Advances in Visual Informatics

Software programming for concurrent execution is not a simple task. The main issue related to this work is the lack of visibility of the multiple and parallel execution over the threads. Multi core processor technology is a reality nowadays and the only way to use modern hardware at its full capacity lays in the use of concurrent software. In this paper, we present a new 3D framework, based on hand gestures that manipulate multiple threads of execution and to deal with the visibility issues, using a 3D programming environment.

Recent work has shown the value of treating recommendation as a conversation between user and system, which conversational recommenders have done by allowing feedback like “not as expensive as this” on recommendations. This allows a more natural alternative to content-based information access. Our research focuses on creating a viable conversational methodology for collaborative-filtering recommendation which can apply to any kind of information, especially visual. Since collaborative filtering does not have an intrinsic understanding of the items it suggests, i.e. it doesn’t understand the content, it has no obvious mechanism for conversation. Here we develop a means by which a recommender driven purely by collaborative filtering can sustain a conversation with a user and in our evaluation we show that it enables finding multimedia items that the user wants without requiring domain knowledge.

This paper describes an application of orthogonal nonnegative matrix factorization (NMF) algorithm in blind image separation (BIS) problem. The algorithm itself has been presented in our previous work as an attempt to provide a simple and convergent algorithm for orthogonal NMF, a type of NMF proposed to improve clustering capability of the standard NMF. When we changed the application domain of the algorithm to the BIS problem, surprisingly good results were obtained; the reconstructed images were more similar to the original ones and pleasant to view compared to the results produced by other NMF algorithms. Good results were also obtained when another dataset that consists of unrelated images was used. This practical use along with its convergence guarantee and implementation simplicity demonstrate the benefits of our algorithm.

This paper presents new hybrid robust digital image watermarking scheme based on Integer Wavelet Transform (IWT), Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) and Arnold Transform (AT). The scheme employed the properties of those transforms to achieve the watermarking requirements (robustness, imperceptibility and security). The property of IWT which map integer to integer offers a high robustness and a good imperceptibility. The good stability and the descending order of singular values of S of SVD transform also contributed significantly in robustness and imperceptibility. Finally the scheme which applied scrambling of watermark by AT enhanced the security aspect of the scheme. The experimental results showed that the proposed scheme achieved good imperceptibility and high resistance against geometrical and non-geometrical attacks and outperformed some state of the art schemes.

Image hiding based on chaotic oscillations and near-optimal moire gratings is presented in this paper. The secret image is embedded into a single cover image. The encrypted secret image appears in a form of time-averaged moire fringes when the cover image is oscillated in a predefined direction, according to a chaotic law of motion. The criterion of the optimality of a moire grating is based on the absolute difference between the standard deviation of time-averaged images of near-optimal moire gratings in the background and in the zones associated to the secret image. Genetic algorithms are used for the identification of a nearoptimal set of moire gratings for image hiding applications. Numerical experiments are used to illustrate the functionality of the method.

Iterative Closest Point (ICP) is a popular point set registration method often used for rigid registration problems. Because of all points in ICP-based method are processed at each iteration to find their correspondences, the method’s performance is bounded by this constraint. This paper introduces an alternative ICP-based method by considering only subset of points whose boundaries are determined by the context of the inputs. These subsets can be used to sufficiently derive spatial mapping of point’s correspondences between the source and target set even if points have been missing or modified slightly in the target set. A brief description of this method is followed by a comparative analysis of its performance against two ICP-based methods, followed by some experiments on its subset’s sensitivity and robustness against noise.

This paper relates to a method of integration of RFID and communication technologies for solid waste bin and truck monitoring system. RFID, GPS, GPRS and Digital map along side camera technologies have been integrated and developed the brain and a truck intelligent monitoring system. A proposed kind of integrated theoretical framework using image processing approaches, hardware architecture and interface algorithm has been introduced between the technologies for the successful implementation of the proposed system. With this technique, bin and truck database have been developed such a way that the information on the bin and truck ID, date and time of waste collection, bin status, amount of waste and bin and truck GPS coordinates etc. are compiled and stored for monitoring and management activities. The outdoor field test demonstrates the performance of the developed system in solid waste collection. Important info was identified, collected, and automatically recorded upon the number of the bins.

Human faces undergo considerable amounts of variations with aging. While face recognition systems have proven to be sensitive to factors such as illumination and pose, their sensitivity to facial aging effects is yet to be studied. The FRVT (Face Recognition Vendor Test) report estimated a decrease in performance by approximately 5% for each year of age difference. Therefore, the development of age-invariant capability remains an important issue for robust face recognition. This research study proposed a geometrical model based on multiple triangular features for the purpose of handling the challenge of face age variations that affect the process of face recognition. The system is aimed to serve in real time applications where the test images are usually taken in random scales that may not be of the same scale as the probe image, along with orientation, lighting ,illumination, and pose variations. Multiple mathematical equations were developed and used in the process of forming distinct subject clusters. These clusters hold the results of applying the developed mathematical models over the FGNET face aging database. The system was able to achieve a maximum classification accuracy of above 99% when the system was tested over the entire FGNET database.

In this paper, we described face verification execution using different feature extraction methods on different regions of the face. We chose two feature extraction methods which are the Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) and the Local Binary Pattern (LBP). Classification is done separately on for each region using Support Vector Machine. The final verification decision is calculated by combining the classification scores of the face region. The results show that generally, LBP gives better results than DCT on our dataset and parameter settings but both methods did not extract good discriminating features on the nose region.

In order to detect moving object from UAV aerial images motion analysis has started to get attention in recent years where motion of the objects along with moving camera needs to be estimated and compensated by using detection algorithm. Moving object detection from UAV aerial images based on motion analysis involves modeling the pixel value changes over time. Moving object detection with moving cameras from UAV aerial images is still an unsolved issue due to not considering irregular motion of camera and improper estimation of noise, object motion changes and finally unfixed moving object direction. This paper presents a low complexity based motion analysis framework for moving object detection along with camera motion estimation by considering motion change of moving object and unfixed moving object direction. Based on the experimental results it is expected that proposed motion vector estimation performs well for both invariant motion and invariant moving object direction.

