Color Deducto

Color Deducto is an activity designed for the android OS which aims at helping sharpen the logical and deductive skills if children as well as make them familiar with the Munsell Color System.

The logic of the levels are based on the different terms and concepts of the color system. Each level is based on a different logic, such as monochromacity, addition and subtraction of colors, etc. The player needs to be familiar with the color system to be able to attempt the game. He has to identify the logic behind each level and classify the board as TRUE or FALSE. If he succeeds in correctly identifying the board five times consecutively, then he’s promoted to the next level. Every wrong answer brings down the efficiency.

INSPIRATION

The basic idea behind Color Deducto was put forth by Walter Bender, founder of Sugar Labs, and former Executive Director at MIT Media Labs. It conforms to Sugar’s cardinal objective of teaching children and helping them grow intellectually. It does so by stimulating students’ logical thinking, and familiarising them with the concepts of color system.

FEATURES

Some of the key features of Color Deducto are as follows:-

1. The game is a great tool for sharpening children’s logical capabilities and increasing their knowledge about Munsell Color System.

2. Feedback Facility-

I. It also provides feedback to the user in terms of percentage efficiency.

II. It also provides statistics in terms of number of correct and incorrect answers.

3. User Friendly– Deducto has a number of user friendly widgets as follows:-

I. Save Game– Feature to save the game and resume it later from the point where it was left.

II. Help – Feature to help the users with the rules of the game and to get a better understanding.

III. Facts– Feature to provide the users with facts related to colors.

III. Color Theory– teaches basics of color theory to users .

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LEVELS:

1.Level One

   a.Level One True:

24 boxes in the board are coloured  randomly by computer while  the centre 

     Is always a fixed shade of red.                                                       

    b.Level One False:

      Centre square is never red while rest of the squares may be of any color.

 2.Level Two

   a.Level Two true

       The colors of all the squares are shades of a single color or hue(monochromatic)

   b.Level Two False:

       The squares are randomly colored with adjacent boxes of different hues.

3.Level Three

   a.Level Three True:

      From top to bottom, the Munsell value of colors keeps on increasing 

   b.Level Three False:

       From top to bottom, the colors of the squares are in ascending chroma(i.e.the colors closer to       greyish shade at the top and brighter, brilliant colors at the bottom)

4.Level Four

   a.Level Four True:

The color of the 4 diagonal squares adjacent to the central square, is the addition of color of its adjacent horizontal square and the adjacent vertical square.

   b.Level Four False:

          The color of the 4 diagonal squares adjacent to the central square, is the subtraction of color of its adjacent horizontal square and the adjacent vertical square.

5.Level Five

   a.Level Five True:

      This level is based on Chroma Explosion, i.e. the chroma of the central square is the least(the central square is of a greyish shade), and the outermost squares(of the same color) are of the highest chroma value.

   b.Level Five False:

      This is based on Value Explosion, i.e. the central square is of the least Munsell value and the outermost squares(of the same color) have the highest Munsell value.

6.Level Six

   a.Level Six True:

The squares are of complimentary colors(red and green, yellow and purple, blue and orange). The rest of the squares are of shades of grey.

   b.Level Six False:

      The colors of the squares are adjacent hues(eg. Blue and green, green and yellow)

7.Level Seven:

   a.Level Seven True:

       The colors of the boxes are equiluminant.

   b.Level Seven False:

       The colors of the squares are of high chroma value(high purity,brilliant colors)      

8.Level Eight:

   a.Level Eight True:

     The colors of the squares are of low chroma value(closer to the neutral gray axis in the Munsell solid).

 9.Level Nine:

  a.Level Nine True:
The colors of the boxes are of high Munsell value contrast(some are very dark and the others are very light)

  b.Level Nine False:

       The color contrast of the squares if moderate if the board is false.   

10.Level Ten

   A.Level Ten True:

The squares are colored with warm hues ie shades of red, orange and yellow.

   b.Level Ten False:

    The squares are colored with cool hues ie shades of blue, green and violet.

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Drishti : Goggles for Indian Languages

INTRODUCTION: 

Drishti a realtime multi-language snapshot translation, speech and search mobile application architecture which uses best possible components to achieve efficient text extraction and processing of image captured , keeping in mind the storage and computational limitations of mobile.

The work involves study of existing desktop and mobile OCR application in Indian and foreign languages followed by discussion and understanding of the components of Drishti – 1)OCR 2)Text correction 3)Text Translator 4)Speech synthesizer.

