• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.49-55
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• 2015

According to the statistics of traffic accidents over recent 5 years, traffic accidents during the night times happened more than the day times. There are various causes to occur traffic accidents and the one of the major causes is inappropriate or missing street lights that make driver's sight confused and causes the traffic accidents. In this paper, with smartphones, we designed and implemented a lane luminance measurement application which stores the information of driver's location, driving, and lane luminance into database in real time to figure out the inappropriate street light facilities and the area that does not have any street lights. This application is implemented under Native C/C++ environment using android NDK and it improves the operation speed than code written in Java or other languages. To measure the luminance of road, the input image with RGB color space is converted to image with YCbCr color space and Y value returns the luminance of road. The application detects the road lane and calculates the road lane luminance into the database sever. Also this application receives the road video image using smart phone's camera and improves the computational cost by allocating the ROI(Region of interest) of input images. The ROI of image is converted to Grayscale image and then applied the canny edge detector to extract the outline of lanes. After that, we applied hough line transform method to achieve the candidated lane group. The both sides of lane is selected by lane detection algorithm that utilizes the gradient of candidated lanes. When the both lanes of road are detected, we set up a triangle area with a height 20 pixels down from intersection of lanes and the luminance of road is estimated from this triangle area. Y value is calculated from the extracted each R, G, B value of pixels in the triangle. The average Y value of pixels is ranged between from 0 to 100 value to inform a luminance of road and each pixel values are represented with color between black and green. We store car location using smartphone's GPS sensor into the database server after analyzing the road lane video image with luminance of road about 60 meters ahead by wireless communication every 10 minutes. We expect that those collected road luminance information can warn drivers about safe driving or effectively improve the renovation plans of road luminance management.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
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• v.17 no.1
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• pp.53-69
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• 2011

Vision and voice-based technologies are commonly utilized for human-robot interaction. But it is widely recognized that the performance of vision and voice-based interaction systems is deteriorated by a large margin in the real-world situations due to environmental and user variances. Human users need to be very cooperative to get reasonable performance, which significantly limits the usability of the vision and voice-based human-robot interaction technologies. As a result, touch screens are still the major medium of human-robot interaction for the real-world applications. To empower the usability of robots for various services, alternative interaction technologies should be developed to complement the problems of vision and voice-based technologies. In this paper, we propose the use of accelerometer-based gesture interface as one of the alternative technologies, because accelerometers are effective in detecting the movements of human body, while their performance is not limited by environmental contexts such as lighting conditions or camera's field-of-view. Moreover, accelerometers are widely available nowadays in many mobile devices. We tackle the problem of classifying acceleration signal patterns of 26 English alphabets, which is one of the essential repertoires for the realization of education services based on robots. Recognizing 26 English handwriting patterns based on accelerometers is a very difficult task to take over because of its large scale of pattern classes and the complexity of each pattern. The most difficult problem that has been undertaken which is similar to our problem was recognizing acceleration signal patterns of 10 handwritten digits. Most previous studies dealt with pattern sets of 8~10 simple and easily distinguishable gestures that are useful for controlling home appliances, computer applications, robots etc. Good features are essential for the success of pattern recognition. To promote the discriminative power upon complex English alphabet patterns, we extracted 'motion trajectories' out of input acceleration signal and used them as the main feature. Investigative experiments showed that classifiers based on trajectory performed 3%~5% better than those with raw features e.g. acceleration signal itself or statistical figures. To minimize the distortion of trajectories, we applied a simple but effective set of smoothing filters and band-pass filters. It is well known that acceleration patterns for the same gesture is very different among different performers. To tackle the problem, online incremental learning is applied for our system to make it adaptive to the users' distinctive motion properties. Our system is based on instance-based learning (IBL) where each training sample is memorized as a reference pattern. Brute-force incremental learning in IBL continuously accumulates reference patterns, which is a problem because it not only slows down the classification but also downgrades the recall performance. Regarding the latter phenomenon, we observed a tendency that as the number of reference patterns grows, some reference patterns contribute more to the false positive classification. Thus, we devised an algorithm for optimizing the reference pattern set based on the positive and negative contribution of each reference pattern. The algorithm is performed periodically to remove reference patterns that have a very low positive contribution or a high negative contribution. Experiments were performed on 6500 gesture patterns collected from 50 adults of 30~50 years old. Each alphabet was performed 5 times per participant using $Nintendo{(R)}$ $Wii^{TM}$ remote. Acceleration signal was sampled in 100hz on 3 axes. Mean recall rate for all the alphabets was 95.48%. Some alphabets recorded very low recall rate and exhibited very high pairwise confusion rate. Major confusion pairs are D(88%) and P(74%), I(81%) and U(75%), N(88%) and W(100%). Though W was recalled perfectly, it contributed much to the false positive classification of N. By comparison with major previous results from VTT (96% for 8 control gestures), CMU (97% for 10 control gestures) and Samsung Electronics(97% for 10 digits and a control gesture), we could find that the performance of our system is superior regarding the number of pattern classes and the complexity of patterns. Using our gesture interaction system, we conducted 2 case studies of robot-based edutainment services. The services were implemented on various robot platforms and mobile devices including $iPhone^{TM}$. The participating children exhibited improved concentration and active reaction on the service with our gesture interface. To prove the effectiveness of our gesture interface, a test was taken by the children after experiencing an English teaching service. The test result showed that those who played with the gesture interface-based robot content marked 10% better score than those with conventional teaching. We conclude that the accelerometer-based gesture interface is a promising technology for flourishing real-world robot-based services and content by complementing the limits of today's conventional interfaces e.g. touch screen, vision and voice.