Hello All, I am planning on submitting a Student Proposal to the Google Summer of Code, and my proposal is pasted below. Any comments/suggestion will be appreciated.
Thanks, Sudheendra Bhat * Project title. o Text optical recognition on Photo Images * Project Abstract: o The idea of optical character recognition will be extended to recognize the characters available on a Photo Image. The main advantage being able to use the character information available in the photo image with different services like OpenStreetMap (Say if we have the photo image with the street names, then it can be recognized and used with OpenStreetmap for tracing the street on the map), Language Translators (we can use the character information available on the Photo with translate.google.com), in Social Blogging applications to provide the history of any specific event (Say, my Sunday hangout at Washington DC, all different information available on the photos taken during the whole of Sunday can be used to tag the events automatically with this service - Context Awarenss) and many more related applications. * Project Full Discription (Technical): o Generally a photo image may consist of character informations with meaningful context and this information can be helpful for variety of purposes.In this project an attempt will be made to capture the character information available on any Photo Image. The character infromation available on a Photo can be captured by extending the concept of optical character recognition. Like traditional OCR concepts, we would be requiring to have some sought of Neural Network/Hidden Markovian Model to train our program with set of character types. Along with this, we need to also provide some techniques to process the image to identify the character regions and process (Recognize) those characters from our trained program. Once we have the working module for recognizing the character information from the Image, then we can enhance the module by adding some service related features (i.e. expose the services so that any third party application or program can use this feature of character recognition on their environment).The module which we develop for this project can be easily integrated with Maemo framwork and will have an efficient usage on the Internet Tablets or any handheld device platform. * Project tasks and deliverables: o The project deliverable will be mainly a program to recognize the text characters from a Photo Image (at this stage). And future enhance can be made to provide services to third party programs may be in the form of a Web Service. o My tentative plan/tasks for the execution of this project will be: + Community Bonding (meeting and discussing the technical aspects of this projects with the Maemo team members), understanding the Maemo framework with respect to the current requirement. + Planning to use Cairo Library (which is supported in Maemo), GDK, GDKPixBuf Libraries for the Image processing related tasks. So I would need to spend couple of days to get the experties on these Library usages. + Photo Image pre-processing algorithm development - for parsing the Photo Image ( Either JPG, TIFF or BMP format) and to get the necessary basic information. Also to get the image in the format in which my recognition program can understand. + Developing the training/Learning algorithm ( I am planning on using either Backpropogation Algorithm (Feed forwad algorithm) or some Hidden Markovian Model based algorithm for this purpose). + Application Development (A Gtk+ based application with Hildon support, which uses the trained data sets on the Photo Images which comes as a input to the program to recognize the Text Characters available on the Image). + Upon completion of these above steps, I will use my experience with the Web Services to develop a service oriented architecture for the recognition program and expose relevent api's so that other 3rd party application can access and use them on their applications. o As I have the basic ideas on what needs to be done and hands on experience with the libraries I will be using in this project, I predict that I should be able to complete the standalone program of Text Character recognition within the first 2 months (approximately giving 35-40 hrs a week) of Summer and remaining time of Summer I am planning on working on the Web Service implementation for this project. * Do you have other commitments during the summer of code coding period ? If yes, what kind of commitments ? o NO * Why are you the right person for this project ? o I have some hands on experience with respect to the Recognition system, as I had done a project on Optical Character Recognition using the Neural Network based algorithms. During my internship I did work on the development of context aware application on Hildon Framework where I learn about DBUS, Hildon Framework, Bluez and most of the libraries used on a Internet Tablets.I also have experience progragmming with respect to the mobile platform. Above all I have the zeal to contribute towards the opensource community. * What are the benefits of your project for the Maemo Community ? o This project is targetted to run on a Handheld platform as it can give many useful services (as described in the abstract) to the user. And Maemo framework already provides the necessary library support required for this project, so that this project can be easily integrated with the framework with no extra overhead. Also, this project gives birth to many new topics of interests like using the services from this projects in Social Community like blogs, photo gallery, and implementing many new context aware based applications targetting the handheld devices. * ABout Me: o To introduce myself, I am Sudheendra Bhat currently pursuing my masters in Computer Science from Dept of Computer Science, George Mason University, VA. I am interested in this project as I am planning on doing my thesis in the areas of Mobile Computing and this project should defiantly be a good kick of for the same. Also I have been working on mobile platform (Moblin and IPhone) for last one year now and I am very much interested in contributing to this field and above all I am interested in contributing to the OpenSource community and I think this would be a wonderful opportunity for me to do so. Here is some more information about my background and work experiences, I am currently working as Graduate Teaching Assistant in Dept of Computer Science, GMU where I am teaching Object Oriented Programming with Java to the Undergraduate Students during their Lab Sessions. I did my Summer Interns 08 at Intel Corporations , Hillsboro OR where I worked on research and development of Context Aware Modules for Handheld devices in Moblin Framework (With Hildon,DBUS support). My work as an intern was well appreciated with a Goodie Drawer Level-2 award for my work during my Internship. I have a strong background in the fundamentals of Computer Science and extensive programming experience. I have 2 years of work experience from Wipro Technologies, Bangalore, where I had worked on the design and development of Network Management System and Element Management Systems. I have extensively programmed in C, C++ and Java, J2EE. I can work in both Windows and Unix environments and have a good knowledge of the APIâs. Also I worked as a Graduate Research Assistant for a year with my Professor Dr. Mark Pullen on the development of Joint Battle Management Language. This project mainly used Core Java and Java web services (Using Axis 1.4) along with mySql as a back end tool. The project has been tested and further development is underway. This is an OpenSource Project and you can find out more information about JBML from, http://netlab.gmu.edu/JBML As a part of my course work, last fall 08 I did a project called E-Ticket Verification using the Handheld devices. The entire project was developed on Moblin framework and I had used Java, and Java Webservices for the implementation of the Project. I am working on publishing the paper related to my work with the E-Ticket Verification project and I will be submitting my paper by end of April.I am currently working on 2 main projects as a part of my academia work, first one on buidling a Compiler for a Language called Tiger, and second project is on Buiding a Gene Prediction algorithm. o You can find more info about me at, http://c4i.gmu.edu/~sbhat2 _______________________________________________ maemo-community mailing list [email protected] https://lists.maemo.org/mailman/listinfo/maemo-community