Thorough analysis of various free OCR engines namely Tesseract, OCRopus, Ocrad is done using UNLV ISRI performance toolkit as well as using different images to find that Tesseract Engine  to have the maximum accuracy. Leptonica image processing library is used to improve and smoothen the input image and make it Tesseract Recognisable. Since string returned from OCR showed single letter to be mis-recognized, dictionary of valid words is used to identify nearest neighbor using levenshtein distance Algorithm. Google was found to be best Text-translator for foreign as well as Indian language on its comparison with text translators like Babelfish , Bing ,dictionary.com , WordLingo ,  Free translator etc. Android TTS is used as speech synthesizer for English, Spanish, German, French but for regional languages http post is sent to Google servers as android TTS is still limited to few languages. Proposition and implementation of architecture is followed by testing and computation of efficiency. Various use cases for the application, performance factors, future improvements have been discussed.

DESIGN & IMPLEMENTATION: 

Fig 5.1 Architecture of Drishti Application

The above diagram shows the architecture of drishti and its working. The image is captured using high resolution camera of smartphone device. Care is taken that the image is brightly lit and is not at angle to make it – skewed or perspective image. It has been found that brightness and color do not hamper OCR results as much as geometry. We take the following assumptions while clicking pictures –

1) The applications will only recognize a few commonly used italic font types

2) Text should be sufficiently large and thick

3) Text should be evenly illuminated

4) Text should be roughly horizontal. A significant skew angle is undesirable.

After taking picture, the image is preprocessed to enhance OCR results by doing YUV enhancement to remove the extra white spaces present .Next step is to convert the image into tesseract detectable format which is done by leptonica image processing library . Now the training data of the required language is downloaded. The OCR engine uses the training data to go through the process of analysis of text .First characters are determined which are joined together to form a word and hence a sentence . page analysis is done using tab-spot detection algorithm . The extracted text is post processed to improve accuracy .This process is something similar to spell checker .The corrected text is sent to the google servers for translation.The translated text obtained is spoken out loud for the aid of tourists and people whose eye sight is low . The extracted or translated text can be used for targeted search. Various detailed and very useful use cases are discussed in the next sections.

USER INTERFACE

The user interface of the application is user-friendly. The following section shows the interface and functions of various components visible in the interface.

As the application starts the user views the following interface:

Figure 5.2 :First Screen /capture activity

The Square rectangle is adjustable focus box , which is focused on text to be extracted so that only useful text and no junk is taken in the picture .

The camera button is clicked when we are sure of the text has been focused properly nad we want to perform OCR process.

Pencil button is pressed if user does not want to enter data through OCR scan but to it manually for translation and speech .

When OCR is successful , the extracted OCR text is sent as an intent to the translation-speech activity as shown in figure below :

Figure 5.3 translation activity

The first activity does OCR on image to obtain word hello in English which is translated to hindi as “Namaste “ and spoken out in hindi dialect . Another example of English text OCR to hindi language translation is shown in the second figure .

The radio buttons are for selecting that the search will be targeted on original text or translated text .

The 12 buttons shown are methodology for targeted search of the text extracted through snapshot . They are :

1)Speech

Text is converted into speech using speech synthesis engine provided by android architecture for languages like german , Spanish , English .For regional language there is no support of android TTS thus we use google translator API to provide the speech synthesis of text sent .The results from the operation were satisfactory .

2)Word Meaning

For the given word input , word meaning is found on dictionary.com for foreign languages .For regional shabdkosh.com is used to provide meaning of hindi words. The accuracy of shanbdkosh was found to be pretty good.

3)News

Consider that you are reading news and want to read more articles related to that news, all you have to do is to click picture of the news so that OCR is performed on it to extract heading/keyword and click news button for extensive news articles till date.

4)Google Maps

User wants to google a location and has address printed , all he has to do is perform an OCR of the text and hit google maps button to get the direction to the required location

5)Web

General Web Search of any kind of printed text is done by clicking this button.

6)Google Images

Images are smarter , efficient and faster way of finding things on net .This allows the user to search images related to to the text they extracted.

7)Flicker Images

Searches through the flicker data to provide the user with list of picture with tag of the text extracted .

8)People

Have a name and want to know more detail of the concerned person. Just click picture of the name and press the button to know about the linked in professional  profile of anyone user desires .

9)Dropbox

This is share intent and uploads the contents captured and recognized  on the cloud seamlessly for later use .

