20367321
Interactive Storyboard: Animated Story Creation on Touch Interfaces
Storytelling, or the telling of narrative, plays a central role in human experience. However, prevalent tools for animated story creation are so complex that expertise is required to grasp them. To help novices such as children create a wide range of visual stories quickly and easily, in this paper we present the design and evaluation of the Interactive Storyboard, an application that enables novices to create vivid animations on touch interfaces, and further to generate live digital stories in a cooperative way. User interviews help us reach the basic assumptions of use cases and design principles for storytelling via Interactive Storyboard. The prototyping application is evaluated by potential users including children and parents, after which improvement on usability and extension of functionalities is conducted. Further usability tests indicate that the Storyboard application is easy to use, more efficient and attractive than formal tools in concrete scenarios, and effectively enhances novices' creativity.
12667544
Camera Readable 2D Bar Codes Design and Decoding for Mobile Phones
2D bar codes were designed to carry significantly more data than its 1D counterpart. Thanks to the popular combination of cameras and mobile phones, it will naturally bring great commercial value to use the camera phone for 2D bar code reading. This paper addresses the problem of specific 2D bar code design for mobile phones and introduces a low-level solution of matrix codes. At the same time, we propose an efficient scheme for 2D bar codes decoding, of which the effort is put on solutions of the difficulties introduced by low image quality that is very common in bar code images taken by a phone camera.
17705372
1D Bar Code Reading on Camera Phones
The availability of camera phones provides people with a mobile platform for decoding bar codes, whereas conventional scanners lack mobility. However, using a normal camera phone in such applications is challenging due to the out-of-focus problem. In this paper, we present the research effort on the bar code reading algorithms using a VGA camera phone, NOKIA 7650. EAN-13, a widely used 1D bar code standard, is taken as an example to show the efficiency of the method. A wavelet-based bar code region location and knowledge-based bar code segmentation scheme is applied to extract bar code characters from poor-quality images. All the segmented bar code characters are input to the recognition engine, and based on the recognition distance, the bar code character string with the smallest total distance is output as the final recognition result of the bar code. In order to train an efficient recognition engine, the modified Generalized Learning Vector Quantization (GLVQ) method is designed for optimizing a feature extraction matrix and the class reference vectors. 19 584 samples segmented from more than 1000 bar code images captured by NOKIA 7650 are involved in the training process. Testing on 292 bar code images taken by the same phone, the correct recognition rate of the entire bar code set reaches 85.62%. We are confident that auto focus or macro modes on camera phones will bring the presented method into real world mobile use.
35188491
Requirement and Design Analysis for the Post-Trauma Mobile Psychology Service
In 2008, a serious earthquake struck Sichuan province. Tens of thousands of people in disaster areas have suffered injuries both in physical and mental aspects. Thus, a Post-Trauma Mobile Service (PTMS) is launched and implemented in Sichuan province, which creates a new mode of long-distance psychological counseling service. This study discusses the comparisons between mobile-based and traditional psychological counseling method, indicating that mobile-based method is a significant experiment both in the post-disaster psychological assistance work and mobile communication service. Besides, requirement analysis is explored, which guides the work of PTMS system design. The system design is described in three stages including architecture design, service mode design and industry chain analysis, in which online and offline service mode are highlighted. This study presents the implementation of PTMS service, which shows that the mobile-based platform and service mode have acceptable psychometric properties, equivalent with paper-based method.
14093058
A virtual mouse system for mobile device
This paper presents a novel virtual mouse system for mobile phones. The system is based on computer vision techniques. It first captures an image using the camera of the mobile phone, then extracts feature points of the scene and tracks them. By using this algorithm we can estimate the camera motion and give the translation vector to our virtual mouse interface. We use NOKIA 6630 camera phone as the developing platform which has a Mega Pixel camera on the back of it. The experiments show the promising results.
16868039
Automatic text discovering through stroke-based segmentation and text string combination
In this paper we present a novel framework of automatic text discovering for content-based multimedia application. For single image, the stroke-based binarization and the coarse-to-fine text extraction will collaborate to generate a clean text image for recognition. For image sequence, multi-frame text enhancement is adopted to increase the text/background contrast, and the recognition results are finally refined by the text string combination algorithm to get more precise semantic information. Two prototype demos have been successfully developed on mobile phones. The experimental results on different platforms show the superior performance of the proposed method.
