Noman Islam

Noman Islam, Zeeshan Islam, Nazia Noor

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) has been a topic of interest for many years. It is defined as the process of digitizing a document image into its constituent characters. Despite decades of intense research, developing OCR with capabilities comparable to that of human still remains an open challenge. Due to this challenging nature, researchers from industry and academic circles have directed their attentions towards Optical Character Recognition. Over the last few years, the number of academic laboratories and companies involved in research on Character Recognition has increased dramatically. This research aims at summarizing the research so far done in the field of OCR. It provides an overview of different aspects of OCR and discusses corresponding proposals aimed at resolving issues of OCR.

Noman Islam, Zubair A. Shaikh, Aqeel-ur-Rehman et al.

Mobile Ad hoc Network (MANET) is an infrastructure-less network formed between a set of mobile nodes. The discovery of services in MANET is a challenging job due to the unique properties of network. In this paper, a novel service discovery framework called Hybrid Association Rules Based Network Layer Discovery of Services for Ad hoc Networks (HANDY) has been proposed. HANDY provides three major research contributions. At first, it adopts a cross-layer optimized design for discovery of services that is based on simultaneous discovery of services and corresponding routes. Secondly, it provides a multi-level ontology-based approach to describe the services. This resolves the issue of semantic interoperability among the service consumers in a scalable fashion. Finally, to further optimize the performance of the discovery process, HANDY recommends exploiting the inherent associations present among the services. These associations are used in two ways. First, periodic service advertisements are performed based on these associations. In addition, when a response of a service discovery request is generated, correlated services are also attached with the response. The proposed service discovery scheme has been implemented in JIST/SWANS simulator. The results demonstrate that the proposed modifications give rise to improvement in hit ratio of the service consumers and latency of discovery process.