Interests

[ Home ] [ About Me ] [ Interests ] [ Experience ] [ Qualifications ] [ ECA ]

This page describes my hobbies, projects, and interests.

	Hobbies Play badminton, listening to music, and cycling.
	Projects Currently involved in implementation of Ministry of Home Affairs subsystem (IVRS). Small scale project undertaken includes conversion of existing analog Periphonics VPS/is system to a digital system. Undergraduate projects undertaken include In-House Practical Training (IHPT) and Final-Year Project (FYP). IHPT is a 8-week programme carried out in four phases. FYP is carried out through two semesters during the last academic year of study.
	Interest Involve in community service activities, learn to play 'ti zi' (a Chinese Orchestra instrument), and read books on frequently used IT knowledge.

MHA IVRS is a subsystem of Ministry of Home Affairs. Entities of this subsystem include Conversant Integrated Voice Response system and a Windows NT server termed Simple Management Terminal (SMT). The functions of Conversant IVR include performing calls to various equipments like numeric pagers, alphanumeric pagers, and mobile phones, gather response, and voice administration. PL/SQL, C Programming, and shell programming are skills used to supplement the proprietary development tool.

IHPT emphasizes on practical aspects of analysis, design and construction, testing, reliability and documentation. The work undertaken will further reinforces theories and concepts. The four phases are:

Phase 1: Hardware
This phase aims to reinforce logic concepts and programming skills. Based on given schematic diagrams, DAC, ADC, and I/O circuit boards were developed using soldering and wire-wrapping.

Phase 2: Application
This phase made use of the I/O circuit board done in Phase 1 together the equipments provided by the laboratory. A security control system was developed using C language and DOS platform was used. A password physically entered by user through the I/O board was read and verified by the program.

Phase 3: Design Software
Design software, ECAD, was introduced to aid in designing of electric circuits.

Phase 4 (Project)
The project was title “The Intelligent Projector”. The I/O board was used as an interface, ADC to convert analog values read from sensors to digital values, and DAC to convert digital values sent to actuators to analog values. Physical properties such as temperature and light intensity were measured using appropriate sensors. Control parameters such as fan speed and light bulb intensity were sent to appropriate actuators. Real-time graphical user interface was developed to reflect the instantaneous state of the ‘projector’.

FYP was carried through a span of 9 months. The title of the project is “Comparison of Neural Approaches to Image Compression”. The project was undertaken without any prior knowledge on image compression and neural networks. The project was carried out in 5 distinct phases, each implementing one neural algorithm. The 5 algorithms implemented are Kohonen Vector Quantization, K-Mean Vector Quantization, K-Means Scalar Quantization, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and Independent Component Analysis (ICA).

A standard lena image in PGM format is used as input for the various algorithms. The image is as shown below:

Original lena image

During each phase, signal-to-noise ratio and compression ratio were used as metrics for comparison. The neural algorithms were used to train a chosen neural network architecture so that the network would adopt the properties of the given inputs. Vector quantization is main approach used to achieve image compression.