Web-Base Help Desk System for Telecenter

Help Desk System is an integral part of many organizations that must support products or services. In the complex help desk environment, analysts with varying skill levels rely on their expertise as well as systems, tools, and repositories to answer a range of problems.Telecentre (TC) often needs support to address problems faced in their daily routine, and it is expensive to call or ask for visits from the stakeholders. Hence, the study will propose a web based Help Desk System for the telecentre to provide administrator with the appropriate details relevant to their requirements. The study will follow the Spiral development model

Accelerating Halide on an FPGA by using CIRCT and Calyx as an intermediate step to go from a high-level and software-centric IRs down to RTL

Image processing and, more generally, array processing play an essential role in modern life: from applying filters to the images that we upload to social media to running object detection algorithms on self-driving cars. Optimizing these algorithms can be complex and often results in non-portable code. The Halide language provides a simple way to write image and array processing algorithms by separating the algorithm definition (what needs to be executed) from its execution schedule (how it is executed), delivering state-of-the-art performance that exceeds hand-tuned parallel and vectorized code. Due to the inherent parallel nature of these algorithms, FPGAs present an attractive acceleration platform. While previous work has added an RTL code generator to Halide, and utilized other heterogeneous computing languages as an intermediate step, these projects are no longer maintained. MLIR is an attractive solution, allowing the generation of code that can target multiple devices, such as parallelized and vectorized CPU code, OpenMP, and CUDA. CIRCT builds on top of MLIR to convert generic MLIR code to register transfer level (RTL) languages by using Calyx, a new intermediate language (IL) for compiling high-level programs into hardware designs. This thesis presents a novel flow that implements an MLIR code generator for Halide that generates RTL code, adding the necessary wrappers to execute that code on Xilinx FPGA devices. Additionally, it implements a Halide runtime using the Xilinx Runtime (XRT), enabling seamless execution of the generated Halide RTL kernels. While this thesis provides initial support for running Halide kernels and not all features and optimizations are supported, it also details the future work needed to improve the performance of the generated RTL kernels. The proposed flow serves as a foundation for further research and development in the field of hardware acceleration for image and array processing applications using Halide

A systematic implementation of image processing algorithms on configurable computing hardware

Configurable computing hardware has many advantages over both general-purpose processors and application specific hardware. However, the difficulty of using this type of hardware has limited its use. An automated system for implementing image Processing applications in configurable hardware, called CHAMPION, is under development at the University of Tennessee. CHAMPION will map applications in the Khoros Cantata graphical programming environment to hardware. A relatively complex automatic target recognition (ATR) application was manually mapped from Cantata to a commercially available configurable computing platform. This manual implementation was done to assist in the development of function libraries and hardware for use in the CHAMPION systems, as well as to develop procedures to perform the application mapping. The mapping techniques used were developed in such a way that they could serve as the basis for the automated system. Many important considerations for the mapping process were identified and included in the mapping algorithms. The manual mapping was successful, allowing the ATR application to be run on a Wildforce-XL configurable computing board. The successful application implementation validated the basic hardware design and mapping concepts to be used in CHAMPION. Nearly a tenfold performance increase was realized in the hardware implementation and performance bottlenecks were identified which should enable even greater performance improvements to be realized in the automated system. The manual implementation also helped to identify some of the challenges that must be overcome to complete the development of the automated system

The Archigram Archive

The Archigram archival project made the works of seminal experimental architectural group Archigram available free online for an academic and general audience. It was a major archival work, and a new kind of digital academic archive, displaying material held in different places around the world and variously owned. It was aimed at a wide online design community, discovering it through Google or social media, as well as a traditional academic audience. It has been widely acclaimed in both fields. The project has three distinct but interlinked aims: firstly to assess, catalogue and present the vast range of Archigram's prolific work, of which only a small portion was previously available; secondly to provide reflective academic material on Archigram and on the wider picture of their work presented; thirdly to develop a new type of non-ownership online archive, suitable for both academic research at the highest level and for casual public browsing. The project hybridised several existing methodologies. It combined practical archival and editorial methods for the recovery, presentation and contextualisation of Archigram's work, with digital web design and with the provision of reflective academic and scholarly material. It was designed by the EXP Research Group in the Department of Architecture in collaboration with Archigram and their heirs and with the Centre for Parallel Computing, School of Electronics and Computer Science, also at the University of Westminster. It was rated 'outstanding' in the AHRC's own final report and was shortlisted for the RIBA research awards in 2010. It received 40,000 users and more than 250,000 page views in its first two weeks live, taking the site into twitter’s Top 1000 sites, and a steady flow of visitors thereafter. Further statistics are included in the accompanying portfolio. This output will also be returned to by Murray Fraser for UCL

Recent Application in Biometrics

In the recent years, a number of recognition and authentication systems based on biometric measurements have been proposed. Algorithms and sensors have been developed to acquire and process many different biometric traits. Moreover, the biometric technology is being used in novel ways, with potential commercial and practical implications to our daily activities. The key objective of the book is to provide a collection of comprehensive references on some recent theoretical development as well as novel applications in biometrics. The topics covered in this book reflect well both aspects of development. They include biometric sample quality, privacy preserving and cancellable biometrics, contactless biometrics, novel and unconventional biometrics, and the technical challenges in implementing the technology in portable devices. The book consists of 15 chapters. It is divided into four sections, namely, biometric applications on mobile platforms, cancelable biometrics, biometric encryption, and other applications. The book was reviewed by editors Dr. Jucheng Yang and Dr. Norman Poh. We deeply appreciate the efforts of our guest editors: Dr. Girija Chetty, Dr. Loris Nanni, Dr. Jianjiang Feng, Dr. Dongsun Park and Dr. Sook Yoon, as well as a number of anonymous reviewers

