NUVIEW:software for display and interactive manipulation of nucleic acid models

The NUVIEW software package allows skeletal models of any double helical nucleic acid molecule to be displayed out a graphics monitor and to apply various rotations, translations and scaling transformations interactively, through the keyboard. The skeletal model is generated by connecting any pair of representative points, one from each of the bases in the basepair. In addition to the above mentioned manipulations, the base residues can be identified by using a locator and the distance between any pair of residues can be obtained. A sequence based color coded display allows easy identification of sequence repeats, such as runs of Adenines. The real time interactive manipulation of such skeletal models for large DNA/RNA double helices, can be used to trace the path of the nucleic acid chain in three dimensions and hence get a better idea of its topology, location of linear or curved regions, distances between far off regions in the sequence etc. A physical picture of these features will assist in understanding the relationship between base sequence, structure and biological function in nucleic acids.

MAST: multi-script annotation toolkit for scenic text

This paper describes a semi-automatic tool for annotation of multi-script text from natural scene images. To our knowledge, this is the maiden tool that deals with multi-script text or arbitrary orientation. The procedure involves manual seed selection followed by a region growing process to segment each word present in the image. The threshold for region growing can be varied by the user so as to ensure pixel-accurate character segmentation. The text present in the image is tagged word-by-word. A virtual keyboard interface has also been designed for entering the ground truth in ten Indic scripts, besides English. The keyboard interface can easily be generated for any script, thereby expanding the scope of the toolkit. Optionally, each segmented word can further be labeled into its constituent characters/symbols. Polygonal masks are used to split or merge the segmented words into valid characters/symbols. The ground truth is represented by a pixel-level segmented image and a '.txt' file that contains information about the number of words in the image, word bounding boxes, script and ground truth Unicode. The toolkit, developed using MATLAB, can be used to generate ground truth and annotation for any generic document image. Thus, it is useful for researchers in the document image processing community for evaluating the performance of document analysis and recognition techniques. The multi-script annotation toolokit (MAST) is available for free download.