Published papers

Technologies related to urban air mobility (UAM) are being studied worldwide. However, the social acceptance of UAMs and drones has not been investigated thoroughly. To address this issue, the authors propose a social acceptance evaluation method that combines subjective assessments by questionnaires with objective evaluations using a Kansei Analyzer based on a simple electroencephalograph. The effectiveness of the proposed method was confirmed. In the benefit-effect assessment conducted in December 2023, scene assumption was proposed as a means of improving social acceptance. However, the reliability of the obtained data was insufficient, and there was a possibility of not preparing an appropriate experimental environment or assuming sufficient scenes. Even if the subject is able to adequately assume the scene, it is difficult to ignore the discrepancy between the actual UAM and CG. Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the discrepancy between the actual UAM and CG by improving the experimental environment. As it is difficult to conduct experiments using an actual UAM, in this study, we used a drone (multicopter) for the investigation. This paper presents the results from a preliminary experiment conducted with students in our research group, rather than with participants from the general public.

It is commonly believed that by drawing human's attention to particular objects, human activity can be effectively facilitated. The aim of this paper is to propose a novel video modification method for directing gaze to specific objects of interest, using a saliency map model based on L*a*b* color space. First, we compute the saliency map, and modify the L*a*b* components of each frame based on the obtained saliency map for adjusting saliency value. And then, we repeat this process until the specified objects has become the most salient in each frame. By applying the our attention retargeting method to a video, we can obtain the video in which the specific object shows the highest saliency.