Programmable Image-Based Light Capture for Previsualization

Previsualization is a class of techniques for creating approximate previews of a movie sequence in order to visualize a scene prior to shooting it on the set. Often these techniques are used to convey the artistic direction of the story in terms of cinematic elements, such as camera movement, angle, lighting, dialogue, and character motion. Essentially, a movie director uses previsualization (previs) to convey movie visuals as he sees them in his minds-eye . Traditional methods for previs include hand-drawn sketches, Storyboards, scaled models, and photographs, which are created by artists to convey how a scene or character might look or move. A recent trend has been to use 3D graphics applications such as video game engines to perform previs, which is called 3D previs. This type of previs is generally used prior to shooting a scene in order to choreograph camera or character movements. To visualize a scene while being recorded on-set, directors and cinematographers use a technique called On-set previs, which provides a real-time view with little to no processing. Other types of previs, such as Technical previs, emphasize accurately capturing scene properties but lack any interactive manipulation and are usually employed by visual effects crews and not for cinematographers or directors. This dissertation\u27s focus is on creating a new method for interactive visualization that will automatically capture the on-set lighting and provide interactive manipulation of cinematic elements to facilitate the movie maker\u27s artistic expression, validate cinematic choices, and provide guidance to production crews. Our method will overcome the drawbacks of the all previous previs methods by combining photorealistic rendering with accurately captured scene details, which is interactively displayed on a mobile capture and rendering platform. This dissertation describes a new hardware and software previs framework that enables interactive visualization of on-set post-production elements. A three-tiered framework, which is the main contribution of this dissertation is; 1) a novel programmable camera architecture that provides programmability to low-level features and a visual programming interface, 2) new algorithms that analyzes and decomposes the scene photometrically, and 3) a previs interface that leverages the previous to perform interactive rendering and manipulation of the photometric and computer generated elements. For this dissertation we implemented a programmable camera with a novel visual programming interface. We developed the photometric theory and implementation of our novel relighting technique called Symmetric lighting, which can be used to relight a scene with multiple illuminants with respect to color, intensity and location on our programmable camera. We analyzed the performance of Symmetric lighting on synthetic and real scenes to evaluate the benefits and limitations with respect to the reflectance composition of the scene and the number and color of lights within the scene. We found that, since our method is based on a Lambertian reflectance assumption, our method works well under this assumption but that scenes with high amounts of specular reflections can have higher errors in terms of relighting accuracy and additional steps are required to mitigate this limitation. Also, scenes which contain lights whose colors are a too similar can lead to degenerate cases in terms of relighting. Despite these limitations, an important contribution of our work is that Symmetric lighting can also be leveraged as a solution for performing multi-illuminant white balancing and light color estimation within a scene with multiple illuminants without limits on the color range or number of lights. We compared our method to other white balance methods and show that our method is superior when at least one of the light colors is known a priori

Digital Light

Light symbolises the highest good, it enables all visual art, and today it lies at the heart of billion-dollar industries. The control of light forms the foundation of contemporary vision. Digital Light brings together artists, curators, technologists and media archaeologists to study the historical evolution of digital light-based technologies. Digital Light provides a critical account of the capacities and limitations of contemporary digital light-based technologies and techniques by tracing their genealogies and comparing them with their predecessor media. As digital light remediates multiple historical forms (photography, print, film, video, projection, paint), the collection draws from all of these histories, connecting them to the digital present and placing them in dialogue with one another. Light is at once universal and deeply historical. The invention of mechanical media (including photography and cinematography) allied with changing print technologies (half-tone, lithography) helped structure the emerging electronic media of television and video, which in turn shaped the bitmap processing and raster display of digital visual media. Digital light is, as Stephen Jones points out in his contribution, an oxymoron: light is photons, particulate and discrete, and therefore always digital. But photons are also waveforms, subject to manipulation in myriad ways. From Fourier transforms to chip design, colour management to the translation of vector graphics into arithmetic displays, light is constantly disciplined to human purposes. In the form of fibre optics, light is now the infrastructure of all our media; in urban plazas and handheld devices, screens have become ubiquitous, and also standardised. This collection addresses how this occurred, what it means, and how artists, curators and engineers confront and challenge the constraints of increasingly normalised digital visual media. While various art pieces and other content are considered throughout the collection, the focus is specifically on what such pieces suggest about the intersection of technique and technology. Including accounts by prominent artists and professionals, the collection emphasises the centrality of use and experimentation in the shaping of technological platforms. Indeed, a recurring theme is how techniques of previous media become technologies, inscribed in both digital software and hardware. Contributions include considerations of image-oriented software and file formats; screen technologies; projection and urban screen surfaces; histories of computer graphics, 2D and 3D image editing software, photography and cinematic art; and transformations of light-based art resulting from the distributed architectures of the internet and the logic of the database. Digital Light brings together high profile figures in diverse but increasingly convergent fields, from academy award-winner and co-founder of Pixar, Alvy Ray Smith to feminist philosopher Cathryn Vasseleu