Full Moon Crescent Saber: Chapter 1 (1)

Chapter 1: The Outstanding Youngster

It was dawn, foggy, very thick fog.

Ding Peng pushed open the window of his small room. Milky, thick fog drifted in like willow catkins and stroked his face gently.

He had a very delicate face, and a healthy body. When he spoke, he looked vigorous, full of vitality. Yet when he smiled, his face often showed a childish and naïve look, as though he was just a big boy, a kid you had always watched as he grew.

But Ding Peng was no longer a kid.

In the last three months, he had already defeated in a row three famed swordsmen in the Martial World.

Sunshine and water make plants and trees grow bigger and stronger. Victory and success also make a boy mature and grow up.

Now he was not only a true man, but also calm, composed, and full of confidence.

He was born in March, and turned twenty this year. It was right on his birthday when he defeated the renowned swordsman Shi Ding of the Baoding City, using a move called “Shooting Star Beyond Skies.” Shi Ding was a sword master of the Northern Style Green Duckweed Sword Art. He used this victory as a birthday present for himself.

In April, he defeated “Wind-Chasing Sword” Ge Qi with the same move “Shooting Star Beyond Skies.” Ge Qi was the head apprentice of the Huashan Sword School. His sword art style was especially speedy and peculiar, and contained many ruthless moves.

Ge Qi was a very proud swordsman, but after that fight, he admitted his defeat sincerely. He actually acknowledged publicly, “Even if I train for another ten years, I would still have no way of fending off that sword move of his.”

In May, the Head Master of the Iron Sword Clan, “Songyang Swordsman” Guo Zhengping, also lost to his sword move “Shooting Star Beyond Skies.”

Guo Zhengping’s comment for this sword move and for him was, “The sword move rises above the mundane world, leaving absolutely no trace behind. Within one year, this young man will shine in the Martial World and have the world under his feet.”

The Iron Sword Clan was not a prominent school, but it had a long history and a reputation of honesty and decency. Naturally words from the Head Master of such a Martial Art school carried extra weight.

Every time when Ding Peng remembered that comment, he couldn’t help but feeling a great surge of excitement and thrill.

“Shine in the Martial World, and have the world under his feet!”

He had trained very hard in the past thirteen years, fourteen hours every single day, so hard that both his palms and soles bled many times from excessive rubbing.

Especially during those coldest, bitter nights of the winter, to maintain an upbeat spirit, he always held a snowball in his hand. If he saw any sign of sluggishness in himself, he would shove the snowball into his pants, a kind of experience not easily imaginable by others.

The reason why he tortured himself like that was because he was determined to excel and succeed, to earn respect for his father who accomplished nothing in his entire life.

His father was a nameless escort, and accidently got hold of an incomplete page of a sword art manuscript.

The entire sword art only contained one page. And on that one page, there was only one move, “Shooting Star Beyond Skies.”

A shooting star flying by from beyond skies and suddenly disappears. The instant of shine and swiftness are simply unstoppable. But his father was already too old with declined intellect and sluggish response. He could no longer master such speedy sword art. So he passed the page of sword art manuscript to his son.

The last words he left his son at his death bed were, “You must master this sword move. You must earn respect for your father so everyone knows that I have a son who has the world under his feet.”

Every time when Ding Peng thought of his father’s words, his blood would boil and he couldn’t hold his tears back.

But now he decided to never shed another drop of tear. Tears are for the weak. A true man only shed blood!

He took a deep breath of the early morning’s fresh air and drew his sword from under his pillow. Today he would once again fight for another victory using this same sword move.

If he wins today, it would be a real success.

Though Shi Ding, Ge Qi, and Guo Zhengping were also famed swordsmen in the Martial World, the three previous victories would be no match for today’s battle.

Because his rival today is Liu Ruosong.

A member of the “Three Friends of Winter^[1]”, the world-renowned “Pine Swordsman”, Liu Ruosong; the owner of the “Ten-Thousand Pines Villa”, Liu Ruosong; the only layman apprentice of the prominent Priest Tianyi of the Xuanzhen Taoist Temple on Mount Wudang, Liu Ruosong.

