Whiz Kid Woes

I was out there with two old school friends today and we helped several people park their cars which were stuck on the road! It was a wonderful evening to spend with friends. We had an extension exhaust in our car and we were safe. Here are some of the pictures of the Gulshan-e-Iqbal vicinity we took with a cellphone. It is a total mess out there! Much more rain is expected.

This is the second-ever blog which I’m doing over a GPRS connection!

I’ve been secretly working on a way to perform efficient and accurate Urdu OCR! I started working with binary images using C++ but soon moved to Matlab. After in-depth analysis, I realized a character-level OCR would be harder and would be less accurate. The main idea behind designing such a system was to textize all the Urdu images that are floating around on the web and maybe scanned book content in the future. The system I’m developing requires training before it can perform the OCR. I’m sure several products already exist which can do similar task once trained for specialized glyphs but its so much fun to do something from the scratch!

Here is some sample text in image form I grabbed off a website:

The number mapping on each frame correponds to the ID of a successful match in the library:

I have a lot of ideas to automate the library expansion process but time is an enemy on this one. There is a huge amount of detail which I’m not posting on the blog at this time.

ITCN was really messy this year (more or less like last year!). It has become a market-place for shop and brand owners to market their ‘imported’ products! The cell-phone companies had TV actors and actresses on their stalls to attract the audience and they were throwing… guess what?… kit kats (the mini-bars) at the audience. I was there with a spectacular bunch of people from FAST. Munir is the one who called me up to join The Adams Family group (which was only then conceived!). The most interesting stall (to me, at least) was of a company in Islamabad who are doing 8-layered PCBs. Unfortunately, they are into commercial production so I didn’t attempt ot pursue them into giving me an educational trip to their facility.

Here are two computer casings that looked like a vacuum cleaners at first!

There was a dancing stand on one of the stalls which was quite nice. I have uploaded the video.