10)Share

If you have a long printed text which needs to be sent via mail or message , rather than attaching image OCR can be done is this is highly useful feature for students exchanging notes  .

11)Search videos

Search youtube videos related to  the extracted text from OCR.

12)Search books

If you are in a bookstore and want to search more about a particular book.all one has to do is take picture of title and do targeted search by clicking books icon.

The third screen is the preference window screen which is opened by clicking the menu button from first screen or second screen .It keeps track of the user choices , the language to be recognized and translated to . There is list of black listed and white listed .black listed characters will be removed from the OCR during post processing .

 Figure 5.4: preference activity

LIST OF LANGUAGES

Figure 5.5 :list of languages

There are various languages which can be recognized by tesseract engine. Drishti is capable of recognizing 36 languages including hindi . the tesseract can be extended to other regional languages like gujarati bengali etc

USE CASE Scenarios 

Examples of Use Case /Scenarios where Drishti can be of use have been discussed below where the application may be used :

1)Book Search
This is example of Books targeted search .The title of the book is captured , drishti runs OCR engine on it to recognize the title in text , this sends a book search intent to get the result as shown in figure .

2)Image Search

The Hindi Ocr engine is selected for the given image captured to obtain saree in hindi which is converted into English using translator . image search intent results in the following output

3)Speech

The below figure is demonstration of English text to Tamil language . Tamil text is spoken as well in tamil dialect so that user gets to know the pronunciation of words as well .

4)People search 

In this the extracted name from journal or business card is passed as an intent to LinkedIn serach task to get the required list of suggested names .

5)Video  search – The name of artist “AR Rahman” is OCR ed here and you tube video search is done

5)Word Meaning – the word to searched is put in box and passed to OCR engine for text extraction  . the extracted text is sent to dictionary for meaning .

6)Location Search  – location search from given address is one of the most interesting search as well as useful . GPS can be used to improve search result .    

World Newspapers

Link  to World Newspapers on Playstore

Easy to use directory of thousands of local and international newspapers, magazines and websites. More than 6000 WORLDWIDE newspapers, websites and magazines links at your fingertips optimized for your android phone. World Newspapers, was made with the vision to make the access of Newspapers and Magazines from over the globe easy for the android mobile user community. It presents Links to the users segregated in various categories like By country, most popular, thus catering to their requirements. The magazines are sorted in categories namely social, science and technology, business etc. The application also contains an RSS feed aggregator based on Google News where one can add and search for feeds manually or using the search option. The Application supports easy sharing of links using Url shortner by Bit.ly on Facebook , mail, SMS, Twitter etc .One can save articles for offline viewing . The articles can be marked “read it later” online bookmarking service, translated from one language to another using Google Translator, saved in browser history log. User can save newspaper links of his choice as Favourites. The app provides option for clear cache before exiting. User Settings can be done to set preferential browser viewing settings.

INTRODUCTION
NEWS is North-East-West-South. World Newspaper is android application which gives a whole new dimension to the meaning of NEWS by opening new avenues of information for knowledge thirsty minds in this eventful world . Its powerhouse of Newspapers and magazines from all over the globe made available with just a touch of finger. In the app Newspaper and Magazine sites are optimized for Android and removes the daunting and cumbersome challenge of saving separate bookmarks and icons. A major problem any user faces today is, finding local news from around the world . Sure, you can browse the “World News” sections of various popular media outlets, but while giving you some of the most significant stories, they lack the local focus that regional media outlets carry. This will often leave you longing for a feel for the local culture and way of life. This is where World Newspapers comes in.

Fig 1-main screen-showing favourites, My country, Browse, RSS,  Offline Tabs This app completes the news feed sources . Be it Indian or foreign, technology or life-style, fashion or environs, this is an all-in-one armoury for keeping you with-it on current affairs. This app has a favourite tab wherever you will be able to view news feeds of your preference. The categories that you may opt include Magazines, Web news, amusing/Social/Popular, additional Countries news, and Android news.

World Newspapers is an umbrella app for a huge variety of newspapers and magazines. Here’s a short overview of the menu:

•  Favs: This is list of favourite newspapers which the user can set .Add any newspaper or magazine to your favorites with long-click.
• My country: allows user to choose their country for fast access.It shows all the links belonging to that category.thus gives sense of personalisation.
• Browse: Lists all countries and categories.
• RSS: RSS Feed Reader
• Offline read: Gives list of links which the user has stored for offline reading.

