Cell phones are one of the most widely used technology on this planet today. Most people in the world access the internet right on their cell phone, rather than on a computer. But the question still echos, are cell phones safe, even today? The answer is not clear. Research has been going on for more than a decade, but the results are still being interpreted. Many experts in the fields of cancer research, epidemiology, electrical and computer engineering and electromagnetic radiation see cause for concern, but many others don’t. Supposedly, the radiation emitted from cell phones is at a low enough frequency that it would not damage cells, but this is still being disputed.

We still don’t know to what extent it affects humans. The trend may be scary in the future though, take cigarettes for example, it took 30 to 40 years after they were mass produced for a noticeable change in lung cancer to be noticed. More explaining is done in this article from CNET.

Mike Litchfield

Can one say today that they purchase a cellular phone mainly to use it to talk, without all the little features that comes with them? For the technologically savvy, the answer is “no”. Its inventor, Dr. Martin Cooper made the first US analogue mobile phone call in 1973.  The Motorola DynaTac has broken the barrier of calls being made from a stationary location when he made a call while walking to his rival, Dr. Joel Engel, from AT&T’s Bell Labs.  Three and half decades later, cellular phones have evolved into mini computers while still having the capability of making local (US) and international calls. They give us the ability to surf the net, read and write emails, use Microsoft office applications, sync with our PC, listen to any media, real-time GPS, games, bar-code scanner, take pictures and videos, and much more. The next step for cellular phone usage is in the medical field.

At the University of California Berkeley, “researchers have developed an add-on to a mobile phone that can take detailed images and then analyze them to diagnose diseases such as tuberculosis”.  David Breslauer and his colleagues hope that this device will be useful in the developing world; and where diagnostic medical issues are difficult, but the ownership and coverage of a cellular phone are commonplace.  Knowing these facts, they hope to make medical diagnoses and/or medical care portable at one’s own convenience without the inconvenience of going to the doctor’s office.

kamal

One upcoming necessity here at Project54 is the need to be able to scan licenses using a mobile phone camera. I designed an experiment involving many different camera capture formats and post camera capture image processing techniques to see which of these produced the most successful results using the DTKBarcode Barcode Reader SDK.

This scenario involved the following camera parameters:

• HTC Touch Pro
• 3MeagPixel Picture
• Default Saturation
• Default Sharpness
• Default Contrast
• Distance between camera and barcode: About 7 inches

Results:

These two barcodes are from the same picture, the bottom one (Figure 2) being the original. The only property physically different between them is the top right and bottom left corners of the top barcode were skewed two pixels inward using Adobe Photoshop CS3. The result of this skew is shown below (Figure 1). This minute change enabled the barcode to be read by the DTK Barcode Reader SDK.

Figure 1 : SUCCESSFUL Scan by the DTK Barcode Reader (Photoshop Skewing)

Figure 2: FAILED Scan by the DTK Barcode Reader (Original HTC Camera Photo)

Conclusion:

I took well over 300 pictures with varying settings. I took my best three cases (Grayscale, Sharpness +5, Saturation +5), each with only 50% success, and applied additional image processing, post capture, with Photoshop. The most successful Camera settings and Photoshop techniques were additional Saturation, Sharpening and Color Level manipulation, with none being much more successful than the others. The best I could raise the scan success rate to was 75%, for one test case, using a combination of all three techniques. Keep in mind that I was sitting, using two hands, and stabilizing the camera with my elbows on the table. The realistic case would be more along the lines of someone standing, holding the phone with one hand and the license with another, with no additional stability support. It seems with this margin of error, the DTK Barcode Software will not be able to meet our needs.

Perhaps someone else has an answer or suggestion to solve this problem?

Eric Ojala

Yesterday Mark Taipan and I presented KLAS, or Kingsbury Location Awareness System at the Interdisciplinary Science & Engineering (ISE) Symposium for the 10th annual UNH Undergraduate Research Conference. We were able to share with the audience our project poster, our KLAS video, as well as have two PDAs on hand to provide user demos.

Here we see the KLAS URC presentation setup where both Mark and I are showing two interested engineers our project’s attributes.

This pictures (taken during one of our slower traffic moments) shows a little more of our presentation display.

Finally, we see both Mark (Left) and Myself (Right), standing next to our project poster.

In addition to these photos, we have posted many other pictures from this year’s URC here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eceblogger/sets/72157617236370816/

These pictures, as well as the ones above, were taken by Oskar Palinko. Thanks Oskar for capturing the event!

Overall this year’s URC was an excellent experience, and both Mark and I are proud to have been able to do the work to be involved!

Matthew Lape

Recently Mark Taipan and I completed the development of our Kingsbury Location Awareness System (KLAS) Video. Here you will see the development and operation of KLAS, and its principle functions, giving an example usage for both the Tour Guide and Navigation Applications. Hope you enjoy the video!

Matthew Lape

A few days ago I ran across an interesting device in a local electronic store. Finally it is time when such device arrived at our lives with satisfying performance for an affordable price. I found that buying it as a new PDA/phone accessory would be worth considering. It is an ultra-mobile (size: 2.0×0.9×4.5″, weight: 5.6 oz, battery life: 40-60 minutes) handheld projector which uses LED technology to project an image up to 50 inches in diagonal. It might potentially solve the burden of a small phone screen.

Although, the video shows some potential applications, it is still not clear what the killer app will be, how the mobile phone users will accept mobile projectors (regarding privacy), and how the projectors will enhance user experience and multi-user interaction.

Ivan Elhart

Have you ever wanted to tag photographs immediately upon capture?  Your answer to this question is probably twofold: (1) Yes I have; it would seem to be more convenient. (2) No I have not; text entry on a mobile device is a difficult process.  Now, what if I told you that we’ve developed an application which provides this functionality while removing you from the larger majority of text entry?  If I told you this then you’d be willing to participate in its evaluation study, right?

The figure above depicts the latest version of Project54’s imaging application.  It’s come a long ways since its initial developments, now targeting any camera-equipped Windows Mobile 6.0 device.  The leftmost portion of the figure shows the Manager window, where you can capture photographs.  The rightmost portion of the figure shows the Tags window, where you can tag your photographs via text entry, screen-tap selections or voice commands.  That’s right, voice commands; hence, using voice to tag digital photographs on the spot.  Interested?  The middle portion of the figure demonstrates the imaging application’s cooperation with Flickr, allowing you to upload your live photo stream directly to your account wherever you are.  Interested?

Participation in the study is free and usage of the application will not expire, you get to keep it for however long you want.  Everything you need to get started is downloadable: installer; written tutorial; video demonstrations.  The application also houses an on-device tutorial, so if you’re the type who likes to figure things out as you go along, then this may provide a quick and easy route through basic training.  You should be aware that this is a research study and that large amounts of data will be logged and transferred from your device.  Therefore, if your cellular data plan is anything other than the unlimited type then you may not wish to participate.  For additional information regarding the logging and collection of data please review the study’s consent and release forms.

So how does it work?  There are many features implemented by the imaging application, all of which are detailed in the written tutorial.  In an effort to keep this post as simple as possible I’ll only review the tagging process.  The figure below depicts the First Use window (left) and the Tag Bank window (right).  Upon first use of the application, the First Use window will be displayed and you’ll be able to link with your Flickr account.  At this time the most frequently used tags from your Flickr account will be downloaded to your phone.  The First Use window also allows you to specify up to five photographic interests, each of which is compared against Flickr’s immense tag database for similar listings which are then downloaded to your phone.  This series of downloads initially populates the tag bank.

Only the tags displayed by the Tag Bank window are valid voice commands.  Tags may be inserted or removed from the tag bank as necessary, as shown in the rightmost portion of the figure where we are inserting the tag “john”.  The more you use the application the more voice becomes a viable interaction method.  The performance of speech recognition is based on your knowing of which tags exist in the tag bank, so please review its contents after linking with your Flickr account. 

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions you may have.  Thank you for your participation – and don’t forget to speak up!

Michael A. Farrar
mafarrar@unh.edu

Trevor Darrell a distinguished professor from UC Berkeley gave a very interesting invited talk yesterday at IUI’09 on the role of image processing in making user interfaces more intelligent.

He elaborated on the state-of-the-art of image recognition. There are essentially two categories of this field: 1) instance level recognition and 2) category level retrieval. The first category is almost a solved problem, while the second one sill causes headaches to scientists: how could computers recognize that a bar stool and a rocking chair belong to the same category?

Trevor also showed a few new cutting edge technologies that are starting to change our everyday life. For example, the SnapTell application for smartphones can recognize snapshots of book covers, CDs, etc. made with your cameraphone and find the product on the internet. The goal of this program is of course commercial, to sell the items that you are looking for. But such applications can also enable you to find out more about e.g. a new movie, based on a snapshot of its poster or even a TV advertisement.

This idea seems relevant to the work of my colleague, Michael Farrar, at Project54. His photo tagging application could be further improved to enable location, object or even suspect recognition (in the long run) for police officers.

Oszkar Palinko

So apparently in the UK the Department of Transportation is called the Department for Transportation. This means that the acronym is DFT, which is confusing because DFT of course stands for Discrete Fourier Transform. So the question is, when transportation becomes fast in the UK will the DFT become the FFT? OK a little geeky humor there ;)

Anyway, the DFT has a nifty test you can run online to see how attentive you are to pedestrians when driving and listening to a cell phone at the same time. It would be interesting to have participants run the test with and without the sound of the mobile phone call, in order to see how much the phone call affects your ability to count pedestrians.

[via How we Drive]

Andrew Kun

Are you using your cell phone while driving? The National Safety Council says you shouldn’t.

Of course, cell phones are just one of the distractions in a car. The NSC recently hosted the International Symposium on Distracted Driving. There are many interesting presentations to review on the symposium website. I really liked Paul Green’s presentation (especially the car-through-the-roof picture!).

Andrew Kun