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We propose an interface for easily accessing a variety of content using the metaphor of reading poetry. The interface is designed to search content by turning the pages of a book-like device. Using the device, the user can easily access desired content without pressing buttons many times, using complex graphical user interfaces, or using a scroll bar to scroll excessively. The prototype we developed can control TV, radio, and media files stored in an HDD and browse the Internet. The interface can be applied as a controller for products such as PCs, TVs, and mobile devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given the large amount of devices in the Internet of Things (IoT), a major challenge is to efficiently find services that meet specific requirements. The proliferation of standards and protocols precludes the existence of a common nomenclature to describe IoT devices, and hence hinders device interoperability. In the previous work, we had proposed the Swarm, a framework to create a common interface for IoT devices. The Swarm provides a software agent to facilitate the decentralized communication and interaction of devices, constituting a step toward interoperability in the IoT. Semantic technologies have been successfully used for service discovery in business applications, and more recently are being used to solve interoperability problems in the IoT. This paper aims to propose a framework to enable semantic discovery in the Swarm. We provide an architecture and describe a reference implementation, based on open Web technologies. We also provide a method to validate our results and propose future directions of this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The national standard of digital cable broadcasting in Korea as well as in North America has its root from the OpenCable and OpenCable Application Platform (OCAP). However, OCAP may have interoperability problems when an OpenCable-certified host is moved to a different service area where extended Application Programming Interfaces (API) not defined in the standard are used or code version management is not properly done between System Operators (SOs). Such abnormal cases can be easily found in practical business environments such as in merge and acquisition of SOs. Hosts used in two different SOs may use two incompatible OCAPs. In this paper, a new method is proposed to allow hosts to navigate in different SOs by modifying the Code Version Table (CVT) defined in the Common Download (CD) specification in OpenCable. Also, in this paper, actual validation of the idea using the modified CVT is included through several field tests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) has become one of the major Internet applications, IPTV users increase rapidly and hundreds of channels emerge to satisfy users' demands. However, the increased number of channels makes users difficult to find their desired channels. Along with this problem, the channel zapping time of IPTV incurs serious user-perceived delay. To alleviate these problems, this paper presents hybrid schemes that combine channel prefetching and reordering schemes. Specifically, adjacency and popularity based prefetching schemes are combined with popular channel reordering schemes and their performances are simulated under various conditions. Experimental results show that the proposed schemes reduce the channel seek time by up to 44.7% when up-down channel selection interfaces are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) is becoming increasingly popular as an emerging Internet application due to its variety of contents and services. However, hundreds of IPTV channels make it difficult to find one's desired channel. To relieve this problem, this paper presents a popular channel concentration scheme for efficient channel navigation in IPTV. Based on the property that TV channel selections concentrate on several frequently selected channels, the proposed scheme reorganizes channel sequences by clustering popular channels. Specifically, channels are rearranged in a frequency interleaved way to minimize the seek distance. Simulation studies show that the proposed scheme reduces the seek time of IPTV channel navigation significantly when up-down channel selection interfaces are used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Multimedia systems are widely used in consumer electronics environments today, where humans can work and communicate through multi-sensory interfaces. Unfortunately smell detection and generation systems are not part of today's multimedia systems. In this paper, we propose an Electronic Nose that can be used in a multimedia environment. The proposed electronic nose can detect a large number of smells and will have a significantly lower cost compared to the detection systems used in industrial applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the advent of internet-of-things (IoT)-based home automation systems, time synchronization techniques for low power sensor modules are in high demand. The constrained application protocol (CoAP) was recently standardized for sensor networks by IETF and is becoming widely adopted for home automation systems by ETSI, OMA, and oneM2M. The network time protocol (NTP) is not applicable to home automation systems due to its limited computing resources. This paper proposes a lightweight time synchronization algorithm for CoAP-based home automation system networks. The CoAP option field and a shim header are used to include time-stamps in the home automation system. The proposed scheme can thus be applied to both IP-based and non-IP-based home automation systems. In experiments with several household devices having non-IP communication interfaces, experimental results show that the proposed technique gives an average error of 1 ms and a network overhead reduction of 17% when compared to the ideal NTP service. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many devices, including smart TVs and humanoid robots, can be operated through speech interface. Since a user can interact with such a device at a distance, speech-operated devices must be able to process speech signals from a distance. Although many methods exist to localize speakers via sound source localization, it is very difficult to reliably find the location of a speaker in a noisy environment. In particular, conventional sound source localization methods only find the loudest sound source within a given area, and such a sound source may not necessarily be related to human speech. This can be problematic in real environments where loud noises frequently occur, and the performance of speech-based interfaces for a variety of devices could be negatively impacted as a result. In this paper, a new speaker localization method is proposed. It identifies the location associated with the maximum voice power from all candidate locations. The proposed method is tested under a variety of conditions using both simulation data and real data, and the results indicate that the performance of the proposed method is superior to that of a conventional algorithm for various types of noises1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As gesture recognition technology has improved, it has been applied to various consumer appliances to provide natural interfaces. Television is a representative system for this kind of interface because of its complex requirements for various functions. Icon-based interfaces are the general method used. However, according to the performed survey, various functions were not required for watching TV. This work found most viewers mainly tend to use some specific functions such as channel or volume. These functions should be controlled easily and quickly since they are frequently used. However, the iconbased interface has difficulty fulfilling this requirement since it is affected by Fitts' law. Hence, this paper proposes a gesturebased method for easy and quick control. User hand gestures are recognized by capturing the motion path when the user draws different symbols in the air. These gestures are used to interact with the TV. It is implemented using a single-camera dedicated hardware system. This system is based on a real time parallel processing structure. The analysis shows that subjects enjoy this TV control system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a design of the optimized in-home multi-session streaming server and presents a performance evaluation of high throughput multi-session streaming service with Ethernet and IEEE1394. The in-home streaming server is a kind of personal home server or residential gateway, however it is specialized for in-home multi- session streaming and distribution of multimedia contents. In order to realize this server, two specific features should be in harmony with each other: the multi-stream transcoder to support various presentation constraints of the multimedia client devices and the multi-session streaming interface to transfer multiple high-throughput streams concurrently. In particular, the network interface should absorb the throughput tolerance caused by the concurrent stream-converting processes to maximize the multi-streaming capability of the server with a limited transcoder performance. Hence, this paper evaluates the streaming performance of the two major network protocols, gigabit Ethernet and IEEE1394a, in order to understand their adequateness for the in-home multi-session streaming service'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When speech-based interfaces are used for small handheld devices such as cellular phones and personal digital assistants in mobile environments with unknown noises and surrounding talkers, all signals except the legitimate user's voice must be rejected as noise signals by the system. This paper proposes a new algorithm that detects the user's voice in spatial and temporal domains using directional and spectral information. It rejects undesirable signals that originate from noise sources or surrounding talkers. Experimental results indicate the proposed algorithm reduces the voice activity detection error rate by 34.3% relative to the conventional methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new system interface architecture is proposed for low-cost realization of system-on-glass (SoG) with low-temperature poly-silicon (LTPS) thin-film-transistor (TFT). By re-arranging the order of graphics data transmission, line memory is eliminated, which enables small area and thus lost cost implementation of SoG. Timing controller required for the proposed system interface has been developed for gate and source drivers which are all integrated on the same glass substrate of SoG. