EMERGENCY ALERT MOBILE APPLICATION FOR DEAF

Emergencies happen aroW1d us are m1expectedly in various forms which is fire, flood, earthquake or ac.cidents.. In emergencies, upcto-date information is lifecsaving. However, this information is not accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people. The current problem now is deaf and hard of hearing people face some difficulties on how to detect any alert som1d and how to responds to the emergency. The study is comprehensive by fucusing .and highlighting .on .core .and .basic process of voice .and soW1d recognition which covered from the root operations to the final production. Prior to the requirement of Emergency Alert Mobile Application for Deaf, the study also covered the description of tool development that will be used which is Eclipse IDE and also the other elements and parts of programming that could contribute directly to the project such as Android Development Tools (ADT) and Android API (Application Programming Inter[ac~). ~~ tool .i~ well recommended by experts and professionals as project development tool due to its good compliance and compatibility with most Wliversal common current operation system on mobile which is Android Operating System. As you can see, an emergency alert device is not only useful for protecting the safety of our loved ones, but can also be economical. After all, one false alarm resulting in a visit to an emergency room can cost thousands of dollars. That alone makes an emergency alert device completely worth it. This project is to help the deaf people to alert with any emergency alarm or alarm trigger

Text-detection and -recognition from natural images

Text detection and recognition from images could have numerous functional applications for document analysis, such as assistance for visually impaired people; recognition of vehicle license plates; evaluation of articles containing tables, street signs, maps, and diagrams; keyword-based image exploration; document retrieval; recognition of parts within industrial automation; content-based extraction; object recognition; address block location; and text-based video indexing. This research exploited the advantages of artificial intelligence (AI) to detect and recognise text from natural images. Machine learning and deep learning were used to accomplish this task.In this research, we conducted an in-depth literature review on the current detection and recognition methods used by researchers to identify the existing challenges, wherein the differences in text resulting from disparity in alignment, style, size, and orientation combined with low image contrast and a complex background make automatic text extraction a considerably challenging and problematic task. Therefore, the state-of-the-art suggested approaches obtain low detection rates (often less than 80%) and recognition rates (often less than 60%). This has led to the development of new approaches. The aim of the study was to develop a robust text detection and recognition method from natural images with high accuracy and recall, which would be used as the target of the experiments. This method could detect all the text in the scene images, despite certain specific features associated with the text pattern. Furthermore, we aimed to find a solution to the two main problems concerning arbitrarily shaped text (horizontal, multi-oriented, and curved text) detection and recognition in a low-resolution scene and with various scales and of different sizes.In this research, we propose a methodology to handle the problem of text detection by using novel combination and selection features to deal with the classification algorithms of the text/non-text regions. The text-region candidates were extracted from the grey-scale images by using the MSER technique. A machine learning-based method was then applied to refine and validate the initial detection. The effectiveness of the features based on the aspect ratio, GLCM, LBP, and HOG descriptors was investigated. The text-region classifiers of MLP, SVM, and RF were trained using selections of these features and their combinations. The publicly available datasets ICDAR 2003 and ICDAR 2011 were used to evaluate the proposed method. This method achieved the state-of-the-art performance by using machine learning methodologies on both databases, and the improvements were significant in terms of Precision, Recall, and F-measure. The F-measure for ICDAR 2003 and ICDAR 2011 was 81% and 84%, respectively. The results showed that the use of a suitable feature combination and selection approach could significantly increase the accuracy of the algorithms.A new dataset has been proposed to fill the gap of character-level annotation and the availability of text in different orientations and of curved text. The proposed dataset was created particularly for deep learning methods which require a massive completed and varying range of training data. The proposed dataset includes 2,100 images annotated at the character and word levels to obtain 38,500 samples of English characters and 12,500 words. Furthermore, an augmentation tool has been proposed to support the proposed dataset. The missing of object detection augmentation tool encroach to proposed tool which has the ability to update the position of bounding boxes after applying transformations on images. This technique helps to increase the number of samples in the dataset and reduce the time of annotations where no annotation is required. The final part of the thesis presents a novel approach for text spotting, which is a new framework for an end-to-end character detection and recognition system designed using an improved SSD convolutional neural network, wherein layers are added to the SSD networks and the aspect ratio of the characters is considered because it is different from that of the other objects. Compared with the other methods considered, the proposed method could detect and recognise characters by training the end-to-end model completely. The performance of the proposed method was better on the proposed dataset; it was 90.34. Furthermore, the F-measure of the method’s accuracy on ICDAR 2015, ICDAR 2013, and SVT was 84.5, 91.9, and 54.8, respectively. On ICDAR13, the method achieved the second-best accuracy. The proposed method could spot text in arbitrarily shaped (horizontal, oriented, and curved) scene text.</div

A Study of Colloquial Place Names through Geotagged Social Media Data

Place is a rich but vague geographic concept. Much work has been done to explore the collective understanding and perceived location of place. The last few decades have seen rapid expansion in the use of online social media and data sharing services, which provide a large amount of valuable data for research of colloquial place names. This study explored how geotagged social media data can be used to understand geographic place names, and delimit the perceived geographic extent of a place. The author proposes a probabilistic method to map the perceived geographic extent of a place using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) based on the geotagged data uploaded by users. The author also used spatio-temporal analysis methods in GIS to explore characteristics, hidden patterns, and trends of the places. Flickr, a popular online social networking service that features image hosting and sharing, was selected as the main data source for this project. The results show that outcomes of KDE with different functions and parameters differ from each other; therefore, it is crucial to select the proper KDE bandwidth in order to obtain appropriate geographic extents. Official boundaries and reference boundaries can be used to assess the geographic extents. Google Maps Street View is another useful source to examine the visual characteristics of places. Spatio-temporal analysis of the geographic extents over time reveals significant location changes of the places composed of man-made structures. Besides names and variations of place names, related colloquial terms, like Cades Cove of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, are also useful sources when delimiting a place. Several examples are analyzed and discussed. Studies like this research can improve our understanding of geotagged Online Social Network (OSN) data in the study of colloquial place names as well as provide a temporal perspective to the analysis of their perceived geographic extents

Design revolutions: IASDR 2019 Conference Proceedings. Volume 3: People

In September 2019 Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University was honoured to host the bi-annual conference of the International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) under the unifying theme of DESIGN REVOLUTIONS. This was the first time the conference had been held in the UK. Through key research themes across nine conference tracks – Change, Learning, Living, Making, People, Technology, Thinking, Value and Voices – the conference opened up compelling, meaningful and radical dialogue of the role of design in addressing societal and organisational challenges. This Volume 3 includes papers from People track of the conference

Extraction of textual information from image for information retrieval

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH