The year 2009 has been a busy one for Project54.  We began the year off in February by moving from our garage facility in Madbury to a garage located on campus and within Morse Hall.  The transition of the group from two locations into one has been seamless and has worked out beautifully.  We now have all of our personnel and equipment housed in the same location.

In early May we held an open house to show off our new location as well as to celebrate our 10 year anniversary.  Hard to believe it has been 10 years for the project already.  The weather was great and we had a good turnout with a nice mix of law enforcement, fire dept and campus personnel.

The middle of March brought upon us a flurry of outreach activity beginning with our participation in the UNH High Tech Day a program put on by the Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering departments for area high school students, ECE Open House to welcome freshman along with a steady stream of demonstrations and tours provided to visiting organizations and high schools that has continued through out the year totaling over 500 visitors!

In April we were fortunate enough  to have the opportunity to host Paul Green for a visit to our lab. He gave a great talk on Human Factors Engineering and spent the day visiting us and answering all of our questions.

Amidst our outreach activities demonstrating the Project54 system we have been busy traveling to a variety of conferences, where we have written and had papers and posters accepted for presentation as well as busy with developing and running a number of experiments. For example, Mike Farrar’s experiment “Using Voice to Tag Digital Photographs on the Spot” conducted to determine how effective voice could be in the tagging of photos. Some other experiments by Nemanja Memarovic, Alex Shyrokov and Zeljko Medenica using our driving-simulator and eyetracker to collect a variety of data pertaining to distracted driving and navigation.  During this time we were also busy with recruiting activities leading to the hire of Mark Taipan, a recent BS graduate and former student of Project54. We were very fortunate that Mark accepted the offer for our Research Project Engineer position and is now a staff member of the Project.  Welcome, Mark we are happy to have you as part of the P54 team!

One of the great things about this project is that we have a lot of great students that work with us but the time always arrives where they reach graduation and it seems all too quickly we have to say goodbye. This year we have said goodbye to undergraduates Matt Lape, and David Garneau along with graduates Mike Farrar, Nemanja Memarovic and very soon Alex Shyrokov who is currently preparing his Ph.D defense.  Lastly, Ivan Elhart is leaving us to return to his home country of Serbia. Ivan, thank you for all of your work with the handhelds. Undergraduate, Eric Ojala, who has been with us for roughly a year has also contributed greatly to progress on the handhelds and is, unfortunately for us, leaving to pursue a new position.  Good luck to everyone and thank you for all of your hard work on the project, you will be missed.

So now we are left with working on bringing more students to the project, new undergraduate faces we have currently working on the project are Devin Mullen, Erika Swanson, and Mike Litchfield who started earlier this year and we welcome new Graduate Research Assistants, Dylan Fransway and David Filipovic, who will be starting in January.

It has been a fun and productive year with the new year just around the corner.  Let the holidays begin!

~Erika C.

Here at Project54, we work extensively with New Hampshire State Police. Subsequently, we have one of their 2006 Dodge Chargers for demonstrating and testing the Project54 system. One of my colleagues here at the University of New Hampshire, Daniel VanderClock, recently took the opportunity to take some photos of the interior and exterior of the car (some photos are shown below). The entire outstanding set can be seen on our Flickr account here.

Thanks Dan for your all of your wonderful work and we look forward to your future photo shoots!

Mark Taipan

Last Friday, a few of us from P54 attended a day long student conference geared towards human factors and ergonomics. The conference was very interesting, showcasing about 20 presentations dealing with various fields. Three of us from P54 (only ones from NH) gave presentations on our current research. I gave my presentation on our research on the multitouch display with geotagged & oriented photos.

It was a valuable experience for me, since I have not yet given a presentation to so many people whom I did not know. Of course, I was nervous at first, but it went away as my presentation started, and went well overall. I’m sure I will have to make more of these types of presentations in the future, so it was very good practice. Aside from my presentation, I also enjoyed a lot of other things from the conference. One of the other presentations was focused on controlling fully automated search and destroy robots in the field, and how often the person controlling them should reassess the goals and priorities of the robots.

