More: A Mobile Open Rich Media Environment

‘Rich media ’ is a term that implies the integration of all of the ad-vances we have made in the mobile space delivering music, speech, text, graphics and video. This is true, but it is more than the sum of its parts. Rich media is the ability to deliver these modalities, to interact with these modalities, and to do it in a way that allows for the construction, delivery and use of compelling mobile services in an effective and economic manner. In this paper, we introduce a sys-tem called Mobile Open Rich-media Environment (‘MORE’) that helps realize such mobile rich media services, combining various technologies of W3C, OMA, 3GPP and IETF standards. The differ-ent components of the system include formatting, packaging, trans-porting, rendering and interacting with rich media files and streams. 1

Indian women with higher serum concentrations of folate and vitamin B12 are significantly less likely to be infected with carcinogenic or high-risk (HR) types of human papillomaviruses (HPVs)

BACKGROUND: Studies conducted in the USA have demonstrated that micronutrients such as folate and vitamin B12 play a significant role in modifying the natural history of high-risk human papillomaviruses (HR-HPVs), the causative agent for developing invasive cervical cancer (CC) and its precursor lesions. OBJECTIVE: The purpose of the current study was to investigate whether these micronutrients have similar effects on HR-HPV infections in Indian women. METHODS: The associations between serum concentrations of folate and vitamin B12 and HR-HPV infections were evaluated in 724 women who participated in a CC screening study in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh, India. Serum folate and vitamin B12 concentrations were measured by using a competitive radio-binding assay. Digene hybrid capture 2 (HC2) assay results were used to categorize women into two groups, positive or negative for HR-HPVs. Unconditional logistic regression models specified a binary indicator of HC2 (positive/negative) as the dependent variable and serum folate concentrations combined with serum vitamin B12 concentrations as the independent predictor of primary interest. Models were fitted, adjusting for age, education, marital status, parity, type of fuel used for cooking and smoking status. RESULTS: Women with higher concentrations of serum folate (>6 ng/mL) and vitamin B12 (>356 pg/mL) were at lower risk of being positive for HR-HPVs compared to those with serum folate ≤6 ng/mL and serum vitamin B12 ≤ 356 pg/mL (odds ratio = 0.26; 95% confidence interval: 0.08-0.89; P = 0.03). CONCLUSIONS: These results demonstrated that improving folate and vitamin B12 status in Indian women may have a beneficial impact on the prevention of CC. Micronutrient based interventions for control of HR-HPV infections may represent feasible alternatives to vaccine based approaches to HPV disease prevention, which are currently unaffordable for use in resource limited areas in rural India

Video Error Resilience through Efficient Shadowing of Decoder

A common method for stopping error propagation in encoded video is to transmit intracoded blocks whenever errors occur, but this results in significantly increased bitrate. Error propagation can also be stopped by synchronizing the state of the encoder to that of the decoder. For example, one may emulate and repeat the entire decoding – including the channel errors – inside the encoder. This approach has both a simple decoder as well as good rate-distortion performance, but has not been widely used because it is cumbersome at the encoder. In this paper we propose an efficient error shadowing technique that achieves encoder re-synchronization without the need for a full decoder-at-encoder implementation. Our encoder tracks the error magnitudes without explicitly recalculating the intensity values. Simulations reveal that the proposed method has better performance compared to other techniques that have comparable decoder complexity. The use of motion compensated prediction in the standard based video coders causes spatiotemporal error propagation at the decoder when the compressed bitstream is received erroneously. When limited feedback is available, various solutions to recover from error propagation have been proposed. They can be classified into three categories according to where extra complexity is introduced: encoder based [1, 2], decoder-based [3] and encoder-decoder methods like reference picture selection (RPS) in H.263+. Our method belongs to the class of encoder-based methods which are more attractive when the decoder must be kept simple

Streaming Mobile Augmented Reality on Mobile Phones

Continuous recognition and tracking of objects in live video captured on a mobile device enables real-time user interaction. We demonstrate a streaming mobile augmented reality system with 1 second latency. User interest is automatically inferred from camera movements, so the user never has to press a button. Our system is used to identify and track book and CD covers in real time on a phone’s viewfinder. Efficient motion estimation is performed at 30 frames per second on a phone, while fast search through a database of 20,000 images is performed on a server.

Mobile visual search using image and text features

Abstract—We present a mobile visual search system that utilizes both text and low bit-rate image features. Using a cameraphone, a user can snap a picture of a document image and search for the document in online databases. From the query image, the title text is detected and recognized and image features are extracted and compressed, as well. Both types of information are sent from the cameraphone client to a server. The server uses the recognized title to retrieve candidate documents from online databases. Then, image features are used to select the correct document(s). We show that by using a novel geometric verification method that incorporates both text and image feature information, we can reduce the missed positives up to 50%. The proposed method can also speed up the geometric process, enabling a larger set of verified titles, resulting in a superior performance compared to previous schemes. Index Terms—mobile visual search, image retrieval, document retrieval, document analysis I