[maemo-community] GSoC Student Proposal

[From: timeless]

On Thu, Apr 2, 2009 at 8:08 PM, Sudheendra Bhat <sbhat2 at netlab.gmu.edu> wrote:
>     * Project title.
>           o Text optical recognition on Photo Images

Please use the standard phrase "Optical Character Recognition" in your
title. That your title fails to match the first line in your Abstract
is unfortunate.

>     * Project Abstract:
>           o The idea of optical character recognition

Please capitalize OCR and stick OCR in parens after it....

> will be extended to recognize the characters available on a Photo Image.

you don't mean 'extend', you mean 'apply'

drop 'the', there's no guarantee you'll catch them all.

you mean 'from' or 'in' not 'on'.

> The main advantage being able to use the character information available

don't use 'being able to'.

don't use 'character information', you mean 'words'
* this comment applies repeatedly for the remainder of your proposal

> in the photo image with different services like OpenStreetMap (Say if
> we have the photo image with the street names, then it can be

you want 'a' not 'the' and later you don't want 'the' at all

> recognized and used with OpenStreetmap for tracing the street on the

please ensure you spell proper names correctly and consistently,
earlier you capitalized the M in OSM.

'to trace' instead of 'for tracing'

and you want 'a map', not 'the map'

> map), Language Translators (we can use the character information

I wouldn't recommend mentioning language translators. Having to deal
w/ Human translators (who do a terrible job), the last thing to
advertise is automated translation of OCR'd data.

> available on the Photo with translate.google.com), in Social Blogging

'in' not 'on' (I don't think I'm going to correct this again)

> applications to provide the history of any specific event (Say, my

'a' not 'any'

> Sunday hangout at Washington DC, all different information available

'in' not 'at'
you don't mean 'all different', you might drop 'different'

> on the photos taken during the whole of Sunday can be used to tag the

in ...

'whole', not 'whole of' -- although this still isn't great

> events automatically with this service - Context Awarenss) and many

Please be aware of spell checkers, GMail has one, so does Firefox,
they both suggest that you are not aware of the spelling of awareness
:(

> more related applications.
>     * Project Full Discription (Technical):

***

>           o Generally a photo image may consist of character
> informations with meaningful context and this information can be

***

> helpful for variety of purposes.In this project an attempt will be

Please include a space after periods.

For the record, I'm aware that Chinese deals in 'characters',
'information', and doesn't care about spaces. However, your proposal
is in English (or something which resembles a machine mistranslation
to the same), so it should follow the conventions for this language.

> made to capture the character information available on any Photo

***

> Image. The character infromation available on a Photo can be captured

***

> by extending the concept of optical character recognition. Like

extend => apply

> traditional OCR concepts, we would be requiring to have some sought of

be requiring => need
sought => sort

> Neural Network/Hidden Markovian Model to train our program with set of

a set

> character types. Along with this, we need to also provide some

character types is *odd*. Do you mean "fonts"?

> techniques to process the image to identify the character regions and

use 'text' not 'character regions'

> process (Recognize) those characters from our trained program. Once we
> have the working module for recognizing the character information from
> the Image, then we can enhance the module by adding some service
> related features (i.e. expose the services so that any third party
> application or program can use this feature of character recognition
> on their environment).The module which we develop for this project can

That sentence was way too long.

BTW, you get points for spelling recognize correctly and using i.e. correctly.

What's the difference between a third party application and a program?
- drop one.

> be easily integrated with Maemo framwork and will have an efficient

with _the_ ...
***
> usage on the Internet Tablets or any handheld device platform.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'efficient usage'.
In general, I automatically flag all _uses_ of the word "usage",
because In My Experience, it's mis_used_ by non-native speakers.

>     * Project tasks and deliverables:

***

>           o The project deliverable will be mainly a program to
> recognize the text characters from a Photo Image (at this stage). And
> future enhance can be made to provide services to third party programs
> may be in the form of a Web Service.
>           o My tentative plan/tasks for the execution of this project
> will be:
>                 + Community Bonding (meeting and discussing the
> technical aspects of this projects with the Maemo team members),
> understanding the Maemo framework with respect to the current
> requirement.
>                 + Planning to use Cairo Library (which is supported
> in Maemo), GDK, GDKPixBuf Libraries for the Image processing related

Personally, I'd recommend avoiding GDK*. You're free to ignore this
recommendation at your peril.

