Virtual try-on of clothes has received much attention recently due to its commercial potential. It can be used for online shopping or intelligent recommendation to narrow down the selections to a few designs and sizes. In this paper, we present a mixed reality system for 3D virtual clothes try-on that enables a user to see herself wearing virtual clothes while looking at a mirror display, without taking off her actual clothes. The user can select various virtual clothes for trying-on. The system physically simulates the selected virtual clothes on the user's body in real-time and the user can see virtual clothes fitting on the her mirror image from various angles as she moves. The major contribution of this paper is that we automatically customize an invisible (or partially visible) avatar based on the user's body size and the skin color and use it for proper clothes fitting, alignment and clothes simulation in our virtual try-on system. We present three scenarios: i) virtual clothes on the avatar, ii) virtual clothes on the user's image and iii) virtual clothes on the avatar blended with the user's face image. We have conducted a user study to evaluate the effectiveness of these three solutions from the end user's perception of quality attributes, cognitive attributes and attitude towards using. The user study shows that among these three scenarios, the second one is most preferred by the users and for 50% of them the experience they had with our system was sufficient to make the purchase decision for the outfits they virtually tried-on.

High-dynamic-range (HDR) images require tone mapping to be displayed properly on lower dynamic range devices. In this paper, a tone-mapping algorithm that uses histogram of luminance to construct a lookup table (LUT) for tone mapping is presented. Characteristics of the human visual system (HVS) are used to give more importance to visually distinguishable intensities while constructing the histogram bins. The method begins with constructing a histogram of the luminance channel, using bins that are perceived to be uniformly spaced by the HVS. Next, a refinement step is used, which removes the pixels from the bins that are indistinguishable by the HVS. Finally, the available display levels are distributed among the bins proportionate to the pixels counts thus giving due consideration to the visual contribution of each bin in the image. Quality assessment using both quantitative evaluations and user studies suggests that the presented algorithm produces tone-mapped images that are visually pleasant and preserve details of the original image better than the existing methods. Finally, implementation details of the algorithm on GPU for parallel processing are presented, which could achieve a significant gain in speed over CPU-based implementation.

Electricity, a fundamental commodity, must be generated as per required utilization which cannot be stored at large scales. The production cost heavily depends upon the source such as hydroelectric power plants, petroleum products, nuclear and wind energy. Besides overproduction and underproduction, electricity demand is driven by metrological parameters, economic and industrial activities. Therefore, the region specific accurate electric load forecasting can help to effectively manage, plan, and schedule appropriate low cost electricity generation units to decrease per unit cost and provision of on time energy for maximum financial benefits. Machine learning (ML) offers different supervised learning algorithms including multiple linear regression, support vector regressors with different kernels, k-nearest neighbors, Random Forest and AdaBoost to forecast the time series data, but the performance of these algorithms is data dependent. It is vitally important to consider correlated metrological parameters of the specific region for accurate prediction of electricity load demand using ML based forecasting models to minimize the price per unit. In this study, an algorithm is proposed to select least cost electric load forecasting model (lcELFM) using correlated meteorological parameters. We developed least cost forecasting models by minimizing root mean squared error, mean absolute error, and mean absolute percentage error. For simulations, the recorded electricity demand data is taken from a substation of water and power development authority Muzaffarabad city from 1st January 2014 to 31st December 2015. The meteorological time series data are obtained from the substation of Pakistan meteorological department for the same period and same region. Empirical results demonstrate the robustness of the proposed algorithm to select lcELFM. Moreover, SVR (Radial) based electric load forecasting model proves to be the robust model when built using correlated features (temperature and dew point) for the said region and in turn can save up to PKR 0.313 million daily.

Advances in both parallel processing capabilities because of graphical processing units (GPUs) and computer vision algorithms have led to the development of deep neural networks (DNN) and their utilization in real-world applications. Starting from the LeNet-5 architecture of the 1990s, modern deep neural networks may have tens to hundreds of layers to solve complex problems such as license plate detection or recognition tasks. In this manuscript, we present a review of the state-of-the-art methods related to automatic license plate recognition. Since deep networks have demonstrated a remarkable ability to outperform other machine learning techniques, we focus only on neural network based license plate recognition methods. We highlight the particular types of networks, i.e., convolutional, residual recurrent, or long-short-term-memory, used for the specific tasks of license plate detection, extraction, or recognition in different existing works. The presented summary also highlights some of the most widely used data sets for comparison and shares the results reported in the reviewed papers. We also give an overview of the effects of fog, motion, or the use of synthetic data on license plate recognition. Finally, promising directions for future research in this domain are presented.