TRIZ contradiction matrix was built after years of study on patent information. Designers using TRIZ contradiction matrix have to identify the improving and worsening features of their design problems and determine the inventive principles to solve their design problems. It is common to identify multiple improving and worsening features and with some features more important than the others. With the updated 2003 and 2010 TRIZ contradiction matrix introduced, more features have been added and hence, there is a need for a software tool based on these TRIZ matrices. This paper presents an engineering design support tool based on TRIZ that allows considerations for multiple improving and worsening features and allows designers to prioritise these features using weights to solve their design problems as well as the option to choose the version of TRIZ they prefer.

Automated visual inspection is an important step to assure the quality of printed circuit boards (PCB). Component placement errors such as missing, misaligned or incorrectly rotated component are major causes of defects on surface mount PCB. This paper proposes a novel automated visual inspection method for PCB. The proposed method uses a sequence of image processing techniques inspired by the theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ) with Affine-SIFT image matching techniques to enhance the component placement inspection. Only analytic discussions are presented in this paper to support the potential of the proposed method.

In this paper, we evaluate the various methods of Human Computer Interface (HCI) for mobile command and control for military operation. For example, within a forest, field of observation and communication are limited. Thus, the design of user interface for command and control system for military operation is important to ensure delivery of command and control is directly received to all soldiers who involved in the operation. This will ensure the effectiveness of mobile human computer interface for soldiers can be used for military operation in different kind of environment.

In this paper, the design and development of a simple standalone sign based recognition translator without the use of supercomputer processing is presented. The main components for digital signal processing (DSP) and data storage in this translator system are peripheral interface controller (PIC) microcontroller and secure digital (SD) card respectively. The PIC 18F4620 is chosen as system’s DSP because it is able to interface with the SD card. The input of sign gestures is being recognized and translated into text message such that people can understand its meanings. A flex sensor is attached to each finger in a data glove which has the capability to measure the finger sign. The five fingers per hand can create many different signs that can be translated into different text messages. The attached PIC 18F4620 microcontroller in the data glove receives the data associated with a given sign. These data are then diagnosed and translated by matching with the predefined data in the SD card data storage device by using deterministic matching model. When the data is matched, the matched predefined data will be sent to the microcontroller to display its text message on an on-board LCD module. The developed standalone translating system is flexible and adaptive as it can be reprogrammable according to the users that have special disabilities without any aid from a supercomputer.

A framework for image super resolution using Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was developed. In this paper, we focus on verifying the performance of Convolutional Neural Network compared to other methods. CNN generally outperforms other super resolution methods. The training images were collected from various categories, i.e. flowers, buildings, animals, vehicles, human and cuisine. The neural network trained with multiple categories of training images made the CNN more robust towards different test scenarios. Common image degradation, i.e. motion blur and noise, can be reduced when the CNN is provided with proper training samples.

In diagnosing interstitial lung disease (ILD) using HRCT Thorax images, the radiologists required to view large volume of images (30 slices scanned at 10 mm interval or 300 slices scanned at 1 mm interval). However, in the development of scoring index to assess the severity of the disease, viewing 3 to 5 slices at the predetermined levels of the lung is suffice for the radiologist. To develop an algorithm to determine the severity of the ILD, it is important for the computer aided system to capture the main anatomy of the chest, namely the lung and heart at these 5 predetermined levels. In this paper, an automatic segmentation algorithm is proposed to obtain the shape of the heart and lung. In determine the quality of the segmentation, ground truth or manual tracing of the lung and heart boundary done by senior radiologist was compared with the result from the proposed automatic segmentation. This paper discussed five segmentation quality measurements that are used to measure the performance of the proposed segmentation algorithm, namely, the volume overlap error rate (VOE), relative volumetric agreement (RVA), average symmetric surface distance (ASSD), root mean square surface distance (RMSD) and Hausdorff distance (HD). The results showed that the proposed segmentation algorithm produced good quality segmentation for both right and left lung and may be used in the development of computer aided system application.

Lane detection system for car driver assisted becomes an important study to be implemented for safety purposes. It used to lessen possibility of traffic accidents, to monitor the position of a car effectively and to contribute for further development of autonomous navigation technology. In this paper, we proposed an improved Hough transform technique to detect road lane where a comparison has been made on edge detection technique of Canny, Sobel and Roberts. The improved Hough Transform used to extract the features of structured roads. The close field-of-view scope adopts a straight line model to accelerate the speed of data calculation and to find the fitting line. Prior-knowledge is used in lane finding process to efficiently decrease Hough space efficiently, thus enhancing its robustness by improving the processing speed. The algorithm gave good result in detecting straight and smooth curvature lane on highway even when the lane was affected by shadow. The data of road lane has been taken in a video format. Experiment has been done by making a comparison of edge detection technique and we find that the best method that produces high accuracy of detection is by using canny edge detector.

Besides rubber and rice, oil palm or Elaeis Guineensis remains as one of the most important plantation crops in Malaysia. Unfortunately, the lack of experience in oil palm fruit grading among the plucking farmers results in wrong estimation when harvesting. This affects production, negatively. Meanwhile, region growing conventional image segmentation techniques need manually or fixed initial seed selection which, actually, increases the computational cost, as well as, implementation time. Hence, the main goal of this study is to improve the seed region growing algorithm in order to gain higher accuracy in segmenting color information for oil palm fruit image. This study presents n-Seed Region Growing (n-SRG) for color image segmentation by choosing adaptive numbers of seed. The data sample consists of 80 images which comprises and two ripeness classes (ripe and unripe).The proposed work has out-performed the k-mean clustering method with 86% and 80% of average accuracy rates correspondingly.

This paper reviews and compares the performance of five well-known detectors, SIFT, SURF, ORB, MSER and STAR, when combined in combination of with using three common descriptors, SIFT, SURF and ORB. To validate the results, these descriptors’ performances are verified using three scenarios that differ with respect to changes in scale, light variation and rotation. The results show that the SIFT and SURF detectors possess the most stable features, with an overall accuracy of 80% under various conditions. Among the tested descriptors, SURF provides the best description of each keypoint.

