UCSC Wins Overall Gold At NBQSA 2013

UCSC won the OVERALL GOLD at the National Best Quality ICT Awards held on 17th October 2013 at Kingsbury Hotel. Among the 146 participants at the NBQSA 2013, 47 were commercial products from the local ICT industry and 99 were Students Projects by undergraduate and Postgraduate Students. SIYARA – Harbour VTMS (New dimension in Port Traffic management) product of the UCSC having won the GOLD under Research & Development Category went on to win the Overall Gold. UCSC won 3 Gold awards, 1 Bronze award and 4 Merit awards at this event.

Siyara is a real-time 3D Vessel Traffic Management System (3DVTMS) for commercial/ large-scale ports and was installed at the Colombo harbour in August 2013. Siyara consists of the full scale 3-Dimensional (3D) view of the harbour environment and the conventional 2-Dimensional (2D) traffic monitoring view. The observation capabilities of the solution are not limited to single static location. The operator has the freedom to select viewpoints and perspectives within the 3600 panorama scene and view moving or static objects. It supports for multiple viewers such as mobile devices and PCs to monitor the real-time traffic. It supports in planning port operations, address safety issues such as environmental impact of shipping accidents and address security issues. It keeps track of vessel movements, voyage information and other important facts. It supports to wide variety alarms and hazard warnings. 3D view enhances the user’s situation awareness. It leads to a significant reduction in human error and increases the user efficiency.

Siyara 2D/3D Vessel Traffic Monitoring solution is entirely based on Free and Open Source frameworks and it uses off-the shelf commodity hardware. It uses more flexible and distributed architecture to cater a wide range of requirements.  Technologies used in the system: Visual Studio, Eclipse Environment, Blender/Autodesk 3ds Max, OGRE 3D Rendering System, CEGUI interfaces , OgreMax Scene Exporter ,OpenCPN chart plotting system, WX Widgets, Imgkap map creation technology, Android/Google Map API version 2 , MySQL, RS-232 serial communication . Siyara consists of 2D/3D vessel traffic viewers,  vessel traffic detection modules and Central coordinating point to manipulate vessel traffic viewers/vessel traffic detection modules/users.

FaceID: A Facial Muscle Anatomy Based Solution For Forensic Facial Reconstruction in Sri Lanka by final year ICT students of the UCSC, namely: Roshan Rajapakse, A.K. Madugalla, P.I.U. Amarasinghe & V.H. Padmathilake was theTertiary (Business) GOLD Winner. This project was supervised by Dr. Anuja Dharmaratne & Mr. Damitha Sandaruwan and was carried out together with the Department of Forensic Medicine, University of Sri Jayewardenepura.

Completely decomposed or disfigured dead bodies would at times make it hard for Forensic Officials to establish their identity using existing identification mechanisms. In such cases forensic facial reconstruction is used. (ex: Natural Disasters, Murder Cases). But in Sri Lanka this process is still not been conducted due to several unresolved issues and lack of data in this area. Hence the aim of this study is to solve those issues and gather necessary data and to introduce a more efficient multimedia based solution that would make the local forensic officials more efficient and their process more accurate. In order to come up with a facial reconstruction solution that would suit Sri Lanka, several reconstruction mechanisms that were used in other countries were tried out and it was resolved to use a novel approach of reconstructing based on sculpting Facial Muscles since it would mirror the manual reconstruction process in Sri Lanka. The process involved acquiring a 3D model of the skull and digitally recreating the facial muscles. This was done with the aid of tissue thickness markers placed on the skull and for this purpose a facial tissue thickness analysis was done. Once the face is reconstructed, facial features were added to it based on a Facial Feature Analysis done on Sri Lankans. The final output was evaluated with all parties that would be benefited from this process, namely the general public, forensic officials, lawyers and medical experts.

Sensing Environment Through Mobile: A Personalized Wearable Obstacle Detection System for Visually Impaired by Y.M Kalindu Priyadarshana final year CS student was the Tertiary (Technology) Bronze Winner. This project was supervised by Dr. Prasad Wimalaratne.

Moving through an unknown environment becomes a real challenge for visually impaired people compared to others. The challenge of improving the mobility of visually impaired people is still exist in the world even after proposing various types of solutions. This project presents a wearable obstacle detection approach which can be personalized along with the user via a mobile device. The time of flight (TOF) characteristic of a sonar wave has been used to identify the obstacles while several approaches are used to classify the identified obstacles. The device aims to discover the ability to identify the surrounding obstacles located underneath the waist level of the user. The direction and the distance to an obstacle are informed to the user as a vibration feedback pattern. The approach can be personalized according to characteristics of the user such as user’s height, vibration sensitivity, etc.

Research & Development Category Merit Award was won by Dr. K.L. Jayaratne for the Content Based Audio Music Monitoring Approach for Singhala Songs.