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Friday, August 15, 2014

Mendaftar TOEFL Preparation Course

Kampus saya memiliki sebuah lembaga bernama Balai Bahasa. Disana terdapat beragam kursus bahasa. Salah satunya bahasa Inggris. Berhubung saya harus memiliki nilai TOEFL atau setara sebagai syarat sidang, maka saya bersiap terlebih dahulu untuk les disini.

Untuk mahasiswa UPI, biaya kursusnya Rp 600.000. Pertemuannya direncanakan 3 kali dalam seminggu selama 3 jam. Teman saya yang pernah ikut kursus ini mengatakan terdapat 3 kali tes PTESOL (The Proficiency Test of English for Speakers of Other Language), setara TOEFL. Jadi lumayanlah, sekalian belajar bahasa Inggris sekalian dapat testnya.

intermezzo - PTESOL bukan TOEFL. TOEFL sendiri adalah serangkaian test hak cipta dari ETS (Educational Testing Service), nah sedangkan PTESOL itu dibuat oleh universitas. Biaya test TOEFL yang asli berkisar US$160-US$250. Lumayan mahal memang.
Peserta TOEFL Prep Course ada 30 orang. Kursus ini dilaksanakan jika kuota peserta sudah terpenuhi. Jadi jika anda mendaftar dan masuk ke dalam waiting list, saat balai bahasa menghubungi anda segeralah untuk daftar ulang dan membayar biaya kursus.

Sebelumnya saya pernah mendaftar di bulan Juni yang rencananya untuk bulan Agustus. Saya saat itu sudah dihubungi, tapi berhubung saya masih mudik jadi saya menolak. Selasa lalu saya kembali ke Balai Bahasa dan bertanya mengenai TOEFL Prep Course, dan ternyata katanya tersisa 7 kuota. Saya saat itu belum siap dan berniat untuk kembali esoknya. Saat besoknya datang ternyata (kata mas-mas yang jadi petugas di Balai Bahasa) tersisa 1 kuota lagi. Alhamdulillah masih ada, saya langsung daftar.

Prep Course periode ini dimulai dari tanggal 19 Agustus nanti setiap hari Selasa, Rabu, dan Jumat.

Thursday, August 14, 2014

Progress about my paper

Today I  spoke to my advisor lecturer about my final project. It's called POME (in case you don't remember you can check my previous post).

In my campus there's a rule that the student need to see the advisors at least 6 times per semester. I haven't seen him for a couple of month, so.. yeah, my final project also got stuck. By the way I have two advisor, but I haven't got time to see the second ones.

Before I saw my advisor I had prepared my questions correlated about my project. We talked a bit, and here's the resume.

First, I misunderstood about erosion and dilation. These two processes is to do morphological change. At first, I thought this process expand every pixel in structuring element. But I was wrong. I rechecked the sample at HIPR2. It's only the center of pixel affected.

Here's an example. Assume there's a 5x5 binary image like this (0 is background and 1 is foreground)

00000
00100
00000
00000
00100

and we have a structuring element for dilation of 3x3

111
111
111

At first I thought the image is going to be like this
11111
11111
11111
11111
11111

Why? Because I change every 3x3 pixel around the foreground's. But, the right answer is this
01110
01110
01110
01110
01110

I reported my finding to my advisor and he told me to rewrite my second chapter of my paper.

For more detail explanation go to its website at http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rbf/HIPR2/dilate.htm

Second, I rethought for data decode and need to learn scaling. For this project at first I have to create a trained network for my classifier so I need to do training.  The input is every correct input letters. I thought it's going to be more convenient to decode those extracted training forms to XML data. Because I need to input the same amount of pixels for every data but the data itself can be different for each extraction so I have to scale them appropriately.

My advisor told me to use the available library out there for scaling. He said scaling can be quite complex. But... I don't know, I thought a simpler scaling because it's binary image. I had read about bilinear interpolation and I think it's quite simple for 2D image. The concept is the original pixels spread out then a structuring element count the gray value.

Err.. that's convenient for shade of grays, maybe I'll find another simpler method for binary images.