In shallow water Sea Bed Logging (SBL) survey, air layer response from the Electro-Magnetic (EM) signals creates a disturbance known as the source-induced airwaves. The airwaves commonly denote the energy that propagates from the EM source via the atmosphere to the receiver on the seabed. As a result, the airwaves dominate the measured survey data, so that the sought-after signals from possible hydrocarbon layers in the subsurface can be totally masked. In this study, a 5x5 factorial design is used to analyze the effect of frequency, seawater conductivity, sediment conductivity, seawater depth and offset on the magnitude of airwaves. The result based on

F

-statistics, indicates that frequency has higher significant effect on the magnitude of the airwaves followed by the seawater depth, offset, seawater conductivity and sediment conductivity in that order.

Acquired brain injury, such as traumatic brain injury and stroke, is the leading cause of long term disabilities in most countries. In rehabilitation, two critical issues are the increasing number of patients and heterogeneity of impairments lead to limit human resources, facilities resulting in high cost of rehabilitation treatment; and the patients’ perceptions that traditional rehabilitation exercises are boring which lead them to neglect the prescribed exercises. Currently, there is no specific standard and guideline to deliver feasible and effective game-based rehabilitation intervention. Hence, in this paper, a conceptual framework is proposed to guide the designing of effective and efficient games for acquired brain injury cognitive rehabilitation. The conceptual framework is developed by investigating serious games and rehabilitation related frameworks and literatures.

This research investigates and identifies the factors that influence positive user engagement while interacting with games interfaces. In this paper we provide a finding on our experiences with two case studies; 1) A study on the variation of flow experience in different gaming devices (mobile and non-mobile) using

Time Tunnel

game; and 2)A study of the user engagement by measuring the user experience while interacting with the game interface using

The Sims 3

game

.

From the results, we identify some issues arising from using different platforms such as flow experience on difference game devices, and different user experience and user engagement on game interface. These findings on games interfaces and user engagement offer many avenues for further research, such as manipulating the levels of user engagement through appropriate gaming interface design.

Reconstruction and repairing damaged parts after object removal of digital video is an important trend in artwork restoration. Video completion is an active subject in video processing, which deals with the recovery of the original data. Most previous video completion approaches consume more time in extensive search to find the best patch to restore the damaged frames. In addition to that, visual artifacts appear when the damaged area is large. In this paper, we present a fast and efficient video completion method without the extensive search process. The proposed method is based on the object prior positions and the temporal continuity of the video frames. The proposed method is fast and maintains the spatial and temporal consistency. In addition to that, it can handle the object size and posture change, non periodic motion, and non stationary background.

Reading difficulties are synonymous with dyslexic children, whose unique condition is due to dyslexia. One of the major theories of dyslexia is visual deficits which are not caused by the problems with the eyes but with the information processing that took place inside the brain. Hence, to assist dyslexic children reading we propose BacaMAX, a visually stimulating voice replay application designed carefully to ease them reading. The application is a result of years of study on dyslexic children and their colour choices. Bedside experiment with the children was carried out on a systematic background and a foreground colour scheme, specifically on syllables, words, and short sentences. This paper aims to deliberately discuss BacaMAX interface design that started with our beta version to the current improved version. Rapid application development is employed as the methodology to develop prototypes and user acceptance test is employed to test the prototypes on real users. As the result, all versions are presented and discussed.

Touch screen mobile devices have begun to better facilitate different game playing while gaining greater attention among users. ‘Playability’ is an important element that measures the ease by which games can be played. It is evaluated by two common methods; heuristic evaluation, and playtesting. Several heuristics have been proposed to evaluate playability but users still face playability problems. This paper attempts to evaluate existing mobile games using the heuristic evaluation method in order to examine the extent in which the heuristics support playability. Two sets of existing playability heuristics were used in the study. Six android games of different genres were evaluated by fourteen test participants. The study result reveals that existing playability heuristics lack the capability of identifying playability problems. These problems are usability, mobility, gameplay, and the multiplayer function for touch screen mobile game applications. Thus, there is a need for a new set of playability heuristics that extensively cover all aspects of playability.

Though today’s children have many chances to interact with IT technology, what they understand about technology from their point of view still needs to be explored. In this paper, we report how children view technology according to their perspectives. We used qualitative research methods that employed drawing activity and interviews. Seventeen 11-12 years old primary school children participated in the study and produced five drawings. From the study we found that the children actually wanted technology which is ubiquitous, wearable, natural in interaction and child-centred.

Dimensionality reduction from an information system is a problem of eliminating unimportant attributes from the original set of attributes while avoiding loss of information in data mining process. In this process, a subset of attributes that is highly correlated with decision attributes is selected. In this paper, performance of the great deluge algorithm for rough set attribute reduction is investigated by comparing the method with other available approaches in the literature in terms of cardinality of obtained reducts (subsets), time required to obtain reducts, number of calculating dependency degree functions, number of rules generated by reducts, and the accuracy of the classification. An interactive interface is initially developed that user can easily select the parameters for reduction. This user interface is developed toward visual data mining.The carried out model has been tested on the standard datasets available in the UCI machine learning repository. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the method especially with relation to the time and accuracy of the classification using generated rules. The method outperformed other approaches in M-of-N, Exactly, and LED datasets with achieving 100% accuracy.

The Representational Power (RP) of an example-based model is its capability to depict a new 3D face for a given 2D face image. In this contribution, a novel approach is proposed to increase the RP of the 3D reconstruction PCA-based model by deforming a set of examples in the training dataset. By adding these deformed samples together with the original training samples we gain more RP. A 3D PCA-based model is adapted for each new input face image by deforming 3D faces in the training data set. This adapted model is used to reconstruct the 3D face shape for the given input 2D near frontal face image. Our experimental results justify that the proposed adaptive model considerably improves the RP of the conventional PCA-based model.

The big picture of an organization plays an important role in providing insight into the decision making process. Thus, the objectives of this paper are to investigate how experts and decision makers obtain the features of the big picture, and then identify related challenges (problems and issues). Data analysis and interpretation show that experts and decision makers gain the big picture through a process of collaboration. Basically there are four main sequences in the collaboration process of constructing the big picture. These are: (i) understanding the big picture requirements, (ii) extracting content from the tools, (iii) collaborating on pieces of information and (iv) using the collaborative information for decision making. In addition, the challenges of attaining the big picture were identified and then clustered into the 3 main components from the perspective of knowledge visualization (KV) on user perception, namely cognition, perception and communication. Data was collected using semi structured interviews following qualitative methods. The sketching technique was used in the one-to-one interviews to represent mental models which are important for later use in the design stage.

Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) is significant for all personnel engaged in work or employment. OSH websites is as well important as it should be relevant to educate the workers to be aware of any hazard or inconvenience act that may jeopardize their health and safety in workplace. This study is conducted to evaluate three OSH websites which are DOSH, NIOSH and OSHA using eye-tracker equipment to collect usability data. This paper is an extended version of our previous submitted paper which reported the details of methodology and results of usability testing conducted for these three websites. This paper reports the satisfaction results obtained from user’s subjective preferences. The satisfaction data is represented into rating percentage and word clouds. This paper also concludes the results of OSH website usability in terms of user satisfaction and preferences with recommendations on further research on usability for OSH domain.

The process of assembling electronic components on a printed circuit board (PCB) with moving board time delay characteristic involves complex co-ordination of a component feeding system, a pick and place system and the positioning movement of the PCB board. Different component arrangements in the feeder system and different assembly paths influence the total assembly time. Reducing the total assembly time can deliver significant cost savings. In this research work, the application of simulation to component assembly enables process engineers to visualise, compare assembly paths and the arrangement of the feeders as well as to verify the total assembly time achieved. This allows the process engineers to make better decision on the planning of the PCB assembly process. The paper shows that simulation when coupled with optimisation techniques enable process engineers to make and plan improvements in PCB assembly times.

Input devices come in different interaction modalities, structure, layout and controls on a mobile platform. However, there is limited information on the types of mobile input devices that affect player experience. Most of the information about the advantages and disadvantages of input devices are reported in isolation without involvement from mobile game application. This paper aims to explore player experience by comparing two different types of mobile input methods, namely hard keypad (HK) and soft keypad (SK), for mobile gaming. Interview was conducted and the results were analysed using content analysis as a way of understanding player experience of input devices for mobile games. The content analysis highlighted positive and negative feedback comprising of two main categories,

Features

and

Effects

. Overall, both qualitative and quantitative data collected revealed that HK was better than SK for mobile gaming.

The present work aims to exploit the new generation of 3D vision systems for detecting people. We present a challenge process dedicated to test the feasibility of detection over disparity maps by exploiting techniques used with monocular cues, specifically HOG/SVM. Disparity maps are extracted by a developed stereoscopic vision system using two passive sensors with an algorithm stack well adopted to real time constraint with lower processing speeds. This detection module can improve systems’perception ability in complex scenes under shadows, gradual/sudden illumination changes and animated texture. Another key point is to estimate their exact locations to predict intrusions in monitored areas. Results indicate a clear advantage of the proposed method to enhance the rate of performance up to 99.6%.

This paper presents the development of a multimedia courseware namely ‘My LINUS’ as a medium in teaching and learning specially designed for slow learner with reading difficulties. The courseware will help slow learner children using an approach and a suitable technique/method with appropriate teaching materials essential for the learning process. The courseware integrates Literacy and Numeracy (LINUS) Syllabus officially prepared by the Ministry of Education for primary school children aged between 7 to 9 years old with the learning multimedia theme. The “MyLINUS” primarily consists of 2 sections for the modules and exercises. The modules consist of 3 sub-modules. Each module is designed to teach in certain domain starting from Module 1 till Module 3. Module 1 teaches the users on how to recognize and pronounce a letter. Module 2 teaches users on how to combine letters to form a word. Module 3 guides users on how to combine words and syllable to form complete sentences. A user acceptance test was conducted in two primary schools in Perak. The results help to support suitability and acceptability and the effectiveness of the courseware for further improvement. The findings of the evaluation indicate positive feedback about the courseware.

A study conducted in 2006 had successfully determined that users could form a schema for the location of web objects on informational websites. This study investigates whether users’ expectation has not changed since the previous study. Among the objects being examined include ‘Logo’; ‘Internal links’; ‘Search’; ‘Advertisement’; ‘External links’; ‘Site title’; ‘Login’; ‘Language’; ‘Content’ and ‘Calendar’. Ninety-four participants from ten ASEAN countries were presented with a demographic questionnaire followed by a mock browser window consisted of six horizontal and seven vertical grid squares. They completed the survey on the expected location of each of the ten web objects. The study found that there were significant changes in user expectations in web object locations. The result supported the findings of the previous study that predicted the advances of technology significantly affect user’s schema of the web objects’ layout within a four-years minimum.

This study used the partial least squares (PLS) and structural equation modeling (SEM) tool to examine evaluation constructs that are appropriate to evaluate educational computer games (ECG) by real users. The focus of the evaluation constructs are for evaluating ECG that still in the development process. There are five constructs that being derived from heuristic evaluation for ECG known as Playability Heuristic Evaluation for Educational Computer Games (PHEG) that being developed to evaluate ECG by expert evaluators. The constructs are interface (10), educational element (6), content (6), playability (7) and multimedia (8). Total numbers of items for the five constructs are 37. Statistical results confirm that all of the five constructs and 29 items are important to be included in evaluating ECG. The results, besides indicating the suitability of the PLS in statistical analysis, has also contributed to a better understanding of constructs needed in evaluating ECG that still in the development process that has not been tested. Findings are useful for game developers and educational technologist to have a validated model and questionnaire that can be used to evaluate ECG. The result of the evaluation using the proposed model can be used to enhance the ECG before it can be released. Limitations and suggestions for future research are also included.

This paper reports on an ongoing research regarding the availability and the needs of creative content application for visually-impaired (VI) learners, particularly low vision children. Numerous assistive technologies (AT) products in terms of hardware and software have been found in previous studies. Conversely, studies in the development of creative content application especially in education are highly scarce. Furthermore, elicitation from literatures also reveals that the use of AT was problematic for low vision children. Hence, this study attempts to investigate the availability and the needs of creative educational content application for VI learners. Accordingly, semi-structured interviews have been conducted with experts from special needs field. The results indicate that the creative educational content application specifically developed for VI learners is not yet exist and the need for it is urgent.

Handheld devices are popular device for an Augmented Reality application. It has a basic hardware requirement for AR system. However it must be overcome some technical obstacle to realize its true power. One of the problems is interaction in handheld AR environment. Touch screen interaction is one of the common interaction methods in handheld AR but it is not easy to interact in touch screen with virtual object in handheld AR scene. Current research shows that Freeze Interaction technique shows its usefulness in handheld touch screen AR interaction. However it has a drawback such as, when users freeze their view it freezes the whole scene. When virtual object are updating continuously the real world-view is not being updated and remains as still picture. It can be a problem when users need to deal with current up-to date real world scene. To overcome current problem of Freeze Interaction technique we have implemented new freeze technique ‘Freeze-Object’ for more precise interaction. This paper presents a short review of handheld AR interaction technique and our proposed work.