Many years ago had he heard of this name. At that stage of his life, this name had been as grave as Mount Taishan^[2], majestic, lofty, and untouchable. But that was no longer the case. Now he was confident that he could defeat this man. He followed the most appropriate manner when he sent in his invitation, requesting an opportunity to learn swordsmanship from an eminent senior sword master, to make sure Liu Ruosong could not refuse the fight, because he must defeat this man in order to advance and join the class of true Kung Fu masters in the Martial World. Both the time and place of the challenge were set by Liu Ruosong – June 15^th, noon, at the Ten-Thousand Pines Villa.

Today is June 15^th.

The fight today will shape his fortune for the rest of his life.

The clothes he had washed, straightened, and put up on bamboo poles by the window last night were almost dry now.

Although they were not completely dry, they would soon be once he put them on.

This was the only set of clothes he owned, hand-sewed by his old and sick mother right before his departure. It had been washed pale by now and had many frays. But as long as it was washed clean, he found no shame wearing it.

Poverty is not shameful; Laziness and dirtiness are.

He put on the clothes, and then retrieved from underneath the pillow a money bag also made of blue cloth.

There was only a small knob of silver inside.

This was his entire asset. After paying for the small inn room, there would probably be only a few dozens of copper pennies left.

Normally he slept at places that required no rent. Under the sacrifice altar in the shrine or on the small meadow inside the woods could all be his bed.

For the fight today, he gritted his teeth and booked a room at the small inn, because he needed plenty of sleep to make sure he had plenty of mental and physical strength to win the fight.

After taking care of the inn bill, he made the harsh choice of spending the rest of the money on half pound of halogen beef, ten pieces of dry bean curd, a big bag of peanuts, and five big steamed buns.

For him, this was not only extreme luxury, but also unforgivable waste. Usually he could easily get by a day with only three hard bread cakes.

But he decided to forgive himself today. Today he needed strength, and strength only comes with quality food.

Besides, things could be completely different after today.

Fame can bring not only glory and self-esteem, but also many things one would never dream of. Wealth and social status will also follow along.

He knew that very well, hence he always gritted his teeth to endure poverty and hunger.

He never let himself be tarnished by any indecency, for he was determined to rise up through the right way.

Since it was still four hours from noon, he decided to find a good spot to enjoy the wonderful food.

Somewhere by the foothills near the “Ten-Thousand Pines Villa”, he successfully found a spot that had a spring, a good size patch of grass, beautiful flowers and a nice view. The place was surrounded by flowery trees. The cloudless sky radiated with a beautiful shape of blue.

By then the thick fog had all cleared. The sun had just barely risen. Morning dews glittered on top of dark green leaves like beautiful pearls.

Ding Peng sat down on the soft grass and tore off a piece of beef. The beef tasted even better than what he had imagined.

He was extremely delighted.

Just at that moment, a girl ran into his secret little world like a little antelope chased by a hunter.

The girl was completely naked.

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[1] “Three Friends of Winter” was created by Song Dynasty Poet Su Shi and refers to Pine, Bamboo, and Calyx canthus in Chinese culture because all three of them remain beautiful despite the severe cold of the winter. Here it is the name of a small trio of Kung Fu Masters whose nicknames contain these three things. The last character in Liu Ruosong’s name, “song”, also means pine.

[2] Mount Taishan is a famous mountain in Shandong Province, China. It is the first of the “Five Mountains” and is known for its majesty.

Now support the translator Lanny by following my blog and leaving comments! :)

Do not pretend to be something you are not, and I am not a plumber!

AI and Robots: Hybrid Video Display of Visible and Infrared Might Help Search and Rescue

A recent article in New Scientist discussed a research project performed at Brigham Young University where the effect of combining visible light and infrared on real-time video footage in Wilderness Search and Rescue was evaluated.

The research project was directed by Dr. Bryan Morse (who is also one of my committee members) and implemented by Nathan Rasmussen (a friend of mine, who successfully received his MS from this project and graduated in 2009). It is one of the many projects in the WiSAR research group at BYU that works on how to use mini-UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to support Wilderness Search and Rescue. The picture on the right shows Nathan throw-launching a UAV in a field trial at Elberta, Utah.

This research focuses on the human-robot interaction aspect and try to determine which method of display works better for human operators: displaying visible light video side by side with infrared video, or combine both in a hybrid display.

