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.
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.
9889663
Feature Similarity Based Redundancy Reduction for Gene Selection
this paper we propose a feature similarity based redundancy reduction (FSRR) algorithm for high-dimensional gene expression data analysis. FSRR has two steps. First, the relevance of each feature is evaluated. Second, based on the relevance, the redundant features are removed by feature similarity. The efficiency and effectiveness of our algorithm is established through an experimental study using gene expression data. Four state-of-art feature ranking algorithms and three feature similarity measures are compared and discussed in our work. The results indicate that our algorithm has the capability of finding a well-suited feature set and improving the classification accuracy.
14158906
A New Certified Email Protocol
As a continuative effort of our WICS'05 paper, a new certified Email protocol is proposed. Email is a standard communication method nowadays but certified email is poorly developed and has very limited application. A certified email protocol assures non-repudiability which means that if the email is successfully sent, the sender cannot deny s/he has actually sent the mail and the recipient cannot deny s/he has actually received it. Our protocol uses an efficient RSA-based convertible signature with non- interactive partial signature proof method and additively split signing secret key.
15004157
A Semantic QoS-Aware Discovery Framework for Web Services
Augmenting web services with explicit semantics forms the foundation of Service Oriented Architectures (SOAs) automation. As more and more Semantic Web Services (SWSs) are deployed, similar SWSs could have quite different quality-of-service (QoS) levels. The QoS-aware discovery becomes an important challenge. While some efforts try to solve it via Constraint Programming (CP), they suffer from the purely syntactic matchmaking method. Furthermore, the construction of constraints and the selection of services are completely dependent on the literal translation from QoS descriptions, which increase obstacles to actually apply CP. In this paper, we propose a semantic QoS-aware framework for SWSs discovery by combining the semantic matchmaking and CP. Initially, a QoS ontology is presented to define QoS data into service descriptions. Then the ontology reasoning is adopted to change previous syntactic matchmaking into a semantic way. Through confirming the compatibility of concepts, complex QoS conditions are solved as constraints and a selection algorithm is proposed to obtain the optimal offer. Finally, the prototype implementation of our framework is discussed and a SWSs discovery case is used to illustrate the comprehensive discovery process.
189947
Evaluating Service Identification with Design Metrics on Business Process Decomposition
One of the key activities to construct a successful Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is the identification of services with the right level of abstraction. Most of existing SOA design methodologies advocate identifying services from the top-down decomposition of business processes. However, the identification quality in these methodologies heavily depends on the expertise and experience of individual designers. The ability to quantitatively evaluate service identification is absolutely needed. In this paper, we propose an approach that supports such evaluation by applying the measurement technology to the service-based business process decomposition. A model to capture related architectural elements with their relationships is presented. A set of design metrics are proposed for measuring various features of identified services in the service portfolio, including service granularity, coupling, cohesion, and business entity convergence. To apply the approach, a prototypical measurement tool for service identification is developed. An automotive work order scenario is used as an illustration example to explain our approach and demonstrate its effectiveness.
10702245
A wireless LAN-based indoor positioning technology
Context-aware computing is an emerging computing paradigm that can provide new or improved services by exploiting user context information. In this paper, we present a wireless-local-area-network-based (WLAN-based) indoor positioning technology. The wireless device deploys a position-determination model to gather location information from collected WLAN signals. A model-based signal distribution training scheme is proposed to trade off the accuracy of signal distribution and training workload. A tracking-assistant positioning algorithm is presented to employ knowledge of the area topology to assist the procedure of position determination. We have set up a positioning system at the IBM China Research Laboratory. Our experimental results indicate an accuracy of 2 m with a 90% probability for static devices and, for moving (walking) devices, an accuracy of 5 m with a 90% probability. Moreover, the complexity of the training procedure is greatly reduced compared with other positioning algorithms.