Medical Family Tree can provide a branch-by-branch indication of the types of diseases that have been present in a family’s past. Some of these diseases may be genetic in nature. By exploring a Medical Family Tree we can become more aware of any genetic factors that may put us at risk of developing genetically-linked diseases. The main purpose of this paper is to present a proposal on a study to explore the medical family data using visual data mining techniques. This article seeks to enable reader to basically understand how and why this type of research is being conducted and how it can be used to help medical practitioners in understanding family health and condition based on information gathered for family medical tree. Initial investigation suggest that visual data mining has huge potentials as it can visually help a lot people such as health practitioners, therapist, clinicians, social workers and others in various fields to understand the patient’s family medical history and to look for recurring patterns of illness and behaviour.

The development of multimedia educational software using available multimedia technologies has been proven as an effective tool to support teaching and learning process. It provides a good solution to the problem of introducing new learning and teaching techniques in education system. Therefore, this research is investigating a suitable technique to develop interactive multimedia application for effective learning. In this research, cognitive, constructive learning and metaphor of active learning theory was investigated as a potential technique that could be applied in this application. A statistical research study then follows which aims at finding out whether the animation and interactive environment in the courseware developed using learning techniques mentioned above can make learning more efficient and help student to increase their understanding in the subject of Data Communication & Networking. Collection and analysis of data was carried out quantitatively and qualitatively including survey on student learning tools preferences.

Traditional vision tracking approaches have failed to support the fast tracking required by Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR) for a real-time interactive effect. The main problem addressed by this research is the tracking problem in MAR where the computational load is a major issue. In this paper we proposed a more efficient visual tracking technique based on fast detectors and small binary descriptors which are capable of providing both; scale and rotation invariance. We also propose a new hybrid tracking technique which can speed up the overall performance of MAR by reducing the detection rate of the tracking process. The hybrid technique is based on the usage of inertial sensors such as accelerometer, gyroscopes and gravitational vectors which can readily improve the efficiency of any vision based feature tracking system that uses computer vision. The preliminary tests carried out during the course of the study produced very promising results.

This paper describes the acquisition setup and development of a new gait database, MMUGait DB. The database was captured in side and oblique views, where 82 subjects participated under normal walking conditions and 19 subjects walking under 11 covariate factors. The database includes ‘sarong’ and ‘kain samping’ as changes of apparel, which are the traditional costumes for ethnic Malays in South East Asia. Classification experiments were carried out on MMUGait DB and the baseline results are presented for validation purposes.

This paper introduces a novel and fast method for person re-identification using features extracted from the appearance of individuals observed in non-overlapped fields of views in a network of surveillance cameras. The proposed method involves segmentation of silhouettes into meaningful regions, which is close to human visual categorization of colorful clothes, consequently obtaining better performance in various poses. The spatial features extracted from these areas that include color features contribute to the robustness of the method due to illumination changes. In addition, the use of the voting scheme reduces the computational complexity of the algorithm, thus yielding a fast algorithm.

Usability has played a big role in refining the design of a website. Effective design of e-commerce web interfaces potentially increases perceived trust of its consumers. It is thus critical that e-commerce designers understand usability issues pertaining to e-commerce. However, usability looks only at functionalities and we have moved beyond usability towards user’s emotions. The purpose of this study is to design a preliminary checklist using Kansei Engineering for an e-commerce perspective, which can contribute towards trust and purchase intention of consumers in the Malaysia context. A usability evaluation method was conducted, Feedback Capture after Task (FCAT) using the URANUS tool. It was performed on an online gift shop with a group of potential consumers with age range of 18-22. Using Kansei Engineering, we manage to extract words that are mentioned by the users, in which we have categorized it as per Kansei Concept. There are four categories, namely aesthetic, physical, sensational and operational. This research is deemed important in which future web designers could use as a guideline to design an e-commerce website that focuses on perceived trust and purchase intentions based on Kansei Engineering.

Assessment of student’s Engineering Drawing (ED) is always tedious, repetitive and time consuming. Image processing has been the common method to convert ED to be automatically assessed. This method is tedious as algorithms need to be developed for each shape to be assessed. Our research aims to create a software application that is able to perform automatic assessment for AutoCAD Drawing Exchange Format (DXF) files for undergraduate ED course. To achieve this goal, we have explored methods to convert DXF files into SVG format and develop a marking algorithm for the generated SVG files. The result shows that it is feasible to create software that automatically assesses ED without human intervention. Future implementation would include complex real-world ED.

Many researchers have been carried out in order to increase motivation and to stimulate the ability of memorizing among the Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) patients. Modern therapy methods have begun to integrate with multimedia and computer technology in their therapy session for more desirable results. Memory book is an example of an application that is used to assist in the treatment of people who is suffering from the AD. With the advancement in computer technologies, the concept of traditional memory book has been transformed to an attractive, interactive as well as an effective digital memory book. This paper looks into the design and development of a personalized digital memory book specially catered for a 67 years old early stage Alzheimer’s patient. The content included some information about the patient’s family and a multimedia-based learning guide on how to perform prayer (solah). The Alzheimer’s patient, who was previously a devoted Muslim, has now succumbed to her disease and has forgotten how to pray. The outcome from this study revealed that with the help of the personalized memory book, the patient was able to give positive response. Due to the promising result, this study should be continued with some improvement on its contents, user interface design and the hardware used.

Engaging learning environment for learning complex materials in higher education is difficult to perform because the contents are mostly theoretical and hard to visualize. This problem motivates the use of mobile augmented reality in this research. The objective of this research is to design and develop a mobile augmented reality application that can enhance the student’s perception of the selected materials in computer organization and operating system course. The application was developed using three levels of knowledge (understand, apply, analyze) and involved the integration of video, audio, graphic and text information. The evaluation of the application using responses from 13 second year university students shows that this application can be used to enhance the students understanding and engage them in a group discussion for solving the given exercises. This application is expected to be a good start for learning complex materials in the selected course and can be extended to cover different levels of knowledge and subjects.

