1. Software Engineering

Fifth Generation’s software engineer must balance a variety of factors during software product development, such as, functionality, quality, performance, usability, time to market, and cost. In order to produce software which can satisfy the acceptance criteria in each of the above-mentioned, the company performs on-going research to continuously improve craftsmanship in software development. The following projects are underway:


2. Manufacturing Efficiency

Continuous research is happening at Fifth Generation on new methods and technologies for improving efficiency in manufacturing plants. A new technology that is being developed currently involves the use of artificial intelligence techniques to identify imminent, potential failures (of machines) in manufacturing plants based on the collection of real time data. This will in turn enable timely attention to the machine in order to prevent such failure, and thereby, result in the reduction of downtimes which translates directly to the profitability of manufacturing organizations.

3. Access Vision

Using a parameterized face recognition algorithm that is efficient and works in real time on a simple charged coupled device camera, Fifth Generation is working on a system that can make decisions autonomously on providing access to authorized persons to a restricted area. This system, which is a biometric one, would be a more reliable replacement to the smart access cards. The decision making shall be done autonomously from a local host computer, which in turn, would have access to a central server for maintaining the parameterized data of authorized faces, access logs, etc. Access Vision shall also come with a built-in a web display of real time streaming of the videos from the access cameras and shall have the capability to communicate with remote mobile devices in real time in the event of access to the restricted area.

4. Multiple Camera Control System

Any video surveillance system normally uses multiple cameras to scan the area that is being monitored for security. Each camera provides its own image of its field of view, and typically, a multi camera display is available in the control room to manually monitor for changes or untoward events. Currently, intelligent PTZ cameras that can detect objects and track them within their field of view are available.  However, in a system of multiple PTZ cameras spanning a region of space, there is yet a reliable technology for automatic hand over of the “tracking control” from one camera to the next as the tracked object moves from the field of view of the first camera to the field of view of the next camera. Fifth Generation is involved in the research of a peer-2-peer multiple camera control system that can deliver a seamlessly stitched video of tracked segments from multiple cameras.

5. Document Summarization

Document Summarization is an emerging area in Natural Language Processing.  This involves providing the capability to a computer program to summarize the content in a document.  Techniques for natural language generation need to be developed for creating such a capability. Natural Language generation is the process of converting information in databases to a format that is similar to a natural language. In other words, the system should be capable of automatically converting contextual information and conceptual definitions that are stored in the data base into words and sentences that are simple to read and understand. Fifth Generation is embarking on a research project to create a document summarization utility for multi-media documents (such as, videos, text, audio, etc.) based on qualitative semantics of the documents.