Abstract

There is a need to create quality open source educational resources to address the needs of Indian schools. In this paper,we describe a virtual physics lab which we built based on open source components. This is basically an authoring tool that lets user create their own experiments. We first discuss for the need for virtual labs. We then present the architecture of our tool and the technical challenges we faced in creating it. We also present the feedback we received from school students on this tool.

Abstract

Computed tomographic (CT) images are widely used in the diagnosis of stroke. In this paper, we present an automated method to detect and classify an abnormality into acute infarct, chronic infarct and hemorrhage at the slice level of non-contrast CT images. The proposed method consists of three main steps: image enhancement, detection of mid-line symmetry and classification of abnormal slices. A windowing operation is performed on the intensity distribution to enhance the region of interest. Domain knowledge about the anatomical structure of the skull and the brain is used to detect abnormalities in a rotation- and translation-invariant manner. A two-level classification scheme is used to detect abnormalities using features derived in the intensity and the wavelet domain. The proposed method has been evaluated on a dataset of 15 patients (347 image slices). The method gives 90% accuracy and 100% recall in detecting abnormality at patient level; and achieves an average precision of 91% and recall of 90% at the slice level.

Abstract

Exudates are a class of lipid retinal lesions visible through optical fundus imaging, and indicative of diabetic retinopathy. We propose a clustering-based method to segment exudates, using multi-space clustering, and colorspace features. The method was evaluated on a set of 89 images from a publicly available dataset, and achieves an accuracy of 89.7% and positive predictive value of 87%.

Abstract

Mathematics is one of the difficult subjects children encounter. This is attributed to the fact that mathematics is taught as an abstract set of symbols and rules. Many innovative approaches have been tried to clear this misconception and make children see the real applications of mathematics. One such approach is using ethnomathematics – the mathematics present in the cultural forms of an ethnic group. In this work, we explore the effectiveness of this approach to teach a difficult mathematics concept – fractions. Fractions have been chosen due to its complexity and the inherent difficulties they pose to children. A tool was developed to teach fractions by engaging the child in two activities – making a bead necklace and tiling an area. The evaluation results indicate that such an approach is very effective in teaching the concept.

Abstract

The high level of engagement students have with games has motivated many researches to study various aspect of games-based learning. The approach taken in most of the studies is bringing instruction element implicitly in games. Adapting instructional content for creating games is a viable alternative approach to create interactive virtual learning environment development. Pedagogical support in the form of simulation exercises have been shown to be more effective in learning context. In this paper we argue the simulation exercises can be combined to produce games using an authoring tool. We illustrate our idea with an exemplar in the form of a 3D virtual physics game authoring tool. The results of evaluation of our exemplar indicate that use of subject-related terminology can help participants relate virtual game context with theoretical and real world phenomenon; however, games by themselves may not serve to be an effective way to learn new concepts.

Abstract

Autism and dyslexia are both developmental disorders of neural origin. As we still do not understand the neural basis of these disorders fully, technology can take two approaches in helping those affected. The first is to compensate externally for a known difficulty and the other is to achieve the same function using a completely different means. To demonstrate the first option, we are developing a system to compensate for the auditory processing difficulties in case of dyslexia and to demonstrate the second option we propose a system for autism where we remove the need for traditional languages and instead use pictures for communication.

Abstract

The ability to detect, and track multiple moving objects like person and other robots, is an important prerequisite for mobile robots working in dynamic indoor environments. We approach this problem by detecting independently moving objects in image sequence from a monocular camera mounted on a robot. We use multi-view geometric constraints to classify a pixel as moving or static. The first constraint, we use, is the epipolar constraint which requires images of static points to lie on the corresponding epipolar lines in subsequent images. In the second constraint, we use the knowledge of the robot motion to estimate a bound in the position of image pixel along the epipolar line. This is capable of detecting moving objects followed by a moving camera in the same direction, a so-called degenerate configuration where the epipolar constraint fails. To classify the moving pixels robustly, a Bayesian framework is used to assign a probability that the pixel is stationary or dynamic based on the above geometric properties and the probabilities are updated when the pixels are tracked in subsequent images. The same framework also accounts for the error in estimation of camera motion. Successful and repeatable detection and pursuit of people and other moving objects in realtime with a monocular camera mounted on the Pioneer 3DX, in a cluttered environment confirms the efficacy of the method.

Abstract

Capillary Non-Perfusion (CNP) is a condition in diabetic retinopathy where blood ceases to flow to certain parts of the retina, potentially leading to blindness. This paper presents a solution for automatically detecting and segmenting CNP regions from fundus fluorescein angiograms (FFAs). CNPs are modelled as valleys, and a novel multiresolution technique for trough-based valley detection is presented. The proposed algorithm has been tested on 40 images and validated against expert-marked ground truth. Obtained results are presented as a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. The area under this curve is 0.842 and the distance of ROC from the ideal point (0,1) is 0.31.

Abstract

In this paper we present a method for fovea localization which does not use organization information of other retinal structures like optic disk and arcades. The main advantage of this method is that it does not require segmentation/localization of other retinal structures which are required as prior knowledge in existing fovea localization methods. The key idea is to enhance the relative contrast between the fovea and its surrounding such that it is well-separated in a retinal image. The approach was tested on 520 retinal images which include normal and pathological color retinal images. An overall accuracy of 90.57% is reported independent of left eye, right eye, normal or pathological retinal images.

Abstract

We present a new method for optic disk (OD) detection in a retinal image. It is an hybrid approach which uses properties of both appearance and model-based approaches which are mostly used for OD detection. An extrema pyramidal decomposition is employed and hill type topographical features are extracted at the lowest level of the image pyramid. The detected hill points are characterised as candidate OD locations. Later, a confidence measure is derived for each candidate using vessel structure information and candidate with the highest value is declared as final OD location. This method has been tested on different retinal image dataset and quantitative results are presented