation procedure and its evaluation, supported by pertinent case studies. Aimed at researchers/graduate students in the medical image processing domain, image processing, and computer engineering, this book: Provides broad background on various image thresholding and segmentation techniques Discusses information on various assessment metrics and the confusion matrix Proposes integration of the thresholding technique with the bio-inspired algorithms Explores case studies including MRI, CT, dermoscopy, and ultrasound images Includes separate chapters on machine learning and deep learning for medical image processing

The Joy of Photoshop is the long-awaited book from the social media sensation James Fridman. Have you ever taken a seemingly perfect picture only to have it ruined by one tiny detail? Photoshop master James Fridman is only too happy to help, even if he sometimes takes requests a little too literally. The Joy of Photoshop contains James's best-loved and funniest image alterations. From the woman who wished to look like a mermaid, to super-fans who want to be edited into their favourite movies, his followers never get quite what they asked for. Including plenty of never-before-seen pictures, this meme-tastic book will have you in stitches!