The UAV used in the experiments can already carry both a visual spectrum camera and an infrared camera (BTW: very expensive). Visible light video footage can be useful in spotting objects of unnatural/irregular shapes and colors (top view). Infrared light video footage, on the other hand, can be helpful in detecting objects with distinct heat signatures that are different from surrounding environments (especially early mornings, evenings, and nights, or in cold weathers where heat signatures are more distinct).

In order to align footage from both sensors, a calibration grid was created with black wires on a white background. To allow the infrared camera to "see" the grid, an electricity current was sent down the wires to heat them up. An algorithm is then used to align the vertices of the two grids to compensate for the slightly different viewing angle.
Once the hybrid view was possible, a user study was performed where students were used as test subjects to watch UAV videos in both methods and tried to identify suspicious objects while listening to audio signals (counting beeping sounds as a secondary task in order to measure mental workload). I happen to be one of the test subjects, and my hard work earned me some delicious chocolates.

Experiment results show that people who viewed the hybrid display performed much better in the secondary task of counting beeps. This suggests that the hybrid video is easier to interpret (requiring less mental work) and would allow the searcher to focus more on identifying objects from the fast moving video stream.

The research was presented at the Applications of Computer Vision conference in Snowbird, Utah, in December 2009. If you are interested in more details about this research, you can read Nathan's thesis　(warning: 22.4MB).

Picture of the Day:

Beautiful dusk sunshine mountain view from my house!

Robot of the Day: CubeStormer, the Rubik's Cube Solver

Ever played Rubik's Cube before? If you have, then you know how hard and how long it takes to solve a game of Rubik's Cube. The robot we talk about today, however, can solve it within seconds, and most impressively, the robot was built completely using Lego pieces from the Lego Mindstorms Kit, which means you could build a robot just like this yourself for only a couple hundred bucks!

The robot's name is CubeStormer, built by British engineer Mike Dobson using Lego Mindstorms parts hooked up to a laptop computer. The computer acts as the brain and performs tasks such as recognizing colors, solving the puzzle using algorithms, and sending motor commands.

As shown in the video below, the robot first quickly inspects all six sides of the cube using multiple cameras by first rotating it a few times to recognize the current state of the cube. The computer vision task is actually really simple because the cube is placed at a fixed position, so the recognition software only needs to sample a few points for each color piece and then simply detect the color of the pixels (one out of six possible choices). The state of the cube is then passed on to a solver software (such as this free online one) and sequences of moves are generated, which are translated into motor commands for the robot to perform.

What is impressive about this robot, though, is the engineering side of things, such as how parts are connected and how motors are used all with toy Lego pieces. A beautiful designed enabled the robot actuators to solve the game in such short period of time. If you look closely at the video, you'll also notice that two rows of the cube can be rotated at the same time to speed it up!

CubeStormer by Mike Dobson

The time it took the robot to solve a random game was about 12 seconds. This is very much comparable to the fastest human Rubik's Cube solvers such as the one shown below.

Rubik's cube official world record 7.08 Erik Akkersdijk

There are of course other Rubik's Cube solving robots in the wild, such as the one built by UC Berkeley shown in the video below, which solved a puzzle in 6 seconds. But apparently this robot would cost a lot more.

Rubik's cube solver by UC Berkeley

However, the Cubinator, aka RuBot II, by Pete Redmond from Dublin, Ireland gets extra point in my book of Human-Robot Interaction. Although much slower compared to the other two robots, it has a head and two arms. And after picking up the cube all by itself, it even played music and talked to the audience while solving the puzzle.

Cubinator by Pete Redmond

What if the Cubinator not only solves Rubik's Cube, but is also capable of playing board games or hide-and-seek with your kids, tell them jokes, read books for them, and help them with their homework? Would you want one for your kids? If so, for how much? If not, why?

Picture of the Day:

Leftover Valentine’s chocolate? Use it to measure the speed of light with your microwave. Click the picture to find out how!

Random Thoughts: Are you being watched?

It started as a great idea at the Lower Merion School District, outside Philadelphia, when school officials decided to loan laptop computers to students to encourage them to embrace newer technologies and to study better. However, the situation came to a dramatic turn when a suit was filed against the school district for spying students at students' homes through the web cam built into the laptop and a software that allowed the school officials to activate the camera remotely in order to view and take pictures of the students.

