Abstract

In Africa, there are a number of languages with their own indigenous scripts. This paper presents an OCR for Amharic scripts. Amharic is the official and working language of Ethiopia. This is possibly the first attempt towards the development of an OCR system for Amharic. Research in the recognition of Amharic script faces major challenges due to (i) the use of more than 300 characters in writing and (ii) existence of a large set of visually similar characters. In this paper, we propose a two-stage feature extraction scheme using PCA and LDA, followed by a decision DAG classifier with SVMs as the nodes. Recognition results are presented to demonstrate the performance on the various printing variations (fonts, styles and sizes) and real-life degraded documents such as books, magazines and newspapers.

Abstract

In this paper we describe a spectrum of algorithm for rectification of document images of camera based analysis and recognition. Clues like document boundaries page ,page layout information, organisation of text and graphics, components, apriori knowledge of script or selected symbols etc. are effectively used for removal of perspective effect and comforting the frontal view needed for a typical document image analysis algorithm. Appropriate results from projective geometry for planar surfaces are exploited in these situations.

Abstract

In this paper we propose a novel technique for robust visual servoing in presence of a large proportion of outliers in image measurements. The method employs robust statistical techniques and novel view prediction for improving the performance. We identify a set of points from initial and reference images and compute the essential matrix relating them. The selected points are predicted from the initial and reference images to the current frame using essential matrices. A function of the difference between the observed and predicted image point measurements is used to identify outliers. This technique is validated with many experiments and compared with other robust methods in a simulation framework.

Abstract

Many of the human activities such as Jumping, Squatting have a correlated spatiotemporal structure. They are composed of homogeneous units. These units, which we refer to as actions, are often common to more than one activity. Therefore, it is essential to have a representation which can capture these activities effectively. To develop this, we model the frames of activities as a mixture model of actions and employ a probabilistic approach to learn their low-dimensional representation. We present recognition results on seven activities performed by various individuals. The results demonstrate the versatility and the ability of the model to capture the ensemble of human activities.

Abstract

Digital Libraries have received wide attention in the recent years allowing access to digital information from anywhere across the world. They have become widely accepted and even preferred information sources in areas of education, science and others. When the full potential of digital libraries is realized, any citizen will for the first time be able to access all human knowledge immediately from any location. For a successful and useful Digital Library, the assurance of quality of the product from digitization process is quite essential. In this paper we discuss the major quality concerns of data from the digitization process, and how we assure for better quality before they are web enabled for the end-user to use. Also we discuss a Quality Management Framework that we applied for the improvement of both the Quality of the digital output and the efficiency of the processes.

Abstract

Image-based rendering techniques include those with geometry and those without. Geometric information in the form of a depth map aligned with the image holds a lot of promise for IBR due to the several methods available to capture it. It can improve the quality of generated views using a limited number of views. Compression of light fields or multiple images has attracted a lot of attention in the past. Compression of multiple depth maps of the same scene has not been explored much in the literature. We propose a method for compressing multiple depth maps in this paper using geometric proxy. Different quality of rendering and compression ratio can be achieved by varying different parameters. Experiments show the effectiveness of the compression technique on several model data

Abstract

Sketch matching algorithms are commonly used for indexing and retrieval of documents based on printed or hand-drawn sketches. One could use a hand-held computer to do sketch-based queries to a database containing hand-drawn and printed sketches. We present an on-line hand-drawn sketch matching algorithm based on a line-based representation of sketches. A distance measure is defined for comparing two sketches based on this representation. The algorithm is computationally efficient and achieves a recall rate of 88.44% at the same precision, when tested on a database of 150 sketches collected from 5 users.

Abstract

This paper presents a software tool for performing the static and dynamic analysis of regular and simple multi-storied structures. This analysis procedure is based on IS 1893:2002 (Part I), Criteria for Earthquake Resistant Design of Structures. This tool is a windows based software program developed in Visual Basic. The tool provides a userfriendly GUI for the calculation of base shear and its distribution over the height of the structure, depending on the input parameters. Usual input parameters are structural dimensions, type of structure, soil type, purpose of structure and location. Though this tool is simple, can be used for verification of design within short time. This tool is aimed to help students, architects and engineers during design of earthquake resistant structures.

Abstract

When an active bedrock fault ruptures, the movement along the fault propagates through the overlying soil and produces zones of intense shear. If the fault movement propagates upto or near the ground surface, the damage to constructed facilities due to faulting, in conjunction with that induced by strong ground motion, can be significant. This paper contributes to the understanding of the response of soil deposits to the underlying bedrock fault displacement. In the conventional attenuation relationship, peak ground acceleration shows maximum value at the closest distance from the fault. However, in the real observations, sometimes it is found that the damage near to the surface fault is not maximum, instead it is high little away from the surface rupture zone. To understand the above-mentioned response of soil deposits, we attempted to develop a new application to Applied Element Method (AEM) by modeling the fault rupture zone. In this, we study the behavior of dip-slip faults. The effect of the slip velocity on the ground motion is studied first and then the attenuation of PGA in the near fault zone is studied. Effect of the material properties is also discussed.

Abstract

In this papcr, wc propose an approach for continuous speech recognition by spotting consonant-vowel (CV) units. The niain issues in spotting CV units are the location of anchor points and labelling the regions around these anchor points using suitable classifiers. The vowel onset points (VOPs) trave bcen used as an- chor points. The distribution capturing ability of autoassociative neural network (AA”) models is explored for detection of VOPs in continnous speech. We consider support vector machine (SVM) based classifiers due to their ability of generalisation from limited training data and also due to their inherent discriminative learn- ing. The CV spotting approach for continuous speech recognition has bccn dcmonstratcd for scntcnccs in Indian languages