Reliable person recognition is crucial in all modern-day processes. Biometric systems have been arrayed by public and private organizations. Iris has been used as the most trusted physical attribute of human being as it is accurate, highly reliable, unchangeable and unique. Iris recognition is the identification for an individual based on iris features. In the past, many methods were used to enhance the efficiency of iris recognition systems (IRS). However, currently, the majority of existing systems substantially limit the position and motion of the subjects during the recognition process. This is largely due to the image acquisition process, rather than the specific pattern-matching algorithm applied during the recognition process. Therefore, the current study proposes an accurate method for identification of people using iris recognition system based on video streaming (V-IRS). The results of the study are expected to reveal that iris recognition on the move is an accurate and effective method to identifying people. The study concludes by highlighting the importance of the iris recognition system based on the subject moving.

As the viewing devices for augmented reality (AR) shift from head-mounted display to smart devices, screen becomes a design factor which affects the viewing experience and associated conceptions. In this paper, we present three models of smart-device-based augmented reality (SDAR) for applications in interior design. The objective is to provide a theoretical framework for the rethinking of augmented reality based on relationships among screen, body, space and information, leading to developments in SDAR-assisted design for interior design profession.

In 21

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Century Learning, students use educational technologies to apply knowledge to new situations, to analyse information, to collaborate, to solve problems, and to make decisions. Utilising emerging technologies to provide expanded learning opportunities is critical to the success of future generations. In this paper, the author aims to discover if the 21

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century’s skills (collaboration, communication, problem solving, and critical thinking) can be discovered through integration of Learning Management System with Social Network Sites. In this preliminary study, two sets of questionnaires were distributed to 84 diploma students and 41 lecturers from Politeknik Ibrahim Sultan, Politeknik Merlimau, Politeknik Tuanku Syed Sirajuddin and Politeknik Sultan Idris Shah. This paper shares the preliminary findings on the perceptions of the students and lecturers on the use of Learning Management System, Social Network Sites and Collaborative Learning in the teaching and learning process. All collected data had been analyse using SPPS 19 software and the results of the study showed the existence of difficulties in communication and interaction in existing LMS and the need to assess students’ engagement in group projects. Incorporating LMS with Facebook to support Online Collaborative Learning as recommendation for future research is suggested.

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate unidimensionality of scale used to understand student’s behavior towards an Online Discussion Site (ODS). The extended Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) model was adapted and examined for unidimensionality using Rasch analysis. Seven factors was used to model the student’s intention to use ODS. There are Online Course Design (OCD), User-interface Design (UID), Previous Online Learning Experience (POLE), Perceived Usefulness (PU), Perceived Ease of Use (PEOU), Perceived Interaction (PI) and Intention to Use an Online Discussion Site (IUODS). Item fit statistics and principle component analysis (PCA) suggested that unidimensionality assessment can be achieved after removal of one item from User-interface Design (UID) factor. Our result reports that after removal the misfitting item, the 23 item instrument might provide a unidimensionality assessment of student’s intention to use ODS ability.

In this paper, we propose a rewritable data embedding method in the JPEG-XR compressed domain. Our proposed method is based on modifying the sign of the selected FCT (Forward Core Transform) coef- ficients. Specifically, the last coefficient, with respect to the conventional zigzag scanning order, in a 4

×

4 HP block is selected to embed data. Af- ter extracting the embedded data, the proposed method can restore the image quality by using the proposed simple majority vote method. Al- though the restoration does not perfectly regenerate the original image, the proposed data embedding method is rewritable. To evaluate the pro- posed method, four criteria including quality of the output image (i.e., embedded with data), file size of the output image, available payload and reconstructed image quality, are considered. Experiments are carried out to verify the basic performance of the proposed method. In the best case scenario, the proposed method can embed up to 15954 bits into an 8-bit grayscale image of dimension 512

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512 pixels with a reconstructed image of SSIM = 0

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9919.

The original work on development of Augmented Reality Remedial Worksheet System for Negative Numbers Subtraction Operation (AR2WN2),which is a system designed to assist remedial learners visualize correct thinking process (CTP) on negative numbers subtraction operation, using visualization of correct thinking process (AVCTP) via an animated step-by-step algorithm involved five stages: i) to identifying incorrect steps taken by respondents for items tested; ii) to predict incorrect thinking process (ITP) of respondents based on incorrect solution identified at stage (i); iii) to scaffold respondents based on the ITP predicted towards a CTP based on AVCTP that can be emulated by remedial learners; iv) to create a flowchart algorithm for negative numbers subtraction operation involving two integers based on the AVCTP identified from stage (iii) and v) evaluation of AR2WN2 through a usability testing. Thus, a Usability Testing on AR2WN2 involving two integers based on AVCTP, was conducted on the five (5) selected constructs: ease of use, learnability, effectiveness, flexibility and attitude of users on the AR2WN2 system. The respondents of this study involved 124 students aged 14 years old and six (6) Mathematics teachers from two secondary schools in Malaysia. However, this paper highlights only the Effectiveness and Ease of use constructs based on the five (5) components/modules: History, Thematic (Job), Diagnostic Assessment, Hybrid and Learning Game. The Ease of use construct and its components were measured based on the Data Analysis Model 1 (DAM1). Generally, findings of the usability testing on the ‘Effectiveness’ and ‘Ease of use’ constructs of the AR2WN2 system based on the components mentioned earlier, indicated either highly or moderately accepted or both respectively, by the remedial learners and Mathematics teachers.

Reduced carbon footprints and sustainable public transportation including cab services can be achieved with the applications of suitable green technology. However, to promote the usage of green technology, the technology must not only meet public needs but the public must also appreciate the benefits of adopting green technology in the form of ICT solutions in their routines. Using a theoretical model based on the theory of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study determines the needs for prompt delivery from cab operators as one of the most important modes of public transportation and to develop the appropriate technology applications that would best fulfill these needs. Twenty five cab drivers and users from the state of Malacca were surveyed on their perceptions of existing services as well as suggestions for actions to improve the services. Potential characteristics of green technology for meeting these needs were also identified which will be used for the development of the new technology. Initial findings from this research indicate that ascertaining availability of cab services is an issue that can be alleviated by employing appropriate applications. Important attributes of the ICT solution identified included ease of payment and ease of use.