The interesting part was that a student named Blake Robbins was accused of selling drugs and taking pills by school officials (Blake claimed that he was eating candies), and the school official actually provided proof -- images of Blake eating things at home taken secretly through the web cam -- to back up their claim! The image on the left shows Blake's family and their lawyer appearing on "Early Show Saturday Edition" discussing the entire fiasco (photo credit CBS).

I am simply AMAZED at the intellectual capabilities of the school officials involved here!! The issue here is not whether the kid took pills or not. The issue is about a crude invasion of personal privacy at people's own homes without their knowledge and consent. A federal judge quickly ordered the school district to stop activating the cameras, and the school complied. The FBI has also opened a criminal investigation of the web cam use to see if the school district broke any federal wiretap or computer-intrusion laws.

Disturbing as the story is, what I want to emphasize here, though, is slightly different. Many people use web cams to do video conferences with friends and family. Some still use the old external web cams connected through USB ports (I am one of them). However, most people use the laptop built-in web cams these days because of the convenience and also because most laptops come with built-in web cams. So do you really know if you are being watched?

People these days take their laptops with them everywhere they go, including very private places such as their bedrooms and bathrooms. Many companies would also give their employees laptops so they can work from home or while they go on trips. Many large organizations DO put remote access software on company laptops for the ease of IT support, and I personally have used such software when I worked as an IT support staff in the past. The truth is, IT support staff can remotely watch your monitor screen when you have no idea they are doing so. And if the computer has a web cam, activating the web cam through such management tools is a piece of cake.

Also, many home computers are hacked and made into "zombie" computers for spamming or Denial Of Service attacks in large botnets controlled by hackers. These hackers can also easily control the web cams connected to these infected computers and the users would have no clue about such activities! If you think you are safe behind security firewalls you purchased from McAfee of Symantec, you'd better think twice.

So what lesson should we learn from this? That is, we should never naively believe that we have total control of web cams connected to our computers. The safest thing to do is to cover it up with tape of a piece of paper when we are not actively using it, because you never know who might be watching through the web cam. Especially for people have built-in web cams, it is so easy to forget about that special "eye" in the room, and it might be watching you actively at this very moment!

The commercial in the YouTube video below might seem funny, but it wouldn't be so funny if you weren't in a video conference yet someone is secretly watching you behind the web cam device. I think all built-in web cams should have a cover, so people only open it when they actively use it and can always close the cover when they are not.

This also poses an interesting question about future robots in people's homes. These robots will probably also have eyes, and eyelids will probably have to be mandatory so they don't peep on you when you don't want them to.

Video of the Day:

Sony laptop with built-in web cam ad!

Paper Review: Evaluation of evaluation in information retrieval

This paper was written by Saracevic from Rutgers University and published at the 18th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, 1995.

Evaluation metrics are important components of scientific researches. Through evaluation metrics, performances of systems, algorithms, solution to problems can be measured and compared against baselines or among each other. However, what metrics should we use, at what level, and how good are these metrics? Questions like these must be carefully considered. This paper discussed such concerns about past and existing evaluation metrics used in Information Retrieval (IR) and raised many more questions. Please note that this paper was published in 1995 and evaluation metrics/methods in IR have progressed dramatically by now.

This paper is somewhat a survey paper that discussed evaluation metrics used in IR throughout the history and provided many literature references. The main contribution of the paper is that it suggests looking at the evaluation of IR from a much higher perspective, going back to the true purpose of IR, which is to resolve the problem of information explosion. When considering the evaluation of IR systems from this high point, the paper pointed out that there are a lot more to be evaluated besides common/popular evaluation metrics at simply the process level (e.g. Precision and Recall). It urged the IR community to break out of the isolation of single level narrow evaluations.

The author systematically defined six levels of objectives (engineering, input, processing, output, use and user, and social) that need to be addressed in IR systems together with five evaluation requirements (a system with a process, criteria, measures, measuring instruments, and methodology). Then he further discussed in details current practice, potential problems, and needs of evaluation metrics with respect to each of the requirement and how they can be categorized into the six objective levels. This is an excellent way of organizing contents and arguments, which allows the readers to easily see the big picture in a structured framework.

