Templatebased image processing toolkit for android phones

Abstract

Nowadays smart phones are becoming the most widely used portable devices. Cell phones significantly enrich daily human life experience by providing ubiquitous access to sophisticated multimedia features such as voice and data services, short messaging, built-in cameras, Wi-Fi, Internet, Bluetooth and many more. Attracted by "any time and any place" communication accessibility many educators explore opportunities to improve student learning by using either standard phone features or applications dedicated for learning needs. In these scenarios cell phone is considered as learning content delivery and interaction device. While many such studies are reported, another aspect hasn't been explored thoroughly - efficient learning strategies for smart phone application development itself. This is an important problem for electrical and computer engineering students as there exist credit hour constraints in curricula, technology changes very fast, and offering related chain of courses is not very feasible. This paper presents an approach facilitating the introduction to smart phone application development using short template projects combined in a template library. The idea is to familiarize students with the whole development cycle by minimizing code-programming, by having ready-made templates which can be manipulated for hands-on experience. The complexity of course materials can be varied using different set of modules, and thus such learning modules can be offered independently, integrated in other conventional courses or used for outreach. With this concept the phone application development is demystified, the big picture clarifies, while students can learn specific insights according to their needs using existing learning tracks. The described system is created for Android phones but the idea can apply for other platforms as well. The proposed library offers a convenient user interface to facilitate students to analyze the image processing techniques by making certain modification in the pre-existing code. © 2012 American Society for Engineering Education.