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Full-Text Articles in Engineering
Towards Improved Paper-Based Election Technology, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Daniel Lopresti, George Nagy, Ziyan Wu
Towards Improved Paper-Based Election Technology, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Daniel Lopresti, George Nagy, Ziyan Wu
Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations
Resources are presented for fostering paper-based election technology. They comprise a diverse collection of real and simulated ballot and survey images, and software tools for ballot synthesis, registration, segmentation, and ground-truthing. The grids underlying the designated location of voter marks are extracted from 13,315 degraded ballot images. The actual skew angles of sample ballots, recorded as part of complete ballot descriptions compiled with the interactive ground-truthing tool, are compared with their automatically extracted parameters. The average error is 0.1 degrees. These results provide a baseline for the application of digital image analysis to the scrutiny of electoral ballots.
Evaluation Of Voting With Form Dropout Techniques For Ballot Vote Counting, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Shatakshi Goyal, Robbie Scott, Daniel Lopresti
Evaluation Of Voting With Form Dropout Techniques For Ballot Vote Counting, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Shatakshi Goyal, Robbie Scott, Daniel Lopresti
Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations
Vote counting accuracy has become a well-known issue in the vote collection process. Digital image processing techniques can be incorporated in the analysis of printed election ballots. Current image processing techniques in the vote collection process are heavily dependent on the anticipated, geometric positioning of the vote. These techniques don’t account for markings made outside of the requested field of input. Using various form dropout techniques, however, every mark on the form can be extracted and used by the machine to make an intelligent decision. Most methods will still miss a few marks and result in a few false alarms. …
Enhancement Of Historical Printed Document Images By Combining Total Variation Regularization And Non-Local Means Filtering, Laurence Likforman-Sulem, Jérôme Darbon, Elisa H. Barney Smith
Enhancement Of Historical Printed Document Images By Combining Total Variation Regularization And Non-Local Means Filtering, Laurence Likforman-Sulem, Jérôme Darbon, Elisa H. Barney Smith
Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations
This paper proposes a novel method for document enhancement which combines two recent powerful noise-reduction steps. The first step is based on the total variation framework. It flattens background grey-levels and produces an intermediate image where background noise is considerably reduced. This image is used as a mask to produce an image with a cleaner background while keeping character details. The second step is applied to the cleaner image and consists of a filter based on non-local means: character edges are smoothed by searching for similar patch images in pixel neighborhoods. The document images to be enhanced are real historical …
Characterizing Challenged Minnesota Ballots, George Nagy, Daniel Lopresti, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Ziyan Wu
Characterizing Challenged Minnesota Ballots, George Nagy, Daniel Lopresti, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Ziyan Wu
Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations
Photocopies of the ballots challenged in the 2008 Minnesota elections, which constitute a public record, were scanned on a high-speed scanner and made available on a public radio website. The PDF files were downloaded, converted to TIF images, and posted on the PERFECT website. Based on a review of relevant image-processing aspects of paper-based election machinery and on additional statistics and observations on the posted sample data, robust tools were developed for determining the underlying grid of the targets on these ballots regardless of skew, clipping, and other degradations caused by high-speed copying and digitization. The accuracy and robustness of …
A Mask-Based Enhancement Method For Historical Documents, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Jerôme Darbon, Laurence Likforman-Sulem
A Mask-Based Enhancement Method For Historical Documents, Elisa H. Barney Smith, Jerôme Darbon, Laurence Likforman-Sulem
Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations
This paper proposes a novel method for document enhancement. The method is based on the combination of two state-of-the-art filters through the construction of a mask. The mask is applied to a TV (Total Variation) -regularized image where background noise has been reduced. The masked image is then filtered by NLmeans (Non-Local Means) which reduces the noise in the text areas located by the mask. The document images to be enhanced are real historical documents from several periods which include several defects in their background. These defects result from scanning, paper aging and bleed-through. We observe the improvement of this …
Descreening Of Color Halftone Images In The Frequency Domain, C. J. Stanger, Thanh Tran, Elisa H. Barney Smith
Descreening Of Color Halftone Images In The Frequency Domain, C. J. Stanger, Thanh Tran, Elisa H. Barney Smith
Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations
Scanning a halftone image introduces halftone artifacts, known as Moiré patterns, which significantly degrade the image quality. Printers that use amplitude modulation (AM) screening for halftone printing position dots in a periodic pattern. Therefore, frequencies relating halftoning are easily identifiable in the frequency domain. This paper proposes a method for descreening scanned color halftone images using a custom band reject filter designed to isolate and remove only the frequencies related to halftoning while leaving image edges sharp without image segmentation or edge detection. To enable hardware acceleration, the image is processed in small overlapped windows. The windows are filtered individually …
Development Of Dna Based Active Macro-Materials For Biology And Medicine: A Review, Frank Xue Jiang, Bernard Yurke, Devendra Verma, Michelle Previtera, Rene Schloss, Noshir A. Langrana
Development Of Dna Based Active Macro-Materials For Biology And Medicine: A Review, Frank Xue Jiang, Bernard Yurke, Devendra Verma, Michelle Previtera, Rene Schloss, Noshir A. Langrana
Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations
DNA was first discovered as the carrier of genetic information for the majority of the known living organisms, encoding the secret of life. Its delicate design based upon double helical structure and base pairing offers a stable and reliable media for storing hereditary codes, laying the foundation for the central dogma (Watson et al. 2003). The impact of this molecule is far reaching into scientific community and our society, as manifested in many fields, for instance, forensics (Budowle et al. 2003), besides medicine. To date, a great deal of research effort has been directed towards understanding