The paper made a strong statement that “both system- and user-centered evaluations are needed” and more efforts are required to allow cooperative efforts of the two orientations, in contrast to the widely proposed shifting from one to the other. This again highlights the author’s suggestion of treating the evaluation of IR as an overall approach.

The author identified many compelling problems and important issues with regard to the evaluation of IR and argued them well. To name a few: Laboratory collections are too removed from reality and TREC has highly unusual composition as to types and subjects of documents and should not be the sole vehicle for IR evaluation. Applying various criteria in some unified manner still poses a major challenge in IR. Assumption of one and only one relevant set as an answer to a request is not warranted. When using relevance as the criterion with precision and recall as the corresponding measures, someone has to judge or establish relevance; the assumption here is that the judgment is reasonable while we know relevance is a very subjective topic.

The paper repeatedly emphasized evaluation of interaction between users and IR systems as an integral part of the overall evaluation. In recent years, there’s also a strong trend showing more and more researchers in various areas interested in understanding how the human factors and the interaction between human and machines (robots) play an important role in the performance of systems. A good example is the emergence of Human Robot Interaction (HRI). Therefore, this topic deserves a separate discussion here. The ultimate goal of an IR system is to serve human. If information retrieved is not presented to the user correctly, then the IR system fails miserably. Also because of the subjectivity (with respect to an individual user) and ambiguity (such as query term meanings) of IR, multiple rounds of interaction between the user and the IR system can dramatically improve the performance of information retrieval. One example would be retrieving documents related to the query term “Python”. An interactive IR system can further allow the user to specify if he/she wants to retrieval information about the animal or the programming language. As stated in the paper, interactions in IR were extensive studied and modeled, however, interactivity plays no role in large evaluation projects (which I believe is still true even up to today). Granted that it is difficult to come up with sound evaluation metrics for interactivity, more discussion and research in this area is definitely very necessary.

This paper certainly has its shortcomings. First of all, the author could certainly have been more concise in the writing. Additionally I found the comparisons using expert systems and OPAC to be distracting from the main ideas and do not contribute much to the arguments. Eliminating them would have made the paper more focused.

Granted that precision and recall are used as the main evaluation metrics to measure relevance in the system and process level, many other evaluation metrics also existed but were not covered in this paper. Examples include (but not limited to) F-measure, Entropy, Variation of Information, Adjusted Rand Index, V-Measure, Q-2, Log likelihood of the data, etc. Besides quantitive evaluation metrics, qualitative analysis is also a common tool people use to evaluate performances of IR systems, and the paper didn’t touch this subject at all.

The paper argued that it is a problem that “every algorithm and every approach anywhere, IR included, is based on certain assumptions” and these assumptions could have potential negative effects. I found this argument weak and not well constructed. It is true that when researches design algorithms or model problems they make assumptions. Good researchers clearly identify these assumptions in their publications and analyze the potential effects these assumptions have on their algorithms or their models. Sometimes assumptions are made without sound reasons but are justified by good performances from real applications/data. It is almost unavoidable to make various assumptions when we do research. We should not be afraid of making assumptions, but be careful about our assumptions and justify for them.

Lastly, there is one more important drawback of this paper. It did a good job identifying many problems and issues regarding evaluations in IR. However, it did a poor job providing constructive ideas and suggestions to many of these problems. I am not suggesting the author should find solutions to many of these problems, but some initial ideas or thoughts (let it be throw-away or naïve ideas) would have improved the paper considerably.

In summary, the paper succeeded in bringing attentions to treating evaluation in IR from a much higher perspective and also provided good description, references, and discussion for the “current” state (up to 1995) of evaluation metrics in IR. I enjoyed reading this paper.

Video of the Day:

If you have a Toyota, take it in for a check, because it might be a matter of life and death for you and your family!

Full Moon Crescent Saber: Prologue

Tonight was a night of a beautiful full moon, so I thought it would be the perfect time for me to start this translation project, something I've wanted to do for a long time. :)

Full Moon Crescent Saber is a book started by Gu Long and finished by Sima Ziyan. Because of that, it is also the most controversial book of Gu Long. I like this book because of the unique artistic conception and atmosphere described in the book, which really made it stand out from all other Gu Long books.

