Mohd Azam Osman

An Exploratory Study on the Trend of Smartphone Usage in a Developing Country

The purpose of this study is to better understand the current dynamics of the Malaysian market for mobile content and applications. This paper presents the result of a survey on the trend of smartphone from the perspective of end consumers. The data was collected from 1814 respondents across major cities in Malaysia. This study has looked into the familiarity of users towards smartphones, choices of smartphone brand and service providers, and most importantly the determinants that influence their purchasing decision. Additionally, the consumers’ preferences on smartphone specifications such as design, computing power, operating platform, and price are investigated. The statistics presented is to provide fundamental information regarding the status and trends in the smartphone market in Malaysia. Such information is useful for academics to the development of future works in the field, and for smartphone manufacturers, application developers and other stakeholders to plan their direction in the Malaysian smartphone market.

GREC'09 arc segmentation contest: performance evaluation on old documents

Empirical performance evaluation of raster to vector methods is an important topic in the area of graphics recognition. By studying automatic vectorization methods we can reveal the maturity of the tested methods whether as a research prototype or a commercial software. Arc Segmentation Contest held in conjunction with the eighth IAPR International Workshop on Graphics Recognition (GREC09) is an excellent opportunity for researchers to present the results of their proposed raster to vector methods. The contest provides a uniform platform where the output of different methods can be analyzed. The relevance of the contest is further revealed by the creation of new test images with their ground truth data. Old documents were used in this contest. Five methods participated (two research prototypes and three commercial software). Two tests were performed namely between-methods test (participated by all methods) and within-method test (participated by only one method). This paper presents the results of the contest.

Adoption of E-Commerce Online Shopping in Malaysia

The continuous growth and development of ecommerce around the world is disproportionate to Asianconsumers’ adoption of online shopping. The average adoption rate in Asian countries is low compared to that in western countries. The purpose of this paper is to provide an understanding of the current situation regarding online shopping behavior in Asian countries, especially Malaysia. The factors that are believed to influence consumers’ adoption of ecommerce fall into three main categories: consumer attitudes towards online transaction processing systems, the security and privacy of consumer personal information within merchant systems, and trust in reliability of online vendors. This study provides a foundational understanding of how security and privacy issue in online transactions, and trust in reliability of online vendors affect consumers’ confidence in participating in e-commerce. Therefore, those organizations that are involved in e-commerce are expected to take note of the findings, especially in Malaysia context.

Eye 2H: A proposed automated smart home control system for detecting human emotions through facial detection

The increasing cost of living nowadays has caused many people to work harder in order to gain more pay. The associated heavier workloads together with tension and pressure often lead to stress-related health problems. People do really deserve a good rest when they come home from their office. As a result, the proposed solution - The Eye 2H is an intelligent system that will use the technique of image processing and face recognition to detect and analyze the human emotion to control the electronic equipment in their house through an intelligent control box. There are several studies highlighted that by controlling the brightness of light, we could affect the emotion or behavior of humans. Thus, we believe that The Eye 2H is capable to fulfill the main objective of the project which is to provide a better living environment for people in order to provide them a harmony and happy (2H) living life. The Eye 2H is capable of boosting the mood and emotion of the residents by controlling the electronic equipment in their house. The feature of turning on light automatically as well as fine-tune the brightness of light according to human emotion mood will give a “welcoming home” effect to the house owner. Besides that, The Eye 2H is also a green technology project as it will support the Go Green concept by reducing the energy usage.

Tracking Multiple Fish in a Single Tank Using an Improved Particle Filter

Studies on tracking fishes have become a popular research endeavour in recent years. Many methods have been used to track fishes by integrating microchips in fishes, using infra-red cameras, image processing and motion sensor. The use of particle filter in the process of tracking has been widely used by researchers. Particle filters is used to track people, fluid movement and animals. In this paper, the particle filter algorithm is improved to track multiple fish in a fish tank. The aim is to identify every fish trajectories and fish target location for further analysis. The main challenge is to ensure that the correct fish are tracked and the algorithm manages to identify specific fish even if they overlaps with each another. The objective of the study is to improve the existing particle filter to track multiple fish in a single fish tank. The improved algorithm contains an additional cache which stores the object’s position to estimate the next potential move of the fish. The result is evaluated by comparing existing algorithm without the enhancement with the improved algorithm. Besides, suggestions in improving the particle filter will also be discussed in this paper.

Traditional Shadow Puppet Play – The Virtual Way

In this paper, we present a virtual shadow puppet play application that allows real-time play of the puppet and gives the user the impression of being a storyteller or a shadow play puppeteer. Through this tool, everybody can be a puppeteer digitally regardless of the ability to perform the traditional art.

Recognition of fish based on generalized color Fourier descriptor

Recognizing objects using computational methods have become a popular research endeavor among researchers. In this paper, the recognition of fish based on GCFD (Generalized Color Fourier Descriptor) is introduced. The features are extracted using the GCFD technique which represents the image in a frequency domain. By analyzing the frequencies, the non-related information (backgrounds, not required lines or borders) are identified by performing some spectrum changes on the frequencies. The required objects in this study are the fish. In other words, the frequencies corresponding to the fish are maintained while other frequencies are removed from the frequency domain. After removing the non-related frequencies, the frequency domain is inversed in order to obtain the required image for further image processing. GCFD is used as a descriptor to extract the features of the fish as it is invariant to rotation and translation. A cultured fish tank installed with high-end video cameras is required to record the video from side and top views. Koi fish are chosen due to their active swimming behavior, variety of colors and easy-to-adapt habitat in the water. The evaluation of the technique is based on Bhattacharyya Distance. Some improvements were obtained in the recognition rate using the GCFD compared with existing color descriptors. The improvement can lead to better classifications of objects.

Modelling of Fish Swimming Patterns Using an Enhanced Object Tracking Algorithm

Modelling of fish swimming patterns has long been a challenge for the aquaculture community. In this proposed work, the modeling of fish swimming patterns and water condition such as pH, temperature and dissolved oxygen in fish tanks are analysed using network cameras and water sensors. An enhanced object tracking algorithm consisting of a combination of motion detection and condensation algorithm is applied to detect the change in speed and vector movement of the fishes in the viewing field. In addition, this research proposes an intelligent real-time monitoring tool to provide alert signals of water quality and healthy level of fishes.

Design and Development of an Interactive Virtual Shadow Puppet Play

Shadow puppet play has been a popular traditional storytelling method for many centuries in many parts of Asia. This paper describes a method to model a virtual shadow puppet play using sophisticated computer graphics techniques available in Adobe Flash in order to allow interactive play in real-time environment as well as producing realistic animation. Areal-time method is proposed to produce the shadow image that allows interactive play of the virtual shadow puppets by using texture mapping and blending techniques. Special effects such as lighting and blurring effects for virtual shadow puppet play environment are also proposed. Moreover, the use of geometric transformations and hierarchical modeling facilitates interaction among the different parts of the puppet during animation. In essence, our methods and techniques have overcome various limitations of the existing works in virtual shadow puppet play.

Final report of GREC’13 arc and line segmentation contest

In this paper we present a system devoted to spot graphical symbols in camera-acquired document images. The system is based on the extraction and further matching of ORB compact local features computed over interest key-points. Then, the FLANN indexing framework based on approximate nearest neighbor search allows to efficiently match local descriptors between the captured scene and the graphical models. Finally, the RANSAC algorithm is used in order to compute the homography between the spotted symbol and its appearance in the document image. The proposed approach is efficient and is able to work in real time.