No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we propose an OCR (optical character recognition)-based localization system called OCRAPOSE II, which is applicable in a number of indoor scenarios including office buildings, parkings, airports, grocery stores, etc. In these scenarios, characters (i.e. texts or numbers) can be used as suitable distinctive landmarks for localization. The proposed system takes advantage of OCR to read these characters in the query still images and provides a rough location estimate using a floor plan. Then, it finds depth and angle-of-view of the query using the information provided by the OCR engine in order to refine the location estimate. We derive novel formulas for the query angle-of-view and depth estimation using image line segments and the OCR box information. We demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed system through experiments in indoor scenarios. It is shown that our system demonstrates better performance compared to the state-of-the-art benchmarks in terms of location recognition rate and average localization error specially under sparse database condition.
With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), Indoor Positioning System (IPS) has attracted significant interest in academic research. Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is an emerging technology that can be employed for IPS as it offers centimetre-level accuracy. However, the UWB system still faces several technical challenges in practice, one of which is Non-Line-of-Sight (NLoS) signal propagation. Several machine learning approaches have been applied for the NLoS component identification. However, when the data contains a very small amount of NLoS components it becomes very difficult for existing algorithms to classify them. This paper focuses on employing an anomaly detection approach based on Gaussian Distribution (GD) and Generalized Gaussian Distribution (GGD) algorithms to detect and identify the NLoS components. The simulation results indicate that the proposed approach can provide a robust NLoS component identification which improves the NLoS signal classification accuracy which results in significant improvement in the UWB positioning system.
The Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems have been widely used in various of application scenarios, such as office automation (OA) systems, factory automations, online educations, map productions etc. However, OCR is still a challenging task due to the various of text appearances and the demand of computational efficiency. In this paper, we propose a practical ultra lightweight OCR system, i.e., PP-OCR. The overall model size of the PP-OCR is only 3.5M for recognizing 6622 Chinese characters and 2.8M for recognizing 63 alphanumeric symbols, respectively. We introduce a bag of strategies to either enhance the model ability or reduce the model size. The corresponding ablation experiments with the real data are also provided. Meanwhile, several pre-trained models for the Chinese and English recognition are released, including a text detector (97K images are used), a direction classifier (600K images are used) as well as a text recognizer (17.9M images are used). Besides, the proposed PP-OCR are also verified in several other language recognition tasks, including French, Korean, Japanese and German. All of the above mentioned models are open-sourced and the codes are available in the GitHub repository, i.e., https://github.com/PaddlePaddle/PaddleOCR.
The accuracy of smartphone-based positioning methods using WiFi usually suffers from ranging errors caused by non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions. Previous research usually exploits several statistical features from a long time series (hundreds of samples) of WiFi received signal strength (RSS) or WiFi round-trip time (RTT) to achieve a high identification accuracy. However, the long time series or large sample size attributes to high power and time consumption in data collection for both training and testing. This will also undoubtedly be detrimental to user experience as the waiting time of getting enough samples is quite long. Therefore, this paper proposes a new real-time NLOS/LOS identification method for smartphone-based indoor positioning system using WiFi RTT and RSS. Based on our extensive analysis of RSS and RTT features, a machine learning-based method using random forest was chosen and developed to separate the samples for NLOS/LOS conditions. Experiments in different environments show that our method achieves a discrimination accuracy of about 94% with a sample size of 10. Considering the theoretically shortest WiFi ranging interval of 100ms of the RTT-enabled smartphones, our algorithm is able to provide the shortest latency of 1s to get the testing result among all of the state-of-art methods.
Visible light communication (VLC) has become a promising research topic in recent years, and finds its wide applications in indoor environments. Particularly, for location based services (LBS), visible light also provides a practical solution for indoor positioning. Multipath-induced dispersion is one of the major concerns for complex indoor environments. It affects not only the communication performance but also the positioning accuracy. In this paper, we investigate the impact of multipath reflections on the positioning accuracy of indoor VLC positioning systems. Combined Deterministic and Modified Monte Carlo (CDMMC) approach is applied to estimate the channel impulse response considering multipath reflections. Since the received signal strength (RSS) information is used for the positioning algorithm, the power distribution from one transmitter in a typical room configuration is first calculated. Then, the positioning accuracy in terms of root mean square error is obtained and analyzed.
Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has spread all over the world since it broke out massively in December 2019, which has caused a large loss to the whole world. Both the confirmed cases and death cases have reached a relatively frightening number. Syndrome coronaviruses 2 (SARS-CoV-2), the cause of COVID-19, can be transmitted by small respiratory droplets. To curb its spread at the source, wearing masks is a convenient and effective measure. In most cases, people use face masks in a high-frequent but short-time way. Aimed at solving the problem that we dont know which service stage of the mask belongs to, we propose a detection system based on the mobile phone. We first extract four features from the GLCMs of the face masks micro-photos. Next, a three-result detection system is accomplished by using KNN algorithm. The results of validation experiments show that our system can reach a precision of 82.87% (standard deviation=8.5%) on the testing dataset. In future work, we plan to expand the detection objects to more mask types. This work demonstrates that the proposed mobile microscope system can be used as an assistant for face mask being used, which may play a positive role in fighting against COVID-19.