10958697
PDPTW Based Taxi Dispatch Modeling for Booking Service
This research involves a study of the existing taxi dispatch system employed by taxi operators in Singapore. Based on the booking surcharges, there are generally two categories of taxi bookings, current and advance. Current bookings are requests that taxi should reach the customer immediately or within half an hour, and advance bookings are requests made at least half an hour in advance. In this paper, a novel trip-chaining strategy for taxi advance booking based on a customized algorithm of Pickup and Delivery Problem with Time Window (PDPTW) was proposed. The idea is to chain several bookings with demand time points which are spread out within a reasonable period of time, and with each pick-up point coinciding with or being within close proximity to the previous drop-off location. Based on the experimental results, the proposed system has the potential to improve the taxi booking service currently operating in Singapore.
33243327
Certain Predicates Defined by Induction Schemata
It is known that we can introduce in number theory (for example, the system Z of Hilbert-Bernays) by induction schemata certain predicates of natural numbers which cannot be expressed explicitly within the framework of number theory. The question arises how we can define these predicates in some richer system, without employing induction schemata. In this paper a general notion of definability by induction (relative to number theory), which seems to apply to all the known predicates of this kind, is introduced; and it is proved that in a system L 1 which forms an extension of number theory all predicates which are definable by induction (hereafter to be abbreviated d.i.) according to the definition are explicitly expressible. In order to define such predicates and prove theorems answering to their induction schemata, we have to allow certain impredicative classes in L 1 . However, if we want merely to prove that for each constant number the special case of the induction schema for a predicate d.i. is provable, we do not have to assume the existence of impredicative classes. A certain weaker system L 2 , in which only predicative classes of natural numbers are allowed, is sufficient for the purpose. It is noted that a truth definition for number theory can be obtained in L 2 . Consistency proofs for number theory do not seem to be formalizable in L 2 , although they can, it is observed, be formalized in L 1 . In general, given any ordinary formal system (say Zermelo set theory), it is possible to define by induction schemata, in the same manner as in number theory, certain predicates which are not explicitly definable in the system. Here again, by extending the system in an analogous fashion, these predicates become expressible in the resulting system. The crucial predicate instrumental to obtaining a truth definition for a given system is taken as an example.
4594972
New Fair Payment Protocols
Fair payment protocol is designed to guarantee fairness in electronic purchasing, that is, no party can falsely deny involvement in the transaction or having sent/received the specific items/payment. In this paper we first present an efficient fair payment protocol providing invisibility of TTP, timeliness, and standard RSA signatures as the final non-repudiation evidences. Then we present a second payment protocol which is the first one to provide abuse-freeness. Our protocols can be easily integrated into the existing electronic payment systems.
33547700
Collaborative and interactive room design on the web
Design on the Web raises challenging questions concerning how users interact with objects, applications, and other users. In this work, we propose a collaborative and interactive client-server design framework and implement a room design system for our study. We have integrated technologies used in distributed computation (Java and CORBA) and computer graphics (VRML). It divides the design process into three tiers. First, collaborative and interactive design, viewing, and publishing. Second, scene generation. Third, scene database management. Our system can be applied in Electronic Commerce to improve the existing systems by allowing customers to select furniture and to visualize the whole furnished room in 3D.
12111515
Algorithm of integrating QFD and TRIZ for the innovative design process
TRIZ, the Russian acronym of the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving, is a useful tool that can solve the problem of "how to do" effectively in the innovative design process, while QFD (Quality Function Deployment) is able to settle the problem of "what to do". Although the potential of using both QFD and TRIZ in the product design process is huge, there are little tools to integrate these two methods effectively. In this research, we describe an algorithm that can integrate QFD and TRIZ effectively for the purpose of the innovative design process. The core of the algorithm is to identify the contradictions in TRIZ by defining rules based on HOQ (House of Quality) in QFD. A software tool called TRIZmatrix is developed based on this algorithm. Application of the algorithm to the case of the airbag problem is studied in detail. The software application and the case study show the advantage of this algorithm for CAI (computer aided innovation) software development.