Information visualization is a significant, measured and potential advantage of Electronic Health Records (EHR) for understanding patient data to physicians. Doctors take primarily interest in understanding a complete knowledge from different portions of visualization that is comprised of numbers, pictures, texts and colored icons. However, complex presentation due to non-identification of different knowledge driven factors in EHR tools results in lesser attraction for its daily use in public health care units. Understanding and analysis of these factors that affect the utilization and sole understanding of visualization in EHR by physicians is main issue. Based on previous work by different researchers in same domain, these factors are shortlisted and compared to analyze the use of such tools by doctors. A survey based questionnaire study with a group of doctors is conducted using a approach to understand the deficiency areas for EHR tools. This figure out the requirements and expectations of doctors with EHR that may also assist other stakeholders like database professionals and visualization designers to align the tools based upon physician’s requirements. Results are analyzed based on feedback of doctors from emergency and outdoor departments of hospitals as they are first to deal with patients and their data in daily routine. Facts are represented in two different categories where first is mentioning the rate of knowledge skills of physicians about visualization and second is mentioning future expectations from such tools. Results concluded that EHR tools should facilitate in more insight about multiple patients history and more skills improvement is required for doctors to use such tools. This research paper is also an integral part of our ongoing effort for developing an integrated model, CARE1.0 that has been proposed in one of the previous work.

Research has shown that the number skills delayed relative to reading skills for Down Syndrome (DS) children. The DS children use the same learning strategy as the normal children, but their learning stages develop more slowly. A possible solution using computer based application, which the children can interact with material that have the integration of visual information and auditory. This paper describes the design, implementation and evaluation of a computer application for learning basic numeracy skills for DS. This application consists of three modules; learning identifying numbers, matching and counting. Dual Coding theory, Schema learning theory and Rapid Application Development (RAD) is employed in the design. Initial user acceptance test of the prototype has shown positive results.

‘Presence’, the sense of being inside a virtual environment evoked with the help of computer mediation, has come to be a subject well explored in the field of virtual reality. Studies on mental imagery confirm that we can intuitively evoke objects and spaces in our minds and interact with them temporally. We believe that a sense of presence could be experienced in such self-evoked reality as well. This paper explores the experience of presence in visual mental imagery. We studied verbal expressions, physical movements and gestures, exhibited during mental imagery experiences in two scenarios - a guiding task and a mental walk exercise. A ‘protocol analysis’ was performed followed by analysis of time taken and mapping of physical movements. The results evidently point to this spatio-temporal phenomenon of experiencing presence. Furthermore, we present a comparative review on the sense of presence experienced during mental imagery and virtual reality.

Agile development methods are most flexible approach for software development where the development team keeps on improving the software with ongoing involvement of user. Despite its flexibility approach in software development, agile methods are still lacking usability evaluation approaches in their development, and integration of usability evaluation into agile development methods is not adequately addressed. In Agile software development, emphasis on requirement gathering and development of comprehensive feasibility reports is not considered in detail. Traditional software development considered this documentation as a quality attribute for the success of the project. Rapid solutions provided by agile software methods leads to the deficiency of good design and architecture which renders the project as expensive. As a remedy, a proposed life cycle for agile software development has been designed. The proposed life cycle outlined in this paper integrates usability evaluation concepts and agile software methodologies for the development of interactive software. To achieve the results, a survey form was formulated and carried out. The results show a greater interest of usability at the initial stage of software development along with user participation and involvement at each stage. The experiment was conducted in the software company by developing an interactive desktop-based application to evaluate the proposed life cycle and IEEE Std. 12207-2008, ISO 9241:210 was used to validate the proposed software model.

Modern mobile phone application interfaces have potential to support various age group users. Among the different age groups, older adults have been quite slow in adopting mobile phone applications and its interfaces. Limited research work has been carried out to investigate the graphical icons and examine its ease of use for various age group users. This paper presents an experimental study to determine the recognition rates of icons from two sets of users with different age groups i.e. younger adults (20 – 40 years) and older adults (+50 years). Users responded to a set of questions consisting of 40 icons obtained from two different brands of mobile phones. The findings reveal that recognition rates vary depending on how familiar the icons are to the users. The results from this study could be useful to support application developers to develop mobile phone applications interfaces that are more suitable for various age group users.

Intellectual Output (IO) of a university is often neglected by society whereas it actually possesses a great capacity of university’s knowledge produced by researchers. Knowledge preservation is important for community to be able to access, utilize and improve the knowledge at the same time. Thus, Institutional Repository (IR) of an institution is essential to ensure the knowledge is stored and accessible at anytime. There is no specific technique to preserve knowledge, but with the existence of ontological and taxonomy model can help in modeling the knowledge. The scope of IO in this paper is University’s IO gained by UiTM Research Innovation Business Unit (RIBU). Taxonomy presented in this paper is derived from RIBU’s intellectual output which is expected to help the search and retrieval mechanism for an IR.

The ubiquitous use of computer by children is highly perceptible in current research. Therefore, providing the increasing interaction to computer technologies demands a careful designing of these technologies keeping in view the pedagogical aspects, psychology, abilities and interests of the children. These requirements make development of such applications a very complex job. Therefore, existing applications follow the content delivery model i.e. previously crafted contents are stored to deliver to a user. This limits the effective learning of the children. The present work proposed a rule-based system utilizing semantic web technologies (Ontologies) as a domain knowledge and semantic web rule language (SWRL) for rules representation. The proposed system overcomes the complexity of developing the intelligent and interactive applications for children. Evaluation is performed by using formal usability evaluation heuristics over an application developed using our proposed system for preschool cognitive skills tutoring. Results provided here demonstrates that the underlying knowledge modeled through the use of Ontologies is highly supported to flexible and child-friendly interfaces and pedagogical and playability activities (motor, reasoning) for cognitive skills tutoring.

Concept map is a technique that arranges knowledge in a form of connected nodes. In our hypothesis, applying a concept map approach in teaching and learning History as a courseware can improve students’ understanding and cognitive development. Therefore, we developed a courseware to complement the text book and were distributed to students in a Secondary School. For the purpose of this study, an experimental assessment was conducted among students where twenty students responded and went through the courseware assessment session. They filled in a form which was purposely designed to assess the effectiveness of the concept map instructional delivery and learner-friendliness of the design interface. In particular, the study looked at the effectiveness of a simulated learning experience, interface design as well as the technical aspects of the courseware. The findings from the study suggested that, in general, an implementation of concept map has been effective and useful. The outcome of the study concluded that concept map is one of the promising methods that can be effectively used to teach history in secondary students.

