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.
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.
9126668
Hand Gesture Tracking for Wearable Computing Systems
A spin stabilized, earth orbitting satellite having a phased array antenna capable of radiating a plurality of steered electromagnetic beams to predetermined earth locations. The antenna array extends around the satellite and is made up of individual elements which are energized through semiconductor diode devices by electron beams. The electron beams are controlled by fields having the same frequency as the spin frequency of the satellite.
206800753
Automatic character location and segmentation in color scene images
This paper describes a connected component (CC)-based approach to automatic text location and segmentation in natural scene images. A multi-group decomposition scheme is used to deal with the complexity of the color background. Connected component extraction is implemented using the block adjacency graph (BAG) algorithm after noise filtering and runlength smearing (RLS) operation. Some heuristic features and priority adaptive segmentation (PAS) of characters are proposed in block candidate verification and grayscale-based recognition. A prototype system is completed and the experimental results prove the effectiveness of the proposed method.
8140967
Character-like region verification for extracting text in scene images
This paper proposes a method of identifying character-like regions in order to extract and recognize characters in natural color scene images automatically. After connected component extraction based on a multi-group decomposition scheme, alignment analysis is used to check the block candidates, namely, the character-like regions in each binary image layer and the final composed image. Priority adaptive segmentation (PAS) is implemented to obtain accurate foreground pixels of the character in each block. Then some heuristic meanings such as statistical features, recognition confidence, and alignment properties, are employed to justify the segmented characters. The algorithms are robust for a wide range of character fonts, shooting conditions, and color backgrounds. Results of our experiments are promising for real applications.
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.
4407504
Optimal ISP subscription for Internet multihoming: algorithm design and implication analysis
Multihoming is a popular method used by large enterprises and stub ISPs to connect to the Internet to reduce cost and improve performance. Recently researchers have studied the potential benefits of multihoming and proposed protocols and algorithms to realize these benefits. They focus on how to dynamically select which ISPs to use for forwarding and receiving packets, and assume that the set of subscribed ISPs is given a priori. In practice, a user often has the freedom to choose which subset of ISPs among all available ISPs to subscribe to. We call the problem of how to choose the optimal set of ISPs the ISP subscription problem. In this paper, We design a dynamic programming algorithm to solve the ISP subscription problem optimally. We also design a more efficient algorithm for a large class of common pricing functions. Using real traffic traces and realistic pricing data, we show that our algorithm reduces users' cost. Next we study how ISPs respond to users' optimal ISP subscription by adjusting their pricing strategies. We call this problem the ISP pricing problem. Using a realistic charging model, we formulate the problem as a non-cooperative game. We first prove that if cost is the only criterion used by a user to determine which subset of ISPs to subscribe to, at any equilibrium all ISPs receive zero revenue. We then study a more practical formulation in which different ISPs provide different levels of reliability and users choose ISPs to both improve reliability and reduce cost. We analyze this problem and show that at any equilibrium an ISP's revenue is positive and determined by its reliability.
796248
An auctioning reputation system based on anomaly
Existing reputation systems used by online auction houses do not address the concern of a buyer shopping for commodities - finding a good bargain. These systems do not provide information on the practices adopted by sellers to ensure profitable auctions. These practices may be legitimate, like imposing a minimum starting bid on an auction, or fraudulent, like using colluding bidders to inflate the final price in a practice known as shilling.We develop a reputation system to help buyers identify sellers whose auctions seem price-inflated. Our reputation system is based upon models that characterize sellers according to statistical metrics related to price inflation. We combine the statistical models with anomaly detection techniques to identify the set of suspicious sellers. The output of our reputation system is a set of values for each seller representing the confidence with which the system can say that the auctions of the seller are price-inflated.We evaluate our reputation system on 604 high-volume sellers who posted 37,525 auctions on eBay. Our system automatically pinpoints sellers whose auctions contain potential shill bidders. When we manually analyze these sellers' auctions, we find that many winning bids are at about the items' market values, thus undercutting a buyer's ability to find a bargain and demonstrating the effectiveness of our reputation system.
6690308
PEPA Analysis of MAP Effects in Hierarchical Mobile IPv6
To overcome the drawbacks of the mobile IPv6 protocol on handling local mobility management, IETF proposed the HMIPv6 protocol which introduces an intermediate mobility anchor point (MAP) to hide the movement of a mobile node within a local area. However, the MAP forms a bottleneck in the network since all the traffic destined for its served nodes has to go through it. Most research on HMIPv6 focuses on protocol optimisation, and performance analysis of HMIPv6 is usually simulation-based. In this paper, we employ a performance evaluation formalism named PEPA to investigate the performance tradeoffs of MAPs in HMIPv6. Performance measures such as response time and MAP utilisation are presented.
7017728
Indexing Genomic Databases for Fast Homology Searching
Genomic sequence databases has been widely used by molecular biologists for homology searching. However, as amino acid and nucleotide databases are growing in size at an alarming rate, traditional brute force approach of comparing a query sequence against each of the database sequences is becoming prohibitively expensive. In this paper, we re-examine the problem of searching for homology in large protein databases. We proposed a novel filter-and-refine approach to speed up the search process. The scheme operates in two phases. In the filtering phase, a small set of candidate database sequences (as compared to all sequences in the database) is quickly identified. This is realized using a signature-based scheme. In the refinement phase, the query sequence is matched against the sequences in the candidate set using any local alignment strategies. Our preliminary experimental results show that the proposed method results in significant savings in computation without sacrificing on the accuracy of the answers as compared to FASTA.
8760513
The Design of a Nanometer Biosensor and Its Microfluidic Integration