I'll try to learn it a little bit and do some experimenting to use it. If it's quite complex (it took me 5 days to develop it, haha) then it's better for me to use image processing library, even though that's rather overkill.

Third, I made up my finding pattern. I made my paper forms. It's consist of white boxes for write text and black boxes for my finding pattern algorithm. I made it up and have no reference. Then I thought it will be great to use QR Code method to find the mark.

Fourth, feature extraction of text.

It's quite long story.

At first, I thought Sobel Edge Detector is great to extract the feature of the text, but then I realize it's no need because I had thresholded it. Sobel Edge Detector maybe will be more useful for noisy and many object on image, not like my paper forms which is quite obvious to remove the background colors.

Then I found thinning from my elder alumni's paper. His method is quite sophisticated. He detect japanese characters. A letter can be 3 or 5 pixel width. He then do "thinning" to it, find its intersection, and count the strokes. Really cool, but complicated. I don't want to use the intersection and stroke counting, but I like the way he do thinning.

Then I tried the thinning method from HIPR2 (which I think still bad, maybe my algorithm is wrong) but I found the image looks so strange. The N letter become looks like W after it's thinned. I'm not sure thinning is good, but maybe it's just because my thinning algorithm.

There's also a paper from Farhad Soleimanian, he put the letter's pixel directly to its neural network.

So what should I use? Directly put it to neural network, thinning method, or Sobel edge detector? My advisor told me to STOP TINKERING IMAGE PROCESSING FOR FEATURE EXTRACTION and do the simplest thing first. Use the "direct input" and do the training to see how much the classification correctness.


What's next? I think I have to do these
  1. Implement "Finding Pattern" method in extractor app
  2. Implement "segmentation"  in extractor app
  3. Implement "export form to XML" in extractor app
  4. Implement "import form XML" in training app
  5. Implement "Neural Network Training" in training app
  6. Implement "export network XML"  in training app
  7. Implement "import network XML" in testing app
  8. Implement "testing" in testing app
  9. Try each "direct input", Sobel edge detector, and thinning method then count how big are the correctness
  10. Recheck thinning method, because my algorithm output differ with HIPR2's images


Long post eh? That's my documentation about my paper progress. It's become more and more exciting. Wish me luck then!

Bonus: Here's how I am making it


P.S: Excuse my Engrish though, it's one of my program to learn english. So grammar nazis out there, have yourself tons of corrections

Saturday, August 2, 2014

Pertanyaan Indonesia tentang ke luar negeri

Saya bukan pelancong tapi saya senang diajak berlancong. Apa itu berlancong? Anyway, setiap saya nonton acara travelling dengan kerabat, teman sepertontonan saya sering nyeletuk ",dapat makanan halal disana gimana ya?" Pertanyaan-pertanyaan macam gini sering menggelitik, apalagi kalau negara yang dikunjungi itu mayoritas penduduknya bukan muslim. Itu pertanyaan iseng sih, tapi ya itu, sering banget ditanyakan. Untuk itu saya coba rangkum pertanyaan orang Indonesia tentang hidup di luar negeri.

  1. Gimana cara dapat makanan halal?
  2. Kalau lagi jalan-jalan terus mau sholat gimana caranya? (soalnya nggak ada mushola)
  3. Kalau mau sholat Jum'at gimana? (takutnya nggak ketemu mesjid)
  4. Beli kecap disana gimana ya? (ujung-ujungnya juga nanya tempe, kerupuk, sampai terasi bisa dibeli di mana)
  5. Disana ngenetnya gimana? (pertanyaan buat ngenet di hape dan warnet)
  6. Kita bisa pake nomor hape sendiri nggak?
  7. Kalau nyuci baju gimana caranya? (maksudnya nanyain laundry di sana yang pake koin kayak di film-film)
  8. Mudik nggak? Kan mahal?
  9. Nyuci, maaf, bokongnya, maaf, pakai, maaf, tisu, maaf, ya?
  10. Kalau ke dokter umum mahal nggak sih?
  11. Makannya mahal nggak sih?
  12. Paspor harus dibawa melulu nggak?
Itu dulu kali ya, kalau misalnya nanti ada yang lain saya update buah ditambah. Ciao!