This paper presents a systemused toautomatically recognize the road traffic control gestures of police officers. In this approach,the control gestures of traffic police officers are captured inthe form of depth images.A human skeleton is then constructed using a kinematic model. The feature vector describing a traffic control gesture is built from the relative angles found amongstthe joints of the constructed human skeleton. We utilizeSupport Vector Machines (SVMs) to perform the gesture recognition. Experiments show that our proposed method is robust and efficient and is suitable for realtime application. We also present a testbed system based on the SVMs trained data for real-time traffic gesture recognition.

Road Traffic Control Gesture Recognition using Depth Images

Mobile RFID is a new application that uses a mobile phone as an RFID reader with wireless technology and provides a new valuable service to users by integrating RFID and ubiquitous sensor network infrastructures with mobile communication and wireless Internet. Whereas the mobile RFID system has many advantages, privacy violation problems on the reader side are very concerning to individuals and researchers. Unlike in regular RFID environments, where the communication channel between the server and reader is assumed to be secure, the communication channel between the backend server and the RFID reader in the mobile RFID system is not assumed to be safe. Therefore it has become necessary to devise a new communication protocol that secures the privacy of mobile RFID-enabled devices. Recently, Lo et al. proposed a mutual key agreement protocol that secures the authenticity and privacy of engaged mobile RFID readers by constructing a secure session key between the reader and server. However, this paper shows that this protocol does not meet all of the necessary security requirements. Therefore we developed an enhanced mutual key agreement protocol for mobile RFID-enabled devices that alleviates these concerns. We further show that our protocol can enhance data security and provide privacy protection for the reader in an unsecured mobile RFID environment, even in the presence of an active adversary.

An Enhanced Mutual Key Agreement Protocol for Mobile RFID-enabled Devices

This paper presents an image processing-based validation method for unrecognizable numbers in severely distorted license plate images which have been degraded by various factors including low-resolution, low light-level, geometric distortion, and periodic noise. Existing vehicle license plate recognition (LPR) methods assume that most of the image degradation factors have been removed before performing the recognition of printed numbers and letters. If this is not the case, conventional LPR becomes impossible. The proposed method adopts a novel approach where a set of reference number images are intentionally degraded using the same factors estimated from the input image. After a series of image processing steps, including geometric transformation, super-resolution, and filtering, a comparison using cross-correlation between the intentionally degraded reference and the input images can provide a successful identification of the visually unrecognizable numbers. The proposed method makes it possible to validate numbers in a license plate image taken under low lightlevel conditions. In the experiment, using an extended set of test images that are unrecognizable to human vision, the proposed method provides a successful recognition rate of over 95%, whereas most existing LPR methods fail due to the severe distortion.

Image Processing-based Validation of Unrecognizable Numbers in Severely Distorted License Plate Images

An image obtained from a low light environment results in a low-exposure problem caused by non-ideal camera settings, i.e. aperture size and shutter speed. Of particular note, the multiple color-filter aperture (MCA) system inherently suffers from low-exposure problems and performance degradation in its image classification and registration processes due to its finite size of the apertures. In this context, this paper presents a novel method for the color enhancement of low-exposure images and its application to color shift model-based MCA system for image refocusing. Although various histogram equalization (HE) approaches have been proposed, they tend to distort the color information of the processed image due to the range limits of the histogram. The proposed color enhancement algorithm enhances the global brightness by analyzing the basic cause of the low-exposure phenomenon, and then compensates for the contrast degradation artifacts by using an adaptive histogram specification. We also apply the proposed algorithm to the preprocessing step of the refocusing technique in the MCA system to enhance the color image. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method can enhance the contrast of any low-exposure color image acquired by a conventional camera, and is suitable for commercial low-cost, high-quality imaging devices, such as consumer-grade camcorders, real-time 3D reconstruction systems, digital, and computational cameras.

Color Enhancement of Low Exposure Images using Histogram Specification and its Application to Color Shift Model-Based Refocusing

Recently, the smart grid (SG) has been introduced to solve the serious network issues caused by the increasing electrical demand and the complex nonlinear nature of the electric power distribution network. The SG, regarded as the next generation power grid, can transmit power in more efficient ways by building an automatic and distributed energy delivery network. In this paper, we first assess how various existing networking technologies, such as IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) and IEEE 802.15.4 (ZigBee), meet the requirements of the SG communication protocols. Specifically, we classify the existing network protocols into three categories: WSN-based networking, WiFi-based networking, and wireline-based networking. We then survey the security issues regarding the SG. Finally, we propose an agile SG networking architecture and show the effectiveness of different adopted networking technologies and, as a result, present a candidate solution to implement agile networking in SGs.

Minho Jo

Papers

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