The Harris corner detector is a popular interest point detector due to its invariance to rotation, scale as well as illumination variation and robustness to image noise. The Harris corner detector is based on the local auto-correlation function of a signal; where the local auto-correlation function measures the local changes of the signal with patches shifted by a small amount in different directions.

Surveillance technology is now ubiquitous in modern society.  This is due to  the increasing number of crimes as well as the vital need to provide a safer environment. Because of the rapid growth  of security cameras and incapability of manpower to supervise them, the deployment of biometric technologies becomes important for the development of automated visual surveillance systems. Recently, the use of gait for people identification in surveillance applications has attracted researchers from  computer vision.  The suitability of gait recognition for surveillance systems emerges from the fact that gait can be perceived from a distance as well as its non-invasive nature. Although gait recognition is still a new biometric and is not sufficiently mature to be deployed in real world applications such as visual surveillance, it overcomes most of the limitations that other biometrics suffer from such as face, fingerprints and iris recognition which can be obscured in most situations where serious crimes are involved.

Although people can discern the state of the subject from a single static image, motion pictures provide even more rich and reliable information for the perception of the different biological, social and psychological characteristics of the person such as emotions, actions and personality traits of the subject. This is because the acquired perceptual knowledge is encoded in the human motion. Furthermore, this notion was also observed by Darwin (1872) in his book “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals” where it was stated:

Actions speak louder than pictures when it comes to understanding what others are doing.

The human visual system is very sensitive to motion as it tends to focus attention on moving objects. In contrast to static or motionless objects, which are not as straightforward to detect. Motion is a spatio-temporal event defined as the change of spatial location over time. Given some visual input, the perception of motion is regarded as the process by which the visual system acquires perceptual knowledge about the speed and direction of the moving object. Whilst this process is spontaneous for the human visual system, it has proven to be extraordinarily difficult to duplicate this capability into computer vision systems.

For the last three days, I was having a problem with receiving emails due to the failure of DNS servers. I have lost all the emails I was supposed to receive. This is so far the second time during this month.

I just started to hate email systems, either there is a lot of spam or the mail server gets down or your emails will be labeled as spam by other ISPs. Even the university email is a junk and not reliable as I am receiving lots of spam with a lot of restrictions of what to send and to receive.

I have switched to use Google email system which I have integrated with my personal website in order to keep using the same email address ( imed @ imed.ws ).  Hopefully this will fix the problem permanently as I have been wasting time trying to troubleshout the cause of email failures.

  Thinking to start working on a setting up a web application like digg.com but instead for academic research papers and journals only. The site should function the same way as google scholar but with more rich features like voting, digging, posting questions and comments. The web application should be featured with a nice front page portal showing popular articles, latest papers and may be coming conferences or venues.

The idea looks goods to me and encouraging, but thinking money, time and effort wise. it will not be as profitable that much, plus more efforts and time should sacrificed for mining all the research papers from external sites as well as more work must be done for putting references and citations.

But if any one wants to go for it, there is a software called Pligg which you can hack and customize to your needs. For data  which is the most important, if you are that lazy you can write a search mining bot to crawl through google scholar or ieee explorer to get all of their data, but not sure of the legality issues!

Plus, the promotion of the site to academic people is extremely difficult unless you spend money telling them about the site and convince them to use it. But once it is in, it will keep up growing by itself.

I spent the a few hours on Sunday morning updating my popular site : www.imed5.com which is now receiving huge traffic! The website has been recently assigned a page rank of 4 by google.

So, let’s hope it will get a page rank of 5 soon!