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Full Moon Crescent Saber
-- Written by Gu Long, Translated by Lanny Lin


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Prologue

Full Moon

The moon may be wax or wane. The story we are telling here is about the full moon, because it happened at a night of the full moon. At that night, the moon was more beautiful than any other night, with a magnificence so mysterious, so bleak, and so heart-breaking.

Same goes with the story we are telling, a story filled with charms so mysterious yet beautiful and fantasies so mystifying yet stunning. As told in the ancient mythical tale, when the moon rises in the dark nights, there are always fairies dancing in the moonlight – fairies of the flowers, fairies of the gems and sapphires. Even dark souls and fairy foxes living deep underground would come out to worship the full moon and to draw in the vigor of the bright moonlight.

Sometimes they will even transform into human forms, live in the human world as many different characters, and do things no one would ever imagine.

These things are sometimes startling, sometimes heartwarming, sometimes frightening, sometimes exhilarating, and some other times beyond imagination. They could rescue someone from the deepest abyss; they could also shove someone off the steepest cliff.

They could give you all the fame and fortune in the entire world; they could also make you lose everything you’ve ever own.

No one has ever seen their true faces, but no one could deny their existence either.

Crescent Saber

A saber may be straight or crescent. What we want to talk about here is a crescent saber, as curvy as Qing-Qing’s eyebrows.

The crescent saber belonged to Qing-Qing. Qing-Qing is a beautiful and mystic girl, just like the full moon of that night.

Sabers are weapons made to kill.

Same goes with Qing-Qing’s crescent saber. When the crescent reflection flashes by, calamity befalls; no one can escape the calamity, because no one can get away from the crescent shine of the saber.

The shine of the saber is not hasty; it is as smooth as the moonlight, but as soon as you see the moonlight, it has already befallen upon you.

There is only one moon in the sky; there is also only one crescent saber on earth.

It doesn’t always bring calamity when it appears in the mundane world. Sometimes it also brings people righteousness and happiness.

So when it appears in the world once again, what will it bring to this world this time?

No one knows.

Qing-Qing’s crescent saber is also emerald green^[1], as green as the verdant distant mountain, as green as the spring trees, and as green as tears in young lovers’ eyes.

On the emerald green and crescent-shaped blade is a line of tiny words, “All night in the attic I hear the spring sprinkle^[2].”

Fortunes may be as unpredictable as the winds and clouds in the sky. The moon may be dim or bright, wax or wane. Perfection in life was never easy to come by.

May we all be blessed with longevity. Though miles apart, our hearts still cross through the beautiful moon high in the sky.^[3]

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[1] In Chinese, “Qing” means emerald green.

[2] A verse from a poem of Lu You (1125-1210 AD), a poet from the Song Dynasty. I will not attempt to translate the entire poem here.

[3] The last few verses are excerpts of a very famous Mid-Autumn Festival poem by Su Shi (1037-1101 AD), a poet from the Song Dynasty. Here’s my poor attempt at translating the poem:

Prelude to the Melody of Water

When did the bright moon first ever appear?

Raising my wine cup I ask the blue sky.

High above in the moon palaces,

Wonder what year it is tonight.

I want to ride the wind and fly to the moon,

But I fear the jade terrace is too cold and high.

I’d rather stay in the human world,

And dance with my shadow in the moonlight.

As the moon rounds the red pavilion and slants through the silk-pad windows,

It shines upon every wakeful eye.

Moon, are you bearing any grudges.

Why always the full moon when loved ones are not nearby?

People may have joy and sorrow, parting and reunion,

The moon may be dim or bright, wax or wane.

Perfection in life was never easy to come by.

May we all be blessed with longevity, though miles apart,

Our hearts still cross through the beautiful moon high in the sky.

Now support the translator Lanny by following my blog and leaving comments! :)

Videos of the Day:

The beautiful poem referenced above was turned into the lyrics of a beautiful song sang by Teresa Teng, a huge pop icon in the 70s and 80s in the last century. Enjoy!

While searching for Teresa Teng's video, I ran into the video below on YouTube and was very impressed by the talent shown. A girl used her own music composition for the same poem and showed her beautiful voice. Even if you don't understand a word of hers, you'd still enjoy it (someone left a comment saying exactly that)!