LIST OF FEATURES
1)Browse by country and categories 

Fig 1.1-1.3

The whole database is divided in the categories of countries, Magazines, Webnews , fun/Social/popular etc. This helps in easy management and search operations. In each category most popular links have been listed under featured section followed by links in alphabetical order as shown in Fig 1.3

2)My country Tab

Fig 2.1-2.3 My country Tab sets the newspapers of the country selected by user. For USA the newspapers have been categorized according Top USA and 50 states. (Fig2.1) .For rest of the countries most popular come on top ,followed by rest of them in alphabetical order(Fig 2.3) . One can change country preference by using menu->Select country .A dialogue box pops up. Select the country from there.(Fig 2.2)

3)Favorites(customizable):

Fig 3.1-3.4 For personalisation the users can select favourite newspapers using long click on the required link(Fig 3.1). A SQLite Database is maintained to manage the list of favourites. Users can also delete the favourites they no longer want (fig 3.2).Arrange the favourite list according to their preference order rather than having it sorted in alphabetical order. (Fig 3.3,3.4)

4) RSS reader with smart search & offline reading:

Fig 4.1-3 A very important feature of world newspapers is to aggregate RSS feeds .It uses Google News API to get RSS in form of JSON data which is parsed and presented in suitable format. Users can add any RSS link they want by Menu->Add channel (Fig 4.1) to get dialogue box as shown in Fig 4.2 .In the dialogue box either one can add the link of RSS or search according to search word user wants. If the request is granted then RSS id downloaded. Fig 4.3

Fig 4.4-4.6 Once RSS is downloaded it is arranged in read and unread list. The green bar at left (Fig 4.4) shows unread items. Users can click star on the right to mark their favourite RSS news. Also long clicking a RSS (Fig 4.5)gives option to tag the given RSS item as read/unread. Fig 4.6 shows the view of RSS which has share option, and arrow keys to move back and forth.

5)Browsing links

Fig 5.1-5.3

Fig 5.1 shows the browser of world newspapers when a link is opened. There is share button on left side and home button on right side to go back to previous menu . Fig 5.2 shows the menu of browser. Refresh button reloads the page. Translate translates the given webpage to the language selected. Settings are used for personalization of browser.Save article is for offline download of webpage.Read it later saves the link to online bookmarking service given by readinglist.com .

6)Save browser History

Fig 6.1 Every time user opens a link an entry is made in the history database. The history is segregated in the form of Today, Last Week, Last Month .This helps the user to go to previously opened link easily.

7) Search for newspapers

Fig 7.1 The Search activity helps the user to find newspaper/ magazine links in the database. Android’s auto complete function is used to give auto suggestions to the user to help in easy search.

8) Translate web page

Fig 8.1-2 Translate sends the current url to translate.google.com which loads the same webpage in the language selected to be translated in.Fig 8.1 is the translated page of fig 8.2

9) Download web pages for offline viewing
Webpages can be saved for offline viewing of pages. This imp feature allows user to access links even when he doesn’t have internet.

10) Submit a newspaper
Users can submit request for addition of newspapers/magazines in the application by filling a form which in turn goes to spreadsheet

11) Personalized settings
Settings can be set to personalize browser, cache clear options, notification bar etc

12) Read It Later integration
Read it later API is used for online bookmarking of links. Thus the user can read the same links in mobile as well as desktop.

13)Share page via facebook, mail etc
A very important feature people want is sharing of links. This is done by broadcasting an intent .url shortner API bit.ly is used to make the task convenient.14)Select Text in Web pages

Select uses java reflections to copy the the selected text from the webpage to clipboard.From the clipboard it can be pasted to mail/sms etc

BLOGS WRITTEN ABOUT WORLD NEWSPAPERS

1)http://www.androidpit.com/en/android/tests/test/391683/World-Newspapers
2)http://biztech2.in.com/blogs/editorial-blogs/5-news-apps-for-android/92852/0
3)http://www.cnet.de/blogs/mobile/android-app/41541282/world_newspapers_fuer_android_nachrichten_aus_aller_welt_fuer_die_jackentasche.htm
4)http://www.heise.de/software/download/special/pfiffige_android_apps/b73_24
5)http://www.teluguone.com/news/2010/10/04/must-have-android-apps-apps-for-news/
6)http://thecursedvalley.wordpress.com/2010/12/22/app-test-world-newspapers/ -awesome one ;)
7)http://www.androidapptests.com/world-newspapers-zu-gast-bei-mcnews.html

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