The Design of a System Architecture for Mobile Multimedia Computers

This chapter discusses the system architecture of a portable computer, called Mobile Digital Companion, which provides support for handling multimedia applications energy efficiently. Because battery life is limited and battery weight is an important factor for the size and the weight of the Mobile Digital Companion, energy management plays a crucial role in the architecture. As the Companion must remain usable in a variety of environments, it has to be flexible and adaptable to various operating conditions. The Mobile Digital Companion has an unconventional architecture that saves energy by using system decomposition at different levels of the architecture and exploits locality of reference with dedicated, optimised modules. The approach is based on dedicated functionality and the extensive use of energy reduction techniques at all levels of system design. The system has an architecture with a general-purpose processor accompanied by a set of heterogeneous autonomous programmable modules, each providing an energy efficient implementation of dedicated tasks. A reconfigurable internal communication network switch exploits locality of reference and eliminates wasteful data copies

A novel distributed architecture for IoT image processing using low-cost devices and open internet standards

Industry 4.0 can be defined as the integration of computers and automation to current industrial processes, with addition of smart and autonomous systems leveraged by machine learning techniques. In this scenario, a compact, dependable and fast controller is desired, featuring low energy consumption, easily programming and maintenance, with no mobile parts. Nowadays, computing power in single board computers, e.g. the Raspberry Pi among others, has been increased at a very important rate. In just three generations, Pi computers offer almost a two-fold speed gain, when compared to first models. Its design, an underlying video driver with general capabilities of regular OSes, makes them quite suitable to build image processing systems at very low cost, with no mobile parts and low energy consumption. However, designing such a system for industrial image processing is a tough challenge, since it implies to integrate cameras, image processing libraries, database servers and application software with graphical user interface, in an already resource constrained device. This work presents a new architecture for this kind of systems, by means of open internet standards, using a self-contained, high performance web server to publish a RESTful API and a set of web pages that use latest HTML5 capabilities to manage USB webcams and system data. This proposal also integrates OpenCV as a compiled script on client-side using the new WASM paradigm, with an optimized storage for images using -industry-standard RDBMS and a modular design that can target Windows and Linux as well.Sociedad Argentina de Informática e Investigación Operativ

Designing and generating prototype for E-Governance based election strategy using biometric authentication and smart card device

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ENERGY-EFFICIENT LIGHTWEIGHT ALGORITHMS FOR EMBEDDED SMART CAMERAS: DESIGN, IMPLEMENTATION AND PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

An embedded smart camera is a stand-alone unit that not only captures images, but also includes a processor, memory and communication interface. Battery-powered, embedded smart cameras introduce many additional challenges since they have very limited resources, such as energy, processing power and memory. When camera sensors are added to an embedded system, the problem of limited resources becomes even more pronounced. Hence, computer vision algorithms running on these camera boards should be light-weight and efficient. This thesis is about designing and developing computer vision algorithms, which are aware and successfully overcome the limitations of embedded platforms (in terms of power consumption and memory usage). Particularly, we are interested in object detection and tracking methodologies and the impact of them on the performance and battery life of the CITRIC camera (embedded smart camera employed in this research). This thesis aims to prolong the life time of the Embedded Smart platform, without affecting the reliability of the system during surveillance tasks. Therefore, the reader is walked through the whole designing process, from the development and simulation, followed by the implementation and optimization, to the testing and performance analysis. The work presented in this thesis carries out not only software optimization, but also hardware-level operations during the stages of object detection and tracking. The performance of the algorithms introduced in this thesis are comparable to state-of-the-art object detection and tracking methods, such as Mixture of Gaussians, Eigen segmentation, color and coordinate tracking. Unlike the traditional methods, the newly-designed algorithms present notable reduction of the memory requirements, as well as the reduction of memory accesses per pixel. To accomplish the proposed goals, this work attempts to interconnect different levels of the embedded system architecture to make the platform more efficient in terms of energy and resource savings. Thus, the algorithms proposed are optimized at the API, middleware, and hardware levels to access the pixel information of the CMOS sensor directly. Only the required pixels are acquired in order to reduce the unnecessary communications overhead. Experimental results show that when exploiting the architecture capabilities of an embedded platform, 41.24% decrease in energy consumption, and 107.2% increase in battery-life can be accomplished. Compared to traditional object detection and tracking methods, the proposed work provides an additional 8 hours of continuous processing on 4 AA batteries, increasing the lifetime of the camera to 15.5 hours

Content rendering and interaction technologies for digital heritage systems

Existing digital heritage systems accommodate a huge amount of digital repository information; however their content rendering and interaction components generally lack the more interesting functionality that allows better interaction with heritage contents. Many digital heritage libraries are simply collections of 2D images with associated metadata and textual content, i.e. little more than museum catalogues presented online. However, over the last few years, largely as a result of EU framework projects, some 3D representation of digital heritage objects are beginning to appear in a digital library context. In the cultural heritage domain, where researchers and museum visitors like to observe cultural objects as closely as possible and to feel their existence and use in the past, giving the user only 2D images along with textual descriptions significantly limits interaction and hence understanding of their heritage. The availability of powerful content rendering technologies, such as 3D authoring tools to create 3D objects and heritage scenes, grid tools for rendering complex 3D scenes, gaming engines to display 3D interactively, and recent advances in motion capture technologies for embodied immersion, allow the development of unique solutions for enhancing user experience and interaction with digital heritage resources and objects giving a higher level of understanding and greater benefit to the community. This thesis describes DISPLAYS (Digital Library Services for Playing with Shared Heritage Resources), which is a novel conceptual framework where five unique services are proposed for digital content: creation, archival, exposition, presentation and interaction services. These services or tools are designed to allow the heritage community to create, interpret, use and explore digital heritage resources organised as an online exhibition (or virtual museum). This thesis presents innovative solutions for two of these services or tools: content creation where a cost effective render grid is proposed; and an interaction service, where a heritage scenario is presented online using a real-time motion capture and digital puppeteer solution for the user to explore through embodied immersive interaction their digital heritage

A Survey of Prediction and Classification Techniques in Multicore Processor Systems

In multicore processor systems, being able to accurately predict the future provides new optimization opportunities, which otherwise could not be exploited. For example, an oracle able to predict a certain application\u27s behavior running on a smart phone could direct the power manager to switch to appropriate dynamic voltage and frequency scaling modes that would guarantee minimum levels of desired performance while saving energy consumption and thereby prolonging battery life. Using predictions enables systems to become proactive rather than continue to operate in a reactive manner. This prediction-based proactive approach has become increasingly popular in the design and optimization of integrated circuits and of multicore processor systems. Prediction transforms from simple forecasting to sophisticated machine learning based prediction and classification that learns from existing data, employs data mining, and predicts future behavior. This can be exploited by novel optimization techniques that can span across all layers of the computing stack. In this survey paper, we present a discussion of the most popular techniques on prediction and classification in the general context of computing systems with emphasis on multicore processors. The paper is far from comprehensive, but, it will help the reader interested in employing prediction in optimization of multicore processor systems

Major requirements for building Smart Homes in Smart Cities based on Internet of Things technologies

The recent boom in the Internet of Things (IoT) will turn Smart Cities and Smart Homes (SH) from hype to reality. SH is the major building block for Smart Cities and have long been a dream for decades, hobbyists in the late 1970s made Home Automation (HA) possible when personal computers started invading home spaces. While SH can share most of the IoT technologies, there are unique characteristics that make SH special. From the result of a recent research survey on SH and IoT technologies, this paper defines the major requirements for building SH. Seven unique requirement recommendations are defined and classified according to the specific quality of the SH building blocks