Recognition and Tracking of Objects in a Clustered Remote Scene Environment

Object recognition and tracking are two of the most dynamic research sub-areas that belong to the field of Computer Vision.Computer vision is one of the most active research fields that lies at the intersection of deep learning and machine vision.This paper presents an efficient ensemble algorithm for the recognition and tracking of fixed shapemoving objects while accommodating the shift and scale invariances that the object may encounter.The first part uses the Maximum Average Correlation Height(MACH)filter for object recognition and determines the bounding box coordinates.In case the correlation based MACH filter fails,the algorithms switches to a much reliable but computationally complex feature based object recognition technique i.e.,affine scale invariant feature transform(ASIFT).ASIFT is used to accommodate object shift and scale object variations.ASIFT extracts certain features from the object of interest,providing invariance in up to six affine parameters,namely translation(two parameters),zoom,rotation and two camera axis orientations.However,in this paper,only the shift and scale invariances are used.The second part of the algorithm demonstrates the use of particle filters based Approximate Proximal Gradient(APG)technique to periodically update the coordinates of the object encapsulated in the bounding box.At the end,a comparison of the proposed algorithm with other stateof-the-art tracking algorithms has been presented,which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm with respect to the minimization of tracking errors.

Analysis of Factors that Affect Government Digitization:A Pilot Case Study of Pakistan

One of the greatest factors that affects the economic condition of a country is its institutions.In the model of good governance,the primary elements for stronger institution include efficiency,transparency,and accountability;and technology plays a major role in improving these elements.However,there are myriad of challenges when it comes to practical integration of technology in these institutions for efficiency.It is more challenging when a country is developing and one that is already weak economically.It is also important to mention that the challenges of digitization in public sector is not limited to developing countries only.It is equally challenging,even today,in already developed countries to digitally transform their public institutions for improved policymaking and for responsive service delivery.Many factors contribute to the failure of such digitization initiatives,more so within developing countries.And the purpose of this paper is to identify those factors,to measure the significance of each of those factors,and to realize and overcome them.This research considered the case study of Pakistan;however,the results are very likely to match the conditions of other developing regions around the world.Through questionnaires and interviews,valuable feedback was gathered from up to 25 senior government officers that are closely associated with digitization initiatives in public sector.The feedback to the questions were overall unanimous.The results indicate the most significant of factors that affect government digitization in this developing region,including some factors that were not expected.

Investigating the Use of Email Application in Illiterate and Semi-Illiterate Population

The use of electronic communication has been significantly increased over the last few decades.Email is one of the most well-known means of electronic communication.Traditional email applications are widely used by a large population;however,illiterate and semi-illiterate people face challenges in using them.A major population of Pakistan is illiterate that has little or no practice of computer usage.In this paper,we investigate the challenges of using email applications by illiterate and semi-illiterate people.In addition,we also propose a solution by developing an application tailored to the needs of illiterate/semi-illiterate people.Research shows that illiterate people are good at learning the designs that convey information with pictures instead of text-only,and focus more on one object/action at a time.Our proposed solution is based on designing user interfaces that consist of icons and vocal/audio instructions instead of text.Further,we use background voice/audio which is more helpful than flooding a picture with a lot of information.We tested our application using a large number of users with various skill levels(from no computer knowledge to experts).Our results of the usability tests indicate that the application can be used by illiterate people without any training or third-party’s help.

Average Convergence for Directed&Undirected Graphs in Distributed Systems

Consensus control of multi-agent systems is an innovative paradigm for the development of intelligent distributed systems.This has fascinated numerous scientific groups for their promising applications as they have the freedom to achieve their local and global goals and make their own decisions.Network communication topologies based on graph and matrix theory are widely used in a various real-time applications ranging from software agents to robotics.Therefore,while sustaining the significance of both directed and undirected graphs,this research emphases on the demonstration of a distributed average consensus algorithm.It uses the harmonic mean in the domain of multi-agent systems with directed and undirected graphs under static topologies based on a control input scheme.The proposed agreement protocol focuses on achieving a constant consensus on directional and undirected graphs using the exchange of information between neighbors to update their status values and to be able to calculate the total number of agents that contribute to the communication network at the same time.The proposed method is implemented for the identical networks that are considered under the directional and non-directional communication links.Two different scenarios are simulated and it is concluded that the undirected approach has an advantage over directed graph communication in terms of processing time and the total number of iterations required to achieve convergence.The same network parameters are introduced for both orientations of the communication graphs.In addition,the results of the simulation and the calculation of various matrices are provided at the end to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm to achieve consensus.

Cyber Secure Framework for Smart Containers Based on Novel Hybrid DTLS Protocol

The Internet of Things (IoTs) is apace growing, billions of IoT devicesare connected to the Internet which communicate and exchange data among eachother. Applications of IoT can be found in many fields of engineering and sciencessuch as healthcare, traffic, agriculture, oil and gas industries, and logistics. Inlogistics, the products which are to be transported may be sensitive and perishable, and require controlled environment. Most of the commercially availablelogistic containers are not integrated with IoT devices to provide controlled environment parameters inside the container and to transmit data to a remote server.This necessitates the need for designing and fabricating IoT based smart containers. Due to constrained nature of IoT devices, these are prone to different cybersecurity attacks such as Denial of Service (DoS), Man in Middle (MITM) andReplay. Therefore, designing efficient cyber security framework are required forsmart container. The Datagram Transport Layer Security (DTLS) Protocol hasemerged as the de facto standard for securing communication in IoT devices.However, it is unable to minimize cyber security attacks such as Denial of Serviceand Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) during the handshake process. Themain contribution of this paper is to design a cyber secure framework by implementing novel hybrid DTLS protocol in smart container which can efficientlyminimize the effects of cyber attacks during handshake process. The performanceof our proposed framework is evaluated in terms of energy efficiency, handshaketime, throughput and packet delivery ratio. Moreover, the proposed framework istested in IoT based smart containers. The proposed framework decreases handshake time more than 9% and saves 11% of energy efficiency for transmissionin compare of the standard DTLS, while increases packet delivery ratio andthroughput by 83% and 87% respectively.