AI and Robots: BYU using computer vision to catch parking violators

In the past, faculty members, staffs, and students at BYU (Brigham Young University) had to obtain and place special stickers on the windshield of their cars every semester if they want to park on campus in designated parking lots. Starting in Fall 2009, thanks to the new computer vision technology adapted by BYU police, this step is no longer necessary.

There are four types of parking lots at BYU: Faculty and Staff Parking, Graduate Student Parking, Undergraduate Student parking, and Visitor Parking. Because faculty parking lots are everywhere on campus, while graduate student and undergraduate student parking lots are relatively further away from the center of the campus (graduate parking lots are slightly closer), many students are tempted to park at faculty parking lots just briefly for a class period of about one-hour. Many used to be able to get away from it because of limited parking officers, but that is probably coming to an end because campus police has a better weapon to fight parking violators.

An automatic license plate recognition system, developed in Israel (I suspect this company) and made its way into US through Canada (don't ask me why), has become a very powerful tool for BYU police to catch parking violators. Cameras installed on top of police cars (as shown in the picture on the left) can automatically take pictures of cars in the parking lots. License plates are recognized and matched against a database to quickly determine if the car can park at the parking lot. An alarm is played when a violator is identified, and with just a push of a button, a parking ticket is automatically generated and printed. Parking officers can now quickly drive around campus multiple times each day and get their job down all with the comfort of sitting in their seats.

The picture on the right shows a closer view of the type of camera in use. The same kind of camera is also used at gated areas to automatically raise the gate for eligible cars. The accompanying software can read 60 plates a second and can recognize a license plate on a car going 120 mph with the help of the high-speed camera and fast computer algorithms in recognizing numbers and letters. The system also a GPS built-in, so images of cars are also geo-tagged with GPS locations in case people forget where they parked their cars.

Inside the police car, a very durable tablet PC is mounted on the panel so the parking officer can interact with the software using a stylus pen. A wireless keyboard can also be used to enter license numbers into the system.

Obvious benefits of the system include: more efficient patrol of lots of parking lots, comfort of staying in the car in extreme weathers (hot or cold), and automatic alert for stolen vehicles. However, this technology also has its drawbacks. For example, in cases of heavy snow (which is not so rare in Utah), the license plate might be covered by snow and not visible. Also since the parking officers can now do most of their job without getting out of the car, special parking spots like the 15-minutes ones are getting less attention and could be abused more frequently. In the past, people who owned multiple vehicles had the option of hanging a badge in one of the cars. This also means only one car is allowed to be parked on campus because there is only one badge. With the new system, since there's no sticker and no badge, all cars can be parked on campus at the same time. Lastly, privacy is also a concern because now the campus police can easily identify when cars are parked where each day.

So how does the recognition work? There are two main challenges: 1. Identify the license plate in the picture. 2. Recognize the license number. I don't know the exact algorithms used in the system, but based on techniques learned form my computer vision class, I certainly can come up with some intelligent guesses. Identifying the license plate in a picture probably relied on edge detection techniques combined with detecting high-contrast areas that also have the rectangular or rhombus shape. A coarse to fine search is also likely. Recognizing the letters and numbers is relatively easy with machine learning classification algorithms such as decision tree or nearest neighbor.

It is worth mentioning that such license plate recognition systems are already widely used by police forces. The video below shows an example. If you live in California, then you probably have heard stories where people get their traffic ticket in the mail together with a picture of their license plate. A friend of mine told me that once he actually received a ticket in the mail together with a link. Following the link, he was able to view a video of himself making a right turn without making a complete stop. How amazing!

A BYU parking officer said the following in an interview:

"With the money we saved in parking sticker costs, we were able to buy the car."

What I probably would add to that is: "With the extra parking tickets we were able to write, I am expecting a much bigger bonus!" Just kidding!

Picture of the Day:

Google street view uses facial recognition software agent to detect faces in photos and then blur them for privacy protection. The software agent dutifully blurred hunger striker Bobby Sandss's face in a street portrait in Belfast. (Click the picture to see more!)

