Different from traditional age estimation methods under classification or regression frameworks, this paper proposes a novel person-specific age estimation method under ranking framework. The basic idea is to consider the aging process as a personal age-ranked image sequences and extract the relevant information from this sequences. The estimation of age for an unknown face image is determined by first utilizing face recognition to find the persons in template sets who looks similar to the unseen person, then estimating the ranking order of the unseen person in corresponding personspecific image sequences, lastly mapping and fusing the rank order to its real age. Under this framework, our proposed system not only can estimate the correct the age orders of pairs of faces naturally but also can estimate the real age accurately. The proposed method has shown encouraging performance in the comparative experiments either as an age ranker or as an accurate age estimator and the experiment also proved the validity of the above assumption.

The availability of camera phones provides people with a mobile platform for decoding bar codes, whereas conventional scanners lack mobility. However, using a normal camera phone in such applications is challenging due to the out-of-focus problem. In this paper, we present the research effort on the bar code reading algorithms using a VGA camera phone, NOKIA 7650. EAN-13, a widely used 1D bar code standard, is taken as an example to show the efficiency of the method. A wavelet-based bar code region location and knowledge-based bar code segmentation scheme is applied to extract bar code characters from poor-quality images. All the segmented bar code characters are input to the recognition engine, and based on the recognition distance, the bar code character string with the smallest total distance is output as the final recognition result of the bar code. In order to train an efficient recognition engine, the modified Generalized Learning Vector Quantization (GLVQ) method is designed for optimizing a feature extraction matrix and the class reference vectors. 19 584 samples segmented from more than 1000 bar code images captured by NOKIA 7650 are involved in the training process. Testing on 292 bar code images taken by the same phone, the correct recognition rate of the entire bar code set reaches 85.62%. We are confident that auto focus or macro modes on camera phones will bring the presented method into real world mobile use.

Warping is a common appearance in camera captured document images. It is the primary factor that makes such kind of document images hard to be recognized. Therefore it is necessary to restore warped document image before recognition. In this paper, a novel restore method is presented. The method takes a rough line segmentation and character segmentation firstly in order to estimate the warping direction. Then several pairs of key points mapping between the original image and the restored image are determined and Thin-Plate Splines (TPS), which is an interpolation algorithm, is introduced to restore the image. Such process can effectively describe the warping direction of the document and successfully restore the image. Some experimental results show the effect of the image restoration and compare the recognition rate before and after the restoration based on a same OCR application.

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