Mobile Education through Camera-Equipped Mobile Phones

This paper proposes augmented learning contents (ALC) that can supply learners with dynamic interactions using multimedia information by recognizing real images of off-line contents using mobile devices. The techniques employed allow children to rapidly gain access to a large repository of multimedia information through the use of a camera- equipped mobile phone. Especially, there are many usages of external marks (EM) on the off-line contents. To tackle this problem, a few researches use content- based image retrieval (CBIR) based on object colors to recognize real images with a simple computation. However, this has problems of low recognition rates and slows processing on mobile devices with low- resolution camera. There are three issues should be considered in this research field: (1) low recognition rates, (2) fast processing, and (3) rotation-size invariant. To solve drawbacks that use of the EM and difficulty of the color-based image retrieval (CoBIR) by means of a low-resolution camera-equipped mobile phone, we used for shape-based image retrieval (SBIR) system. The ALC can provide learners with quick and accurate on-line contents on off-line using mobile devices without limitations of space. Our aim was to establish whether or not this user interaction technique could be harnessed for education based applications targeted at young children.