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the design of a Broadband Power Line Communication (BPLC) receiver optimized for reduced hardware complexity. To this end, the Radio-Frequency (RP) stage uses a direct conversion architecture while some innovative solutions are used in the base-band signal processing, such as a new frequency offset synchronization scheme based on the frequency domain. Every part of the receiver has been optimized using a new non-commercial hardware-software co-simulation package named BROCOLI (Broadband Co-simulation Library) based on a set of hierarchical models, specially developed for this application. A prototype of the BPLC transceiver has been built and some experimental results are shown which validate the design process and the implemented solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a surveillance camera architecture using a one-bit motion detection algorithm for portable applications. The conventional surveillance system requires too many components and is too complicated for portable applications. In this paper, we propose a simple surveillance camera architecture with a motion detector that can detect changes of an object within its surroundings for low-power and low-cost applications. The proposed motion-detection algorithm uses one-bit images which are selected using a binary search algorithm that is decided by varying the reference voltage. We verify all the functions of the motion detector through the use of a user interface program on an FPGA board. Experimental results are also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speech interface may be the first choice as a user interface for robots or hand-held devices such as personal digital assistants (PDAs) and portable multimedia players (PMPs). However, those devices have the limitation of the memory space and the computation power. The hidden Markov model (HMM)-based speech synthesis is presently considered to be suitable for the embedded systems. In this paper, our HMM-based Korean speech synthesis system is described. Statistical HMM models for Korean speech units are trained with the hand-labeled speech database including the contextual information about phoneme, word phrase, and multilevel break strength. Mel-cepstrum and line spectrum pair (LSP) are compared for the spectrum modeling, and two- band excitation based on the harmonic plus noise speech model is utilized for the mixed excitation source. The developed small-size Korean synthesis system produced considerably high quality speech with a fairly good prosody. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a novel removable medium based on the hard disk drive (called "information versatile disk for removable usage" (iVDR™) and an interface architecture for copyright protection based on public key infrastructure and superdistribution. This interface architecture is applicable to various media including iVDRs whose interfaces are AT-Attachment based. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Handheld pointing devices are increasingly in demand in digital TV market to provide intuitive human?device interfaces (HDIs). HDIs with directional buttons, joysticks, and trackballs are not very intuitive owing to their limited motions. To overcome this problem, cameras, gyroscopes, or ultrasonic sensors have been incorporated into HDIs at the expense of higher power consumption. In this paper, a low-power intuitive pointing device is presented. The transmitter of the proposed device consists of a microcontroller, two infrared light-emitting diodes, and optical components. The receiver comprises a photodiode module and a motion estimation block. The proposed device reduces power consumption by 71.3% and 23.6% as compared with the conventional camera- and gyroscope-based HDIs, respectively. Test results and performance evaluations are presented for validation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Eye gaze tracking system has been widely researched for the replacement of the conventional computer interfaces such as the mouse and keyboard. In this paper, we propose the long range binocular eye gaze tracking system that works from 1.5 m to 2.5 m with allowing a head displacement in depth. The 3D position of the user's eye is obtained from the two wide angle cameras. A high resolution image of the eye is captured using the pan, tilt, and focus controlled narrow angle camera. The angles for maneuvering the pan and tilt motor are calculated by the proposed calibration method based on virtual camera model. The performance of the proposed calibration method is verified in terms of speed and convenience through the experiment. The narrow angle camera keeps tracking the eye while the user moves his head freely. The point-of-gaze (POG) of each eye onto the screen is calculated by using a 2D mapping based gaze estimation technique and the pupil center corneal reflection (PCCR) vector. PCCR vector modification method is applied to overcome the degradation in accuracy with displacements of the head in depth. The final POG is obtained by the average of the two POGs. Experimental results show that the proposed system robustly works for a large screen TV from 1.5 m to 2.5 m distance with displacements of the head in depth (+20 cm) and the average angular error is 0.69°. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a highly area-efficient controller for capacitive touch screen panels (TSPs) is proposed. The proposed controller uses a 10-bit successive approximation register analog-to-digital converter (SAR ADC) with an adder to compensate for the capacitance variation in the TSP and for the offset voltage variation in the charge amplifier of the sensing circuit. By using the proposed compensation method, the area of the controller can be reduced by 90.3% of the area of the conventional controllers. The measurement results showed that the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the controller increases from 12.5 to 21.3 dB after compensation. Also, its spatial jitter decreases from ±1.5 to ±0.46 mm, which is 7% of the sensor pitch of 8 mm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of nomadic devices such as PDAs, MP3 players and especially cell phones .has largely grown in the last years; Indeed, cell phones are becoming powerful, always-connected computers that store a lot of personal information (contacts, calendar, personal videos and pictures). The small size of their keyboards and screens is a major limitation of nomadic devices, hampering their utilization in vehicles. Handling them while driving may distract the user and increases the risk of accident, .and it is illegal in some countries. According to the Web 2.0 vision, the,Internet is a platform rather than a mere source of information..The interfaces of Ajax-based applications are user friendly, and they allow storing personal information and preferences. Google Maps is a good example of this philosophy. Nowadays, it is a familiar tool in desktop computers to locate destinations and to plan routes at home. In this paper we propose a new model of Web 2.0 information migration to nomadic devices that facilitates is access to cars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we propose an optimized real- time AVS (a Chinese next-generation audio/video coding standard) HDTV video decoder. The decoder has been implemented in a single SoC with NW/SW partitioning. A VS algorithms and complexity are first analyzed. Based on the analysis, a hardware implementation of the MB level 7-stage pipeline is selected. The software tasks are realized with a 32- bit RISC processor. We further propose the optimization of Interface and RISC processor based on the proposed architecture. The A VS decoder (RISC processor and hardware accelerators) is described in high-level Verilog/VHDL hardware description language and implemented in a single-chip A VS HDTV real-time decoder. At 148.5MHz working frequency, the decoder chip can support real-time decoding of NTSC, PAL or HDTV (720p@60 frames/s or 1080i@60fields/s) bit-streams. Finally, the decoder has been fully tested on a prototyping board. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes an alternative timing recovery method for VSB receivers. It employs a timing error detector which uses both in-phase and quadrature-phase component of received VSB signal and operates at twice of a symbol frequency. The proposed method shows the insensitivity to residual carrier phase offset contained in the signal, thus providing consistent performances regardless of carrier recovery status. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of different types of devices on the home network is expanding greatly. While this explosion of innovation provides compelling new devices to consumers, it problems with ensuring compatibility among these devices, and providing a useful overall user interface for them. This paper describes an experimental set-top box platform for home media applications. The key feature of this platform is that it can dynamically exchange code with other devices on the home network, allowing it to not only acquire new cap abilities at run time, but also provide new capabilities to peer devices on the network. These new capabilities can take the form of new data transmission protocols, CODECs, or user interfaces. We describe the underlying architecture of our platform, as well as the user interface that allows control over a variety of home devices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we consider the design of root-raised cosine filters for receivers in digital transmission systems with strong adjacent interferences. Linear programming techniques are applied to trade off intersymbol interference and stopband attenuation. Only the specification of the transmitter filter in the frequency domain is used. It is shown that linear programming techniques are easy to use and examples are provided to show that it is possible to meet highly demanding specifications with a reduced number of taps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal digital assistants are lightweight, inexpensive, and ubiquitous. Furthermore, they have desktop class operating systems features supported by industrial strength development tools. These devices provide an ideal platform for deploying a practical platform for 12C bus analysis. In this paper, we propose a low-cost, highly-portable 12C bus analyzer on a Palm OS based PDA. We describe the hardware interface, the supporting libraries, and the Palm OS- compliant application. The proposed approach is flexible and supports the creation of additional bus analyzer applications by third parties. The example bus analyzer application described here provides three operating modes, passive snooping, active bus mastering, and active slave device emulation. Each mode can function over a number of user- selectable data rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present lightweight and generic application level gateways for connecting service oriented sensor networks to service oriented standards in the consumer electronics domain. We study the trade-offs between interface richness, deployment granularity and overhead in discovery protocols and we present how the varying interaction patterns on both sides of the gateway can be efficiently mapped onto each other. As a result we obtain three different application-level gateways architectures. The analysis is kept concrete using the Open Service Architecture for Sensors and Universal Plug and Play (UPnP). [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The transmitter identification of the DTV systems becomes crucial nowadays. Transmitter identification (TxID, or transmitter fingerprinting) technique is used to detect, diagnose and classify the operating status of any radio transmitter of interest. A pseudo random sequence was proposed to be