ENHANCING USERS’ EXPERIENCE WITH SMART MOBILE TECHNOLOGY

The aim of this thesis is to investigate mobile guides for use with smartphones. Mobile guides have been successfully used to provide information, personalisation and navigation for the user. The researcher also wanted to ascertain how and in what ways mobile guides can enhance users' experience. This research involved designing and developing web based applications to run on smartphones. Four studies were conducted, two of which involved testing of the particular application. The applications tested were a museum mobile guide application and a university mobile guide mapping application. Initial testing examined the prototype work for the ‘Chronology of His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah’ application. The results were used to assess the potential of using similar mobile guides in Brunei Darussalam’s museums. The second study involved testing of the ‘Kent LiveMap’ application for use at the University of Kent. Students at the university tested this mapping application, which uses crowdsourcing of information to provide live data. The results were promising and indicate that users' experience was enhanced when using the application. Overall results from testing and using the two applications that were developed as part of this thesis show that mobile guides have the potential to be implemented in Brunei Darussalam’s museums and on campus at the University of Kent. However, modifications to both applications are required to fulfil their potential and take them beyond the prototype stage in order to be fully functioning and commercially viable

Novel Template Ageing Techniques to Minimise the Effect of Ageing in Biometric Systems

ect of ageing on biometric systems and particularly its impact on face recognition systems. Being biological tissue in nature, facial biometric trait undergoes ageing. As a result developing biometric applications for long-term use becomes a particularly challenging task. Despite the rising attention on facial ageing, longitudinal study of face recognition remains an understudied problem in comparison to facial variations due to pose, illumination and expression changes. Regardless of any adopted representation, biometric patterns are always affected by the change in the face appearance due to ageing. In order to overcome this problem either evaluation of the changes in facial appearance over time or template-age transformation-based techniques are recommended. By using a database comprising images acquired over a 5-years period, this thesis explores techniques for recognising face images for identify verification. A detailed investigation analyses the challenges due to ageing with respect to the performance of biometric systems. This study provides a comprehensive analysis looking at both lateral age as well as longitudinal ageing. This thesis also proposes novel approaches for template ageing to compensate the ageing effects for verification purposes. The approach will explore both linear and nonlinear transformation mapping methods. Furthermore, the compound effect of ageing with other variate (such as gender, age group) are systematically analysed. With the implementation of the novel approach, it can be seen that the GAR (Genuine Accept Rate) improved signif