> tasks. So I would need to spend couple of days to get the experties on

expertise

> these Library usages.
>                 + Photo Image pre-processing algorithm development -
> for parsing the Photo Image ( Either JPG, TIFF or BMP format) and to

Aww, I like TGA and PDF :)

> get the necessary basic information. Also to get the image in the
> format in which my recognition program can understand.
>                 + Developing the training/Learning algorithm ( I am
> planning on using either Backpropogation Algorithm (Feed forwad

*** ***

> algorithm) or some Hidden Markovian Model based algorithm for this
> purpose).
>                 + Application Development (A Gtk+ based application
> with Hildon support, which uses the trained data sets on the Photo
> Images which comes as a input to the program to recognize the Text
> Characters available on the Image).
>                 + Upon completion of these above steps, I will use my
> experience with the Web Services to develop a service oriented

drop 'the'

> architecture for the recognition program and expose relevent api's so

> that other 3rd party application can access and use them on their
> applications.

Note that writing '3rd party application ... applications' is
problematic, first you changed number (singular to plural), and second
you essentially repeated yourself. Simple drop everything starting
with 'on'.

>           o As I have the basic ideas on what needs to be done and
> hands on experience with the libraries I will be using in this
> project, I predict that I should be able to complete the standalone
> program of Text Character recognition within the first 2 months
> (approximately giving 35-40 hrs a week) of Summer and remaining time
> of Summer I am planning on working on the Web Service implementation
> for this project.
>     * Do you have other commitments during the summer of code coding
> period ? If yes, what kind of commitments ?
>           o NO
>     * Why are you the right person for this project ?
>           o I have some hands on experience with respect to the
> Recognition system, as I had done a project on Optical Character
> Recognition using the Neural Network based algorithms. During my
> internship I did work on the development of context aware application

my internship <where/when> <comma>
I did work => I worked

of => of a

> on Hildon Framework where I learn about DBUS, Hildon Framework, Bluez
> and most of the libraries used on a Internet Tablets.

you shouldn't write 'most of the libraries used on a Internet Tablets'.
1. people can use anything on them, so it's pretty likely you're wrong
about 'most'
2. <a> and tablet<s> don't agree on number (singular, plural)
3. you've excluded DBUS, Hildon and Bluez which is just strange

> I also have
> experience progragmming with respect to the mobile platform. Above all

***

> I have the zeal to contribute towards the opensource community.

'zeal' has some strange implications, stay away from it.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealotry>

>     * What are the benefits of your project for the Maemo Community ?
>           o This project is targetted to run on a Handheld platform
> as it can give many useful services (as described in the abstract) to
> the user. And Maemo framework already provides the necessary library
> support required for this project, so that this project can be easily
> integrated with the framework with no extra overhead. Also, this
> project gives birth to many new topics of interests like using the
> services from this projects in Social Community like blogs, photo
> gallery, and implementing many new context aware based applications
> targetting the handheld devices.
>     * ABout Me:
>           o To introduce myself, I am Sudheendra Bhat currently
> pursuing my masters in Computer Science from Dept of Computer Science,

from _the_, and either write 'Department' or 'Dept.', I'd recommend the former.

I'd probably actually write George Mason University's Department of
Computer Science.

Note that GMU is notable enough
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Mason_University>, that I
wouldn't bother including 'VA', it just seems odd.

> George Mason University, VA.

>             I am interested in this project as I am planning on doing
> my thesis in the areas of Mobile Computing and this project should
> defiantly be a good kick of for the same. Also I have been working on
> mobile platform (Moblin and IPhone) for last one year now and I am

Please spell iPhone correctly, it's at least a brand name,  in fact
it's a trademark:
<http://www.apple.com/legal/trademark/appletmlist.html>
iPhone™


> services (Using Axis 1.4) along with mySql as a back end tool. The

Please spell MySQL correctly, otherwise someone might assume you mean
something else....
<http://www.mysql.com/about/legal/trademark.html>
MySQL®

----

I hope people don't mind this feedback.

Note that I've considered giving feedback on a number of previous proposals.

I've decided to select this one and only this one. If people contact
me privately (although I think they're out of time), I'll be glad to
give private feedback.