embedded into the DTV signal before transmission. Thus, the transmitter identification can be realized by invoking the cross-correlation functions between the received signal and the possible candidates of the pseudo random sequences. Gold sequences and Kasami sequences are two excellent candidates for the transmitter ID sequences as they provide a large family of nearly-orthogonal codes. In order to investigate the sensitivity of the transmitter identification to different topologies and different Kasami sequence lengths, we present the analysis here for four different geometric layouts, namely circular distribution, doubly concentric and circular distribution, square array and hexagonal tessellation under the ENG (electronic news gathering) crews? working environment. The coverage area and the lowest received signal-to-interference ratio are considered as two essential parameters for the multiple-transmitter identification. It turns out to be that the larger the Kasami sequence length, the larger the received signal- tointerference ratio. Our new analysis can be used to determine the required Kasami sequence length for a specific broadcasting coverage [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We proposed "Twist& Tap" as a new text entry method for TV remotes. The method uses a combination of operations that are easy for the body to rem ember: multi-tap of the four directional keys and five level twist control of the wrist holding the remote in either clockwise or counterclockwise direction. Experiments confirm that Twist& Tap offers increased text entry speed, and that many of the subjects could achieve text entry speed close to that of the more commonly used Multi-tap interface after just 3 hours of use, in the condition where the users could not see the remote. Twist&Tap is thus an easy-to-learn eyes-free interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Facial Expression Recognition (FER) from video is an essential research area in the field of Human Computer Interfaces (HCI). In this work, we present a new method to recognize several facial expressions from time sequential facial expression images. To produce robust facial expression features, Enhanced Independent Component Analysis (EICA) is utilized to extract locally independent component (IC) features which are further classified by Fisher Linear Discriminant Analysis (FLDA). Using these features, discrete Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are utilized to model different facial expressions such as joy, anger, and sad. Performance of our proposed FER system is compared against four other conventional feature extraction approaches (i.e., PCA, PCA-FLDA, ICA, and EICA) in conjunction with the same HMM scheme. The experimental results using the Cohn-Kanade database of facial expression videos show that our proposed system yields much improved recognition rate reaching the mean recognition rate of 93.23% whereas the conventional methods yield 82.92% at best. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The limited resolution capabilities of color displays, coupled with the limited perceptual resolution of the human eye has been widely exploited to reduce the actual number of colors that are simultaneously displayed. In this work, we propose a color approximation technique that is orthogonal to traditional, color simplification schemes, and targets the reduction of the energy required for the transmission of color information on digital LCD interfaces. Our approach leverages the serial nature of the transmission so as to approximate RGB pixel values with suitable codes that minimize the number of transitions on the LCD bus, for a given tolerated image quality level. Application of this scheme on a set of benchmark images shows average savings from 60% to 75%, depending on the image qualiy1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We propose two TV interfaces for freely accessing a rich variety of content stored on a large-capacity HDD by continuous multi-channel recording. The first is designed to handle multi-stream data received by multiple TV tuners and to simultaneously search multiple TV channels. The second is designed to handle specific time ranges and to search for scenes within those ranges. These interfaces can be incorporated into commercial products such as PCs, TVs, and HDD recorders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents a study on the service of video, voice and data to the consumer via either a fiber network that extends to a very few homes or a fiber network that extends to the individual home. Issues in getting services from the side of the home to the subscriber; State of consumer-side interfaces; Implications for future work.

Deals with a study which described adaptive timing synchronization schemes for a short-ranged Bluetooth system in partial-band noise environments. Overview of the Bluetooth system; Connection procedure of Bluetooth units; Detection performance of the synchronization receiver; Conclusions of the study.

We propose Unicursal Gesture Interface (UGI) which is a thumb gesture to expand the number of gestures possible from a TV remote with a touchpad. UGI pairs a shape with orientation to create a command. The shapes are unicursal figures whose paths start and end at the same position and that are easy for the user?s thumb to remember. UGI allow user to access different layers of hierarchical menu and to select network content comfortably. As an example of Electronic Program Guide access, we evaluate the performance four kinds of UGI. The mean recognition rate of the UGI is 96.1%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]