My Research: BYU UAV Demo for Utah County Search and Rescue Team

On November 21, 2009, our research group, WiSAR (Wilderness Search and Rescue) demonstrated our UAV technologies to the Utah County Search and Rescue team representatives at Elberta, Utah. Three search and rescue personnel participated in the demo and one of them flew the UAV in a simulated search and rescue exercise.

In two previous blog postings I described BYU research on using UAV to support Wilderness Search and Rescue and UAV capabilities:

My Research: BYU UAV Demo Dry Run
Robot of the Day: UAVs at BYU

The demo was scheduled at 8:30-11:00 am at Elberta, Utah (in the middle of nowhere), which was about an hour's drive from BYU campus. That meant we had to get there by 8 to set up and test equipments. The previous day's weather forecast predicted snow shower, so I was assigned the task of picking up some hot chocolate from the BYU cafeteria so people don't freeze to death!

Despite the facts that I had to deal with my 10-month old son's high fever at 1:30am and not really fall asleep until 3:30am and unconsciously turned off my alarm clock, I actually made it to the cafeteria only 5 minutes late, then I waited another 25 minutes because they haven't made the hot chocolate yet. By the time I arrived at the demo site at 8:30am, turned out the trailer just got there also, so I didn't miss anything! Also, turned out the weather forecast was way off, there was no snow at all, and it was going to be a great day!

Left to right, top to bottom: 1. BYU Cafeteria 2. Beautiful Utah mountains at Dawn
3. The lonely freeway 4. Driving down the highway 5. Good morning, Cows!
6. Gravel road with the destination in view (the ridge in the far distance).

The pictures above were taken by me using an android phone running NASA's GeoCam mobile client. Therefore, all photos were geo-tagged with GPS locations and camera orientation. You can actually view them from Google Earth, where you'll see the exact route I took on the map. Just download the zip file, unzip, and then double click the kml file.

Viewing pictures from Google Earth

The goal of the demo is to show real search and rescue workers how easy and useful our UAV technologies are in support of search and rescue operations. A simulated search and rescue mission was set up, a member of the search and rescue team had to fly the UAV using our interface and locate the simulated missing person (a dummy placed in the wilderness). Students and professors from BYU also acted as aerial video analysts and ground searchers to assist the simulated search. The picture blow shows a ground searcher scouting around in the distance searching for the missing person. The ground searchers always wear bright-colored vests so they can be easily spotted by others (e.g. from the aerial videos) and don't get shot at by hunters. (I know, research is a dangerous profession!)

Ground searcher in a distance (click photo to enlarge)

After setting up everything, Ron Zeeman, a member of the Utah County Search and Rescue team, test flew the UAV, and completed a test drill (launch, manual control, fixed pattern flying, and landing).

Left to right: 1. People busy setting things up 2. UAV at dawn 3. Last minute exercise

After other Search and Rescue team members arrived, we explained how our UAV works, and then started the simulated search and rescue mission. This time I was quite lucky to catch the flying UAV with my camera.

Left to right: 1. Two more professional searchers arrived 2. Two retired UAVs in display 3. The show is on now!

Left to right: 1 and 2. UAV in the air 3. UAV loitering above area of interest (click to enlarge)

Left to right: 1. The kind of junk people would dump to the middle of nowhere 2. Debris of camp fire 3. Real-time video mosaicing (frame stitching)

Eventually, the missing person was located in the aerial video and confirmed by ground searchers. "Unfortunately", by the time we found "him", he was not breathing.

The "missing person" was found, breathless.

Technologies demonstrated include auto launch, auto land, various UAV control mode (carrot and stick, fixed pattern flying, etc.), integrated gimballed camera view in augmented virtuality, click and point gimballed camera control (separate from UAV path), real-time video mosaicing, real-time video annotation and video zooming/scrubbing, point of interest communication between video GUI and UAV control GUI.

Technologies not demonstrated but are work in progress include automatic missing person probability distribution generation, automatic path planning (based on distribution), see-ability metric to measure coverage quality, and automatic anomaly detection.

The demo was a great success! The professional searchers were pleasantly surprised by the ease of operating the UAV and the usefulness of the aerial video support. Their comments included, "That was so cool!" "This could be very helpful!"

Video of the Day:

If the UAV sitting in our lab had a mind of its own,
it would have been singing this all night long...