Nor Azman Ismail

Feature extraction in holistic approach for Arabic handwriting recognition system: A preliminary study

Handwriting recognition is the ability of a computer to receive and interpret intelligible handwritten input. Recognition systems are divided into two categories: holistic approach and analytical approach. A holistic approach handles the whole input image, while analytical approach involves two steps namely; segmentation and combination. Handwriting recognition began long time ago mainly in Latin and Chinese characters. However, little effort has been devoted to Arabic characters. The domain of handwriting in the Arabic script presents unique technical challenges and has been given more attention recently than other domains. In respect to the above issue, this paper investigates two different feature extraction methods, Angular span method and Distance span method, which may represent the distribution of pixels in the word properly. Samples from IFN/ENIT benchmark dataset are used to evaluate both methods.

Usability study of kitchen app with multimodal interaction among beginner & intermediate cookers

This paper presents the usability study of a cooking application, KitchenGeek with a wearable device, Smart M between two user groups, beginner and intermediate cookers to test if the application and device lowers the gap of time taken for both of the user groups to complete the cooking tasks. The results of this paper indicates that KitchenGeek and Smart M did lower the gap of time taken for task completion and it helps beginners to cook better than not being able to cook at all. An independent-samples t-test was conducted to compare the score of beginner and intermediate groups of cooker. The result shows that there was no significant difference in time taken to complete all cooking tasks for beginner and intermediate group of cookers (p= 0.85). This research suggests that beginners should use KitchenGeek and Smart M to improve their cooking skills and they will be able to cook at the same rate as intermediate cookers.