The usability engineering process has indicated the importance of setting usability criteria and a measureable level for important goals. Without goal-oriented practice, novice or inexperienced designers do not know how to deliver usable and quality system and would unreasonably follow what they have seen or used before. This paper presents a quantitative basis for selecting and prioritizing design goals or usability goals, thereafter selecting the best prototype relative to the usability goals. The proposed method consists of two main phase, namely: the prioritizing goals phase and the user evaluation phase. The objective of the prioritizing goal phase is to set priorities of the usability goals using analytic hierarchy process (AHP). The second phase involves users in the quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods to evaluate the prototypes using quantitative criteria and thereafter select the best prototype. The level of importance of usability goals assists designers to decide which alternative designs meet the most important usability goals. A case study of prototype selection in students’ design assignment is presented, and the proposed approach is applied to facilitate their design decision during prototype development and evaluation.

Attitudinal theory from the social psychology has been widely used in developing persuasive information technology and services in conjunction to shape or change user’s attitude or behavior. Persuasion is the essence in building trust. The nature of this article is conceptual-theoretical where it discusses how emotion approach can be used to make people trust persuasive application. This article describes the three components; persuasive technology, trust, and emotion individually and the relation between them. Moreover, a conceptual model with related elements is proposed to show the relationship between those components.

The emergence of new gesture-technologies that use bare-hands without any remote control or tools to hold is a good indicator that the technology is implementing naturalness in an input control system. However, the concept of naturalness that is commonly applied is interpreted from the adult user’s perspective without realizing that the equally importance users of gesture-based technology are children. For this reason, this study was undertaken to describe the natural elements of gesture-based interaction in terms of how they influence the behavior of children using gesture-based technology devices, and to what extent the children benefit from their use. This includes the identification of issues and opportunities related to naturalness in using the latest gesture-based technologies, Kinect and iPad. Our observations show that the naturalness in gesture-control devices enabled children to reflect real world situations into the interaction, thus, aiding them to call back (recall and demonstrate) the gesture command easily and sparking positive feelings during the interaction. We conclude that understanding naturalness from a children’s perspective can offer potential benefits to children in the utilization of gesture-based technologies.

The characteristics of the visual haptic approach complement the need in teaching and learning of proper Jawi handwriting skills in Malaysian educational setting. This paper explores literatures and previous studies on the visual haptic applications focusing on handwriting. The advantages, limitations and possible solutions for each stage will be taken into consideration in designing and developing Haptik Visual-Jawi (HV-Jawi). The development of the HV-Jawi architecture also has been proposed based on the review and findings of the relevant literatures, previous studies, and our preliminary analysis results.

Universities and other educational institutions around the world are increasingly using e-learning technology to more efficiently and effectively deliver the education to their students. Successful implementation of e-learning system is determined by the acceptance of such system by students. Therefore this study was undertaken to explore the factors that influence the intention of students to adopt e-learning at the South Eastern University of Sri Lanka (SEUSL) and the investigation was carried out by using UTAUT model. It was found that, performance expectancy, effect expectancy and facilitation conditions are the important factors, that are influencing students’ intention to adopt e-learning, and the results are contributory for the development of a strategy for implementing e-learning system at this university. It was also found that, both, the university and students are capable of adopting e-learning system.

This study aims to examine the reliability of five cultural dimensions of Power Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty Avoidance, Masculinity and Long-Term Orientation towards interface tendency among university students. The second purpose of this study was to test whether there are differences in the pattern of utilization of the interface according to culture. The third purpose of this study was to determine whether there are differences for each of the cultural dimensions of religion and thus has a distinct tendency to interface components. A total of 100 population samplings were collected from the respondents. The questionnaire was adapted from the study of Reinecke (2010), which includes questions for dimension of Power Distance, Individualism, Uncertainty Avoidance, Masculinity and Long-Term Orientation. Data were analyzed using the Cronbach alpha test.

There are various techniques to determine the usability of a design such as product label. One of them is the employment of eye movement measurement technique which takes into account a more natural setting and actual user involvement. While previous studies have explained the definition of eye movement and in the usability of a design, this preliminary research was study the eye movement characteristics through the theory of eye tracking on product label that was choose by student, before the research will be further on expert validation on product label through interview. It combining several aspects in eye movement measurements comprises fixation count, fixation duration, cumulative proportion of respondent fixation count and cumulative proportion of respondents for fixation duration on area of interest (AOI) of product label design. The findings reveal that AOI for text design has the highest cumulative proportion of respondent in fixation count and fixation duration. However, AOI for text design also indicates that there was a lack of attention in eye movement. In conclusion, the characteristics of the design elements for each AOI can be determined by the proportion results of eye movement.

Teaching and Supervision Evaluation System (TESES), is a system to evaluate the quality of teaching and supervision from students’ perspective. It is an official student feedback system used to evaluate efficiency and effectiveness of the Quality Management System (QMS) MS ISO 9001:2008 for management of undergraduate and graduate studies. In addition, the input obtained from the students will be used to continually improve and enhance the quality of teaching and learning at Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. Although the feedback from the system can contribute to improving the quality of the programs but the usability issues in terms of effectiveness and efficiency of the system design along with the reliability of the inputs and feedbacks from the students are disputable. Subsequently, these issues are studied in order to improve the system. This study use a triangulation method which is an integration of the three techniques; namely survey, observation through eye tracking technique and interviews, carried out on a sample consists of 30 students from the Faculty of Information Science and Technology. The visual interaction patterns, usability problems and the reliability level of student feedback are identified at the end of the study.

Social networking is a platform to build social relation among people around the world. Facebook is one of the applications widely used by everyone. Now we can share information, ideas, knowledge through social networking sites (SNS). These activities are enjoyed by everyone without any barriers. In this paper we discuss the navigation issues in Facebook by visually impaired (VI) user who using screen reader. Our study focuses on important navigation activities by VI user, explaining navigation barriers and suggesting solutions.