Also the girl in the picture (one of three presenting) had an amazing voice. We all agreed she should be on radio or something, or a professional presenter. Mark and Zelijko gave awesome presentations too, and we all enjoyed some Friday evening rush hour traffic from Boston. It was great!

Mike Litchfield

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With the goal at Project54 being to produce solutions in order to create a safer environment in which the police officer can control all of the lights, radar, and various devices within his/her police car, it is interesting to see the need for similar technology within regular cars to solve the problem of distracted drivers. Recently, the New York Times featured the series “Driven to Distraction”. Along with examining the issue of distracted drivers, the series allows you to “Gauge Your Distraction” with an interactive game that illustrates the large distraction that texting while driving creates. Similar to the goals of Project54, the public should become more aware of the dangers of in-car distractions and what can be done to limit these hazards.

Erika Swanson

Encyclopedia Britannica gives the definition of a relay. Project54 uses 8 relays in order to control the lights and siren on the Lee Motorcycle, in a relay box. This relay box consists of the 8 relays, and a microcontroller that switches the relays on and off. To turn these relays on and off, ASCII commands must be sent to the microcontroller through a DB9 connection. In the motorcycle setup, the relay box has its own IDB box, and the commands are sent through the network from the embedded PC. When a button is pressed on the BikeRelay Project 54 GUI, C++ code interprets that particular button press, and sends the correct ASCII commands to the relay box. The microcontroller interprets these, and turns on or off the corresponding relays.

 Above: The relay box used for controlling the motorcycle lights at Project54

For more information on how relays work, visit HowStuffWorks.com.

Devin Mullen

We enjoyed the company of the Keeper’s Camp when they visited Project 54. The kids were very excited as we showed them a taste of what we do. Mark, Erika , Oskar and myself took the twenty-four kids around Morse Hall and showed them the show car and simulator.

They sat in the drivers seat of the cop car to give them a feel of what Project 54 is, and turned on the lights to see how its used. We also showed them the guts of how it all works, and how the devices communicate with one another.

They were thrilled to see the simulator in action. Oskar explained to them how we use it for research and why it is a vital testing tool, and not a video game even though it is entertaining to drive!

We were delighted to be a part of the camp’s program, and to be able educate kids about Project 54 and what it is to be an Electrical Engineer. Thanks, and we are looking forward to seeing you again next year!

Eric Ojala

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

Alyssa Shooshan, Senator Gregg’s chief of staff and Dean Hingson Senator Gregg’s new counsel, visited Project54 earlier this week. They toured our labs and the new Project54 garage (the location of our recent open house) and had a chance to see in person the results of Senator Gregg’s continued support for Project54. In the picture below you can see Alyssa and Dean (right) looking on as Michael Farrar demonstrates the Project54 handheld application.

Thanks for visiting Alyssa and Dean, we hope to see you again soon.

You can see more pictures from this visit on Flickr.

Andrew Kun

On Monday, May 11, I was honored to present my work at a very prestigious IEEE conference on Homeland Security technologies, held in Waltham, MA. During the technical session on the interoperability and field deployable communications, I gave a presentation on the design and development of a software defined Project 25 data base station. Here is a picture taken during my presentation:

First, I took a couple minutes to introduce data communication and talk about potential benefits of having data messages in public safety communication system. I continued my presentation by talking about the problem of very expensive Project 25 equipment that hinders the implementation of data communication in small police departments. Our approach towards a software defined data base station seems a promising and cost effective way for local departments to bring data messages into their cruisers. A very precise and rigorous testing procedure performed in our laboratory showed the compliance of the base station with commercially available P25 radio equipment. Also, the test procedure produced promising and encouraging results prior the real world deployment in a local NH police department. Finally, I concluded my presentation with a demo video which demonstrates an application of querying a remote server using the data base station and Project54’s speech user interface. Here are the slides:

After the presentation I answered a few great questions and received a lot of positive comments about our work on the radio interoperability at UNH and Project54.

Special thanks to Dan Farfan from KinetX Inc., who was so kind to take pictures of me presenting.

Ivan Elhart